Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses’ 2014 Indie Market

On November 22, 2014, above/ground press participated in our first ever Indie Market in Toronto, hosted by Meet the Presses, and had a magnificent day! We’re hoping we might even be invited back, possibly. And of course, there was far more than this at the fair that I was able to pick up (and even more I didn’t get a chance to get near). So many amazing publications! There is simply never enough money, and never enough time.

Already there are a couple of post-fair reports online by others, including those by Ryan Pratt, Kate Sutherland and Stuart Ross, as well as a photo by/of Lorette C. Luzajic; given that I currently work at the whims of the wee babe, perhaps I’m lucky to get mine posted at all.

London ON: I’m constantly amazed by at least one title by Baseline Press every season, and the crop this time ‘round included the new chapbook by Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes (2014) [see my recent review of her previous chapbook, here]. Unlike the prose-works of her previous chapbook, Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes is a small collection of more traditional-looking lyric poems, yet poems rife with narrative longing, from the stretch of the title “his death left no capital of the world, neither here / nor anywhere else,” “prophecies of my youth fulfilled but not in the way / one expected” or “it was not in parks that i learned humility,” many of which, her acknowledgments tell us, are borrowed “from lines of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry.” It is as though each title clears the way for a narrative framing or thread merely hinted at within the body of each piece; as though she writes each poem not to tell a story, but to suggest, and even fragment. Even her poems want to tell you stories, which she responds to by breaking them down into smaller, disconnected portions.

the word revealed out of darkness was   pear

someone has been writing

on your perfect menu

and your spirit has left you

for a stranger passing by your home

in the basement

you brew tea

and a list of rebuttals

a shadow hums in your window

as dusk la-tee-das

behind the mountain

the fruit was bold

to appear that way

you think

and no one prepared

for the smaller wars

LaFarge WI/Hamilton ON: From XEXOXIAL Editions, comes Hamilton writer and composer Gary Barwin’s “the wild & unfathomable ways” (2014), produced as the fifty-eighth issue of Xerolage. The description of the journal reads: “Visual poetry, copy art & collage graphics, each issue devoted to the work of one artist. Xerolge is a word coined by mIEKAL aND to suggest the world of 8.5 x 11 art propagated by xerox technology. ‘The mimeo of the 80s.’ The primary investigation of this magazine is how collage technique of 20^th century art, typography, computer graphics, visual & concrete poetry movements & the art of the xerox have been combined. 8.5x11, 24 pages each. Subscriptions $24/4 issues. For overseas delivery, add $15 for airmail printed matter.”

[the poem above is reprinted from NEWPOETRY] There is something of Gary Barwin’s concrete and visual poetry that has been developing over such a long period that it feels as though it has always existed, and hasn’t been appreciated nearly enough. Given his work as a lyric poet, fiction writer and composer of music, the thread of his wonderfully playful and inventive letter-poems deserve far more serious consideration and appreciation than what has occurred so far. It’s curious to see: derek beaulieu might build some of his visual and concrete poems (specifically, the letraset poems) using the individual letter-forms themselves as building-blocks, but Barwin’s attention is far more specific, often focusing on a single letter or character or two, and making the slightest, smallest twist. Might a selected works be in the cards, possibly? I really think a healthy collection of Barwin’s visuals is seriously required, with a good-sized critical introduction.

Vancouver BC: Given that it won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award (announced mid-day during the 2014 Indie Market), I suppose I’m rather late on getting to the party on Vancouver poet Christine Leclerc’s Oilywood (Nomados Literary Publishers, 2013), a title that has actually been sitting on my desk for some time.

We listen to water.

We go float in it.

The ocean makes us giggle.

     We giggle when we’re in it.

But no matter how advocacy demands

our sketches, the future is far from

shapeless—already flush with months,

minutes and—

                            hear  something

                            —

assholes. It has power, movements,

press releases. And it’s full of sound-

tracks to make you feel you’ve just seen

a movie, like your life is something—

                        hard to leave

—like a supertanker.

