Six Questions with Micheline Maylor: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Calgary writer and editor Micheline Maylor, whose book Whirr and Click (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interviews with Anne Compton, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Alexandra Oliver, Sadiqa de Meijer and Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Micheline Maylor’s many-textured poems explore the liminal space where finite life and infinite time expand and contract into one another. In a duet of contrasts, memory, coming of age, danger, the erotic, and love twine into elegy and wonder. Time plays a featuring role and acts to freeze moments exactly as they arrive and simultaneously stretches experience into ungraspable infinity.

Micheline Maylor teaches creative writing, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and composition at Mount Royal University. She serves as guest editor for Frontenac’s renowned Quartet series for Fall, 2013. She serves as the President and co-founder of Freefall Literary Society, and is the editor-in-chief of FreeFall literary magazine. Her first book is titled Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems (2007) and is available through Wolsak & Wynn. Micheline Maylor has a Ph.D. from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Literature.

1. Whirr and Click is your second trade collection of poetry, after Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems (Wolsak & Wynn, 2007), and the chapbook Starfish (Rubicon Press, 2011). After two trade books and a chapbook over the space of nearly a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
I'll start with what hasn't changed. And that is a deep seated belief that poetry is a humanist art form and that its purpose is, at best, to unite interesting language and commonality of human experience. What has changed is my methodology for achieving those ends. In my first book, the story belonged to someone else (Knister), the experience of love and loss wasn't my own. As a new writer, I don't think I had either the bravery or the experience to write my own story. This second book is a far braver thing. In "Starfish", for example, I tell a true story, but with poetic considerations, like syntax, sound, refrain, palindromic mirroring, to, hopefully, create emotional charge and craft. My purpose as a writer is to generate that effect in the reader where they feel connected say, "I wish I had said it like that". You try for that as an author.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
Don Coles. Hands down. Anytime I read his work I feel as though I have an old friend to count on. Don Coles is the best poet in Canada. Period. K in Love still floors me. Forest of the Medieval World is stunning. Another modern master and huge influence on my work is fiction writer Douglas Glover. His use of syntax and sentence are essential examples of line level craft. Ultimately, a writer should always be concerned with HOW it said, perhaps more so than WHAT is said.

3. You’ve lived in Calgary for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of Calgary, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
The community of writers in Calgary is diverse. If you are looking for it, you can find it in Calgary: cowboy poets, concrete poets, post modern poets, spoken word poets, old poets, brand new poets, modern poets, eco-poets . . . This diversity allows for a whole lot of interesting discussions, for example, Derek Beaulieu is a person that I don't agree with aesthetically, but have a lot of respect for as a creative mind, mentor, and maker. Through these discussion, boundaries are pushed, if the disagreements are about opening ideas and challenging conceptions, rather than bitter and insulting feuds. In this way, discourse leads to energy and excitement about poetry. However, my deepest influences here and those I feel the most kinship with conventionally are these people Richard Harrison, Chris Wiseman, and more recently Rosemary Griebel, Joan Shillington, and Juleta Severson-Baker.

I think where you live is less important than who you talk to on a deep level about the craft, and what you synthesize in your own aesthetics. At this point communication is beyond regional. These discussions happen on-line and in books, they even happen with the long dead. More the questions to ask as an author are: What are you willing try, and what are you willing discard? And do you know the reasons why?

4. In Bruce Hunter’s review of Whirr and Click posted at Canadian Poetries, he speaks of your poems in terms of their “obsession, longing, and Borgesian myth-making.” How do you feel about this description, and how important is an element of story-telling to your poetry?
Narrative is in our DNA. We all love a good yarn. Poetry as concrete never achieves the level of connection a good narrative does, think of Shahrazad, the way you tell a story is a life/death proposition. And Bruce is a smart cookie. He really understood me and the book and the way reality is both a truth and a plasticity, as is poetry. It was an astute observation.

