Soham Patel, to afar from afar and ever really hear it

This is to inform you:

Where you are going.  To offspring your own place

for the compass needle to point—make your own

magnetisms.  Only movement generates equations.

The push and the pull.  You carry a globe around:

furniture.  Used to reference, instruct, daydream,

decorate.   Ecliptic obliquities solve some loss.

Trace the figure eight.  Follow the way the analemma

draws the path the sun makes in the sky. Memorize

the Equation-of Time:      in the Northern Hemisphere if you

see the sun’s position is more east than where the dial on your

watch says it would be, the Equation-of-Time is negative—

the clock is behind the sun—if the sun is more west, the

Equation-of-Time is positive—the clock is in front of the

sun.  it will tell you what month.  It shows us the sun’s

declination for every day in the year.  You can sit still

feel the hours turn.

Georgia-based poet and editor Soham Patel’s managed two full-length poetry collections last year, including her debut, to afar from afar (CCM/Writ Large Press, 2018), and ever really hear it (Boulder CO: Subito Press, 2018), on the heels of four chapbooks, including and nevermind the storm and New Weather Drafts (both from Portable Press @Yo-Yo Labs) and Riva: A Chapter (kitchen-shy press). I do find it curious that neither collection includes an author biography, a rarity for poetry titles, let alone two by the same author, which might lead one to suspect this might be an author preference, allowing the work to speak without interference.

The book is built in sections: the seven poem “This is to inform you:” (with all poems sharing that title), the ten poem “On an other note:” (with all poems sharing that title), the triptych “smoke prelude – for now,” “in    airplane” and “to hear it and forget,” to the ten poem “Mixed with always”: (with all poems sharing that title) and the final poem in the collection, the single page “Hello, Ghost,” a poem that reverberates through the collection as a whole:

Hello, Ghost

As you trace your finger over

the globe your uncle gave you

the year you were born,

you remember how he used

to call it your baby earth.

It has raised and indented

relief. Your finger trembles

when you spin it fast. Fast

like the metals spinning

past the mantle at the core.

But on this 12” replica

of where we are—with its

white-like-parchment antique

ocean—only synthetic resins

and textile fibers can reside.

You remove a line of dust.

Rolling fingerwide waves.

Recall this isn’t like those

go-where-your-finger-lands

when-the-spinning-stops

destiny kind of games.

This is for remembering

the dust trail you’re always

leaving behind and the one

you aim at errantly

like a bewildered scout.

If language can only offer

a reduction of things—

why is it years

later when you notice

it still says Ceylon, you say

nothing and keep spinning?

The poems in to afar from afar are composed as extended, linked suites, each poem connecting to the prior, and speak to attention, attentiveness and distraction. The poems speak of, against and to the distances, from geography and home to those that may have been left behind. How does one bridge such enormous gaps? There is something fundamental about how Patel writes about and around being, and the creation and self-creation that battles expectation, as well as how that being interacts with the world. She writes intimately, it would seem, of being so very far away from home. As she writes in the first section of “This is to inform you:” poems: “How to make a good husband. / How to make a good wife. How / to make all the children obey / right. To make a house hold run. ///// Flames are the place from which you came.” There is such a deep and abiding wisdom to her lyrics and prose poems, one that seeks to navigate the world and be open to all its charms and difficulties. The kind of poems that, to paraphrase Don McKay, any bird would trust to land upon.

Winner of the 2017 Subito Prize, ever really hear it is another collection constructed as an extended lyric suite, one that is built out of sentences, prose poems and incredible lyric precision. As she writes:

You walk into a room full of forgiving. Both sable and embryonic in what it knows—a room can know something clearly when the ceiling is all glazed and glitter. A sandy sort of silvergold. Pink trimmings and paint chips. I cannot speak these narratives into being. You just have to pay attention. Whatever you can afford. Listen to the same song in different volumes. There are always noises traveling in through spaces between windows and walls.