Composed as a reaction to the Kinder Morgan Pipeline pipeline debate and protests, the collaborative structure of Oilywood was discussed recently in an article in the University of British Columbia’s campus newspaper, The Ubyssey, written by Jamey Gilchrist. As Gilchrist writes:

“One of the idea’s was to put a giant “Oilywood” sign on the North Shore mountains as that image would act as a mirror to the Hollywood hills sign and its associations with a pro-development and a pro-oil stance that we are seeing in Western Canada and around the world,” said Leclerc.

Leclerc found inspiration for her poetry when she spent a summer around different regions of the Burrard Inlet. During her time there she went to the beaches, collecting interviews, pictures and water recordings. She noticed how many people spent their time there and if they knew about the proposal to expand the pipeline significantly. This curiosity led to community workshops where “people were asked to write down some memories and knowledge about the inlet on a rough map. These sorts of community input[s] were used to create the chapbook, in addition to Kinder Morgan news releases,” said Leclerc.

I’ve long been aware of a grouping of poets and poetics in Vancouver specifically, and British Columbia generally, engaged in their immediate social and political concerns in a way I don’t really see happening (certainly not at the same level, if at all) in the rest of the country. Given the recent protests around the pipeline, writers, academics, poets and many others have jumped feet-first into the fray, living their politics in a way that has deeply impressed me, and even made me challenge my own actions—how does one attempt to further live and act in ways that might actually affect positive change? Leclerc’s sixteen-section Oilywood is reminiscent of another Vancouver poet’s work, Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] that also worked, via a poem constructed out of a collage of sources, including archival and interview, to document the activities of a particular a geographic space (albeit over a far longer stretch of time) and the actions of outside interests that attempted to profit from actions that not only occupied but devastated that same space. Can a poem affect change? Perhaps it can, if it forces open a conversation. One can only hope.

For me, the saddest thing about being

human is the—

                        shifting baseline

                        —

It’ll be weird to be like, remember the

polar bears? Or, remember when we

would swim here?

I’d be traumatized if I couldn’t go to

the beach. I mean, people pay stupid

amounts of money to live here. It’s not

like the nightlife is tops in Oilywood.

It’s not like there’s tons of jobs here,

or so much stimulation.

                        We have—

fwd: CWILA Call for Essays by Indigenous Writers

CWILA Call for Essays by Indigenous Writers

Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) is actively seeking essays by female or two-spirit Indigenous Canadian writers. Essays may be on any topic related to the literary arts, including the critical reception of Indigenous writing in Canada, gender issues within the Indigenous writing community, resistance to the colonisation of Indigenous literature, or any other literary issue of concern, whether directly related to Indigenous identity or not.

CWILA is interested in creative non-fiction, literary criticism, book or other reviews, and interdisciplinary studies. Also encouraged are innovations within these genres, including the collaborative essay, the dramatic or dialogic essay, the polyphonic essay, the long poem as essay, the meditative essay, the personal essay as witness, and the visual essay.

The aim of this initiative is to hear the voices of female and two-spirit Indigenous Canadian writers, storytellers, scholars, and activists within the Canadian literary community.

Acceptance includes publication on the cwila.com website and payment of a $150 honorarium. Submissions may also be considered for a potential print anthology of CWILA essays.

Submissions should include a short bio (50 words) and the completed essay (maximum 4,000 words), both as Word documents (.doc). Submissions must be original work not accepted for paid publication elsewhere.

