Sunday, December 9, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Jon Paul Fiorentino

Jon Paul Fiorentino's most recent book of poetry is The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006). He is the author of the poetry book Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004) and the humour book Asthmatica (Insomniac Press, 2005). He has recently completed his first novel, Stripmalling. He lives in Montreal where he teaches writing at Concordia University and is the Editor of Matrix and Snare Books.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Well, I guess I felt somewhat respectable when it was published. My first trade book was Transcona Fragments. I was lucky enough to have Clive Holden as an editor and a publisher. He was kind and thoughtful about every aspect of making that book. I was shocked to find out that the book meant something to people. And even more shocked to find out that it got shortlisted for the Carol Shields Award. I look at the book today, and I know there are poems I would not write today, but I remain so very proud of that book. The whole process gave me a sense of permission to go further with my practice and to grow as a poet.

2 - How long have you lived in Montreal, and how does geography, if at all,impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

Montreal has been home for 7-8 years. I went back to Winnipeg in 2003 to teach at the University of Winnipeg. Right now I am living in Montreal and dying in Winnipeg. The anxiety of geography is one of the major themes of my work. I am heavily influenced by writers who deal with race and gender. I have always had an affection for the work of Nicole Brossard, for instance. Gender is of particular interest to me. The anxieties of geography, gender...

3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction 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'm not always working on a "book" but I am always working from a title. A kind of condensed, ideal version of what the poem or story should be. I don't think contemporary writers pay enough attention to their titles. Canadian writing is flooded with remarkably bad titles: The Impossible Weight of Bees. Stuff like that.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Some times you have to sound out a poem in front of people. But I am no performer. People sometimes mistake me for a performer but that's because my nervous energy can sometimes work to my advantage. Honestly, the stress of being in front of people can be a little overwhelming. But you kind of have to suck it up and do it anyways, right? For the work.

5 - 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?

Of course I have theoretical concerns behind my writing. I have questions regarding genre and the professionalization of writing. I have other questions regarding the expectations of linear narrative and the drive toward the emblem in poetry. I am suspicious of the "craft-heavy" type of writing. Which isn't to say I don't have formal concerns. I like to catch myself in those moments when I rely on the more conventional tricks. And that's when I get self-injurious. The most important questions I can think of right now are: 1) Is 3 pm too late to wake up? 2) Is 3:30pm too early to start drinking hard liquor?

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

Absolutely essential. It's only difficult to those who are too precious about their work. Of course, I have had amazing editors in my life. They know who they are,

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

It's always the same ghastly experience.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

I don't believe in eating pears. I don't believe in imagery.

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

"Jon Paul, get over yourself. You're not that special. And don't forget: you owe me fifty dollars, you stupid mook."-- My mother, 2007

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Fairly easy because there are things I save for my fiction, like lame jokes, and there are things I save for my poetry, like prairie angst.

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?

I write late at night and when people start their daily trudge toward their work, it puts me to sleep. I wake up in the afternoon and read and go to the Matrix office and drink a diet Red Bull and work on Matrix and Snare.

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

I'm fine. Don't worry about me.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

My most recent book is a completed novel manuscript called Stripmalling. It's a comedic romp through the life of a young man named Jonny, who sells drugs to kids in a strip mall in WInnipeg, and then grows up to be a man and gets a job as a university professor who sells drugs to kids. It's the typical Canadian prairie narrative and it's exactly like all my other books.

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?

I love that McFadden quote. I think books come from nature books, music books, science books, visual art books...I am influenced by the perfect pop song. Like "Beat on the Brat" by the Ramones. That's not a joke, but no doubt people will assume it is...

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


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

Make someone like me.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?

Laundromat attendant.

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

I don't know, rob. I used to go to McNally-Robinson in Winnipeg when I was a kid and look at all the poetry books and fantasize about a life as a poet. I know that seems sad, but it's absolutely true. And I suppose I have always wanted to be a writer. And I suppose my absolute inability to do anything else well sealed the deal. I remember walking into the Zellers staff room when I worked there (I was around 17) and people were talking about me and how I was not good at my job and how I would never "make it." And I was hurt. And then I asked myself, who the hell wants to "make it" in the world of Zellers anyway? From that moment, I promised myself I would waste time trying to thrive in someone else's world. It's kind of lame, but it was important to me.

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

I loved Maya Merrick's new book, The Hole Show. I don't really watch many movies these days.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Thriving in my own world.

