Sean Howard, overlays

 

PREFACE

Tidelines in &
out of print (the

only ever briefly
laid stress): cloth-

bound back-
wash. So

soon,
the

self’s
worn copy! I

don’t know: gha-
zal? haiku? rain

to snow…Just
gulls, rough

edges

I’m fascinated by Cape Breton poet Sean Howard’s latest poetry title, the deceptively-subtle and sleek production of his wildly inventive overlays (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), a book subtitled “( scored poems ),” with addendum “from Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, by Peter Sanger.” The poems that make up Howard’s overlays quite literally respond to the work and structure of Nova Scotia poet, prose writer and critic Peter Sanger’s critical monograph on the late John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1978), a monograph originally published by Xavier Press in 1986 (a “fully revised and expanded edition” appeared with Gaspereau Press in 2023). As British Columbia poet Kim Trainor writes of the first edition of Sanger’s monograph in a review on her blog back in March 2014, the book is “a meticulous line by line commentary on Thompson’s Stilt Jack,” and Howard’s collection holds to the structure and spirit of Sanger’s short work while entirely dismantling the language. “Canada, still harrowing? Pen / knife (but why?),” opens the poem “IX: SCRAPES,” “scraping star- // light from stone. Keats’ cease / fire (so the world we shut // up…): negatives leave / room for the dark. // Left standing, / children’s // voices / over // the wall.”

One might say that Howard’s project responding to Sanger’s text is very meta, set as an homage to an homage, a response to a response, riffing off Sanger writing on Thompson. “Key / note,” opens Howard’s “XXXV: GREENS,” “silence’s / tonic: soon, a // plenty. History’s / dead aims: as Joyce // might sway, gnaw- / ledge is dour…(Me- // thodically, Occam cuts / the world shaving: High // Table, Apollo’s spoon / on the moon.)” The poems are precise, playfully clipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around the boundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics. As the poem “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES” begins:

Blackouts: child’s-eye, searchlights…(Everywhere, sold-
iers, compulsory figures.) Cold War: atoms, butterflies &

wheels. (Learning class, Manchester’s grammar.) Ill-
fitting, often, sign & sound: after the storm, find-

ing language’s anchor. (On course in the
woods? Trout make themselves

clear?) A while, Dylan
Thompson: double

vision,
loose

locks.

Whereas the notion of the response or translation is more familiar in other corners of contemporary (experimental, avant-garde, what have you) poetics—whether bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (Milwaukee: Membrane Press, 1979), Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (as Eirin Moure; Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) or more recent book-length projects responding to different poetry books through her own individual poetry-length works by American poet Laynie Browne [see my review of her latest here; see my interview with her on her ongoing projects here]—it is a form and approach less visible across those working more formal lyrics. One can cite poems here and there, certainly, including the endless array of responses to Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but very few in the way of book-length works, making this poetry title a kind of formal outlier (and an absolutely delightful one).

Echoing the structure of Sanger’s poem-by-poem critical response, Howard’s overlays is structured with three opening poems—“PREFACE,” “INTRODUCTION” and “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES”—prior to the body of the collection, a section titled “NOTATIONS TO STILT JACK,” made up of the opening poems “EPIGRAPHS” and “THOMPSON’S PREFACE” before launching into thirty-eight Roman Numeral numbered poems (a la Thompson’s original ghazal-sequence) to close the section with the poem “CRITICAL ESSAY: JONAH’S ROAD.” The book then ends with Sanger’s own piece responding to the response of his response to John Thompson’s infamous ghazals, the short essay “NIJINSKY’S LEAP: AN AFTERWORD,” that opens:

Sean Howard invited me to comment on his book. He suggested I might respond to his use of Sea Run as framing context for Overlays. I accepted, hoping to say something useful about my intuition that prose commentary, even when as focused as that of Sea Run, can only be penultimate in nature and can only be complete when it is renewed in poetry. I connect that intuition with Mandelstam’s remark in his essay “Conversation about Dante”: “a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically.” In other words, it takes a poem to know a poem.

It can’t be overstated the effect that Thompson’s original Stilt Jack had on Canadian writing, introducing the English-language translation of the Urdu structure of the ghazal [see my review of the 2009 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, “A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson” here], a structure furthered as well by Phyllis Webb (I think it was Agha Shahid Ali who introduced the form into the United States). I think it is fair to consider Thompson, and his work, beloved across elements of Canadian poetry, especially upon the east coast, making this a project not just of playful and inventive structure, but in loving homage. It is an absolutely delightful work. And, in a similar spirit, might some further critic attempt to look at the three works in tandem, or even attempt to respond in some other, further way?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Peter Sanger

Peter Sanger is a poet, prose writer, critic and editor. He received his education at the universities of Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, British Columbia as well as Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. During his thirty year teaching career at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College (NSAC), he became Head of Humanities and later received the recognition of Professor Emeritus in 1999. Sanger's commitment to his work and students, his achievements in his writing and in his community have earned him an Honourary Doctorate from NSAC which he was awarded in May 2012.

