12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Goodfellow

Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collection Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography, just published by Gaspereau Press, spring 2022, and of a collection in draft titled Folklore of Lunenburg County, which is supported by a Research & Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, CV2, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, where he grew up.

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 changed my life in that the publisher I most desired agreed to publish it, and my dream came true.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I saw poems doing things that no other form of writing or art could do. They were more eviscerating and life changing than any painting or song. I didn’t want to make anything else.

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?
It’s a slow process with many drafts, revisions, edits and pencil marks.

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?
A poem usually begins for me in the woods behind the house, in a field, along the shore or in the garden.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They’re neither part of my creative process nor counter. I don’t absorb information well aurally, so I don’t listen to the radio or podcasts or attend poetry readings. I’ll sometimes do readings if asked because I understand other people enjoy them. In terms of promoting poetry collections, I think readings are one of the most inefficient ways of raising awareness about a book; they’re the literary equivalent of burning coal to produce electricity—dimly lit, energy intensive and unsustainable in the longterm of a writer’s daily life.

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?
My poems are generally situated in the place where I live and grew up—the south shore of Nova Scotia.

My first collection, Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (Gaspereau Press, 2022) explores the way humans’ relationship with nature is often mediated through text and guidebooks, engaging with things in the forest that show humans once lived there: wild apple, stone walls, clearing piles. Just as we can’t seem to understand nature without naming the things we see, we’re unable to move through it without leaving markers of the lives we’ve led. In this way, a rain-worn ironstone wall in a clearing of hemlock inadvertently becomes the name we tried to form for what we saw in nature, but failed: a mark or word that even the rain couldn’t wear away.

My second collection, currently in draft, is titled Folklore of Lunenburg County and uses Helen Creighton’s 1950 ethnographic collection of fragmented experiences of the supernatural in this part of Nova Scotia as a departure point on the way to something darker and more hidden, exploring the way that the supernatural has been an analog for loss, disappearance and violence, and the way that early experiences of the supernatural in this area were often mediated by love, community, and neighbours. The collection is supported by a Research & Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think that the role of a poet is to burn what can’t live and cauterize what mustn’t die.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I find that literary magazine editors in Canada rarely suggest or request edits, though magazine editors in the U.S. are more proactive in this regard; magazine edits, when offered, are valuable. In terms of book editors, working with Andrew at Gaspereau when editing the book was more than essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It was what Alice Munro told The Paris Review in 1994 in relation to what place and landscape meant to her and all that she had written: “I’ll never leave.”

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 get up around 5:30 a.m. and sit on my kitchen floor for a while, writing in my notebook, before I make coffee. Just after waking up, my brain is still making analogies and strange connections between things before the rational part of the world has come into focus. I fit in writing and edits into various points throughout the day: parked in my ’98 Rav4, sitting on the porch, waiting for dinner to cook, waiting for appointments and in the bath.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Nature, and the places in nature that show humans were once there.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Garlic, just harvested.

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?
If that’s what David W. McFadden once said, I think he is dead wrong, and the idea that books come from books is monstrous, framing their growth as a kind of cancer. It’s truly levelling and devaluing of all that is rich in the world.

Your question also frames nature as a form, like music or visual art, which is an interesting concept. Nature is the most important influence on my work, but I don’t see it as a form. If we’re talking about human life, we’re the form of the work, and nature is the ending. In a while, when all of this is gone and there are no longer humans, nature will still be here—the blank page after the book ends, the cover that holds it together, the table on which the book is set, the bedrock under the table.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Alice Munro, Robyn Sarah, Carl Phillips, George Johnston, Jack Gilbert, Jenny George, Gabrielle Bates, Aria Aber, Patrick Modiano, Louise Glück, Mavis Gallant, Thomas Wyatt, Chaucer, W.S. Merwin, Linda Gregg, Richard Siken, Anne Sexton, Denise Jarrott, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Despy Boutris, Catherine Pond, Taneum Bambrick, Hailey Leithauser, A. E. Stallings, Alice Oswald, Kevin Young, George Oppen, Ashley Anna McHugh.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to buy a woodstove.