Submissions can be sent to essays@cwila.com. We are open to submissions any time but would be especially delighted to receive your essay by January 15, 2015.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tim Atkins

Tim Atkins is the author of many books of poetry, including 25 Sonnets (The Figures), Horace (O Books), Petrarch (Book Thug), Folklore (Salt), Petrarch (Barque), 1000 Sonnets (if p then q), and Honda Ode (Oystercatcher). The 500-page Petrarch Collected Atkins came out from Crater in July 2014 (http://www.craterpress.co.uk). The World’s Furious Song Flows Through My Skirt (a Poets Theatre play) was published by Stoma in May 2014. His ongoing long verse-novel On Fathers > On Daughtyrs continues to appear with various presses.  A section is available at: http://www.countrymusicpoetry.org/Issue_6_Contents.php He is editor of the long-running online poetry journal, onedit, (publishing Clark Coolidge, Deanna Ferguson, Jackson Mac Low, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, and many younger British poets) and London correspondent for NYC's Lungfull! magazine.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first chapbook—Folklore 1-25—published by Laird Hunt’s Heart Hammer Press in 1995 in Boulder & Paris (!) indicated that my life had changed. Up to that point I had been writing in isolation, avoiding the UK poetry scene (about which I knew next to nothing, in many ways) & dreaming of being a poet in an imagined & unchronological French, North American, Brazilian, & Japanese world of poetry & art.

Folklore came about through friendships that I made in San Francisco in the early 1990s, & indicated that I’d found friends, contemporaries, & some kind of way of saying things in a way that I’d always hoped. I met Laird the day that he had picked up Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press letterpress & was about to drive it back to The Jack Kerouac School in Boulder. It’s a very happy memory. Laird & Eleni Sikelianos (who I met at Carla Harryman’s Poets Theatre) are, to this day, the friends & writers whose works inspire & excite me most.

Laird sent Folklore to various people & received friendly & positive responses.  I remember a really nice letter from Michael Palmer. Before Folklore, my writing had been read by various old English establishment figures (Caroline Blackwood-Lowell & Peter Levi were positive & interested in my very early twenties) but I didn’t have any sense of community or conversation. Laird’s vote of confidence in my writing suddenly made the world a happy & expansive place.  It continues to feel like that to this day. I was a guest at Naropa University this last summer and that felt like the happiest (and most surprising—I’m from the UK) place I could ever find myself as a poet. All as a result of the friendships that began with Folklore.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I read—completely by chance—some Chinese poetry in the library at school when I was 13.  That was it.  I had no idea what I was reading, somehow, but I knew that it was the most exciting thing I had ever read.  I don’t really understand how these things happen, but there was something in me which felt like it recognized the importance of poetry in my life long before I consciously thought, felt, or really knew it. I remember being in the library (in Great Malvern) one summer day in the corner of a dark room looking at a book of Chinese poetry with text (Tu Fu, perhaps) & black & white photographs of misty mountains & thinking that this was the most moving & exciting thing I’d ever read. Not long after that I came to the fiction of Jack Kerouac & H.P. Lovecraft—& there’s enough poetry in that to keep you going, too. But, really, poetry was there right from the start, it seems—just waiting for me to stumble upon it.

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 never make notes and I write very quickly. My new book, PetrarchCollectedAtkins was a finished (as in abandoned) manuscript of 600 poems.  BookThug, Crater, & Barque all did selections & I left the remaining 500 to rot, whilst bragging about how many I’d written. Crater asked to do a Collected Poems & so I have spent the last 6 months making them all as fit as possible for publication.  The poems are neither translations nor original poems. They started life by me buying a book of Petrarch’s poems in English & then writing through it, sometimes paying attention to the “source” poem & sometimes ignoring it. Some of the poems are close to translations, & others are translations only in the sense that I read the corresponding Petrarch poem before writing mine. & then I edited many of them into oblivion so that the finished poem is nothing like the original. So there are many different ways of making a poem in this book. Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments, combined with my own list of translation methods, combined with the general urge to write a poem are what usually go into my poems. I feel uneasy when they are called translations if there is not some kind of understanding that they are also (often) original pieces as well.

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?
I love books. Jack Spicer’s concept of thinking in books is how I have always done things. I always have about ten different books that I want to write.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings. I always have.  I have been really fortunate to have been asked to read all over the UK & North America, & I adore the chance to read my poems to friends & to strangers. The poems that I have been writing in recent years—funny, silly, political, personal ones—do help in that they aren’t in any way difficult & usually have enough pop culture, disgust at government, & happy children in them to strike a chord with most listeners. One’s bullshit detector is always on when one bungs a load of in-progress poems into a room, so that is always really helpful, too. –& the fact that I have read with so many great poets—that never ceases to amaze me.