A lyric is a way of saying in some other language. Dust is nothing but skin shedding and sweep and swipe all you want it always comes back. Hands push into other hands so know breath has a music all its own—know that to have been named after a breath is one thing that can keep the people breathing. After our return: remembrance—after remembrance: you draw the curtains. I draw a bath.

It would be interesting to know which collection was composed first, although it might not entirely matter, both titles circling each other’s orbit (akin to a binary star, perhaps), emerging almost as an unbound dos-à-dos. The parlance of Patel’s poems in ever really hear it really do feel meant to be heard aloud; her lines crackle and bounce, such as the poem “juke :,” that includes: “Gullah // came through the jukebox. / Singing. After rhymes continued. / Came loud so no forgetting now / come the grinding, come the high.” The way her poems are constructed, often title-less (utilizing the first line to indicate poems in the table of contents) is reminiscent, slightly, of the work of Kate Greenstreet, in that the poems, while they might exist as singular units or smaller groupings, they really are meant to exist in this book-length form, surviving impossibly in the wild and held together by an intricate series and sequence of threads, cadences and accumulations.

These really are a remarkable pair of poetry titles, and can be read together or apart, equally (although I would recommend both, if such a thing is possible). If to afar from afar wrote of distances and ghosts, ever really hear it exists in more immediate spaces, exploring a deep intimacy around listening, hearing and other tactile responses, as well as what could be a short excerpt that might be seen as relating to the lack of an author biography (although, admittedly, that might be me reaching for a connection that might not exist): “For the record to be a hit, / it also has to be disposable. / I have no bibliography.” If to afar from afar is a book of away, ever really hear it is a book of where she is, and is making her home. Her poems explore spaces, places and relationships, even if that relationship is but with the blank page.

I keep a leaf in this notebook. She gave it to me. In every city, morning is the same: sun and something warm to drink. A king has been born in a tupelo but queens in the mid-east keep all land full of grace. In Santa Fe, a stranger gave me a necklace—in Chicago, a kiss. Driving too late one night in Summit County the headlights weren’t bright enough to move a moose off the road—she looked up and looked me in the eyes and she grinned back. Hear vagrant harmony best when the music is turned up: all the way up to eleven if you will. What have you ever done but wondered when you could go home. Brown flares warn dancers not to step on feet but just remember every suit is sequined. I wrote down what I couldn’t say. Each word has been lifted from a book. Before I get back on the bus, a woman at the filling station asks me where I am from. I pretend I can’t hear her. Dark shades, white belt, stowed drams, in the pocket: rolling papers and a flinted lighter, practiced answers for interviews, comb, dust cloth, rose water, corrugated map of the Americas.

Ali Znaidi reviews A perimeter (2016) in Empty Mirror

Poet and translator Ali Znaidi was good enough to provide a lengthy review of my poetry title, A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016), via Empty Mirror. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. This is actually the second review of my New Star title, after Jonathan Ball wrote a brief review of such via the Winnipeg Free Press. And of course, you can still order copies of the book through the publisher (or me, even).

A perimeter by rob mclennan / New Star Books / 978-1-55420-128-0 / paperback / 80 pages / 2016

In A perimeter rob mclennan has ordered the poems which were written between 2010 and 2014 in a way that the cumulative force makes us savour those new things that have happened to him: A new daughter; Rose, a new lodging experience, and a new surrounding. This is shown from the very outset in the dedication page:

for Rose Irene Valentina McLennan,
who arrived just then,

A perimeter - poetry by rob mclennanThis collection spins keen observations and strong stories of a new father and the oppression that fills his days as he is caught between writing and fatherhood or precisely “[c]aught, between ambition and exhaustion” (page 5). mclennan’s poems are set in Alta Vista Drive in Canada where he becomes an owner of his home. Speaking to his neighbourhood newspaper, VISTAS [PDF], in its October 2016 issue, rob mclennan says in page 17, “I’m also now in an area familiar to family history: my maternal grandparents original owners of a house on Kirk Drive, a street later renamed Ridgemont. My parents married in the church across the street from our front door, and relocated nearly an hour’s drive east, near Maxville, to his home property. How do I rewrite myself into this familial space?”

