an interview with me in today's ottawa citizen

on my second novel, missing persons (Mercury Press). Thanks, Peter Simpson!

Sarah Pinder: some detritus;

A Shout!

Obviously, I’m open-minded,

but who handles the handover?

What is important is that you’re serious,

and who can handle that? (Do You Like What You See?)

Coming out of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair recently, one of the very few tables with publications that really stood out was by former Montrealer Sarah Pinder, through her series of lovely little chapbooks, covering her table as she sat quietly, knitting. Deceptively small, her publications include the single-poem chapbook thanksgiving (2006), the poetry collection Do You Like What You See? (2009), the short story collection The Beautiful Province (2009), the essay/talk ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’ (2009) and a two-author chapbook of two short stories, Pearls Before Swine Flu / This Is Plague City (with Dave Proctor, 2009).

I used to fuck men in plaid lumberjack shirts all the time when I first moved to this city – saw the canoe paddle over the door of the first boy I dated here and knew I’d have his dick in my mouth in five minutes’ time, though we’d just met. I wanted someone to take me home. All the wilderness tips came back, a thousand kilometres away, regardless of whether you’ve ever actually had to stare down a bear in the middle of a trail. Us kids spent most of the time popping strips of caps on the sidewalk with jagged rocks, or killing small creatures in snares off where the street ended.

But still, that mountain man cliché got under my skin in the middle of Toronto; made me ache for smoke and sweat until I went around sealing my mouth second-handedly over every smoker I could find. Walked around with little dead fires in my mouth all the time, wanting more and more ash. (“Neighbor Study,” The Beautiful Province)

In little publications that run the gamut from essay to poems to short story, hand drawn roughness to carefully-crafted design (the photo series in Do You Like What You See?, for example, is quite lovely), part of what appeals is the lack of self-consciousness in these small chapbooks, from someone who appears to write and publish quietly, out of a sense of necessity, and out of the occasional (making each publication, thusly, a true occasion), as opposed to habit. Her chapbook ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’ comes out of, as she writes at the back, “a lecture at OCAD at a symposium called Collectorama that focused on people’s obsessions with the act of collecting.” Her essay begins:

I want to say something about houses, and the way they end up becoming repositories. When I was fifteen, my mother sold the house I grew up in. I remember walking through the halls of the little bungalow with my camera, taking flash photos of the empty rooms and naked walls, while telling my confused mother it was because I wanted to remember the house we’d lived in. when I got the roll of film developed, I leafed through the photos I’d meant to describe our life before the atomizing effects of divorce and just saw the flash bouncing off those naked white falls, flattening each room into a box devoid of sentiment. That roll of film made clear to me then that memory is sealed to things that fill the spaces we spend our time in – objects and possessions from paint by numbers to egg slicers that say ‘we are here’.

Still rough in parts, this is a lovely personal essay written as story with all the weight of the personal, adding another bit of thread from her larger weave of concerns, and makes itself, almost, just as much a treatise on art and memory. Does it take going through a writer like Pinder to realize just how little heart comes through in so much other writing? There is much heart, certainly, in Pinder, but rarely a moment of over-sentiment, even while wandering through a series of familiar tales of failed dating, losing one’s own past, and working to negotiate oneself through a new and unfamiliar city.

I was at a yardsale over the weekend, and a woman had a large box of photographs from the 1950s-70s that she was giving away for free. Upon inquiry, she revealed she’d found them at the intersection a few years before – decades of documented family dinners and trips to the beach, which she’d assumed had been tossed to the curb when someone had died. Every photo was carefully annotated with dates, names and little in-jokes or asides about the images themselves. Another woman going through the box with me announced that it was too depressing to look at these images stripped of meaning by the absence of their owner, and her statement neatly named my desire to hold on, archive, become the narrative link.

Where exactly is Sarah Pinder heading with these small, glorious (and sometimes, uneven) moments? I could see something collecting all of the above as a warm and loving arm in a collection produced by, say, Pedlar Press, as very few other publishers seem to want odd little bits of prose and poetry mixed into a single package, but perhaps Pinder remains happy making as many of these as she sees fit, whenever the moment strikes. In many ways, I certainly hope so. I know I would like to see more of these odd, and extremely personal, little productions.

Snap that string and let me reel

out, driving bald highways

towards a holiday I don’t celebrate

with anything but food,

simple movement and talk

of money, grief.