Monday, December 3, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Mark McCawley

Mark McCawley is a fiction writer, editor, poet, and small press publisher. Since founding Greensleeve Editions in 1988, he has published over fifty chapbooks. Since 1993, he has edited the litzine Urban Graffiti. From 1986 to 1993, Mark taught poetry and fiction as a creative writing instructor for Continuing Education (now Metro College). He has given readings of his own work across Canada: in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton. He is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry and short fiction, most recently, Stories For People With Brief Attention Spans (1993) and Just Another Asshole: short stories (1994), both from Greensleeve Editions. His short fiction has also appeared in the anthologies: Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of Short-Shorts, edited by Debbie James (Toronto: Rush Hour Revisions, 1998) and Grunt & Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex, edited by Matthew Firth and Max Maccari (Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002). Mark McCawley can be contacted via email: mccawley64@hotmail.com

By Mark McCawley:

Fragile Harvest - Fragile Lives (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1988)
The Deadman's Dance (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1989)
Last Minute Instructions (Toronto: Unfinished Monument Press, 1989)
Voices from earth: selected poems/ with R. Kurt (Calgary: Prairie Journal Press, 1990)
Scars and Other Signatures : prose poems (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1991)
Thorns Without the Rose: fictions & prose poems (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1991)
Stories for People with Brief Attention Spans : fictions (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1992)
Just Another Asshole : short stories (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1994)

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book was a twenty-four page poetry chapbook entitled, Fragile Harvest--Fragile Lives, which I self-published in July, 1988. It did not 'change' my life, per se, but rather was a decision which altered my writing and publishing future from that point onward. No longer would I alter my writing in any way in order to be published by others, now that I had the means to publish myself (and in this way, I feel my writing has been more free to take risks, as well as the writings of others that I have published over the last nineteen years). To date, all of my collections, both poetry and short fiction, have been small press/micro-press publications.
2 - How long have you lived in Edmonton, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I am a born and raised Edmontonian. The city is very much an element in my writing. One cannot help but write about where one lives. Especially as a writer, that city becomes your city. In my short fiction, Edmonton is often the setting when not functioning as a character itself. Gender impacts on my work insofar as the majority of my work is told from the male perspective, and often deals with the darker side of male sexual identity.
3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction 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?
For the most part, because my writing is largely autobiographical, it begins with personal experience, moves into the realm of memory where it merges with imagination. This way, all of my writings are connected in a sort of conceptual continuity, each poem and work of fiction and non-fiction blend together into one lifelong work (somewhat akin to Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass'). For this reason, I'm not so much working on a 'book' from the very beginning, but individual episodes and chapters of a life: mine. To this end, the chapbook format has proven ideal.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
That largely depends on the public reading series itself, the venue, and the audience. Reading one's work at a car dealership to an audience that does not appreciate what you are attempting to accomplish is counterproductive. On the other hand, the Canada Council sponsored reading I gave in Toronto in 1990 at the Partisan Gallery, along with the week I spent there with my host, has added much to my growth as a writer. It's important for a writer to step out of their comfort zone and risk everything if they wish to grow and expand. Public readings can help in that regard. Then again, some reading series have the bad habit of becoming insular communities onto themselves.
5 - 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 thinkthe current questions are?
I consider myself a transgressive, post-realist writer. Anti-academic. Working in opposition to the great culture machine (of which academia, the literary establishment, and corporate media are all a part). To paraphrase a piece from Ronald Sukenick's seminal book, Suburban Ambush, 'the form of the Great Narrative is a metaphor for a society that no longer exists.' Myself, and writers like me are providing metaphors for a society that does exist now. Raymond Federman, in his book, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, gives the best definition I have thus far found for post-realism: 'a kind of writing, a kind of discourse whose shape will be an interrogation, and endless interrogation of what it is doing while it is doing it, and endless denunciation of its fraudulence, of what it really is: an illusion (a fiction).' These are questions I attempt to answer in my work. Only time will tell if I am successful or not.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have run the entire gamut of experiences working with outside editors, from positive to negative. However, the best editors of all are those that remain invisible. It's their job to make the writer look good, not the other way around.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
Very little has changed since I first began small press publishing. The great culture machine is still very much alive and well. There are still very few Canadian produced titles I find worth reading, let alone buying. Perhaps three really innovative small presses. There are a handful of fantastic writers emerging now, but if micro-presses didn't publish their work, you'd probably never hear about them. As for the process of chapbook making, it is still a joy.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
Do you mean a fresh pear? In season? Hmmmm. I saw a picture of a pear once. On the outside of the can. When was the last time you ate a pear, rob?
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Shut up.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between writer (poetry to fiction) and publisher? What do you see as the appeal?
Since no one else was about to publish my work, I took it upon myself to do so. A very liberating experience. There is something to be said about following the creative process from its first spark to its final form and having complete control of every step in between. Electronic publishing is just a further step along this continuum.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even haveone? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I've never had a writing routine. I don't have a specific writing time, either. I write whenever I write, eat when I'm hungry, drink when I'm thirsty, sleep when I'm tired. I've never forced it, yet neither have I ever experienced such a thing as writer's block (I've got boxes full of notebooks to attest to that fact). A typical day begins like any other. When I do write, I start with whatever it is that I am working on, then move outward from there to other unfinished works (I'm known to spend years on individual works, while days, or just hours on others).
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I simply move on to something else. Very few pieces come 'all at once.' Time and distance have been my greatest allies as a writer. An impatient writer isn't going to last too long.
13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
If one were to look at all of my published works, they would come to one conclusion: a steady movement and evolution from short poetic works to longer and longer works of fiction. They all, however, are part of the same extended allegory which I try to work into all of my writing (see question #5).
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?
While McFadden's statement is true, it is also true that books come from a multitude of influences and forms, which also influence my work: popular culture, music, performance and visual art, science, multimedia. Writers do not exist in a vacuum.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Various writers and writings have influenced my work at different stages in my writing life (Lowry, Burroughs, Genet, Celine, and Selby Jr.). My present work is most heavily influenced by the writings of the Blank Generation post-realist writers (Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz, Cookie Mueller, Bart Plantegna, etc.) and the critical writings of Raymond Federman, Robert Siegel, and Michel Foucault.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to extend my small press/micro-press publications onto the internet.
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?
If I could have picked any other occupation besides writing, I would've picked any other occupation. The definition of futility is being a writer in a post-literate age. I write because I have to: it's as necessary as breathing.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is my way of putting order to a chaotic universe, and understanding my place in it. We are the stories we tell.