A perimeter is a work of exploration and self-discovery in which the poet tries to show those changes that have appeared in his entirely new situation and their effects on his daily life and writing habits. mclennan depicts many details of his daily life through tactile references. Nevertheless, the raw problems he touches upon are universal; issues of conjugal relationships after the birth of a new child, spouse roles, struggles to do house chores, and how to find time to write, and the exhaustion and frustration that accompany all that. This elegiac fragment is but an illustrative example of his nostalgia for sufficient and satisfactory sleep: “u((n)in)t(e)rr((u)pte)d) s(l))ee)p” (page 8).

Grappling with living in the world as poet and as a new father, and despite lack and interruption of sleep, mclennan finds solace and comfort in the beauty of his new daughter. In these beautiful lines, for instance, his daughter Rose and the rose become interchangeable terms. He draws from the haiku traditions of simplicity and conciseness to tell a story of beauty. mclennan intertwines the free-verse form, which is rich with a strong narration, with the delicate short Japanese form, drawing stunning images to emphasize the beauty he is generating. At the end, Rose’s interruption of his muse engenders a newer poem that is more beautiful; something akin to the opening of a petal:

Such wonderful scraps. Rose sleeps,
she stirs, she interrupts the poem. I am crafting
a why, when. Rose unfolds, a petal opens.

You are beautiful. You are like we.
(page 9)

In this collection, the personal intersects with his civilian life. Moving on, the poet takes a light political stance through raw imagery. While readers are immersed in the “newness” of the poet’s life, mclennan surprises them with bitterness. He says:

I see nothing new
in the whole of this country; bitter threads
(page 26)

These two lines would jolt most of us into self-critique. This time, the poet creates bitterness out of newness through effective and poignant language.

Exploration, rediscovery, and self-critique are shown from the outset of the abecedarian poem “A perimeter” in which he ponders on the new space of 1950s suburb, and focuses attention upon the issues of boundaries, location, and ownership through a well-crafted combination of poetic technique. His ruminations upon these issues are coupled with the problems of authorship and naming through language which is “impermanent.” He says in the first section, “A” :

The property boundary is handmade (shared). Fluid,
and only fluid. Unless
you know precisely where. The skin

and space of white noise (hearth). One hundred foot of fence.

Language is impermanent. We retain nothing, have no
specific form. The latent grass, explode; infect
the yard and underneath the stone-work.
(page 43)

In his book, Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975-1984 Charles Bernstein states that “poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena” (page 220). In this regard, mclennan assumes the role of a philosopher. He attempts through plumbing psychological and interpersonal depths to show to what extent a new space or a new map can affect his world view and to what extent a new locale and shift in perspective and vision can affect his poetic craft. With mclennan and his enviable craftsmanship with language, one cannot help but relish in philosophy, while savouring the poetic language of a poet-choreographer, who knows how to make words dance on the paper. The movements are natural, measured and astonishingly sophisticated, all at the same time. In this quoted passage (page 38), for instance, one cannot help but delight in mclennan’s dancing words:

                reworking, legends: archive, scraps
I was moving very quickly;

Thus, the reading that mclennan’s poetry suggests or requires is a reading that keeps on “viewing” or “seeing” the text on the paper, otherwise the reader would find the language of the poem inarticulate, obscure and meaningless. mclennan is a master when it comes to sprinkling words on the page like a masterful baker who sprinkles cumin on bread to make it delicious and mouth-watering. Hence the reader would be captivated by the layout of the poem and its visual aspects. mclennan, thus, uses the means of experimental art but for different ends: not to create a meaningless world but in order to engage readers, and especially the inattentive ones, with his poems and make them aware of what the poem can afford. mclennan’s A perimeter can be looked at as a philosophical inquiry or a treatise that draws attention to one’s adumbrated knowledge of oneself and the world by making it accessible through poetry. Through his uncanny ability to create fragmentary poetic narratives he is able to show a way of seeing/reading the world and the self in a hostile world that neither explains nor gives justifications. Another aspect of philosophy which falls squarely into the realm of this collection is the persistent quest for truth that is coupled with skepticism. Look at this philosophical inquiry which is buried beneath these two lines in page 7:

Not the event but language; laundry cycles, sediment.
Nothing settles.

