Jonathan Ball, The National Gallery

F.H. Varley

The dead hold our hands like small children

Tired out and wanting a quiet walk

But we pay money to hear what they sing

We don’t care that they hate their own songs

We don’t care that their voices are brittle

And crack and the parts about love

Winnipeg writer, filmmaker and critic Jonathan Ball’s fourth poetry collection is The National Gallery (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2019), following Ex Machina (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009), Clockfire (Coach House Books, 2006) and The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books, 2012) [see my review of such here]. As he discussed the project, still a work-in-progress, over at Touch the Donkey in 2017:

Somebody (I forget who, I think it was derek beaulieu) pointed out that I had done a book about books (Ex Machina) and a book about theatre (Clockfire) and a book that is in many ways about film (The Politics of Knives) and expected I would do a book about visual art next. I brushed the idea off but it stuck, and eventually I noticed that I have a number of poems that mimic techniques from visual art, the way that The Politics of Knives contains some pieces that mimic film techniques. 

The National Gallery is framed with a deceptively simple question, as he writes to open his “Notes” at the end of the collection:

The National Gallery asks the question, ‘Why create art?’

            Thousands of years of written history have produced few good answers to this question. To make matters worse, I have tried to complicate those few good answers. Each sequence of poems adopts a different approach, to complicate it in another way, considering the question both in terms of art’s function in the public sphere and its engagement within private realms.

            I do not have any answers, just this art.

Set in nine sections of short poems—“Group of Seven,” “In the Room with the Light,” “Mixed Media,” “Food Court,” “Leatherface Retrospective,” “Gift Shop,” “iPhone Elegies,” “Selfies” and “Help Me Because I Never Learned To Hide”—the narratives of Ball’s pieces don’t twist expectation as much as they sidestep, composing poems that exist in counterpoint or opposition to what he has deliberately set up. The first section, “Group of Seven,” for example, is a section of twelve short poems, each titled with the name of one of the infamous “Group of Seven” painters, as well as a few of their contemporaries, such as Emily Carr (I’m admittedly disappointed that my personal favourite Canadian painter from that period, David Milne, hasn’t his own poem). Each of the dozen poems exist with their ‘namesake’ as red herring, smokescreen and sheen, suggesting an impossible kind of colouring to each of his carved lyrics. One presumes that the “Lawren S. Harris” poem—that opens: “I took my poems to the rain barrel / Where I drowned them one by one”—would shift had it a different title, say, “”Franklin Carmichael” or “Tom Thomson,” and yet, it might not matter in the slightest. The difference could be of perception, of how we see, and even expect to see, things. An incredibly coherent suite of poems, they challenge the notion of art from art, or art at all: what is the ekphrastic when the connections aren’t obvious? The Group of Seven painters are such classic “Canadiana” that much of the awareness of them and their work has been rendered iconic and stereotypical, even mute. What do we know of Lawren S. Harris? What knowledge of him and his work might we bring to this poem? As Ball offers as part of his “Notes”:

            Each poem is titled after a member of the Group of Seven (including major affiliates, for a total of twelve poems). Since these artists have lost all sense of radicality due to their incorporation into the gallery system, these poems refuse to address their supposed subjects but instead mimic an aspect of their painterly approach by subverting conventional Canadian tropes in order to turn each poem against itself.

What is interesting, also, is his description of how the book came together, through the opening section: “Although many of these poems were written earlier, over the course of twenty years, this manuscript began to solidify when I started to write the poems in ‘Group of Seven,’ poems that take poetry itself, and how I relate to my poetry, and how the wider world relates to art, as their subject. These poems question the traditional purposes of poetry and address the various failures of art-making as a whole.” The foundation of the first section holds the manuscript together, certainly, opening up for a variety of ekphractic explorations around art, film and poetry, pop culture and Canadiana, and one’s place in the world of writing, all running along the thread of that central question:

In-N-Out Burger

Poetry warlords are the worst, but I’m the best.

I rap-battled my way off Canadian Idol.

I put the sonnet form to quite the test.

I alluded to the entire Bible.

Poetry warlords sun themselves on beaches nude

Like Adam Beach will one day pose in Playgirl.

They question where the car hath gone to, dude.