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

The last great book: Suburban Pornography by Matthew Firth (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2006). Last great movie: V for Vendetta.
20 - What are you currently working on?

I am presently working on several short stories which deal with themes of alcoholism, familial dysfunction, and perceptions of madness. As the publisher of the micro-press Greensleeve Editions, I am in the process of guiding the first issue of the zine, SPLURGE, to publication in 2008.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Dennis Cooley

dennis cooley grew up in saskatchewan, has lived and taught in winnipeg since 1973. part of the literary ferment in winnipeg that led to the formation of the manitoba writers' guild, turnstone press, arts manitoba (now border crossings). has been central to the writing, editing, teaching, and theorizing of prairie literature. next book: correction line from Thistledown in fall of '08.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I suddenly felt legitimate. The world is full of pretenders, the writing world no less than any other, and I had learned to be sceptical about people who called themselves writers, but who never seemed to write. And so I felt awkward myself in that stretch when I was writing but hadn't published a title.

2 - How long have you lived in Winnipeg, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

Been in Winnipeg since 1973, though the geography of the city has not become central to my writing. I tend to be fairly responsive to geography generally, I think, even though it doesn't always enter the writing very much-not in a sustained or overt way at least. I write of yards a bit-at home, at the cottage-more in my early work than elsewhere, but I'm not big on descriptions of landscape as a rule. (I realize your question doesn't necessarily suppose that version of response). Race doesn't enter my writing much, perhaps because I am wary of entering a territory in which I would be out of my depth and apt to get things terribly wrong, so I don't presume (dare?) to address race very much. Gender's a different matter. It's there a lot, in almost everything I write, I think. It's maybe most overt in the endless love poems and muse poems that I write, but it figures all over the place.

3 - 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 have no set methods but I often write toward a book, a gathering of bits around some site. Seeing Red (using Dracula material), Goldfinger (reworking of fairy tales), fielding and Irene (elegies for my father and my mother), country music and the bentleys (set off by Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House), this only home (space poems), and Bloody Jack (playing with an actual historical figure, Jack Krafchenko)-all were conceived as books and written as books, in some cases over more than a decade, so I do a lot of that kind of work, yes.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I love them, love sounding poems, finding ways to voice them. And that affects how I write many of them, too. It may be that as a result I write more poems for performance than otherwise I might have. It certainly does mean that in performance I tend to choose poems that I think will "work" for an audience. That means I do fewer pieces that are dense or (for my self-protection) that are highly emotional.

5 - 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 am informed by theory all the time. Not so deliberately, perhaps, as some unsympathetic readers might believe, but always, yes. I'm perennially asking myself what a poem might be. What a reader might be. What shifts in the poem might engage the reader. I'm probably more accommodating of a range of formal possibilities than seems credible or wise to some of the more messianic poets or doctrinaire readers might abide, but I am intrigued by what might be done. I do grow weary rather quickly with some of the more forthrightly orthodox poetry that has been recently championed, and of some of the more language-based writing that has in other camps been promoted. There is something to be said for party politics in poetry, I realize, but they don't interest me. I've never chosen up sides (though I do have my own symathies, admirations, and antipathies) and I think that attempts to enforce orthoxies tend to get in the way. Anything approaching fundamentalism of any kind tends to put me off, and I find myself shrinking from summons to keep the faith or to hunt down infidels.