I fill the gas tank in stripped

small towns – payphones and

and lists are my roadside relief

now. I must rake leaves (thanksgiving)

For more information on her or her little publications, check out Sarah Pinder at bitsofstring.wordpress.com

Jay MillAr, ESP: ACCUMULATION SONNETS

avant gardes hold up

banks for performance art

any poseur will do whatever

they’re just people in

topography’s grapple with how

weird will it be to be finished

treading on thin water

yeah – that ice melted

six poems ago used up

these lonely results of art

with the sun’s cocaine

like falling world sounds

a herd of field mice

eats shoots and leaves

a dream resistance imagines

Given just how productive his BookThug has been over the past few years, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Toronto editor/publisher Jay MillAr is still a poet in his own right, recently releasing his fifth solo trade poetry collection, ESP: Accumulation Sonnets (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009), after his the small blue (2007), False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), Mycological Studies (2002) and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000), as well as the collaborative “novel” with Stephen Cain, Double Helix (2006). A collection that could just as well been called “15 x 13 x 4,” his accumulated sonnets (appearing previously in two smaller BookThug editions, including a chapbook section also called “ESP: Accumulation Sonnets” in 2004 [see my review of it here]) of fifteen lines, thirteen poems each in four sections (subtitled “notes”), do exactly what they claim, working the extended/long poem through a series of small accumulations, each edging closer to what the poem as a whole eventually becomes. Is this MillAr understanding and absorbing Jack Spicer’s talk of “the serial poem” in ways that so many other self-proclaimed Spicer-ites have managed to miss?

Along with a quote from the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, the collection begins with an odd quote from “work poet” Tom Wayman, that reads:

People whose daily work leaves them without time, energy or self confidence for longer forms find contemporary poetry a handy vehicle to express what they feel is important about their lives.

I’m not entirely sure what MillAr is looking to accomplish with such a quote; is Wayman suggesting that those such as, for example, Pound and Eliot weren’t able to work proper “longer forms,” and thus, instead, wrote poems? Do you think they, or anyone else, would consider their poems, essentially built of and through (in part) their own contemporary, were constructed out of a lack of proper attention? Or is this simply MillAr working the suggestion of an ongoing poem one of individually constructed parts, working poems in between everything else, that make up an ongoing pattern, through his own combinations of attentions and inattentions?

how do you feel loading

your horse into the sunset

colloquy ominous reverie

quietly wait for the cliché

the sky begins to fall instead

a soft cold song of wind

in the history of the theory

of snow of different words

for monolith of human brick

i must distract my self

have you a knitting needle

for my eye perchance?

the sound of a child asleep

unintended wish for stillness

no word for it but words

Either way, there is a particular kind of silence and stillness that MillAr has achieved, through both his attentions and his inattentions. Through a poetics of calm emergence, and, even, accumulation itself, MillAr moves through a poetry that isn’t showy or extravagant, but meditational, and there’s a particular quiet and essential space he has been slowly carving for himself over the past few years, despite, and perhaps even allowed through, the reader’s own distracted eye. Books emerge as they do, chapbooks emerge as they do, and through the development of his careful, handpicked gaze and light touch. Starting with his trade collection False Maps for Other Creatures (Gibson’s Landing BC: Nightwood/blewointment, 2005), and continuing with the chapbook Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006), arguably two of his strongest works so far, MillAr has been moving into an area of important, if not even essential, poetry. Why not see what else there is?

wait for springs boot lute

the weather late but accurate

some are angry some are anger

‘what ever happened to my gameboy’

ponder the absence of Pompeii

occurrence of regular charms

or the invention of history

digging out ‘the house’

on a cold and mildly abstract

version of the canadian landscape

the wonder of fingerprints

call out their songs

lame projects leave marks there

a virgin of solitude

etched ice heats

12 or 20 questions: with Lina ramona Vitkauskas

Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the recent winner of The Poetry Center of Chicago’s 15^th Annual Juried Reading, judged by poet Brenda Hillman. She was also recently nominated by Another Chicago Magazine for an Illinois Arts Council Award (in the poetry and fiction categories). She has won an honorable mention in STORYmagazine’s Carson McCullers Award contest (1999) and placed as a semi-finalist for the Cleveland State University Open Poetry Series (2002). After obtaining an MA in Creative Writing from Wright State University, she authored three poetry books and chapbooks including: THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING(Ravenna Press, 2010), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006), and Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004).

Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies including: The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), The Prague Literary Review, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris),The Chicago Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Aufgabe; Drunken Boat, White Fungus (New Zealand),MiPoesias, Paper Tiger (Australia), and the In Posse Review Multi-Ethnic Anthology edited by Ilya Kaminsky. Poet Denise Duhamel has noted that her poetry “employs humor and kitsch…the dazzling underside confronts intolerance and terrorism with a wise brilliance.” Her web site is www.linaramona.com.