5. What do you feel teaching writing has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
Teaching writing allows for a crystalization of the WHY. Why does a poem fall flat, how does anaphora contribute to an effect, when is a quatrain more or less effective than a prose paragraph, etc. I feel that I am constantly learning and re-learning the tools of the trade. I am constantly in the shop immersed in the details of poetics and writing. It is very beneficial in every way except time. Teaching requires full attention, and when that attention is given to students, it's taken away from the selfish act of writing for yourself. No the two are never separate. It's always a balancing act.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
Well, that's a complex question. As a writer, it's such a thrill to be recognized, if only for the thrill of knowing someone besides your ten friends read the book, and more than that, liked it. It is a bit like being an A student. Nice, but there are ten other A students in the class who worked just as hard and are equally deserving. Writing, for me, is about me and the page, not me and the gala. That's the wrong sort of motive that will ulitmately lead to disappointment.

As a reader, I understand what variations in climate can do to that short list and how on any given day, with any given variation of jury, an entirely different set of books could be selected and the criteria could be entirely different too. As a short-listed writer, it's good to remember how fragile these lists really are. It's not a thing to pin to your ego, it's more like winning a door prize - a nice thing, a bonus, but it shouldn't make or break you. Just go back to honing your craft because you love to hone your craft and have some champagne regardless of outcome. You deserve that much.

Six Questions with Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Kingston poet and Young Adult author Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, whose book Status Update (Fernie BC: Oolichan, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interviews with Elizabeth Bachinsky, Anne Compton, Alexandra Oliver and Sadiqa de Meijer. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang is the author of the poetry books Status Update (2013), currently nominated for the Pat Lowther Award and the Gerald Lampert award winning Sweet Devilry (2011). She is featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2013, and is also the author of several children’s books, including A Flock of Shoes and Warriors and Wailers. Sarah’s work has been named to the OLA Best Bets for Children 2010, Best Books for Kids & Teens 2011 & 2012, and the Toronto Public Library’s First and Best Book List (2012). She is also the editor of the anthology Desperately Seeking Susans, and the forthcoming Tag: Canadian Poets at Play. Her new Young Adult novel, Breathing Fire was just released with Orca Books.

1. status update is your first trade collection of poetry, after the Gerald Lampert Award-winning Sweet Devilry (Oolichan Books, 2011). What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer has developed over the space of two poetry collections (as well as a Young Adult novel)? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
I think that Sweet Devilry was very much a first collection in that it dealt with everything of importance to me in my life up until then. The death of my father and the birth of my daughter were prominent in that book. For Status Update I wanted a book that was less about me. I don’t know if I succeeded really, since all the poems draw from my own experience and imagination. There was one complaint from a person who was included in this book, she was upset that I had used her status update as a title for a poem. She felt that it was an invasion of her private life (fair enough), though what struck me was the poem ended up being about my husband and daughter. The division between our lives and the lives of others can be a bit of a blurred line.

I started Status Update in part because I was feeling very much at sea when it came to writing. I had also just finished some course work with Susan Musgrave who had provided excellent writing exercises that I always found productive. I took to using the endless loop of people-watching (Facebook) as the writing exercise that would turn into Status Update. The entire thing took about 3 years to complete. It’s hard to say how my writing has evolved. I think it’s become professionalized – I don’t wait for inspiration. I continue to love writing in different genres for different age groups. I like the challenge of writing as widely as I can. 

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
Depending on what genre I’m working in, I try to immerse myself in the voice of those genres (picture books included). It’s a fine balance though. There is an unlimited amount of work that is so much better than my own – I need to remember that I’ll always be reaching, and to celebrate the fact that those wonderful and brilliant books exist. I always come back to Bronwen Wallace when I’m in a funk. Somehow there’s always something new in her writing that I appreciate with every pass.

3. You’ve lived in Kingston for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the Ontario landscape, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
Kingston has been pivotal in my development as a writer. We have a ridiculously strong and supportive writers community in our relatively small city. When I first came to Kingston I started a writers group (now called The Villanelles). It’s been immensely helpful to have this great group of keen-eyed editors to take my work to. I feel like we’ve all grown as writers together. Carolyn Smart has also implemented a fantastic Writer-in-Residence program which was invaluable. To be able to work closely with a changing rooster of fantastic writers has been a blessing. As for the Ontario landscape it does inform my work – especially since Kingston is such a strangely divided city when it comes to the rich and the poor. I live very close to Belle Island which is, to me, emblematic of Kingston. It is a gorgeous piece of land that used to be right next to a municipal landfill. It sits on the water and to get to Belle island we walk through a path strewn with garbage, and it eventually opens into idyllic marsh and woodlands right on the water. They’ve found human remains there dating from 900 CE. That’s Kingston.

