The Malahat Review : Publishing Tips : On Attention, by rob mclennan

I have a short essay posted as part of The Malahat Review's "Publishing Tips" series, composed as "On Attention."

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael S. Begnal

Michael S. Begnal has published the collections Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbook Mercury, the Dime (Six Gallery Press, 2005). His poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in journals such as Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Natural Bridge, The Otter, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has an MFA from North Carolina State University and teaches at Ball State University (Indiana). He can be found online at www.mikebegnal.blogspot.com and @Michael_Begnal

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?

I spent years just trying to get into journals, and then a couple more years trying to get a book manuscript accepted, so the first book (with Six Gallery Press) felt great. I had also at that time had a book accepted by Salmon Poetry, a somewhat bigger press (though really, what poetry press is all that “big”?), and when that one came out I have to say it felt even better. At the time when I was struggling even to break into print, I thought that having a book out would mean I had finally “made it” as a poet. But now even with a few collections out I don’t really feel like I’ve made it, since, as it happens, not a whole lot of people care all that much about poetry anyway, and the poetry world itself is so diffuse. So while of course I still want to get my work out there and have more books published, I’ve kind of gone back to the early, early feelings I had about poetry, before I even got to the point where I thought anyone would ever put out a book of mine, where I was first of all just concerned about writing the poem, and the words on the paper, and the intensity of that. Again, don’t get me wrong, I still send out work and so on, but I suppose I have to say that having books published was not as transformative as I used to think it would be. It’s still better than not having books, though, obviously.

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

I always thought it would be a great thing to be a poet. I read poetry and fiction more or less equally, but poetry was the form that I felt was really me; I just inherently felt that, that it was a field in which I could do something. For that matter, even my favorite novelists are ones who write “poetic prose,” Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Kerouac. I’m not really into plot, I must admit. It’s more about the language for me, and ideas.

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?

If I have an idea, it will eventually find its way, if I can do the writing. Usually an initial draft comes out quickly, and then I probably keep shaping it, to some extent or another, but the basic form is there. If I don’t have the right idea (or any idea), I’ve learned stop forcing things, and I don’t even try to write. I don’t mean I have to have a fully realized idea to begin with, but if I’ve got nothing at all, then there’s no point. On the other hand, maybe an “idea” can just be: let the unconscious do its thing, and then something comes out that you didn’t expect. I honestly don’t have a particular method.

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?

It’s been both at different times. At first I just wrote individual poems that after a while accrued into a book-length manuscript. Then when I was writing what became my collection Ancestor Worship, I realized I was writing to a particular theme, which had to do with Irish and Irish American identity, and so I kept going with it until it was done. Same with the following collection, Future Blues, which was written around the idea of death (yeah, grandiose or whatever, I know). More recently I’ve written longer, chapbook-length sequences, where each is more or less a whole long poem in itself, and where I pretty much knew from the start that that was what I was trying to do.

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

Yeah, I love doing readings, for the most part. There’s a lot to be said for the rhythm of spoken language, a whole lot, and when I read poems out loud, I’m trying to tune into that rhythm, and if I can’t find it then maybe I need to rethink it or rewrite it. I don’t know. When I do have it, I can usually tell from some kind of audience response, and/or the feeling it gives me when I’m reading it. So it can definitely be a part of the process. Even if I don’t have a public reading going on, I’ll read a poem out loud to myself or whoever, so I can hear it outside of my own head. Sometimes, though, there are certain pieces that are designed more for the page, and make use of space or other visual cues, and so don’t work as well orally. That’s okay too.

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?

In Ancestor Worship, and to a lesser extent in Future Blues, I was definitely concerned with identity politics and cultural nationalism, and was trying to work out those kinds of questions. But after that, I felt I needed to do something else. I didn’t want to keep doing it over and over. Lately, I’ve focused more on things like, I guess you could call it ecopoetics, or the intersection of natural, urban, personal, even subconscious spaces. Again, that sounds kind of grandiose. I’m just trying to give a name to something that feels like it happens more or less instinctually. But all writing is rhetorical, whether we’re conscious of it in the moment or not.

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?

Even though it wasn’t Claudia Rankine herself doing this, I thought it was great when a person in the crowd of a recent speech by a right-wing U.S. presidential candidate was shown on camera ignoring said speech by reading Rankine’s Citizen instead. I’d like to see poets be relevant figures in this or similar ways in contemporary cultural/social/political discourse. But, in an often anti-intellectual society, that’s hard to effect. So, I don’t know, just do your thing regardless.