In this way, and because “nothing settles,” poetry acquires a therapeutic function and serves as a constant injection against metaphysical confusions and the sedimentation and fossilization of the mind. This is achieved through mclennan’s deep awareness of line breaks and the power of the poem layout and form.

rob mclennan’s use of orthography, layout and punctuation is always innovative and especially in this collection. Part of the point, no doubt, is to create the right kind of a free zone in which the poetry can develop; besides, to let readers experience the poem as a thrilling adventure or journey. The poem becomes a narrative interlaced into the larger space of the paper with words trying to transgress borders and boundaries like “a stretch of cedar boughs” as he says in page 48. The poet’s innovative use of punctuation ramps up the tension even more and harkens back again and again to the process and craft of poetry composition. Punctuation becomes an act of transgression and a means to go beyond the fence.

A boundary creates another kind of boundary. A perimeter likewise creates its own recurring perimeters. The book, in fact, rather than offering new boundaries, is cathartic, simultaneously conjuring and exorcising the ghost of boundaries of readers with words, precisely with the kinetic energy of language. The politics of mclennan’s poetry reflects an overwhelming sense that a great perimeter was inflicted upon land and people. The poet demonstrates awareness and creates a startling experience of transgressing perimeters through the extraordinary cumulative effects of a poetics that is permeated with patterned departures and returns because, at the end, as he says on page 44:

[t]he lawn requires trim,
and so it does.

The collection reads as a series of short connected sequences, and focuses on how the perimeter, the boundary, and the fence are controlling our lives, and morphing into metaphors of the capitalistic constraints of society. The poems are both fragmentary and visual, and the dialogue between these two aspects enhances the tension and overall experience of the book. mclennan’s poetry displays a propensity towards transgression and crossing: Each Rose’s step is a poem and each poem is a step deeper into sequencing, into freedom, and into ourselves through, as he says in page 68; the last words of the book, “a task of outlines.”

mclennan’s moving collection is an exercise in reinventing one’s own body, psyche and world. The abundant metaphors are the bits or tools that mclennan gives to readers to reinvent themselves. The poems themselves become dense fragments allowing readers to assume the role of experimental collage artists whose vocation is to reshape and remould the semantic space and the world view. Rather than destroying meaning, mclennan tries to explore the meaninglessness of language not in order to annihilate it but to bestow on it an inner cohesion—something this postmodern era lacks—and to restore confidence as he says in page 14: “what shines is confidence, reduced to letter,”.

mclennan’s poetry is clearly an example for a work of art that looks for new possibilities of meaning beyond “the postmodern condition.” Containing seeds of revolutionary acts and political positions (in a non-radical way) mclennan masterfully explores the fissures in the psyche and the cracks in the walls in this hostile world of now.

Michael Nardone, The Ritualites

Away from a relative plane of table conversation,

    The last forks and spoons resume a familiar

Progression, clattering the sink’s tin basin in time

    With Aunt Ange’s O! no! oblivion. Laugh tracks

Wrangle down the hall, jingles clump, APPLAUSE

    Lights up – cues an interlude of who’s on sale –

Have it your way right away be all you can be just

    Do it. Soon it’s static. So the drowsed

Shuffle off to a continent of sleep; they will retire

    There, trim some hedges, craft umbrellas, maintain

A permanent muzak. Like that, a pulse of snores

    Crowds the house, then shush, they scatter once

The windows inhale – through, over the tree peaks –

    Out, aimless away, over Susquehanna. (“O, OR, PLAINS, PENNSYLVANIA”)