4. status update explores the relationships we have with online text, specifically social media, and utilizes various other writers’ own status updates as jumping-off points for your own poems. How important was each update author to the poems you ended up composing from their individual prompts?
It varied based on how well I knew the individual. Quite a few people I’ve never met or talked to, and so their updates were a jumping off point for my imagination. Others, like you rob, I had a vague idea of what was going in their lives and used that to inform my writing. There’s something so universal in the specific experience of fundamental human experiences, like love, or grief. I found the best updates were the ones that were not poetic. I loved having a mixture of the unexpected, the mundane, the profound, and the simplistic. Much like eavesdropping at a local coffee shop.

5. What do you feel teaching writing and creative writing has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
I love teaching creative writing. Having a class work together to make a poem or a story the best it can be is interesting and illuminating every single time. There are a million ways to approach a piece of literature and I find it endlessly fascinating to see how my students will interpret a work and to hear their ideas on how to strengthen those pieces. The process keeps me aware of my own foibles and crutches. It forces me to try and look at my writing from multiple perspectives.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and award-winner, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
I think, especially for poetry, awards are necessary and they do a lot of good. Writing a book of poetry is like taking a few years of your life and throwing it down a well. To hear a little splash at the bottom is helpful. I think we all know  too, that awards aren’t everything – there are so many brilliant books that aren’t nominated. It’s a bit of a crap shoot, and it really depends on your book landing with a jury that naturally responds to your style.  I remember when I found out I was nominated for the Gerald Lampert for my first book – I felt overwhelmingly thankful that anyone had even read the book.

Six Questions with Sadiqa de Meijer: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Kingston, Ontario poet Sadiqa de Meijer, whose book Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interviews with Elizabeth Bachinsky, Anne Compton and Alexandra Oliver. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Sadiqa de Meijer was born in Amsterdam and moved to Canada as a child. Her poetry, short stories and essays have been published in a range of journals and anthologies, including The Malahat Review, Geist, Riddle Fence and Poetry Magazine. Her first book of poems is Leaving Howe Island (Oolichan Books). A selection from the manuscript won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012.

1. Leaving Howe Island is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer has developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
The oldest poems in the collection were written around 2005, but there are scraps from earlier work, too. And at that time, I didn’t have a sense that I was a writer, working towards a book – I wrote poems occasionally, and journal publication was the edge of my aspirations. But over the years, I started reading more methodically, writing regularly whether or not I felt like it, and revising seriously. And when I’d written forty or so poems that I figured I could live with, that was the first version of Leaving Howe Island.

Then a few of the poems were written after that initial compiling – Community Pool at Noon was one of those, and Corridor. I did feel, after writing them, that they belonged with the rest of the work, while some other new poems didn’t. So even though I didn’t start with a structure in mind, that initial assembling of the manuscript did generate a thematic or atmospheric whole.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop. The work of Dutch-American poet Leo Vroman. James Baldwin’s essays – Nothing Personal is a favourite. Michael Winter’s One Last Good Look. A recent find for me is Michelle De Kretser’s work – I loved her novel Questions of Travel.

3. You’ve lived in Kingston for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of Kingston, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
Yes, I’ve lived in Kingston for more than a decade – and I still have an ambivalent relationship with the city. But the local writing and arts communities are wonderful: there are internationally known writers here, as well as new writers like myself, and conversations happen easily, whether at readings or in a park. Over the years, I’ve been given encouragement and criticism in the right doses.

Place, and our temporal bearings to place, are big for me - I blame my childhood, which spanned three continents. I like the effort of conjuring places that I’ve left. When I write about the Netherlands, the setting takes on dream-like qualities: in reality it has changed, but living here I’m only marginally aware of those changes, and so there’s a sense of ghostliness. Kenya is even more spectral to me, with some very clear fragments. But writing about Kingston is like sketching from life, and the results differ: the details aren’t limited to what I happen to (mis)remember – it’s an exercise in observation, recording. I’ve been working on that lately.