They eschew question marks to seem more stable.

Once I couldn’t get published in Grain,

Then I published in every issue of Grain.

Here the heads of former editors I’ve slain.

Ball is a poet that revels in odd humour and odd juxtapositions, striking out in unusual directions that keep going, further than you might have imagined. There are elements of Ball’s poems reminiscent of the work of Canadian poet Stuart Ross, but Ball’s lyrics, in comparison, are more restrained, less outlandish; focusing instead on a wry, observational humour than a sparkling pessimism. Further into his Touch the Donkey interview, he wrote:

I love writing a poem that works as a poem and stands alone but also has an interesting and complicated relationship to somebody else’s artwork. It’s a way to inspire yourself and to create and also be analytical and critical in a sense. I have always been ambitious, and it is also a way to associate yourself with your artistic heroes.

Christian Bök once told me something along the lines that if you open your book with a quote by Kafka, now you are in competition with Kafka. You have to be more Kafkaesque than Kafka. I like the challenge of that concept. When I wrote my poem “K. Enters the Castle” in The Politics of Knives, I was very much thinking in those terms. How can I take what Kafka was doing and extend it beyond Kafka? What would Kafka write if he had watched Tarkovsky’s films, like I had?

While the collection might not aim to specifically answer the question of why one makes art (my own preference leans towards those projects that work to ask questions over the presumption of actually having all or any of the answers), the fact of the finished and published book certainly answers, at least for now, that Ball himself can see a value in the production of art. His answer, despite claiming to not actually have one, is the fact of and the poems within The National Gallery. As well, given his work through short narrative forms, I am curious to see his debut collection of “stranger fiction” out next fall, The Lightning of Possible Storms (2020). I suspect it will be well worth the wait.

Queen Mob's Teahouse: Michelle D'costa interviews Sivakami Velliangiri

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the latest interview is now online, as Michelle D'costa interviews Sivakami Velliangiri. Other interviews from my tenure include: an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevost, an interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Drew Shannon and Nathan Page, also conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Ann Tweedy conducted by Mary Kasimor, an interview with Katherine Osborne, conducted by Niina Pollari, an interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Frank, a conversation between Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan, "On Translation and Erasure," existing as an extension of Jessica Smith's The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test, produced via Essay Press, Five questions for Sara Uribe and John Pluecker about Antígona González by David Buuck (translated by John Pluecker),"overflow: poetry, performance, technology, ancestry": kaie kellough in correspondence with Eric Schmaltz, Mary Kasimor's interview with George Farrah, Brad Casey interviewed byEmilie Lafleur, David Buuck interviews John Chávez about Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, Ben Fama interviews Abraham Adams, Tender and Tough: Letters as Questions as Letters: Cheena Marie Lo, Tessa Micaela and Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Kristjana Gunnars’ interview with Thistledown Press author Anne Campbell, Timothy Dyke’s interview with Hawai’i poet Jaimie Gusman, Hailey Higdon's interview with Joanne Kyger, Stephanie Kaylor's interview with Kenyatta JP Garcia, Jaimie Gusman’s interview with Timothy Dyke,Sarah Rockx interviews Gary Barwin, Megan Arden Gallant's interview with Diane Schoemperlen, Andrew Power interviews Lauren B. Davis, Chris Lawrence interviews Jonathan Ball, Adam Novak interviews Tom Stern, Eli Willms interviews Gregory Betts and Jeremy Luke Hill interviews Kasia Jaronczyk, Karen Smythe and Greg Rhyno, Chris Muravez interviews Ithica, NY poet Marty Cain, Róise Nic an Bheath interviews Kathryn MacLeod, Heather Sweeney interviews J'Lyn Chapman, Lisa Birman interviews Portland, Oregon poet Claudia F. Savage, Justin Eells interviews Eric Blix, Luke Hill interviews Claire Tacon, Jeremy Luke Hill interviews Adam Lindsay Honsinger, Jeremy Luke Hill interviews Marianne Micros, Jennifer Zhou interviews emerging poet Kristin Chang, Ruby Nangia interviews Medha Singh, Vannessa Barnier interviews short story author Zalika Reid-Benta, Melissa Eleftherion interviews Mariel Fechik and Michelle D'costa interviews Mehdi Kashani.