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

Actually, I've not had a lot of engagement with editors. In my experience if I've gotten any editorial response it has tended to be brief and minimal. I wouldn't at all mind something more substantial. In fact I've often wished for a reading that would be more thorough, informed, and tuned-in than what so far I've generally found. A lot of editors, I think, are fairly conservative, or they are inclined to respect what you have done and fear doing anything that might be inappropriate, or unwelcome. In those cases, for me at least, their advice wouldn't be particularly helpful. But to have someone who knows what I am trying to do, and why, an editor who knows the precedents and influences, the poetics that are behind my writing, and who reads texts meticulously-well, yes, I'd love to have that kind of editor.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Generally easier, I think, if by easier we are referring to the writing itself. The production of a book is another matter. Its acceptance or refusal at any stage is never untroubling.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Apparently just the other day. Forgive me, it was so cool and so delicious.

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

What you have to know about poets is: they all are vain, and they all are ungrateful.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

The edges have always been permeable for me, especially as I write poetry in the loose or emphatic rhythms of speech. When I write criticism I also like to construct a more folksy voice, and a slightly playful speaker, one who here and there will break into little songs and riffs, small runs of joke and rhyme. I like the energies of those crossings, and I like moves to break down categories and hierachies. The notion that the critic is by definition a lesser figure, and one who clings parasitically to another figure who is honorifically named as poet or creator, is one I do not support. A good reader is creative and will, more often than some might want to admit, from time to time, and then some, exceed in skill and creativity the very subject (poet) about whom s/he is writing.

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?

Few routines that I am aware of. I write whenever I can, though for practical reasons that means that much of it is done early in the morning or later at night, at least during the academic year when I am absorbed in that work. But I dib and dab into manuscripts all the time. Writing poetry enables frequent brief visits more than working on a novel, I suspect, would. It's so easy to pull out a few pages of poetry and fiddle with them.

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

Crazily, I'm seldom at an impasse, the words just keep coming. I've got hundreds and hundreds of pages underway at various levels of realization, I throw notes constantly onto paper, draft poems all the time. What lies behind that inertia is what I suppose you are asking in a way. And who can say? Inspiration is a good part of it, I'd say, whatever that might mean or wherever that might take us. A love of play-that certainly. The thing is: for me writing is not traumatic or painful, it's virtually always pleasurable, and I suppose that's what keeps me doing it. That and a pathetic, deluded desire to be read and admired.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I don't know, really. The other day Robert Kroetsch was saying to me: you're writing has become more dense and more complicated (he had just been re-reading one of my early books, Fielding). I said I'm not sure, and that most of the characteristics in my writing were there, I think, almost from the outset. You can't, of course, write everything at the same time, nor determine the time of its appearance, so inevitably there will be a chronology of composition and of publication. Trouble is that patterning can mask what is going on. In some ways I am tempted by the argument that after a writer has reached a certain level of competence, and confidence, what follows does not necessarily represent an improvement or a gain, so much as a variation on whatever potential the person is working out of, but hasn't yet written. On the other hand, I would have no problems whatsoever with a careful reading which would identify shifts in the writing.

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?

I am utterly indiscriminate and I will (and do) grab whatever catches my eye. Part of that impulse leads to the research that enters virtually all of the books. I am working on the bentley poems and I read oral histories, letters from immigrants, memoirs. I am writing space poems and I dig out books about astronomers and they begin to enter the text. My mother is dying of cancer, my gardening mother, and there is that cold white garden as she is dying at Christmas, and I think of Pluto, and the next thing I'm reading a bunch of material on classical names and narratives. And so on. I latch onto whatever crosses my eyes, or catches my ear, whatever becomes available because of what I am working on.

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

Many. Many writers have affected my own work. I've offered various lists of names from time to time-the latest being in by word of mouth-and those who are interested could run them down with a little snooping. The list of those "outside" my work would be enormous, and always growing, as it would be, I'd expect, for all writers.

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

Find: a few months of idleness in Portugal, a greater readership.

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?

Were it not for a series of events that fell into place, I probably would have been a highschool teacher in Saskatchewan, teaching literature, and actively involved in the local sports scene.

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

Multiple reasons, unfathomable reasons. A series of accidents, serrendipities, sheer chance. That and a love of words. A series of things converged. Intensely teaching and reading poetry, editing poetry for Turnstone, meeting a couple of dynamic friends who wanted to be a part of making a new literature on the prairies, some intense personal experiences, the sudden availability of magazines and presses, the wild enthusiasm of students in Canadian literature classes-all this in the 1970s-made writing thinkable for me.