‘January’ is a Kingston poem in Leaving Howe Island. Stone boundaries, and then the breadth of the lake. That’s a transition that feels essentially local.

What another place would do, I’m not sure – but I know it would matter.

4. In an interview at Open Book: Ontario you mentioned teenage years writing out poems by Dutch poets. Looking over your writing, do you feel much influence by Dutch poetry, or was that something that fell by the wayside as you began reading works in English? Or do you feel your work is a blend of the two?
I still read Dutch poetry and other writing, so I’m sure it continues to influence me. But the question of how or to what extent – I may not have the perspective to say. One thing that characterizes Dutch literature for me is the precision and concision of language – it’s instructive territory when it comes to those qualities. In some of my poems, like ‘Corridor’, the influence is direct: I took the first line from a poem by the Dutch poet M. Vasalis.

Dutch writers have long paid attention to English literature. There’s a small signal of that somewhere in the letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – a mention of the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg’s admiration for Bishop’s work. But to be influenced in the other direction is less common of course – one place for English readers to start is the Poetry International website, which contains many contemporary Dutch poems in translation: http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/country/item/6/Netherlands.

5. In a more recent interview by Susan Gillis, you said that “having a first language other than English could be a factor. […] I wouldn’t be surprised if that affects my syntax and diction to some degree.” I’ve read how an important part of the syntax of American poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s poetry comes from the fact that her first language is German, and how her English-language lines and phrases become almost unconsciously shaped by the diction of another language. Since speaking with Gillis, have you gone back and looked at any of your lines? What of the Dutch language itself do you see within, if anything?
This is something I’m still figuring out – it’s complicated, how a first language continues to influence us after another becomes dominant. And as you describe in Waldrop’s case, it happens almost unconsciously.

One thing I’ve noticed is that part of me registers it when English words resemble the Dutch ones – I feel closer to those words, they seem more elemental to me.

So for example, in a poem like ‘Dag en Nacht’, I’m half-aware that in writing “birds in the woodcut,” the words are very different from Dutch phrase, which would be “vogels in de houtsnede.” Then, later in that stanza, the line lands close to the Dutch with “rivers and acres,” which would be “rivieren en akkers.” I’m saying it lands, and that seems relevant: it has something to do with place and knowing the ground.

It’s not that I’m constantly translating as I write – but the immediacy or emotional weight that English words hold for me has to do with how much they sound like their Dutch counterparts.

Another thing about this example is that sometimes a Dutch word broadens the English equivalent for me, because of their common origins. So ‘acres’ in English at present means a quantity of land; in Dutch, ‘akkers’ means cultivated fields, which used to be true in English as well. When I use the word acres, that lapsed or archaic meaning is still there for me.

None of what I’ve said has to do with effects on readers – I feel like that’s because my first language, at least when I write, has less to do with conveying something to others than with making the words real to myself.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and award-winning writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
Literary prizes are awarded based on subjective criteria, and so the question of which works get recognized or overlooked has a lot to do with the composition of juries. It’s important that those are diverse in aesthetics and demographics. I also think the terrain between those two factors is much murkier than we generally acknowledge. Organizations like VIDA and CWILA, and writers like Roxane Gay and Madeleine Thien, have demonstrated in recent years that writers who are women, or people of colour, are particularly overlooked in reviews and in awards. I believe the reasons for that are multiple – but one of them is surely the strange idea that political concerns should not contaminate aesthetic processes. And more insidiously, that our lived experiences are political to different degrees – as Lucille Clifton observed in an interview: “Why is it that when you say something about yourself, you’re talking about yourself as a human, but when I talk about my life, it’s political?”

There’s no doubt that prizes make a difference to writers – for me, the CBC Poetry Prize provided validation, income, several readings and interviews, and the chance to work on new projects in Banff – it was wonderful.

I suppose that it’s contradictory to say then that it would be good if prizes made less difference to readers – but because of the subjectivity I mentioned, and the limited number of awards, it’s important that our reading is not limited to award-winning books.

And a deeper concern is that awards contribute – not intentionally, but effectively – to the larger capitalist machine that would publish only profitable books in the first place. And that should alarm us all.