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 want a poetry that resists theory, really.  The biggest question I am trying to answer is how to have fun with words, how to stave off boredom, & how to contribute to a conversation which has inspired & sustained me for the whole of my adult life. Theoretical concerns that foreground a particular world view seem absurdly narrowing. I’m a Buddhist & I guess this open / empty field zen-type thinking informs my world view & what I find attractive it, but one can argue that any theory can be made to fit any type of poetry if one tries hard enough. & that seems to be a long way from the point of it all. John Ashbery said somewhere that complete ignorance & an open mind were the best tools one could have, & I agree.

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 should be as various as there are various writers. It strikes me that one should always do one’s best to be good, generous, open, & compassionate, but to say that poets should be that more than, say, hairdressers seems to be delusional in some ways—& entirely reasonable in others. I’d like everyone to stop eating animals, but writing a poem about it is less likely to bring about change than stopping eating animals.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’m a small press poet. Editors avoid us. The editors who I have worked with (Leslie Scalapino, Geoff Young, Michael Gizzi—have been nothing but generous.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
John Ashbery’s “complete ignorance & an open mind” quote.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I have next to no interest in writing critical prose. I have a PhD (which I got for professional reasons) in which I wrote about creative methods of translation, but I feel that this fact is a burden rather than a boon. I think my skill likes in collecting & cataloguing stuff as opposed to analyzing or explaining something—in my PhD I divided contemporary translation methods into seven types & then listed as many examples as I could. I did not want to write something that told people how to read, see, or think. I feel a real antipathy to a great deal of critical prose (but by no means all). I love William Watkin’s writing about Kenneth Koch—like the aporia at the heart of O’Hara’s action writing and Personism, the trope of trying to go on must be undermined by the hermeneutic logic of decollation and its re-iterative forces of cataphoric re-inscription of anaphora. What does it mean?  I have no idea! I have no interest. The beauty of poetry is that it is the most powerful descriptive tool that we have—& yet by its very nature it resists providing a single point of view about anything. I feel nauseous when I read (or read of) poets arguing over the correct reading of something. It seems absurd for there ever to be one reading of something. My old & dear friend Miles Champion always used to express contempt for the explainers & I always used to feel that he was too extreme in his views, but nowadays I’m inclined to agree with him. The UK is riddled with explainers who seem intent on finding a (tedious academic) position & defending it (aggressively). The idea that you cannot read or understand a poem without being party-line about Marx or Adorno (or whoever) is so scary that it is laughable. (It doesn’t preclude the possibility of a great poet writing great poems from this or any other perspective, though, too, of course.) I’m much more interested in a poetry which says that it doesn’t know & is excited about the journey. Perhaps that’s the difference between UK & North American poetry.  In the UK it’s so often about telling you something, whereas in Japan, Canada, the USA…it’s about showing you something.

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?
It begins with taking my kids to school. I write in the evenings, when I feel like it. I write a lot & I keep very little. Writing has never been a problem for me.  I can’t vouch for the quality of it, but I certainly have no problem with the quantity. Writing has always been a pure & uncomplicated joy. What can you do with words?  Whatever you like! There are enough words & enough variations (& great poets to inspire me) to keep me busy for a lifetime.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m in a constant state of happiness & excitation about poetry. I’ve always got far too many ideas to get down. I guess my Buddhism informs how I think about poetic inspiration: the more empty you are, the more space there is to be filled & the greater possibility there is for conversation & inspiration. My dreadful memory means that there’s never too much of substance going on in my head. I want it to be even emptier.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Damp books & the rotting vegetables that my kids have stuffed down the backs of chairs.