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

One of the last, one of my very favourite books of all time: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Film I can hardly say. I hardly track films and I'm always at a loss with this kind of question.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Journals, several journals from trips to Europe. Essays, assorted essays, most of which I am going to gather in the next few months toward a book. Several of them are on Kroetsch. Five or six collections of poetry-one of them a medical narrative, another set of metalingual pieces, another on the muse, more poems in love in a dry land. Lots of things.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen is a poet, translator, and publisher who divides her time between Iowa City, Washington D.C., and Paris. Her poetry often revolves around the visual arts and has been awarded the National Poetry Series, Sun & Moon’s New American Writing Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Book Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. She translates contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism and edits La Presse, a small press specializing in recent French poetry translated by American poets.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I’m not sure that it did really—one always thinks that it will, but I think it’s very rare that it actually does, except in the way that everything changes your life in one way or another; every detail determines the next. That said, it taught me something about revision; taught me what revision is about because the publication dragged out over two or three years, and I kept tweaking the manuscript the whole time, and by the time it finally came out, I was so happy that it hadn’t come out any earlier. I realized that what I had thought was a done manuscript was simply the solid rough draft, and that I had been working and polishing at the level of the poem or maybe the line, but that I needed to be polishing at the level of the word. And it alerted me to the fact that, in general, I tend to think that things are done before they are—I’m impatient; I push things. I still do, and I still often think things are done when they’re not, but that book happened to have been what made me aware of this tendency.

2 - How long have you lived in Iowa City, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I’ve been in Iowa City about five years, but, even though I love it, I actually spend very little time there. All my adult life, I’ve lived in more than one place—it always seemed like an accident of circumstance—I was going to school in one city and working in another, etc., but when I consider that that has been the case for the past 30 years, I have to concede that in some way it’s a choice I’ve made, and therefore, it must be something I like. I think I simply like the variety and thrive on the turbulence. In fact, throughout my life, it’s gotten worse. I currently divide my life among three places, and all fairly far apart—Iowa, where I work, Washington D.C., where my husband Anthony lives, and Paris, where I do most of my writing.

Geography doesn’t inform my work as much as landscape. I’ve written a lot of pieces that are, simply, landscapes, and I’m planning a project that will include a lot more. I’m very partial to landscape paintings, and am interested in the way that they create actual space—not the illusion of space, but the space itself, and I want to play with that in language.

3 - 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 tend to work on a book from the very beginning. In the last few things I’ve written, the book is the basic unit, so while my books are composed of discrete poems, they are conceived as larger units.

Lately books have started for me through a nagging interest that I want to explore, and often that exploration amounts to lots of reading and light research, and often it has something to do with the visual arts—the visual arts linked with history. It’s a way, perhaps, of insisting upon poetry as language-as-art rather than language-as-information. I feel like I learned a lot the Language poets when I was in my early 20s, and particularly about the material potential of language on the one hand and the dangers (political and social) of the illusion of transparent and/or objective language on the other. That attention to surface has mixed in me with a love of the visual arts and has generated some of my works, though at times I regret poetry’s inability to achieve the same immediacy.

That regret is in part behind my interest in ekphrastic poetry, in reworking that genre so that it’s not so much a matter of standing across from a painting and attempting to replicate or translate its emotional impact, but of finding new ways to live with and in art, to make it increasingly present by having it infuse such a daily staple as language.

I often begin with a specific work of art and a related idea. My most recent book, The Glass Age, comes out of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of windows and their paradoxical opacity (he used such vivid, dense, opaque colors), mixed with the idea that our age, beginning with the technological and scientific revolutions of the 19th century, is an increasingly fragile one, from the psychological brittleness caused by the loss of God to our potential to literally destroy the world.
The book I’d written before that, The Book of a Hundred Hands, began with a drawing manual by that name, and tries to see how much of a sheer concept the hand can become. And the last manuscript I finished, Ours, which is coming out in 2008, began in the 17th century formal French gardens of André Le Nôtre and addresses the idea of public versus private property.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Part of it, in that they’re part of the conversation about poetics that I find absolutely vital. There’s something about the atmosphere of a reading and its immediate afterward that opens a space for people to talk about meaning and meaning-making that doesn’t often come up.
And on another score, I think readings are creative acts in themselves. Lorca’s well-known essay on duende, though he’s talking mostly about flamenco, is equally applicable to poetry readings. I’ve heard people be in the words in a way that’s beyond either the individual words or themselves—both fuse into a potential site for actual presence, and I think that’s what duende is, a kind of annihilating presence.

5 - 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 immediate answer is “no”—I have more concrete questions than theoretical ones, but then how do you make that distinction? My questions revolve around the social and personal impact and potential of aesthetics, whose import I think is greatly underrated. Aesthetics, among other things, orchestrates our sense of balance, leads us beyond the self and yet constantly brings us back to the importance of the superficial, the reality of the surface. I’ve been interested lately in the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, in the work of Semir Zeki and others who are exploring what goes on in the brain in response to different kinds of art. Their work is increasingly showing the importance of the arts in the development of the brain.