Six Questions with Alexandra Oliver: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Toronto poet Alexandra Oliver, whose book Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Windsor ON: Biblioasis, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interviews with Elizabeth Bachinsky and Anne Compton. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Alexandra Oliver’s [photo credit: Andie Petkus] latest book, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, was recently named by Michael Lista of The National Post as one of the top four books of Canadian poetry for 2013 and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Prize.  She has also received two Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as a CBC Literary Award nomination. Oliver has performed her work at venues and events including Lollapalooza, The National Poetry Slam, the CBC Radio NationalPoetry Face-Off, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Spectacular Obsessions Fellini Retrospective at the Bell TIFF Lightbox and the Italian Contemporary Film Festival in Toronto.  She is a co-editor of Canadian formalist poetry journal The Rotary Dial.

1. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway is your second trade collection of poetry, after Where the English Housewife Shines (London UK: Tin Press, 2007). After two trade books over the space of nearly a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
Well, I'll begin by saying that Where the English Housewife Shines was basically a Whitman's Sampler of performance works I had created from the early 90's onward with a few new pieces thrown in for good measure. We were temporarily in Seattle, and I was at home with a small baby. I had friends in the UK who had created an artist-run press, and when they suggested collaborating to make a book, I was thrilled and frankly relieved to have the distraction. It was a fun process putting it together; I got to throw in some of my own illustrations, and that was novel. Skip ahead six years to Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, which began life as my MFA thesis and then evolved into a full-length collection. The poems had more of a narrative purpose there; I wanted to capture the mood of the suburbs, the hypocritical soup of newness, convenience, loneliness, alienation, materialistic desire and competitiveness. I think, as a writer, I've moved away from the "bada-boom-bada-bing" school of thinking which sometimes guides you in making performance-based works. I don't think about flash or drama or trawling for laughs when I'm telling a story now. I instead slow my observation processes down. I watch people very closely, and I always keep my antennae up, even in places like airports, waiting rooms, hair salons, school yards, conferences, office buildings. If the impulse of urgency and compassion is there, the potential to make a meaningful poem will be there also, no matter how "small" the subject matter. Writing doesn't begin and end at one's desk; it's a matter of being "on" at the unlikeliest moments, watchful, sharpening your axe.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
Let's start with poetry: I love Pope, Auden, Thomas, Bishop, Millay, Bogan, Merrill, Larkin, Walcott, Kizer, so many people. I also read a lot of craft and theory books. I'm meant to be reviewing Annie Finch's A Poet's Craft, and I'm dragging my heels because can't stop re-reading it! It's kind of like over-reliance on a friend you have on speed dial. Apart from poetry I'm naturally drawn to writers of observation, and that includes fiction writers who have what I'll term a critical, yet melancholic, eye. I adore, for example, Balzac, Goethe and Nabokov, and I am devoted to Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth is probably my all-time favourite. I also love to read books about looking, thinking and remembering; here, I'm thinking of Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and Elaine Scarry's wonderful books. I also enjoy really good biographies. Over the past year, I've been visiting with Edvard Munch, Edna St Millay and Federico Fellini.

3. Originally from Vancouver, you currently divide your time between Glasgow, Scotland and Toronto. I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the variety of landscapes you’ve existed in, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you remained living predominantly in a single city, or even a single country?
Oh, definitely. I love travelling, and I love meeting all sorts of people. People is the operative word here; like I said before, I'm concerned with observation of the ordinary, seeing folks going on about their business. I'm not concerned with big external sweeping themes--I won't be writing any opuses about Scottish independence, for example. It's outside of my experience range and my jurisdiction. Amongst the new poems I'm working on are a poem about trash on the River Kelvin, one about the people on my street looking out of the windows of their 19th century tenement apartments, another about a fight breaking out in a supermarket (supermarkets again!) and another about kids trading soccer cards outside of a primary school. There's one about Lockerbie, but it's disguised as a kind of fairy tale ballad, and you'd never get that from a first reading.

Scotland has a magic to it; it's very beautiful, in spite of the rain, which is relentless. As for a community of writers: I've met a few here, and they're great, very engaged and friendly. People in general  have a deep respect for poetry, and there's a real noble attempt to keep its existence celebrated. I've gone into my son's primary school to teach workshops, and I've never met a more wildly keen bunch of youngsters. Burns is a god in Scotland, and that's heartening because, in Canada, when you tell people you're a poet, they either think you're a wastrel, a foggy academic or a deranged hobbyist.