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?
Nature filled my external world between the ages of 7 & 18. My book Folklore is all about that world. Punk rock changed my life—the DIY idea aligned to the idea that spirit is as important as proficiency. Marvel Comics were my first introduction to creativity that made me mad with excitement. The language of science & methods of Lee Perry were all over my book 1000 Sonnets. Dub reggae has been as important to the way I think about writing as Gertrude Stein—in fact, they aren’t that different.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Clark Coolidge, Jack Kerouac, Eleni Sikelianos, Lisa Jarnot, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Joanne Kyger, Gertrude Stein, Akiko Yosano, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, Larry Eigner, Kenneth Koch, Issa, Miles Champion, bill bissett, Dogen, Lisa Robertson, Diane DiPrima, Jeff Hilson…

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a book that more than 10 / 100 / 1000 people read.

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 am a teacher as well as a writer. I love the game of communicating ideas in an efficient, flexible, open, individual & exciting way. One job fantasy I have is one where I work clearing land mines from wherever they blight people’s lives—which I guess means everywhere. I get furious just thinking about the people who make them—& do nothing about it beyond writing angry poems. I wish I’d become a Buddhist monk when I lived in San Francisco—but then I wouldn’t have had kids, so have to say that I am happy with what I’ve got. I feel incredibly lucky to be earning a good living by talking about books that I love. Being able to feed my kids & buy books!  There were a couple of years when I could do neither.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I couldn’t help myself. But I do plenty of other things too. The best thing that I do is hug my kids–& listen to “La Bamba”

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I think that Hilda Morley’s What are Winds & What are Waters is a remarkable book. I really do cry every time I read it. I bought it last year—but it came out in 1993. Films—I have just discovered Marie Menken’s work.  I love everything that she’s done.

20 - What are you currently working on?
An ongoing long poem/novel about my two kids, called On Fathers < On Daughtyrs. Parts have come out in The Denver Quarterly & as a chapbook in Issue 6 of Country Music. It’s here: http://www.countrymusicpoetry.org/Issue_6_Contents.php. Men don’t write enough about their children. I’m on a mission to change that. Thing #1 & Thing #2 have their filthy fingers all over my poetry—& that’s how it should be. They are all over the doors, walls, & windows, too, a little less happily.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Travis Cebula and Sarah Suzor, After The Fox

I don’t care whose drink it was.

I don’t care if you ordered fourteen more.

I care about the consequences,

about the reaction,

about the way your feet hit the street that night.

Alone, Nocturnal.

We were both,

ever, again and still

alone.

But go ahead,

tell me about the wishes in the world. (“Atlantic”)

Dedicated to the poet Elizabeth Robinson and opening with a quote by Robin Blaser, I’m already charmed by the collaborative After The Fox (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) by poets Travis Cebula and Sarah Suzor. Each the authors of numerous poetry chapbooks, Colorado poet Cebula is also the author of three poetry collections, most recently One Year in a Paper Cinema (Kenmore NY: BlazeVOX Books, 2014), and Venice, California poet Suzor’s first full-length collection is The Principle Agent (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). Given my lack of knowledge of either of their individual works, I can only speculate on the specifics of their collaboration, and the collection opens with an untitled poem very much suggesting the call-and-response, that begins:

Nocturnal, when was the last time you slept the whole night through?

                        The last time I held a book and listened to the leather rain.

The last time the rain was steady. Like footsteps.

Like marching up these empty halls. Filled.

                        Footsteps and pages turning. And pages torn, dropped

                          one by one into an alley for passing birds and winter.

I’ve long been fascinated by collaborative poetry projects, from Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier (as Uher)’s No Longer Two People (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1979) and Roo Borson and Kim Maltman’s Transparence of November / Snow (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1985) to more recent examples, such as Stuart Ross’ Our Days in Vaudeville (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here, which also lists an enormous amount of collaborations published over the past decade or so] and Douglas Barbour and Sheila M. Murphy’s Continuations (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012), to the collaborative (non-baby) project that Christine McNair and I have been poking at over the past few years.