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

In my experience so far, editors have been largely hands-off. For poetry, I think that’s mostly a good thing. I wouldn’t want an editor to ask me to radically rework my poems, though at the same time I’m open to a level of feedback or suggestions. But it’s really never happened, so far. In academic prose writing, I’ve had some pretty tough comments from outside readers in regard to articles I’ve sent out to peer-reviewed journals. In this case, I’ve found that the suggestions, while tough to deal with at first, ultimately made the piece better. These are different modes of writing, however.

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

In James Liddy’s poem “Photo,” from his collection I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness (2003), he recalls the admonition given to him, “The world is straighter and more Protestant / than you imagine.” Whether literal or metaphorical, it’s a dose of reality worth remembering if you’re trying to be an artist.

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 tend to write poetry in the evening and late at night.

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

You know, I used to worry about this, but now when it happens I just try to forget about it altogether and do something else, and not even care if it inspires me to write or not. Basically, if I never write again, it doesn’t matter.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I honestly don’t know what I would call “home” anymore, so I can’t say. The idea of home is an illusion.

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?

Film and visual art for sure. For film I especially like Stan Brakhage, and lately in painting, Walton Ford. But music more than anything else, and in particular the Stooges have been a big influence on my writing, especially their album Fun House (1970). I’ve written poems that respond directly to their music, and at other times their modes or methods have been in my mind or ears as I write. I really like how Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Kalamu ya Salaam, and others have responded to jazz, and I’ve written about jazz myself, or really just the free-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock. But if I’m going to say what music honestly speaks the most to my individual position in the world, it’s got to be the Stooges.

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

My favorite poets are Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Helene Johnson, Thomas MacGreevy, James Liddy, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Haniel Long, Witter Bynner, Muriel Rukeyser, André Breton, Philip Lamantia, Li Po, and that’s just at the moment off the top of my head.

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

I don’t know. Just keep pushing past where I’m at, in poetry and just in life.

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?

When I was younger, I was in bands myself, of the punk and rock’n’roll varieties. I played drums, which actually I think has fed into how I approach poetry in many ways. But it didn’t turn into a viable career. My job now is teaching writing at the university level, both composition and creative writing. Beyond those, I don’t know offhand.

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

For better or worse, I’ve always had to do something else at the same time. It’s an extremely rare poet who can survive on poetry alone. But I did it because that’s what I wanted to do, so I guess I’ve had to have a degree of persistence. You have to work hard, or work hard at not working hard (ha ha), in order to be able to carve out enough space in your life to keep writing.

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

In the last number of years, the greatest book I’ve read was Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935). The greatest film of the recent era (for me) is Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008). I could mention a number of other, also great works, but I’ve already done a lot of listing, so I’ll leave it at that.

19 - What are you currently working on?

As I mentioned earlier, in the last couple years I’ve been writing in the longer, serial mode, and recently finished a chapbook-length manuscript of linked poems. Now that that’s done, I’m not working on anything. Thank you for asking me these questions, by the way.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Sheri Benning, The Season’s Vagrant Light

Slaughter

I thought there’d always be a lustre of time,

rich and slick like the animal’s oiled hide. I shot one

for its leather, another for the tender meat of its spine.

One more for the fetor of estrus in fur, for its tree-rubbed horns,

the spice of cedar and pine. One for its muscled gallop,

the crack and the echo, the arc of the bullet shattering prairie night.

For the shocked silence after the last streamed snort and cry. I stood

high on a pile of bones, sun-sucked skulls, rifle erect at my side.

From a thicket of poplar and birch, the coyotes’ keen rose,

cut through industry’s metallic reek, shroud of gunsmoke.

Drunk and gutted, sweet grease on my lips, I never thought

that my careless slaughter would lead to such hunger –

thin hospital flannel wrapped around my shoulders

by some kind nurse – that I’d be here,

trying to atone for that wasted flesh,

keeping vigil at your bedside.

I’m intrigued at the selected poems appearing in the UK by Canadian (or more specifically, one might say, Saskatchewan) poets, from Karen Solie’s The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] to Sheri Benning’s recent The Season’s Vagrant Light (Manchester UK: Carcanet, 2015). Offering selections from her two published poetry collections—Earth After Rain (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 2001) and Thin Moon Psalm (London ON: Brick Books, 2007)— The Season’s Vagrant Light also includes twenty-three pages of “new poems.” Benning’s poetry is vibrantly fixed to geographic spaces, much in the way that Solie’s work is, and the new poems offer a broadening geography, heading out from Saskatchewan specifically and Canada generally, from New Brunswick and the Saskatchewan River to Glasgow, Russia and New Mexico, expanding her reach while holding to her prairie roots. There is such a narrative precision to Benning’s lines, descriptively thick and evocative, writing intimately of numerous geographic, familial and personal spaces. Listen, as she opens the poem “Vigil,” writing: “I am no longer young. I know / what we love we will lose. / Your head resting in my lap / as you hold your newborn / to your open breasts, milk scent, / mown hay. Snow falls / beneath the street lamp’s glow, / flutter of her eyelashes as you nurse / her into dreams of light and shadow.”

Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago. It’s eight hundred thousand words long.

I didn’t want to lose anything. That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.

I wrote about myself so I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it.

More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead.

And so opens American writer Sarah Manguso’s new Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf Press, 2015). Manguso has long been one of my favourite writers, and her writing is, quite simply, remarkable. I had already been an admirer of her poetry, but her move into non-fiction/memoir has really opened up the possibilities of the form. A short essay-book on memory, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is built as a slow accumulation of self-contained sections, and begins by describing how she has composed a daily diary for most of her life. She quickly describes the realization that having a child both opened up the impossibility of daily work on her memory-project, and allowed her the permission to not have to record every single moment. As with much of Manguso’s prose, the writing in Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is elegant and incredibly straightforward, and deeply intimate while allowing herself, seemingly, to guard a variety of personal details that would, quite honestly, distract away from the purpose of the essay. Her writing is also extremely difficult to excerpt, and must be seen as an entire, singular whole. She writes:

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.

I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.

Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory.

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Ray Smith (1986-87)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.

Ray Smith (b. 1941) [photo with his dear friend, Jessica Grenier] is from Mabou, Cape Breton, and largely grew up in Halifax. After graduating from Dalhousie University (BA ‘64) he lived a few years in Toronto, but from 1968 lived in Montreal where he taught English at Dawson College. After the Spring 2007 term, he retired and moved home to Mabou, where he lives in the house his grandfather built.

He has two sons, Nicholas (30) and Alexander (26). Nick, a fine mathematician, is married to Emily and lives in Richmond, VA. Zander is doing an MA in linguistics at the Frei Universetät in Berlin; he is fluent in English, French, German, and Dutch.

“A brilliant stylist” (Ox Comp to Can Lit), Ray nonetheless has no Smith style: each of his seven books is unique. Somewhat over half the work is comic, often hilariously so. Although largely set in Canada with Canadian characters, the books reflect his extensive travel and international perspective. Important sections of his work are set in Iceland, Venice, Edinburgh, Paris, Zurich, and Munich, and other languages appear often.

A dramatic performer, Smith has done over 250 readings of his work in North America and Europe.

He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 1986-87 academic year.

Q: When you began your residency, you’d published a small handful of books over the previous decade and a half. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?

A: I’d come to accept that I am not a fast writer. I had only CB and LNT published, and the Jack Bottomly book written but which no one would touch with a barge pole. But when I arrived in Edmonton I was anticipating the imminent appearance of Century in October, so I was excited about that as it seemed to some extent to legitimize my appointment at U of A.

Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?

A: I can’t say that I was influenced in my writing by the landscape or by the people I met at U of A.  However, I certainly found the landscape ravishingly beautiful, and the people I met, almost entirely members of the English department, I found vibrant and well above average in intelligence, wit, and attainments. I don’t consciously think about things in this way, but I suspect I sensed that the U of A was very well funded, and thus could afford to hire only the very best.

Q: What do you feel your time as writer-in-residence at University of Alberta allowed you to explore in your work? Were you working on anything specific while there, or was it more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?

A: Mainly I got to enjoy a year away from teaching, a real blessing. With Century appearing in October, I had no wish to start a new novel, so I did a long critical article for Metcalf’s anthology Carry on Bumping (ECW, 1988) entitled “A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Bullshit of Literature in the Eighties.” It’s an appalled survey of modern critical theory – semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, etc. I was also doing perhaps a reading a week from Lethbridge to Fort MacMurray, and caring for son Nick who turned two that winter and indeed first walked without help in the big English Dept office. His mother (my then wife) Anja is a flight attendant who continued working out of Montreal that year and joined us when she could, generally a few days every week or three. I had a number or reliable baby-sitters.

Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency? Were there any encounters that stood out?

A: It has been 39 years so my memory of such is a bit dim. I do recall that very few if any students came to see me. I doubt they thought me aloof or irrelevant, but were too busy with courses to waste time with me. I sat in on a creative writing seminar or two, but don’t recall any follow-up. My remit also included advice to any non-university writers from Red Deer to the Nunavut border. I was required to read at least, but perhaps only, twenty pages. A few stood out. One was a man who wrote a novel about Alberta; it began before the Rockies were formed and the first human appeared at about page 125. Some I saw in person. One was a radio journalist who told anecdotes about life in private radio. Another was a timid high school girl and her mother. The girl wanted to take a BA, while her mother wanted her to do a BEd so she could get a job. I expect the mother won.