Montreal-based poet and critic Michael Nardone’s second full length collection, following Transaction Record (Gauss, 2014), is The Ritualites (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018), a collection self-described as a “book-length poem on the sonic topography of North America. Composed at sites all across the continent—from Far Rockaway to the Olympic Peninsula, Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of California—the book documents the poet’s listening amid our public exchanges, mediated ambiances, and itinerant intimacies.” And while I love the nuclear green text radiating on a bright orange cover, it does (for me, at least), make the text on the back of the collection entirely unreadable. In an interview conducted by Book*hug intern Mary Ann Matias and posted on the publisher’s website, Nardone speaks to the process of conceiving and constructing the collection:

As opposed to narrating an event, I became fascinated with constructing ways to situate the reader in the event’s midst – as an active listener attending to that situation’s complex polyphony. I became interested in exploring the idea of voice, of voices, of vocality, of the apparent sense of immediacy one feels in listening, and, then, in constructing into poems the variety of ways those voices and that listening is mediated. So, The Ritualites is a product of these initial studies and experiments in listening, in transcription, in resonance.

The Ritualites, then, situates itself as a book of deep listening across a wide swath of North American geographies, something Divya Victor reinforces in her brief introduction:

Michael Nardone’s poetry unsettles territories as it roves through the continent, documenting the neon signs and the billboards, the dinner table conversations, and the overheard terrors of everyday Americans. The book orchestrates unlikely and compelling movements between abstract, parodic narrative and lyric elegy, which Nardone writes as modulated, cerebral laments for an era’s failure to reach utopia. […] My hope has always been for poets to subscribe not to movements or schools of aesthetics, but to be the bearers of urgent form—form as a thing to be broken and held close, at once.

There is something fascinating in how Nardone’s work concurrently works through highly formal poetry structures and a post-language lyric, experimenting with structures and cadences familiar to the work of, say, Stephen Brockwell, just as much as KSW writers such as Colin Smith or Jeff Derksen. One can see it in “O, OR, PLAINS, PENNSYLVANIA,” the twelve-poem sonnet sequence near the beginning of the collection, or further on, as Nardone writes: “Am kiddin / Come on / Get over here / Everyone waitin for ya / Me and Dan / And there’s a band / Playin Stairway to Heffin / Knew that’d getcha / Seeya on the patio / Bye babe / Wooh” (“TOPOLOGIES/OTOGRAPHIES”).

What does our overheard conversation say about us? And what do the snippits transcribed say about Nardone? There is an urgency to these poems, one that attempts both an order and the acknowledgment of a lack of that same order, shifting back and forth throughout. Occasionally, Nardone infers that his is a project of listening without any sort of editorial agency, and other times, entirely inserting himself, shifting and projecting, and offering what and how he wishes you to engage with what he has gathered.

As you read this book, try to stand apart from your self.

            You are not your feelings.

            You are not your thoughts.

            As you read this, notice what information you receive, and by notice I mean: simply observe.

            You deserve to feel great about your life.

            Try to project your consciousness into the corner of this room and see yourself, there, in your mind’s eye, reading this book.

            Can you see yourself almost as though you were someone else? (“UNFIXED TERRITORIES”)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Natalie Morrill

Natalie Morrill's first novel, The Ghost Keeper (2018), was recognized with the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction and the HarperCollins Canada/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Canadian literary journals and included in The Journey Prize Stories anthology. She is the former Writer-in-residence for the Northern Initiative for Social Action (NISA), and edits fiction for Dappled Things magazine. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Ottawa.

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

Maybe it takes the pressure off a little – not that there was ever pressure from others, but I put a lot of pressure on myself to take my writing seriously and do work I was proud of. It was a big project I saw through to the end, and that felt really good.

The first (& recent) book, as well as the new novel I'm working on, are both historical fiction, which I'd never really done before I started my first book. I do really like the research. I hope I'll be able to shift to contemporary stuff soon enough. Sometimes it's harder getting a good feel for the shape of problems that are so immediate, though.