There is something about their After The Fox that suggests a back-and-forth, one that exists almost as a kind of chase: “Dear Nocturnal, / have you jumped into the edge of the Atlantic? / Have you / forgotten me?” They compose their collaboration in five parts—an opening poem, and four sections, the fourth of which acts more as a bookend, akin to the first unpublished piece, than its own individual section—and the poems exist in extended untitled stretches that each extend anywhere from a single page to a couple of pages or more. They write of “Nocturnal,” and the fox, producing less of a narrative than an abstract “tone” across a fairly large canvas; one that holds together while opening further with each new poem, developing very much into that ‘collaborative voice’ that is recognizable not as two voices but an evolving single voice throughout. While the back-and-forthness of their composition is intriguing, there are sections of the collection that could have done with a bit more editing, allowing their meditative stretches to meander a bit more than they should or could have. I am curious to wonder, also: is this a one-off project between Cebula and Suzor, or might collaboration between the two be something they return to, again, with subsequent projects?

The only thing under this island are

consequence, darkness and water.

Wet garbage, dead flowers, they float, they

never ferment.

But you sure crossed something:

your fingers.

Your cold, cold fingers.

Nocturnal, were you scared of the chase?

Humor me for just one second.

One second squared.

One second too long.

In other words,

I recycle this light out of obligation.

Call it innocence. Call

attention to my purity. My

intention.

Nocturnal,

I intend to fake it all the time,

even when I’m scared.

Remember that record you used to play?

And that view from your roof?

All the way to Brooklyn, yeah?

All the way.

*

writing spaces : the new quarterly blog

I participated recently in The New Quarterly's "writing spaces" series, over at their enormously clever blog, referencing the "three things I can't write without."

Profile of Frances Boyle, with a few questions

My profile of Ottawa poet Frances Boyle, with a few questions, is now up at Open Book: Ontario. Might we see you at the launch of her first poetry collection, Light-carved Passages (BuschekBooks) (which she also discussed recently on CBC Radio) tomorrow night at the RailRoad Reading Series?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Theresa Kishkan

Theresa Kishkan [photo credit: John Pass]: I was born in Victoria, B.C. in 1955 and have lived on both coasts of Canada as well as in Greece, Ireland, and England. I was educated at the Universities of Victoria and British Columbia. I make my home on the Sechelt Peninsula with my husband John Pass in the home we built in the early 1980s and where we raised our three children.

I’ve published ten books, including poetry, two collections of personal essays (Red Laredo Boots and Phantom Limb), three novels (Sisters of Grass, A Man in a Distant Fields, and The Age of Water Lilies), and most recently a memoir, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees. Works-in-progress include a second memoir, Blue Portugal, and two novellas, Winter Wren and Patrin.

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 came out when I was 21. I’d sent a mss. to Fred Cogswell who edited Fiddlehead Poetry Books (now Goose Lane Editions) and within two weeks, he responded to say he would publish the book a little later that year. I remember feeling very excited – and validated, somehow. Did it change my life? Well, no. But I remember I felt less self-conscious about defining myself as a poet. I felt brave, bold. And now – well, it’s much harder to place my work with publishers. No one responds within two weeks! (To be honest, some never respond at all!) But that initial experience is still available to me; it’s still at the core of what I am and do.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was young and finding my voice as a writer, poetry was the best vessel for the material I was exploring. It was shapely, capacious, and it felt so right. The way it fit the line, held the language with such intense attention. But I read voraciously (still do) and I wanted to try other genres too. It didn’t seem to be necessary that there be such a separation between poetry and fiction. I suspected that lyric and narrative were at the heart of the writing I loved to read and could also be the guiding muses of what I wanted to write myself.

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?
This is difficult to talk about with clarity but I always know when I’m about to begin something new. It’s as though I’m accumulating – not just material but sensory experience, an apprehension of how things fit together. The air shimmers, objects are more beautiful, and I know somehow that everything I’m seeing is part of the ecology of what I’m hoping to explore in a new work. Sometimes this lasts for some weeks, months even, and then I’m able to begin. I don’t make outlines or schemas. I don’t write quickly but I do work steadily. A novel takes about three years. A novella, about a year. And much of that will have been re-written (re-visioned) many times as I work so the final first full draft is in fact a composite of several drafts.