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?
If I couldn’t write, I’d rather be dead.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was the smallest and most fatal knife in the drawer.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Near Dark by Kathryn Bigelow.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on my next collection of poems, Folklore of Lunenburg County.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Melissa Ginsburg, Doll Apollo

 

Craft Day

Scissors cut
through the snowflaked

morning. Dolly
sharpens her edges.

Trims herself, gives herself
fringe. Makes more like her.

Sisters, clones. She scissors
their slick

magazines, girlskins
sleek as blades.

She hones her scissors
On sandpaper. She will marry

that abrasion. Make it
scrape her. She’ll

feel it. She’ll unfold
garlands.

Mississippi writer and editor Melissa Ginsburg’s second full-length poetry title, following her debut, Dear Weather Ghost (Four Way Books, 2013), as well as the novels Sunset City (Ecco, 2016) and The House Uptown (Flatiron Books, 2021), is Doll Apollo (Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2022), a collection described thusly on the publisher’s website: “With lush imagery and surprising syntactical turns, the poems in Doll Apollo merge mythology with close attention to the patterns, colors, and contours of the material world. Through the figure of the paper doll, the hoax conspiracy surrounding the Apollo moon landing, and lyrics embedded with violence and beauty, Melissa Ginsburg’s feminist ecopoetics weaves the domestic and celestial into considerations of female identity, desire, spiritual yearning, and doubt.” Ginsburg is a poet I first discovered through an issue of FENCE magazine back in 2015 [see my review of such here], and her Doll Apollo (which doesn’t include the work from that issue of FENCE) is a book-length lyric framed in a reference to the Ancient Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo; of the nymph pursued, and finally, transformed for the sake of protection. “halted mid stride / un-nymphed as mayflies,” the opening poem, “Daphne,” offers, “laureled & wreathed [.]”

While the examination of working and reworking updates of mythologies through the book-length lyric certainly isn’t something new—there is something here reminiscent of Gale Marie Thompson’s own second full-length poetry title, Helen Or My Hunger (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], offering her own lyric study of language and beauty, but on the mythical and multiple retellings of Helen of Troy—Ginsberg, on her part, utilizes less a retelling or reworking than allowing that particular myth a kind of loose framing to the collection, able to open up poems riffing off further directions, whether of paper dolls or stories of how the moon landing, via Apollo 11 in 1969, was actually faked. “doubt has been married so long to the altar,” the poem “When Doubt Comes to Apollo” ends, “each star a tribute doubt hunted and placed // on a plate [.]” As the collection opens with the singular poem “Daphne” and into a triptych of lyric sections: “Doll,” “Apollo” and “Toile,” Ginsburg swirls her references and narratives around that central core of Greek myth, writing out beauty and female agency, the stories we tell (including those we tell ourselves) that get altered, shifted and even twisted, and of space travel. As much as anything, this is a lyric of perception and doubt, and how perception shifts, shimmys and twists, even to the point of disconnect. As the second half of the poem “The Bench” reads: “We were figures // in a sketch of a cold deer path. // I did not expect to survive // such flattening. Then you said look // for a perfectly straight horizontal line // and under a mound of blue snow // such a line appeared.”

I find it curious, also, how she utilizes poem-titles in her work, as Ginsberg’s lyric distillations each unfurl from each singular point, utilizing titles almost as subject headers before launching into her examinations, often offering a closing line or two to satisfy a particular kind of closure to that singular moment. “I waited,” as she writes, to close the poem “One Cannot Read Oneself without Great Difficulty,” “quaking under ink // wanting the fingers and the eraser                  the eyes / of the circulars                           variously glossed [.]”

Daniel Scott Tysdal, The End Is in the Middle

 

     Ballad of the Mad Bomber

                A bomb is not a story, though
                                 Metesky claims to soothe
     with rumour-spurring, blast-fed tales,
throning the search for truth.

                   Through telephone and movie seat
              and subway coined with bombs,
     George liens the wrongs and dastard debit
          yet owes each flame-scorched palm.

      Sedate a dream with waking then
                                   rebrand each corpse a calf.
Explore “Mad Bomber”-planted visions,
                        just slice your eyes in half.