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

Fiction has always been what I've primarily read and enjoyed. I've been imagining characters and making up stories since I was a little kid. I've made tentative forays into poetry; I also like writing little vignettes of things I see and hear around me. I'm really hesitant to write seriously about my own experience, for reasons I probably couldn't articulate.

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?

Oof, it depends. Some short projects have come out in one go, with minimal revision. For longer stories, I have to carry them around in my head for a long time. For the first book (The Ghost Keeper), I did some very rough outlining, and then plowed through a first draft, a lot of which was discarded or changed. It took, I'd say, about two and a half years between the end of the first draft and the finished version of the manuscript you see in the book (not that I was able to work on it full time). For my new project, I've done much more detailed outlining. I don't know that that's always better, but for this project, it seemed imperative. We'll see how much revision it ends up needing.

4 - Where does a 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?

Usually when I have an idea, I can tell whether it's book-length or short-story-length. That said, a lot of my potentially book-length ideas aren't really worth investing in for that long, so sometimes I end up scavenging them for short stories.

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

Hard to say. A significant part of me would much prefer just to attend others' readings. But I typically do end up enjoying my own readings when I'm there – there's just a lot of wind-up and wind-down (inwardly) I'd as soon do without. It takes a lot out of me. That said, I think I do have certain responsibilities towards the wider reading and writing community, though maybe I'm still figuring out exactly what that ought to look like. And since writing can be this very isolating activity, and one which doesn't always challenge my more selfish tendencies (speaking for myself), I think it's probably a good idea for me to do readings, even just for the state of my soul.

Probably my most clear-headed answer is: It's incredible that folks would want to hear me read from a book I wrote. And I really do enjoy getting to meet readers and writers.

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?

I think the questions are always secondary to the story, or have to arise from it – which is not to say they aren't essential, but I don't want my characters just to exist at the service of a problem I'm trying to solve. That being said, a lot of my work comes back to questions of forgiveness, faith, and living in light of mortality. Coming to terms with reality, I think. Meeting concrete, individual people, recognizing them as such, and escaping abstraction. That's a big ethical thing for me.

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?

Could there be different roles? There's always something prophetic about it, I think – less in the sense of predicting the future; more in the sense of clearly articulating truths that might otherwise be obscure or fuzzy. Honestly, I think it's a hope-giving thing. Just to state things as clearly as possible is a service to the community. And to stop and think slowly and well, perhaps. Our world doesn't exactly nurture that tendency. It's something a writer might be able to preserve within a very rushed culture.

But simply telling stories – I hope no one ever downplays the importance of that role. That's a deeply human service, I think.

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

Both! Ha. That might be the clearest answer I can give without writing an essay.

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

About writing or life? If the former – make art about the things you care about most. If life – I don't know. Try to interpret people's actions charitably, perhaps – as in, be willing to believe they're generally doing their best.

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

Initially, I had to realize I didn't know how short stories worked. I'd spent most of my life with novels and I approached short stories like little novels. They aren't. They're their own thing, perhaps more like a screenplay or a poem than a novel. But it's been very educational for me to have to learn all that – you become so conscious of structure. Novels are my natural habitat, though. They tend to be far less efficiently designed, more like an old house with multiple generations of additions tacked on. Perhaps it's a presumptuous thing to say when I've only published one, but I feel very at home with novels.

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?

Oh boy. I need to get better at this. Ideally I'd have, say, a whole afternoon to write, and I'd head off somewhere where the internet can't tempt me, and I'd go at it intensely for a few hours. But life isn't ideal, and more and more it's looking like I'll have to carve out spare half-hours between other tasks. That's easier said than done. I find transitioning between activities a bit tough. I need a lot of time to let my brain refresh in the midst of this – a substantial amount of my “writing” time is spent staring at a wall or out the window, and I wouldn't say that's time wasted. It's just how my mind works (and perhaps how most minds work).

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

Art of any kind is a huge one. Amazing books, yes – but sometimes something completely different, like a dance troupe, or a podcast, or a new band. Conversations with people are also very helpful – not necessarily about books, but about what they care about. Those tend to make me think more clearly and deeply. Going for a walk is the classic one that tons of folks talk about, but yes, that absolutely helps me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Wood smoke, for reasons I couldn't definitively state.