Sanger has published numerous books of poetry including Aborealis, a collaborative project with renowned photographer Thaddeus Holownia in 2005, Aiken Drum which was shortlisted for the 2006 Atlantic Poetry Prize and his most recent collection John Stokes' Horse (2012). His prose projects include Spar (2002), White Salt Mountain (2005), The Stone Canoe: Two Lost Mi'kmaq Texts (2007), and his extensive study of the life and poetry of Richard Outram, Through Darkling Air (2010). He is also known for his measured criticism and insightful reviews of work by Douglas Lochhead, Robert Bringhurst, John Thompson, Emily Carr and Elizabeth Bishop. Sanger has been the poetry editor of The Antigonish Review since 1985. He lives South Maitland, Nova Scotia.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The America Reel, my first published book ( there were three unpublished books before it), did not "change" my life when it appeared in 1983, for several reasons.  One was that I was forty and too old to be changed. A second was that the book, at the time, was either ignored or quickly forgotten.  You ask about the differences between the first book and recent work.  That is really for others to say, if they think the differences distinguishable.  I know that the obsessions are the same.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Why poetry, rather than fiction or non-fiction?  I have always heard words in patterns of rhythm.  Poetry is an old song and dance.  I have written a fair bit of non-fiction.  It is the only form of epic poetry I can try to manage. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

In one way or another, the poems of Aiken Drum (2006) took nearly twenty-five years to write, though most of the book was written between 2003 and 2006.  John Stokes' Horse (2012), its successor, took three years to write.  What you call the "writing project" does not begin or end for me.  It is continuous. Some poems are finished in one draft.  Others may take fifty or more.  It may take several years to find the right word- or the word that is a right as I can find.  I keep notebooks recording fragments and variations, often overheard or from my own reading.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Both poems and prose often begin from a rhythmic fragment or a phrase tensioned by sound.  As poems or prose fragments accumulate, they generate a "conversation" among themselves that leads to a book.  At some point, the poetic or archetypal logic of the unfolding book takes over.  All my books are shaped accordingly.  The poems at the beginning of each book are, in a sense, more limited than those at the end, though the last poems are implicit in the first.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy readings, usually, but they are, under modern circumstances, often occasions that are easy to miscalculate and be unbalanced by.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

There are teleological concerns in the poems and prose.  Some would call them theological, The details of these concerns are in the work.  I very much oppose turning them into abstractions which might appear to solve any enigmas the work is perceived to have.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The role of the writer is to keep faith with words.  A writer's word is a writer's bond.  In the modern situation, to be more specific, this faith involves resisting the commodification of language.  At present, the writer can only resist - and that resistance includes resistance of word against word, poetry against poetry, a self resistance.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Working with an editor is both difficult and essential.  It is an example of the kind of resistance just mentioned.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Richard Outram once told me that every poem should contain some element of grief.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

As said above, prose is all the epic a lyric poet might hope to write.  Good prose offers fewer hiding places than bad poetry.  One of the cruxes of good prose is competent handling of transitions.  In bad poetry, transitions are often skidded over or ignored.  A good technical writer of prose is a more worthy artist that a bad poet.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Unless I  have contracted to produce a pice of writing (usually prose) by a certain time, I follow no schedule.  I am always writing in my head, sounding words, and listening to all sounds.  My day begins with chores to do and obligations to meet.  Writing, in one form or another, accompanies them.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to reading.  I go back through my notebooks. I do the day- to- day jobs that must be done. I consult sleep.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Earth.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Where did the first book come from?  We know the story of subsequent ones, it seems.  But the first one?  Maybe it still is there to be written.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There is not room enough or time to answer here. A partial answer is in my books and essays.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to write a poem by anonymous that is recorded as such.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I can easily imagine myself teaching English at an agricultural college.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Vocation.  The vocative voice.  The locative voice.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Paul Celan, The Meridian, Stratford University Press, 2011.  I'm fond of Bergman's film, The Magic Flute.

20 - What are you currently working on?

That remains to be heard.

[Richard Sanger reads in Ottawa at The TREE Reading Series on Tuesday, October 23, 2012.]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;