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?
Because I can’t write poems any more, I’ll have to comment on how a work of prose begins. And novels, essays – it’s pretty much the same. A thread, a note, a phrase beckons and I follow. I don’t always know where I’m going. Usually I have the sense that it’s a fairly large terrain, though, which will almost certainly be a book-length work. Even an essay has a relationship to another so that I keep writing them until I know that work is done.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do like to give readings. When audiences respond, when I sense engagement (on both sides), when I “hear” my own work as I read it and find myself listening and responding to it myself, well, then I love the process. And reading aloud, to an audience, is a test of how lucid the work is, how accessible.

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’m curious about the world and the way disciplines intersect and connect. I’ve become interested in Robert Langland’s program of unifying conjectures, of harmonic analysis, and it’s something I’m trying to understand for a piece of writing.

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?
In a healthy ecosystem, there’s function and balance. I think that human cultures need storytellers and artists as much as they need anyone else – doctors, lawyers, child-care workers, poets.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had some very good experiences with editors. At its best, the relationship is generous and lively; editors have challenged me to go further, have suggested possibilities that might not have occurred to me. One or two have been intrusive. I’d hate to have work with an editor too early in the writing process when I think intention and style might be influenced. But as a way to make a completed work as good as it possibly can be, I think the relationship is essential.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’d written only poetry and a novella (which began as a series of linked prose poems...) before my children were born in the 1980s. I stopped writing when they were small because there simply wasn’t time. My husband I were building a house, there was the dailyness of laundry, cooking, making a garden to grow some of our food (and to put roses on the table), and somehow writing got put aside for about 10 years. And I think I always thought I’d return to poetry. But that voice wasn’t there when I came back to writing. I couldn’t manage the lines, the condensation of what I wanted to say. I kept moving the material around on the page, stretching it out, until finally I decided to simply let it go on as it obviously wanted to – phrases of song, recipes, conversations, map-readings, etc.. That resulted in a collection of essays, Red Laredo Boots, which came out in 1996, and then a novel, Sisters of Grass, and there was no going back to poetry (although I would, in a heart-beat, if it would have me). Though I guess I’m interested in hybridity more than anything – how prose is influenced by poetry, how poetry can be cross-pollinated by scientific prose, etc. In so much of the work I read and admire, the tension is in the language, the ideas, not in how one should finally define the form. When I was 18, I read James Agee and Walker Evans’s extraordinary book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I remember this bit from the Preface: “The nominal subject is North American cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families...More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”

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?
When I’m actively working on something, I like to write in the morning. Strong coffee, notes and research materials spread out on my desk and the floor around my desk (luckily I have a room of my own and I have to say I love old reference books, field guides, musical scores so there’s usually a midden in my room when I’m writing...). And when I’m truly in the zone, I often get up in the middle of the night and come down to work for a bit in the quiet of a sleeping house.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I am willing (mostly) to be patient. I know it doesn’t go away and sometimes the work is better for its rest.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Wood smoke  – and rain.

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?
All those things. I love the specificity of field guides (Nesting information for the Calliope hummingbird in the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: “2 bean-sized white eggs, surprisingly large for such a tiny bird, in a small lichen-and-moss nest covered with cobwebs on a limb of a bush or well-protected small tree.”). I love early music and opera. I’m an avid reader of natural history and science writing and it does inform my own work. And last year, in New York, I was captivated by “house of memory,” an exhibit at the Smithsonian National Musuem of the American Indian in which the Seminole/Muscogee artist C. Maxx Stevens explored how our memory of time and place is composed and sustained. She is a visual storyteller and her imagery resonated with me, echoing in some ways the very work I’m engaged in now, trying to reconstruct my grandmother’s early life in a small village in the Beskydy Mountains in Moravia.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Gary Snyder, Kathleen Jamie, Alice Oswald, Sappho, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Nancy Turner’s ethnobotanical work with coastal First Nations...it’s an endless list.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
A libretto for a grand opera or masque about the western landscape in which rivers, talus slopes, Ponderosa pines, and birds all have roles. In which salmon sing arias of the long swim home and stars sing their guidance.