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

I find it extremely helpful, and I’ve been lucky to work with some great people, people who are willing to question relentlessly and intelligently. It requires so much work on their part; it’s really a creative act in its own right. I find that editors’ suggestions often lead me to examine my own motives and inclinations; they make me ask why I made the choices that I did, and the query often helps me arrive at more nuanced versions of lines. It’s almost always at the level of the line or of the phrase that I find myself changing things at editors’ suggestions—and at times, though small, the changes are crucial. I have loved working with Alice James for this reason—they’re really active with the editing, going over the work literally word by word. And sometimes I seek out editing—I asked Cal Bedient to go over a book, Goest, and he made countless suggestions and comments that made me relook at things; it improved the book immeasurably. Often an editor will point out places where I hadn’t realized I’d been slack, and when I go back to look hard at them, I’m able to take them much further. The questioning is often a catalyst; it gives me a new way back into my own work.

I encounter this question of editing a lot in translation, too. It’s hard to get anybody to tell you the truth—it takes a lot of their time to read that closely, and they have to risk being critical, and for this reason, I particularly love working with Rosmarie Waldrop—she leaps right in; she doesn’t let a single thing slip. I ask other people, too, to go over translations—it’s invaluable, and, of course, it’s also mortifying (how could I have made that error!!!), but then if I really minded mortification, I would have stopped translating long ago. Instead, I just feel secure; in particular, I feel that if something has passed Rosmarie’s eye, it’s ok.

And I’ve tried to use her model when I’m editing translations for the very small press I do that publishes contemporary experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets. I try to be that involved and spend that kind of time on each project.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Neither. But I love its ongoing nature, and because my books are increasingly based in research, I enjoy the way I enter a new world each time I begin one. And I always miss the world I’m leaving, and have at times stretched out projects longer than necessary because I wanted to continue doing the research, wallowing in the subject—I know that once I leave the book, I most likely won’t have the same kind of time to devote to the subject, so in that way, poetry becomes a way of carving out time to spend on other subjects, a way of guaranteeing a deeper reading of them.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

I am eating one now.

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

Never paint a moving part.

That may or may not have metaphorical applications as well, but on the literal level, very good advice indeed.

My “runner-up” would be: Most decisions are not in themselves right or wrong; it’s what you do with them that makes the difference.

I find that helpful because otherwise I can agonize over decisions and end up doing nothing. Which is, of course, itself a decision, but it’s a reactive rather than an active one.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s very easy. I like being engaged in both at the same time. Translation is, for the most part, simply pleasure. At certain stages it has an automatic aspect that can seem a relief, a relaxation compared with writing poetry. There’s much less anxiety.

I also write a lot of prose in the sense of putting prose into my poetry—prose poetry, simply, but I’ve been playing with incorporating a critical voice. What interests me is trying to arrive at a critical analysis and tone while maintaining a sensual, sound-based writing. They’re often assumed to be contradictory, and often can be, but I also think that their intersection can create a stimulating tension.

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?

I do have a writing routine. I write most of my raw material when I’m in France in the summers and December. I often go to the Luxembourg Gardens in the afternoons with a tiny portable computer about the size of a blackberry, and work there, take books along, read, etc. and then go to cafes and continue. I also write a lot late at night; I’ll revise the work I’ve done during the day at night. And all through the year, I tweak things and revise late at night, when all my other work is done.

And a typical day? Begins with coffee. And email. And if I’m not careful, it ends with email as well! I do think we’ve created an interesting monster with email—it’s fabulous! It lets you keep in touch, maintain conversations, get involved in readings, conferences, etc., etc., but on the other hand, almost everyone I know is drowning in it. It’s like having a pound of fudge for every meal. I can’t imagine what we’re all going to do, but I do think we’ll have to do something. The best thing might be to reorganize the calendar so that we have a couple of extra days a week just to catch up on email.

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

I’ve been playing with auto-translation because that gives me a completely different entrance into a piece. If something is stagnating, I’ll translate it into French, and because of the need to keep the sound qualities up front, I’ll have to choose new content, and choosing that new content opens up the poem; then I retranslate it back into English, and by then it’s all changed and is back in motion again. It may still go nowhere interesting, but at least it’s moving again. That process has also given me a chance to work on seriality; it’s something I’ve often envied the visual arts, the ability to work in serial. It’s almost impossible to do that in language, but by going in and out of different languages, it can be approximated.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I feel like I’m going back to a more emotionally-based work, which I veered away from after a book titled Noon. My early work was very much based in the emotions, but I got to a point where I felt I was imposing them—my emotions, that is—on strangers. I’m going back toward emotion because I hope I’m working on a way to engage emotion that is not necessarily my own—emotion that is, in fact, not owned, but that is instead ambient. At the moment, I’m focusing particularly on grief because it seems that the United States for the past seven years has been in the business of manufacturing and exporting grief in the form of sheer torture and death. In short, because of us, there’s much more grief in the world. The U.S. is, of course, not the only source; there are many, but that doesn’t absolve us of the need to find ways to look it square in the face, and to apologize to and for it. And it’s not guilt I’m talking about here—we carry enough of that as well, but I’m talking about grief itself, a grief that rises in me to greet that that I inadvertently create.