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include: City of Ottawa Poet Laureate JustJamaal The Poet, Geoffrey Young, Claire Freeman-Fawcett on Spread Letter, Stephanie Bolster on Three Bloody Words, Claire Farley on Canthius, Dale Smith on Slow Poetry in America, Allison Green, Meredith Quartermain, Andy Weaver, N.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

Eric Sneathen, Snail Poems

say rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line

    sharing the same meter

say fourteen lines using any of a number of formal

    rhyme schemes, in English typically ten syllables per

    line

say a humorous, frequently bawdy, verse of three long

    and two short lines rhyming a-a-b-b-a, popularized

    by Edward Lear

say nineteen lines with two rhymes throughout,

    consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with the

    first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring

    alternately at the end of the other tercets and with

    both repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain

I often enjoy the experience of going through a poetry title by a press I admire, but a poet I’ve never heard of, which is, admittedly, often the case with American publisher Krupskaya, but particularly relevant to a conversation of Eric Sneathen’s Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016). Bay Area poet Sneathen’s debut, Snail Poems, is composed as a book-length elegy; composed in fragments, bursts and stand-alone lyrics in an epistolary mode, held together by the thread of elegy, mourning the death of a close friend, and speaking to a shared politics that drove them to the Peace Corps, and what he can do, still, after her death. As he writes as part of a post-script:

I listen to poets and I march when I’m able—not heroically, mostly quietly, in an ellipsis of my own. It seems I wave distantly to the others, even when we’re together in a line watching fireworks on the freeway. Or in the middle of the street, I walk back and forth across a median and put my hands on cars honking terribly. There are those flashes and momentous surges of what is happening so exquisitely, it is like a future. I have a vision—is this my rage? I expose myself to something troubling in the language—is this my rage? I hold it out to you—slowly, so slowly—and I write it down. My pockets filled with seditious confetti, I don’t stop. Even asleep, it’s where I can see her still. I can attend to the slow death that suddenly blossoms as the individual death. The tragedy. I take what I can of her back into our streets.

The poem-fragments of Snail Poems are powerful, rich and heartfelt, and feel composed as a single, book-length lyric thought, examining friendship, grief and a multitude of other aspects of living, breathing and what comes next. His structure feels akin to a catch-all, open to anything and everything in terms of subject matter, moving through fragments as diary entries, journal entries, and lyric expositions on life and the universe to the smallest domestic frivolity. “say the beaks of birds,” he writes, in the first section, “you name it, stronger even than / a spider’s silk, the teeth of sea snails [.]” This is an impressive, understated lyric, the strength of which is immediate, powerful and stunning.

//snail

after your passing, we stormed the discotheque

the jefferson of rue patrice lumumba

melanie did the worm, slapping her breasts into spilled

drinks and specks of glass and i have no doubts

you would have loved us

as we were furious and out of control

while i was fucking wasting my time and eating

undercooked popcorn and watching b-movies

like the remake of the women and my favorite

under the tuscan sun i was crying

about verb tenses and what was left of them

yesterday you were my snail and

today if you are a snail

and i pretended you died

just pretended

what would that mean to a snail?

curling back inside yourself, no limbs for me to tickle

or manner of spooking you further away from me

a mere helix shell i shake like a magic eight ball

and try again later

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Samantha Giles

Samantha Giles is the author of Total Recall (Krupskaya, 2019), winner of the California Book Award Gold Medal of Poetry. Previous work includes hurdis addo (Displaced Press, 2011) and deadfalls and snares (Futurepoem, 2014), both of which won CA Conrad's Sexiest Poem in the years they were published.  An arts administrator, editor and curator, Giles was the Director of Small Press Traffic from 2009 to 2019.

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

My first book, hurdis addo, was put out by the now dormant Displaced Press and was my MFA thesis.  The creation of that book, both the actual writing and the generous conversations with my professors and fellow students that contributed to the writing, made me take myself seriously as a writer for perhaps the first time in my life. I think of that book as being, in some ways, a document of all that conversation.  It was very lovingly published by Brian Whitener who did a superhero's job of putting out (I think it was 5?)really beautiful books all by himself that year, and the collaboration with Brian kind of fomented my vision of the small utopia of small press publishing, which is very much an ethos of making something out of nothing.