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 began to take voice lessons about 6 years ago and I sometimes wish I’d begun much earlier, that I’d come to music as a young person, that I’d had the discipline to spend an entire day on a note, a phrase. And I’ve always wished I could draw.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was the closest thing to my code for understanding the mysteries of the universe. It doesn’t entirely work but it gets me closest.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Oh, so many books! I’ve been reading Edward Frenkel’s Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, which is wonderful. I just read Robert Hass’s Time and Materials: (Do they confer, do the lovers’ bodies/In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face,/ Confer --, does the slow breeze in the pines?/If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.) I don’t watch many films but did love Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a book-length series of essays called Blue Portugal. Some of the pieces explore family history (that Moravian grandmother) and the essay I’m writing right now, “Euclid’s Orchard”, is an attempt to explore quilting, math (Langland’s program among other things), pattern, horticulture, and love. I recently finished two novellas and hope to write another once I’ve completed these essays.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present

Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2014) is a single, extended poem of accumulated sentences, each presented as stand-alone, with a coda to close this book of more than one hundred pages. Elsewhere, Robertson has described her compositional process as one of collecting, reassembling and collapsing sentences (including her own) together into extended, larger forms, and Cinema of the Present furthers what Robertson had previously done with shorter, individual poems and stretch them across a far larger canvas. This poem/book is immense, large and wise, and contains multitudes, as well as a potential dialogue (or, two-sided monologue) between the italicized and non-italicized lines:

It took you some time to discover the displacement.

Curiosity, limbs and momentum: because of form you kept playing.

It was a burning mortal agony, an insult.

A gate made of medium-density fibreboard, fiberglass, foam, balsa wood and copper.

It was a kind of dance music from the plains you hear at nighttime from far above.

You are fundamentally forgotten and veiled or you are deeply erased and diverted.

It was a place like the farm, but near the ocean.

You were poverty shivering in an old turquoise city.

It was a place of brutal mobility.

You need a hat against anger.

It was a place on a ruined map.

You send them back to their diminutive need to identify with everything they see.

It was a wide and empty Pacific place in too-strong light, with a general appearance of low-grade lack.

You are bitter gentian, gentian yellow.

Lisa Robertson is the author of a wealth of materials, including The Apothecary (Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1991), XEclogue (Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1993), Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997), The Weather (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001), Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria: Clearcut Press, 2003), Rousseau’s Boat (Vancouver: Nomados, 2004), The Men (Toronto: BookThug, 2006), Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House Books, 2009) and R’s Boat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), and yet, it has been only through her last couple of books has she relied so heavily upon the individual sentence and its accumulations. I’ve been suggesting for some time that Robertson is very much a poet of sentences, allowing her poems to shape themselves through the accumulation of self-contained lines that bounce, collect and riff off each other into a complex series of cinematic experiences. Early on in the collection, she writes: “What’s natural, what’s social, what’s intuitive? // As for the serial description… // You now no longer use better words.” As her title suggests, her use of sentences here work to describe that space and state we refer to as “present” in a descriptively-rich form, one that suggests film, blending a mainstream sheen with a more experimental bent, all presented on a very large screen. Certainly: blink, and you might just overlook an important detail. What appeals about this single, extended piece is in knowing that one can enter anywhere and begin, although there is also something larger to be gained and understood by moving through the entirety from beginning to end (although not in the purely “narrative” sense). Cinema of the Present suggests narrative, characters (the coda, “Present: An Index,” by Pascal Poyet, is subtitled “(looking for characters)”) and a variety of scenes and settings, and a dialogue that moves around everywhere and might even, in fact, go nowhere at all. If it is not the destination, one must pay strict attention to the journey.