4. I’m intrigued at the fact that your work appears to be influenced by more formal poetic concerns as well as performance, especially given your time as part of Vancouver’s Edgewise Café. While the two shouldn’t necessarily be considered unnatural partners, most who work in one don’t often engage with the other. How are you able to negotiate and navigate the two, and how comfortable are you doing such?
I started off as a theatre student and, even though I was pretty dreadful as an actor, the whole experience left me with a deep reverence for being as engaged and entertaining as possible when reading anything aloud. I write poetry in form largely because I'm the product of eccentric older European parents. My friends grew up in communes and on goat farms or in swinging ranch houses where the parents had key parties and hoarded sex toys under the bed. None of that in our house; once you crossed the threshold, you may as well have been in a Thomas Mann novel. My dad had me reading poems aloud to the dinner table on a near-nightly basis. So the ham-prissy chicken dialectic has been with me my whole life. My inner Felix Unger and Auntie Mame have been happily married for years.

5. What do you feel teaching writing and creative writing has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
Although I love having long spells where I can just take notes and hammer out poems, teaching enriches my writing life in many ways. For one thing, I get to meet interesting people with their own universes and viewpoints. I get to help them navigate these universes and translate the impulses they experience into written work. I learn from them, and that adds new dynamism to my own view of the world, my own practice. I love teaching people about form because, dollars to donuts, they've been led to believe in hushed voices, either in high school or in undergrad, that meter was practiced by writers who were a) repressed, b) politically conservative, c) unsophisticated or d) insane. They've never been told that meter can be a conduit for subversion or playfulness. Lastly, I find myself astonished by what I tell my students; I catch myself yammering on about how they need to establish good habits for a writing practice, and then I remember all those lost mornings I've spent following some story on the Guardian news wire or searching for shoes on the Internet. I am learning to follow my own counsel, and that's a good thing.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
It's pretty clear that one can't just write because one wants prizes. I write because I honestly can't think of any other way of staying sane in this world. That being said, making poems is an insular business. My dad was a judge, and he used to say that it was a bit like being a priest or an astronaut. Having the acknowledgement of a nomination is gratifying, because, pathetic as it sounds, you feel that it all wasn't in vain. Like many poets, I generally feel as if I toil in obscurity; the idea of getting a prize seems pretty alien, but also rewarding. I'm a realist: I know that I might not fit a certain profile and/or certain judges might not like what I do, but that doesn't really affect my writing life.One thing to keep in mind is that it's important to keep poetry in the public consciousness and awards and accolades help to do that. If folks open the paper and read something about a poet, all of a sudden poetry's  a public act. Any public act has the potential to instigate change. And change, as we all know, is a damn good thing.

Six Questions with Anne Compton: 2014 Pat Lowther Award + Raymond Souster Award Shortlist(s)

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Saint John, New Brunswick poet, critic, editor and anthologist Anne Compton, whose book Alongside (Toronto ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2013) is on the shortlist for both the 2014 Pat Lowther Award and the 2014 Raymond Souster Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interview with Elizabeth Bachinsky here. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Anne Compton is the author of Processional--winner of the Governor-General's Award for Poetry (2005) and The Atlantic Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Prize; Opening the Island--winner of The Atlantic Poetry Prize (2003), shortlisted for The John and Margaret Savage First Book Award; and asking questions indoors and out (2009) – shortlisted for The Atlantic Poetry Prize. In 2008, she won The Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts and a National Magazine Award in Poetry. Compton is the author as well of the scholarly works, A.J.M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical (1994) and Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews (2006), and numerous scholarly articles. She is the Co-editor of Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada (2002) and the editor of The Edge of Home: Milton Acorn from the Island (2002). Compton's most recent poetry collection, Alongside, was published in 2013.