           Though George elates he never killed,
   designed his bombs to goad,
                if terror’s free of fuse and charge

Toronto poet Daniel Scott Tysdal’s work has long been engaged with an irreverent and conceptual structural inventiveness and play on and through poetic form, offering a particular flavour unique in writing and publishing generally, but very much unique through Canadian writing. Anytime I’m moving through a new collection of his, I wonder: exactly where did this guy come from? The author of the poetry titles Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2006), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2010) [see my review of such here] and Fauxccasional Poems (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2015) [see my review of such here], as well as the short story collection Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2021) and the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press, 2013), his latest title is the poetry volume The End Is in the Middle (Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2022). His work exists as a curious outlier, coming at form and pop culture from the seemingly-oddest angle, and his outlier status seems moreso through his publishing books with presses not known for producing experimental work (it isn’t lost on me that one of the blurbs on the back cover is by Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of her latest here], arguably another Canadian poet outlier). Tysdal’s latest, The End Is in the Middle, works through the structure of the infamous Mad Magazine fold-in, something just about everyone of at least two or three generations would be entirely familiar with, as he writes to introduce the collection:

The fold-in poetry form was inspired by one of my childhood heroes: Al Jaffee. For fifty-six years, his illustrated fold-ins comprised the back inside cover of every issue of MAD magazine (Jaffee retired in 2020, when he turned 100). A page-filling image, with a brief caption at the bottom, would be transformed by folding the page to reveal a visual and textual punchline. Borrowing Jaffee’s fold-in technique, the fold-in poem is characterized by three features: 1) the poem does not end at the bottom of the page, 2) the reader completes the poem by folding the page in so that the A guide meets the B guide, and 3) these folds reveal the final line of the poem nested within the original lines. For accessibility reasons, the final, post-fold line also appears after each poem.

the final line of "Ballad of the Mad Bomber"

Arguably, most if not all poetry exists with a requirement for the reader to make connections not overtly in the body of the poem, however directed their reading might be by the author, rarely is the requirement of the reader so physical. I’m reminded of bpNichol’s unreleased and burnable mimeo poem Cold Mountain (no date, but circa 1960s), a visual poem built to be curled, stood up and set with a match; although, in comparison to Tysdal’s folding structure, nothing new is specifically revealed in or through Nichol’s text by the reader doing such a thing. For Tysdal, the requirements for such a piece are immense, offering a narrative echo of the Jaffee’s jumbling visual collage that offered a final reveal that provided a gag as well as new insight into that original, sprawling page. That original A to B is hardly as uncomplicated as it sounds, and to even be a single line, a single letter, off would mean the entire piece might fall apart. And for the benefit of those who don’t wish to mangle their copies, as well as for accessible reasons, the final revealed text is also offered on each following page. It would be curious to know, down the road, how many readers actually did attempt to fold the pages together to reveal the final, hidden line of each poem as it is meant to be experienced. Even jwcurry, bpNichol bibliographer, has said that Cold Mountain was best experienced as a pair: one copy to burn, and one copy to keep pristine.

There’s almost something of the rhyme and joyful metre in certain of these pieces that echo Toronto poet Dennis Lee’s classic poetry titles for children, whether Alligator Pie (1974) or Jelly Belly (1983), as Tysdal bounces and riffs in rhythm in a poem such as “Ballad of the Mad Bomber,” although most pieces exist as extended, singular, stretches. “Why bother writing a poem?” he begins, in the poem “Make,” “The future, / breaking away, doesn’t want it. Even if / your lines are a monument to their moment, / tomorrow’s fools will legislate new rules and / blast your statue, or extinct themselves into / stillness, the levelling left to sand and time.” Set in five sections of poems, each with single-page poems, including the occasional visual poem, and verso final line reveal—“MAD ME,” “MAD MEN,” “MAD MAKING,” “MAD COMPANIONS” and “MORE MAD ME”—the poems are composed with wit and vigor, attention to small moments and grand gestures alike. They are expressive, hopeful and compassionate, even in poems such as “Suicide,” suggesting “A pact signed with such force / it breaks.” Or, as the poem “Snowflake” offers: “it’s because we will melt / that we don’t fear the light.”