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?

I'm sure there are. Sometimes it's hard for me to articulate the connections. As I said above, music and dance and visual arts all help me think about the world and how to make art about it. I also need my prayer life, but that's a whole other thing.

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

Carol Shields, Jean Vanier, Kazuo Ishiguro, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, A.A. Milne, Alan Jacobs, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Helen Oyeyemi, Lydia Davis, Italo Calvino, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.H. White, the Moomintroll comics and the Calvin & Hobbes comics, among reams of others.

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

Build something I could theoretically live inside. Could just be a shed. I think that would be so great.

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 was headed in a biology (specifically ecology & evolution) direction for a time. Getting to do weird science like that but also spend time outdoors – that's just marvellous. Alternatively, possibly something in faith-based ministry or counselling. I've done a lot of mentoring and pastoral support-type jobs and loved those.

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

I don't know! Stories are so great. I always want more of them. But I'll do other things, too. I don't think I could write if I wasn't also doing other things.

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

Last great book – I just read a great book on religious icons called Doors of Perception, but if we're talking fiction, probably the last big win was Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle. Holy cow, that book.

Last great film – Uhhh this is where I embarrass myself. I barely watch films. (Not an “I don't have time for TV” kind of thing. I waste time constantly. It's just rare that I really enjoy a movie.) Maybe What We Do In the Shadows (2014). That is a delightfully re-watchable movie.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

I was interviewed by Quail Bell magazine on curating the Tuesday poem series,

I was interviewed a few days ago by Christine Stoddard for Quail Bell magazine on the Tuesday poem series I curate over at the dusie blog. You can see the full interview here. Much thanks! And you can see a whole slew of interviews with me over the years (presuming all of the links still work, after all this time).

HE SPEAKS VOLUMES: A Biography of George Bowering, by Rebecca Wigod

When he began writing poems at nineteen, he soon found a voice and manner that appealed to publishers. It was the fifties. Poetry was becoming popular in North American, and a postwar vogue for “little magazines” was creating ever more outlets to spread it around. In Vancouver, where he started going to university in 1957 to complete his bachelor’s degree, George was part of a community of young poets. He has written about walking through Kitsilano then and hearing “all along the summer street the typewriters at the open windows.” Later there were plenty of poets – and visual artists, too – in the hippie-era Kosmic League in which he played baseball. In 1974, his two-year-old daughter, Thea, sat on his knee after a game. With them were two artists who’d played on his team: Brian Fisher and, visiting from Ontario, Greg Curnoe. George pointed to Brian and told Thea, “He’s a painter.” He then pointed to Greg and said, “He’s a painter.” Thea pointed to him and said, ‘You’re a poet.” He loved that.

I can’t imagine anyone who knows me at all not aware that I’d been looking forward to the publication of HE SPEAKS VOLUMES: A Biography of George Bowering, by Rebecca Wigod (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018), a volume that, I should note, she did interview me for, during her time in Ottawa researching at the National Archives of Canada (she was startled to realize her short-term rental was mere blocks away from our wee suburban house). The intimate and thoroughly-researched HE SPEAKS VOLUMES explores some eight decades of Vancouver writer, editor, publisher, critic, historian, baseball fan and general troublemaker George Bowering’s life so far. Over the course of some three hundred pages, she provides an overview of a writing life that has generated one hundred trade books of poetry, fiction, history, young adult fiction and essays produced to date, as well as details on his time teaching, his family life, baseball, TISH, various controversies and his tenure as Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Wigod, a former journalist with three decades’ worth of experience, seems to have followed Bowering’s lead from his own explorations of history: working an entirely readable, and deceptively casual, take on Bowering’s life and work. Having seen my way through a number of biographies over the years—with highlights including biographies of Robert Creeley, Richard Brautigan, Robert Duncan and even (yes) Jim Henson (reading Henson’s before the Greg Curnoe biography made the Curnoe text read thin)—Wigod’s holds as a strong contender against the rest, providing a fascinating overview of Bowering’s life.