1. Alongside is your fourth trade collection of poetry, after Opening the Island (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2002), the Governor-General’s Award-winning Processional (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2005) and Asking Questions Indoors and Out (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2009). After four trade books over the space of a little more than a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
Each book is concerned with a central idea. This idea or subject preoccupies me over the course of making the book. Alongside is about beauty (human beauty, landscape beauty, and the beauty of books themselves); asking questions indoors and out is about belief and doubt; and Processional is involved with the procession of the seasons. This is, and has been, my “process”: Each book is a long-term mental and emotional engagement with a subject. After writing an initial eight or ten poems, I recognize the preoccupying idea in the poems. That recognition gives energy and direction to the poems that follow. What I’m observing, overhearing, remembering, and reading attaches itself to the preoccupying idea. Usually, the individual poem begins with a visual or auditory observation.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
I return regularly to work by Michael Symmons Roberts, John Glenday, Charles Wright, Sue Sinclair, and Don Domanski.

3. You’ve lived in New Brunswick for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of New Brunswick, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
As to a community of writers, I’ve never done a workshop or worked on one of my poems in a group situation, although I have taught many creative writing classes and I do free-lance editing, both of which are wonderfully conducive to the discussion of the nature and value of poetry. In terms of making my own poems, though, I do not belong to a community of writers. I work in solitude. Occasionally, I send poems to a journal, but it is generally true that no one sees my work until my editor, Evan Jones, receives the manuscript. I do work with colleagues on poetry-based projects such as the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada and, of course, I talked to many poets in compiling Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews. And, yes, certainly, I would have written differently had I lived in a different part of the country. My research for articles and for the interview book has shown me that here in Atlantic Canada poets are more likely to feel an affinity with Irish, UK, and  continental writers, and writers on the American seaboard, than with Canadian poets west of the Maritimes. “Place” is an under-discussed force in poetry. Place includes, as well as landscape, the cultural-geographic position of the writer.

4. In an interview posted on the Canadian Literature website, you mention how your poetry comes, in part, from your “rural roots.” The natural world exists throughout Alongside, from poems on the seasons, rain and the garden. What do you think you bring to the conversation of the natural world, and what has been called “eco-poetry,” and what do you feel you gain in return?
I understand “eco-poetry,” in the literary sense, to refer primarily to the shaping force of landscape on the forms and rhythms of poetry. It probably matters, therefore, that I grew up near the ocean and that I have lived for years close to the shore of a broad, deep river. The rhythm of water has a way of getting into poems. As for “eco-poetry” in the broader sense, all poets of the natural world summon us to attention, and paying attention is the first step in paying respect. I hope that I have contributed, in some small way, to a more vigilant concern for nature.

5. What do you feel teaching literature brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
Reading and teaching literature is no different from any other experience that goes into the making of a poem. Observing pigeons lined up on a power line may result in a poem image. Talking to a physicist may initiate a train of thought that leads to a poem; similarly, a novel might leave you with a gorgeous phrase that is the start-up of a poem. But it is these differing observational and cognitive experiences in combination that works best for poetry. Nothing, while you wake or sleep, is separate from poetry.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and award-winning writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally? What difference has it made to the way you approach your work, if any?
Getting overlooked by an awards-jury is no different from having your work rejected by a journal. If you don’t want your work judged, then you shouldn’t publish or try to be published. Rejection is part of the process when you publish. I’ve experienced lots of that kind of disappointment.

Awards in poetry, though, are particularly important because they place poetry before the reading public. If those people who read fiction and non-fiction on a daily or weekly basis hear of a book of poems – by way of an award – and go out and get the book, that is positive for all poetry. Awards in poetry, however, make no difference in the making of poetry. Even if you win one, you still have to get back to the innocent, expectant, and exciting state you experienced in creating your first poems.

Six Questions with Elizabeth Bachinsky: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist,

From now until early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Vancouver poet, editor and creative writing instructor Elizabeth Bachinsky, whose book The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Gibsons BC: Nightwood, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of five collections of poetry: Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006), God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2006), I Don't Feel So Good (BookThug, 2012), and The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Nightwood, 2013). Her poetry has been adapted for stage and screen and has been nominated for awards including the Pat Lowther Award, The George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, and the Governor General's Award for Poetry. She lives in New Westminster, BC, where she is an instructor of creative writing and the editor of EVENT magazine.