My most recent book, Total Recall, was published by Krupskaya, was a similarly utopic experience of collaboration and friendship. Writing this book was super different, tho.  I feel like those conversations I had in grad school are more inside of me now. I trusted myself a lot more to write this book than any of my previous work. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the fact that Total Recall has gotten a lot more attention than any previous writing I’ve done, but it does feel different in that respect.

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

It’s possible that I just don’t understand how to craft a clear narrative arc. I was utter crap at making up bedtime stories for my child when they were little. I’m just not that kind of story teller. But I also love poetry’s elasticity, it’s danger, the ways the narrative is more under the surface.

  

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?

I usually write nothing for a long time and then a project starts to come together in large chunks written over a few years in a succession of intensive moments. I don’t move things around or re-write them until I feel the book is really done and then the first draft and the final are mostly the same, save for maybe the way I curate the chunks together to form a (hopefully) cohesive whole.

4 - Where does a poem 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?

Writing for me usually comes from a question or an annoyance that I can’t satisfy any other way than writing about it. I’m generally trying to figure out that question or fight that annoyance and that process is always imagined as a book-length negotiation. I am not entirely sure I could write an occasional poem at this point.

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

I really love giving readings and I’m always so grateful for the opportunity to do so. There’s something in the cadence and the music and the tension of a piece of writing that I can’t really understand unless I perform it. I don’t really write for a specific audience in mind and so actually being in the room with an audience also helps me get a sense of how the work I’m doing might be received. I’m also never not humbled and thankful for the people who organize events and attend them. I think readings are a gift.

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?

What are the stakes of our own complicity in a violent, rotting world? To who and what are we responsible for? Is violence in the world a plant or a gall? Where and how is the right way to be in individual body when there is so much rot and violence in the world? What does it mean to look at everything, even rot and violence? 

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?

I’m trying to not read this question as “Does Poetry Matter?” because the only answer I have for that question is “Of course not and absolutely.” I don’t really know what the current role of the writer is, except in terms of myself, which is to say I think I just try to ask myself impossible questions and then tell the truth as much as I can. I don’t know that that has larger cultural implications or not. Probably not.

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

I’ve never really worked with an editor unless you count my friends, whose critique and guidance are crucial.

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

I’m not sure it’s the BEST advice, but my son recently told me it’s good to remember that friends online are different than friends in person. Which kind of roughly extrapolated out to mean something or someone can be meaningful in your head, which is different than being meaningful in a lived reciprocity. I’ve been thinking a lot about this translation lately.

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

I usually don’t write for a long time and then get hooked into a project or question and then write in large gulps very quickly. I wish I was a daily writer, I really do. But I get too self-conscious for daily writing, it becomes more about the process of sitting down and coming up with something to say than being consumed and interested in the work.

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

I try to read a lot, take long walks in the woods with my dog, pay attention to what I’m paying attention to, go to readings, make good food. You know, live.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Murphy’s oil soap

13 - 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?

Of course. What would be the point of a hermetically sealed poetry? Isn’t the best reason to write to be in conversation about everything?

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

Inger Christensen, Juliana Spahr, Octavia Butler, Hiromi Ito, long profiles in the New Yorker, Renee Gladman, Yedda Morrison

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

Smash the patriarchy, make a rug from scratch, correctly spell the word “occasion” the first time I try

16 - 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 don’t know that I think of writing as my occupation, tho I guess I wouldn’t mind making an attempt to make it my occupation. Otherwise, I’d love to own a cafe/movie theater in a small town.

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

I’m garbage at ping pong.

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

Have you read Charles Foster’s Being a Beast? I really loved that book.  I also loved Anna Moschovakis’ Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love and Stephanie Young’s Pet Sounds. I haven’t been seeing many films lately, but I’ll join the rest of the internet in saying that Fleabag is a revelation.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve been working on figuring out what I’m currently working on, to be honest. The release of my latest book has been the project of the moment. Sometimes things lie fallow. I’m trying to think about what it means to be a writer who is not writing. What is that? Just a person?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;