            Since he gave his okay, much of what I’ve learned from reading his books and diaries, visiting him at his West Point Grey home (notable for its cleanliness and order, even though he and [Jean] Baird share it with a big furry dog), talking with him more than twenty times, and interviewing his relatives, friends, former colleagues, students, and sandlot baseball buddies, has surprised me. I hadn’t known that he reveres the English Romantic poet Percy Byshe Shelley, especially his Ode to the West Wind and Adonaïs elegy, or that he considers himself a direct literary descendant of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and H.D. – all born in the United States in the late 1800s. It has never fazed him that, except for Williams, they’re notoriously hard to read. He likes abstract painting more than representational; he has plenty of time for the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his atonality; he prefers squawky free jazz to the kind that makes good elevator music. He’d rather read novels by John Hawkes and Jerome Charyn than those receiving stamps of approval from Oprah Winfrey and Heather Reisman. In his view, literature should keep breaking new ground. Stein’s prescription for writers – “If you can do it then why do it?” – has become his credo. (“CHAPTER 1 – MR. PROLIFIC”)

What makes Wigod’s biography so interesting is in its accessibility, able to bring even the most casual reader into a world of writing that is still ongoing; and the general reader seems very much part of the intended audience for this volume, unlike, say, the Robert Creeley biography. Another intriguing element is how Wigod manages to tell the story of Bowering’s life and work via two distinct structural threads, working a temporal linearity as well as a series of chapters focusing on a particular subject. While earlier chapters are titled “The Boy” and “The Youth,” further chapters focus on different elements, from “The Husband,” “The Professor” and “The Father” to “The Poet,” “Mr. Baseball,” “The Novelist” and “The Amateur Historian.” Part of why I appreciate the wisdom of Wigod’s structure is in knowing just how complicated the many overlapping threads of Bowering’s writing and life could be to arrange, with multiple book-length projects produced concurrently.

For myself, as a long-time Bowering enthusiast (fan, I suppose), there wasn’t much here that I wasn’t already at least a bit aware of, but the details I might have missed or not been aware of were appreciated. While I might have been aware of certain stories, I did appreciate discovering what I hadn’t known, including his more recent forays into historical non-fiction, moving through multiple volumes of Canadian history. There might come a point where a literary scholar does produce a huge and far heftier volume on Bowering’s life, and I think part of my frustration with this particular title was the difference between what this book is against what it wasn’t attempting to be: a scholarly title three or four times its size, one that deals with every title, and every aspect. For example: I would have been curious to know more about Bowering’s collaboration with Ryan Knighton that produced Cars (Coach House Books, 2002), or on his poetry title Genève (Coach House Press, 1971), or even further details on his interaction with Montreal poets during his time there, such as Artie Gold and others of the Vehicule Poets.

Comparing Bowering to Creeley does feel apt, in that both writers are predominantly known as poets, and known as writers who engaged with far more of their contemporaries than most; known for publishing widely and prolificly, and influencing innumerable writers in their wake. Both volumes, too, were produced while their subjects were roughly the same age (although one might say that Creeley had lost far more peers by the time his book appeared). The difference in approach to both volumes is obvious: one by a journalist for a more general audience, and the other by a literary scholar for a more literary audience. But I wonder if a factor this difference in approach might also be one of country-of-origin: both venerated and established senior writers, but the Creeley volume wrote on an already-known quantity, while the Bowering volume, while detailing the work of a writer equally venerated, works instead to establish him to the general public. Is this a book, comparable to similar biographies of Greg Curnoe and bpNichol, instead working against “Canadian tradition” to establish artists who would, south of the border, be more widely appreciated?

Either way, I shall proclaim: this is an impressive biography, one that is well-researched, thoroughly readable and cleverly arranged, and one that deals with its occasionally larger-than-life subject with honesty, curiosity and enthusiasm. Who could ask for anything more than that?