1. The Hottest Summer in Recorded History is your fifth trade collection of poetry, After five trade books over the space of a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
I am much more aware of the book as a form now than when I was younger. Writing collections like God of Missed Connections and I Don't Feel So Good gave me the opportunity to think about the bookness of the thing, the difference between poems and collections as individual sites and experiences, both for me and for readers. I wrote my first books, Curio and Home of Sudden Service in my mid-twenties. I didn't have any idea how to make a book then. I have a little more of an idea now. But also not at all. My process hasn't changed much. It's still about tracking my fascinations, making a decision to do a thing and muddling until something appears. I still do it because I love to write.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
It's always different. Right now it's novels. Two have really stayed with me over the last two years: Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao and Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. Reading those gave me the same feeling I used to get when I was a kid all wrapped up in a great book, sucked right in by the story. I feel best about writing when I am reading in that way. It feels similar to to way I feel when I'm really rocking out with a project. I lose time, reading and writing feels easy. That's what energizes me.

3. You’ve lived in Vancouver for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of Vancouver, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
I've lived in Vancouver for about a third of my life. It is the place I feel most at home. Vancouver appears in my poetry as a matter of course. The landscape can't help but shape a writer. And the weather. And then we're so close to the US, too. I think my poems often have more in common aesthetically with writers from along the West Coast of North America than, say, someone living in Toronto. When I think of major Vancouver writers who've influenced me, I think of Fred Wah, David Zieroth, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Robin Blaser, Roy Miki, Evelyn Lau, Peter and Meredith Quartermain, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, George Stanley, Michael Turner, others. I mean, these are the people you see at readings. They're right there. People who've stayed with poetry or whose literary activism perfectly suits the landscape. We're still on the edge of things out here on the West Coast. Last of the time zones. Hidden from the rest of the country behind mountains. Suits me fine.

4. You’ve referred to a number of the pieces in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History as “travel poems,” composed while on an extended trip across Canada doing readings and hanging out with friends. When composing pieces on Toronto, Montreal and other places away from Vancouver, were you consciously writing poems as quick postcards to be sent to those back home, or were you attempting to capture something more of the local flavour in each piece?
Yes, many of the poems in this book were written directly to people while I was on the road. I'm intrigued by poems by Jack Spicer, David McFadden, Marilyn Hacker, George Bowering, letters between Daphne Marlatt and Roy Kiyooka etc in which the speaker directly address friends and lovers. I thought if all these poets can write this, why not me? There are poems to wonderful Canadian writers of my generation in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History. I didn't expect this book to be terrifically interesting right away, either. Much more interesting in 20 years. What was important to me was to make a connection to writers and activists I admire and who have shaped me. Before I became a writer, I hadn't travelled. Before then, I was a barista at a coffee shop in Maple Ridge, BC. I had a high-school education. I couldn't have imagined Brisbane or Toronto, Montreal, St John's Newfoundland, New York, Chicago. I mean, really. It's been such an overwhelming pleasure and privilege to go to these places and meet other writers. I had to write it down. It still doesn't feel quite real to me. The reality of poet's lives, that they were so similar to my own, was (is) astounding to me. 

5. What do you feel teaching creative writing has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
I love my students. I love my job. I can't think of anything else I am more suited to doing, besides writing. My students remind me to be courageous and to be kind. It's wonderful that they keep handing things in and discussing poetry and going to readings, creating and reading. I don't think I would feel as good about the experience of teaching if I weren't also a creator. They keep me writing, I think. When I tell them they can be writers, poets even, I mean it.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally? What difference has it made to the way you approach your work, if any?
It's hard for me to feel much but gratitude for literary awards and prizes for poetry. Some of my books have been nominated for awards, others haven't. I've been grateful on both counts. I've sat on many juries, too, which I consider a responsibility. Whatever can be done to draw attention to the craft is helpful. I can't really speak to awards in other genres, but generally speaking I think: great. Best not to take awards too seriously. Better to just write the next thing. That's where the pleasure is.

writing fatherhood, pt. 3 : open book: ontario,

My piece, "Writing Fatherhood, part three" (see the first part here and the second part here), is now online at Open Book: Ontario; in which I discuss some works by Sharon Thesen, Sylvia Plath, Pat Lowther, Meira Cook, Kate Clanchy, Brenda Leifso, Kim Echlin and Elizabeth Smart, Margaret Christakos and Rachel Zucker. Watch for the fourth and final piece to appear over the next week or two.