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 was published in 2004 by Fractal Edge Press (Chicago) and is titled Shooting Dead Films with Poets. The next one was published by dancing girl press (Chicago) and was titled Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star. My first full-length book of poetry is coming out in 2010 on Ravenna Press (Spokane,WA) and it's called THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING. The publication of all of these works came at critical times in my life. The first came soon after I'd moved back to Chicago from Ohio, where I completed my MA in Creative Writing (in 2002).

I'd jumped into the blossoming poetry scene by making contacts in the community and doing a lot of readings. Wayne Allen Jones, a fellow poet, was starting a press and wanted my book to be one the first that he did. I was very happy, of course, and was able to say I'd published. In 2005, Kristy Bowen, publisher of dancing girl press in Chicago, approached me to publish another collection of astronomy-related poems; I was thrilled to be a part of her catalogue of all-female poets--all very talented...to be among the likes of Brandi Homan, Simone Muench, Daniela Olszewska, and Kristy Odelius was a great experience for me. The book coming out in 2010 is a great accomplishment of mine. I am extremely honored that Kathryn Rantala (of Ravenna) is publishing it. It is about 108 poems written between 2005 to 2008. The book feels different because it is lengthy and feels like a comprehensive representation of my work.

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

I began as a fiction writer, but I had always written poetry. I returned to poetry because I seemed to be able to feel more comfortable with it. It seemed more my niche.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially 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?

My writing style begins when the muse visits. Months may pass and she doesn't stop by, then she comes and stays for months (always a wanted guest). I write in spurts and in a flash of inspiration try to capture it all before it slips away. I don't revise until much later, and even then, I am afraid to tamper too much with the initial products I produce. Nothing is ever truly finished, and poems become reincarnated as others at times.

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?

Sounds, words, language. I begin with juxtaposing words that sound as if they belong together. I let the poem take shape as I write. I never know what I am writing about until it is finished, though there are distinct themes of politics, gender roles, shades of humanity, magical realism, surreal terrains, conversations I hear, botany, astronomy, and Lithuanian and Spanish vocabulary and nuances.

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

I do readings and I do enjoy them. I like hearing audience response to my work. What other poets find in my work means a great deal to me. Often times, there are beautiful surprises in their responses.

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?

Russian sociolinguist Bakhtin wrote of heteroglossia, the idea of language hierarchy or conflict within the mind and how it influences language decisions. This meant quite a large deal to me having spoken Lithuanian primarily as a child, and then English, and then studying Spanish. Soon, there was a distinct "language straddling" going on within me and I became rather entertained by the notion of being able to switch between and/or amalgamate words, if necessary. I believe this theory plays a large role in my loose method of writing. It at least fuels the playfulness in my work. Montaigne wrote of the meaning of "to essay" and referred to the Latin translation "to test" or "to try". Early in my master's study, I was quite drawn to this notion and still view the process through this lens.

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 poet in society is changing. I ask, have we arrived as authoritative voices on culture yet? It's becoming apparent with the explosion of citizen journalism and the immediacy of Twitter, etc. that writers have a challenge of maintaining credibility in the creative and non-fiction realms.

In Europe, poets are lauded, respected, and looked upon as great commentators of generations and time. The US has a great tradition, as of late, celebrating genre writers within the fiction realm and using commercial success and film adaptation as the benchmark. There is a distinct misconception among mainstream society about poets and poetry--often times people think of the Shakespeare they learned in high school or think of Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath. There is such a rich world of contemporary poets, talented documenters of our time, that has yet to be discovered. I believe poets deserve more recognition, though I think within the world of poetry itself, there is much mutual recognition and respect.

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

It is essential to the process to shape a published work to fit its medium, but should not alter the intent.

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

Pound's "show don't tell". Robert Creeley said (I'm paraphrasing) "If you don't know what you're doing--trust it." Jodorowsky said, "You cease to exist when you say 'That's what I am.' "

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 only been able to slightly traverse between experimental short fiction and poetry. I prefer poetry.

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?

No routine for writing. For me, personally, routine it is detrimental and counterproductive.

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

I look to scientific texts, Wikipedia's random article, and foreign films.

13 - What did your favourite teacher teach you?

My drama director once told me that I am not as funny as I think I am.

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?

Definitely science (astronomy and botany) and film.

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

Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Lorca, Mina Loy, Breton, Maykovsky, Akhmatova, many others, especially contemporary poets Heidi Lynn Staples, Catherine Wagner, Caroline Whitbeck, Simone Muench, Donna Stonecipher, Jen Karmin, Philip Jenks...so many to name and mention!

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

Film screenwriter, comedy writer, travel more.

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?

Screenwriter, comedian.

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

It was something that approached me.

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

I'm reading Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded currently. Synechdoche, NY was highly underrated and a great film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A poetic series of ekphrastic books in response to select foreign films, a spoken word CD with a koto player.

12 or 20 questions (second series);