, reading Michael Boughn, Audrey Thomas, Maggie Nelson, Maggie Smith + Vladimir Nabokov
, further (spring 2024) notes from a
work-in-progress,
[see multiple other sections from this project over at my substack]
Today is Aoife’s penultimate day of grade two. Rose finished grade five last week, and she is currently in Picton with Christine’s father and his wife, most likely in their pool as we speak. Christine is laid flat with a cold, a trickling virus that has tendrilled through the house over the past few days. It ignores Aoife, and Rose seems to have missed it, but I swat at the potential of impending summer cold with both hands. I will not get sick.
Reading through elements of Michael Boughn’s new Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (2024), I’m struck by his descriptions of some of those “poetry wars” during and around the period of American poetry that developed The New American Poetry (1960). The term “poetry wars” has come up a bit again recently, in reference to conflicts in Prince George, British Columbia a decade or two back, as Jeremy Stewart and Donna Kane were putting together their folio of poetry and prose to celebrate the life and work of Barry McKinnon (1944-2023) that I was posting online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Nothing any of the three of us wished to re-ignite.
I’ve never been interested in participating in wars. Ken Norris used to speak of poetry wars, some of which he got caught up with in the 1970s, with a kind of resigned inevitability. As I understand them, most of these conflicts didn’t seem to stem beyond someone saying something confrontational and others responding, or simply a matter of different aesthetics falling into the perceived requirement of a personal clash. What does it matter that one person writes a poem in a different way? There is work I am interested in and work I am less interested in; people I am interested in and people I am less interested in. I think you’d be surprised how often those considerations blend into different configurations.
For the longest time, one of my absolute favourite humans was Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), her early death a devastating loss for everyone that knew her. A particular favourite spot of hers in Ottawa was Zoe’s, the bar lounge of the Chateau Laurier, where we’d always meet up when she came through town. She quite literally glowed with energy, enthusiasm and creativity, and we were able to support and encourage each other despite having little overlap, it seemed, in reading or writing interest. Most of the writers and writing she admired and was influenced by I had little to no interest in, so how much could I really appreciate her work, no matter the quality?
There are numerous writers it would be lovely to be able to sit down and have a beer with, and conversation; but somehow, for some, aesthetics prevents us. There is so much that can be learned from alternate perspectives on writing and thinking, and it becomes far too easy to fall into our bubbles. Is the goal not to expand our thinking? Is our goal not to improve, and make new? Why have a war?
*
Today is Aoife’s final day of grade two. Rose remains in Picton, for at least two more days. She is older, there.
I am moving slowly through final proofs for these short stories, and thinking about how words get shaped on the page. Simultaneously, I am going through a recent reminiscence by Canadian writer Audrey Thomas on the late Alice Munro, sent out by email newsletter to members of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Thomas writes of heading to do research in England in 1987, and convincing Munro, simultaneously aiming herself to Scotland for the sake of her own research, to not fly to Scotland, but to join Thomas by boat. Thomas makes the trip sound delightful enough it almost makes me consider the same. Thomas writes of their sea-faring adventure, the two of them learning a handful of daily words in Polish, until a storm at the very end of the trip, upon entering the English Channel.
“I’m sorry it turned out to have such a terrifying ending,” I said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Alice.
*
Los Angeles writer Maggie Nelson references Alice Munro as part of The Argonauts (2015). I had pulled the book from yesterday’s shelves, opened it seemingly at random, and there it was: Munro’s work providing Nelson’s teenaged-self a perspective on sexual experience, violation, lust “and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life.” The gift of clarity the greatest one can offer, after all.
I’ve been thinking of Nelson again recently, having caught inklings via social media that she might have a new title either out or forthcoming, which made me curious. Naturally I haven’t yet set down to verify this. I’ve enough other reading in-progress I should probably attend to, first. What of those essays on Sheila Heti and Lydia Davis? But I am curious.
This morning, reading through a recent poem by Andy Weaver. He was good enough to comment upon my work-in-progress elegy for Barry McKinnon, “I wanted to say something,” so it just seems fair for me to do the same for him. Sometimes one simply requires another eye.
“There’s a moral / here or there // isn’t,” he writes, as part of this sequence, “Cut,” “how a straight / edge creates the curved // cut that will heal / in a crescent shape.” There has always been something quietly powerful about Weaver’s work, comparable to the work of Ottawa poet Jason Christie for their stretches of lyric concreteness across lengthy meditative stretches, considerations of writing the complexities of fatherhood, the long form and their own modesty. I’ve been attempting to get these two to interview each other for some time now, to clarify, perhaps, some of their overlap, but as of yet, I have been unsuccessful.
*
In a recent substack post, American poet Maggie Smith writes:
The writing life is one with many paths. There’s no one way. I wish I’d thought more about this when I was starting out; it would have relieved a lot of pressure. And I wish I had realized how many writers—most of us!—have jobs outside of writing books. We’re teachers, editors, arts administrators, and technical writers. We’re therapists, receptionists, and childcare providers. We’re doctors, yoga teachers, and small business owners.
When I say, “I’m a writer,” I’m telling you about more than what I do for a living. I’m telling you who I am.
There’s a lot swirling around in those few sentences worth commenting upon, at least from where I’m sitting: a variety of responses of what I might think, or have thought, or might say, or have said. Smith is entirely correct, obviously: as many ways to write as there might be practitioners. As many grains of sand on the beach, say, or stars in the heavens. The first decade or so of my own foray into serious writing included having to figure out how best to approach my own writing. It isn’t enough to learn how to write, but learn how best I should be writing the things I should be writing. There are no clear paths, nor across-the-board solutions. What might work for one might be anathema to another.
I work best through routine, and by scratching out attempts to figure out shape. My first drafts can often be leagues away from where the poem, the story, the manuscript, might finally settle. Although, I say “settle” as though the process inevitable and smooth, of which it is neither; there are drafts upon drafts upon drafts, including multiple on paper and those through my own head. I used to take thirty to fifty handwritten drafts to make it to a single page, a single poem. Now the process is much more internalized, but my literary archive still grows in leaps and bounds, in pages scribbled upon and reworked. There is an endless array, even down to the copy-edit. A word, moved. A word, excised. The occasional typo.
*
Someone posts a paragraph by Vladimir Nabokov to social media, on how he attempted to discern the difference of taste between a poisonous and non-poisonous butterfly. Why did he do this? And what have we, as readers, learned through his experience?