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?

I’m often influenced by visual art, as I’ve mentioned above. I write a lot in museums and in galleries, and even more with visual art in my mind. The world of visual art works as a launching pad, and I think that it can do this in part because it’s operating in a completely separate realm. Visual art extends through space whereas poetry extends through time, and I think that the one is always trying to overflow into the other. We have perhaps more ready examples of poetry attempting (and succeeding) to extend through space in the various attentions to the page since Mallarme’s Un Coup de dés, and on the visual end, the overflow into film and more recently video and even more recently the Web has allowed the visual arts a temporal dimension, but in neither case is the overflow sufficient to make a truly qualitative leap; there’s a further spatial extension, one that might amount to presence, that I’m always trying to achieve in my poetry.
And I’m also strongly influenced by history. History usually comes to me through books, but sometimes in other ways, such as sites, old buildings, photographs, walking the streets of cities, etc. All poetry comes out of, and into, information, but for me it’s specifically the information of history that I find motivating.

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

Oooo! Big question! And I think I’ll dodge it entirely except to say that the poets I’m currently reading are Keith Waldrop, Martin Corless-Smith, and Cal Bedient, and that my favorite detective novelists are Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes, Pamela Branch, and Nancy Spain.

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

Walk to Santiago de Compostela. From where will depend upon when I get around to doing it.

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?

Museum curator. Art historian. Archeologist. Bookbinder.

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

I don’t know. I have always wanted to write and never seriously thought about doing anything else as my principal thread through life.

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

Ooooo—another big, impossible question! Instead, “great books that leap to mind this particular time that I hear the phrase”: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene; anything by Borges. I find it interesting that when someone says “great book” I immediately think fiction. Re non-fiction, some things that leap to mind are The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Weiner and The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common by Alphonso Lingis.

And I so rarely see films that I’m not worth asking, though Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc cannot be topped, and at the other end of the spectrum, I happened to see a Doris Day movie from the early 1950s several weeks ago; I can’t remember the title, but it had some of the best tap-dancing scenes ever. I’d never realized what a great dancer she was.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A series of poems on ghosts; it’s a book that’s involved with the issues of grief that I mentioned above. It’s called Gravesend, after the town in England that stands right at the spot where the Thames opens into the Channel. Because of its position, it was the town from which many ships set sail in the 17th through 19th centuries, often taking emigrants to Australia, South Africa, North or South America, etc., and most of them never went back to England, so it really was a matter of ending one life and beginning another. I’m fascinated by the liminal quality of this place and this idea; part of the book is directly involved with the town, but most of it is simply exploring the notion of ghosts, both as a literary construct and as lived experience. Parts of the book are based on brief interviews with people, both friends and strangers, because I wanted to have an interplay of voices, almost disembodied voices, in the book as well as sheer testimony; I wanted in part a record of how people today experience ghosts, if they do at all, and what they think of them.

And then, in a completely different corner of my life, I’m co-editing an anthology of contemporary poetry with David St. John titled American Hybrid. It’s coming out next year from Norton and presents 70 poets whose work is hybrid in the sense that it blends experimental and traditional elements. I’ve been intrigued over the past ten or fifteen years to see the breakdown of the “two camp” model that became crystallized at the moment of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry and perpetrated through practice and criticism for the rest of the century. It had tremendous influence over the way poets wrote and even more over the ways in which they were read, yet, thanks to a number of pressures, above all, a particularly vibrant writing culture among young people, this binary has broken down into so many divergent styles and principles that the sense of opposition and thus competition has changed considerably—I’m not saying it isn’t there, but that it’s much more intricate, much more complex, and consequently, much richer. Our anthology looks particularly at the beginning of this breakdown, at the evolving work of poets such as Barbara Guest, Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, and so many others whose work has continually resisted categorization.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Jay MillAr

Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), Mycological Studies (2002), and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000). His most recent collection is the small blue (2007). In 2006 he published Double Helix, a collaborative "novel" written with Stephen Cain. Millar is the shadowy figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to innovative work by well-known and emerging North American and Scandinavian writers, as well as Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, a virtual store that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. A long-time fixture of the Toronto writing and publishing scene, Jay has participated in such projects as the UNBC/Via Rail Poetry Train, The Scream in High Park, Test Readings Series and Influency: A Poetry Salon. He is also the co-editor (with Mark Truscott) of BafterC, a small magazine of contemporary writing, and (with Jon Paul Fiorentino) Pissing Ice: An Anthology of ‘New’ Canadian Poets. Currently Jay teaches creative writing at George Brown College. Singled out in the introduction of The New Canon as a 'young firebrand' (which he reads as 'troublemaker') working against what people hold dear to the Canadian poetic tradition, Jay spent a few minutes in 2006 wondering if the editor had read his work.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I still have many many copies of this book. I am neither proud nor embarrassed by this book; it is as though it happened to someone else. But it was me who made it happen. I suppose that is the important thing. I probably wouldn’t change it much though – it’s too otherly. My first “real” book The Ghosts of Jay MillAr is a very different beast – I’d love to have the opportunity to revisit and rework that crazy overblown book.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I have lived in Toronto since 1992. I moved here from London Ontario. I moved to London Ontario in 1971 from Edmonton Alberta where I was born in 1971. When I was a child Alberta meant a lot to me. I was always doing school projects on Alberta. I found it fascinating to be someone who at a young age was from somewhere else, and understood something about the space one had to travel in order to get there; Alberta was a place it took four days to drive to. Which we did a lot as a family, drive for days, since my parents’ families were in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island, and my father ran research in the Kananaskis Valley during the summer. So every two or three years we’d make that drive. So yes, geography and the movement across it is important to me. Though now as an adult, it is South Western Ontario that I move across, that plays a great role in my writing. False Maps for Other Creatures and Mycological Studies are both books that are highly influenced by South Western Ontario, especially Essex County. There is a little northern-esque in False Maps, too, but when I think of a landscape or a history, it I South Western Ontario.

There is something about living in a large city like Toronto that makes particular demands upon a person – it either demands that you embrace your urban existence or it demands that you embrace be something beyond what you expect that existence to embrace. For me it is important to live in this city. But it is equally important that I leave this city, so that I can return somehow better informed. And when I leave, I usually head down Sowesto.

Race or gender is like geography, except it is the exact geography of your body.

3 - 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 tend to think in terms of the book. Or in terms of something larger than the word I’m working on. But who doesn’t? It’s impossible when thinking about a particular poem one is writing, not to relate that text to all the others you know, whether the texts were written by yourself or not. The universe is that huge, wouldn’t you say? What a huge book the universe is! Or could be. That being said, it is fun to toy with such perceptions: the isolated poem. Imagine if you wrote one poem that stood for your whole life. What a lonely poem it would be. But what would it say? It would probably say: “I’m so lonely! Who can hear me?” Maybe all poems by themselves speak as such. Fortunately we have lives and loves that last longer that the life span (attention span?) of a gnat.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Readings are a space in which I get to imagine static words in a live way. But I don’t think it affects the way I write all that much. It’s more like entertainment, something outside writing. Whether it becomes something the audience will enjoy or not is up to the audience. Some days I feel like pleasing; other days not so much. It’s up to the audience. I usually try to find some way to involve them. It’s a way of suggesting I’m actually alive. I am alive, after all, and I can only assume most of the audience is as well. Why wouldn’t we be alive together with these poems? But I’m not writing for that. I’m writing for my own amusement – and a core group of readers, which is different from an audience. I’ve always liked that the word amusement has a muse in the middle of it. So does a core group of readers. Performing poems is different – it isn’t writing – but it’s still amusement.

5 - 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 theoretical concerns vary between the speaking lyrical I at one end and an I that is lost to a landscape at the other. It’s part of a highly developed pseudoscience I just invented for the purpose of answering your question. Whether that landscape is a physical one (such as saying “I am lost in this landscape” because you actually find yourself lost in or to your surroundings (even if that is your self) and feel the need to say so for the purpose of localization) or an abstract or metaphorical one (such as saying “I am lost in this landscape” by not saying this at all; you are actually lost in all the words you are lost in) makes little difference to me, or to my newly founded pseudoscience. But if you were to do it enough I suspect that you would eventually come to realize that no matter how many different ways you say “I am lost in this landscape” it is really these words you are lost in.

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

I am quite happy to work alone or with others.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

If you mean do I find it harder after being ignored for as long as I have I guess not because I’m still at it. If you mean am I continually trying to top myself by producing superior work to what came before because I’ve fallen for a false notion of “progress” I guess not because I’m still at it. If you mean do you find it difficult to continue due to overlapping and compounding difficulties of financial burdens, relationships, family, issues both personally and communally based, etc etc etc, I guess not because I’m still at it.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

At last! A real question!

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

That what one is writing in the present doesn’t necessarily have to be the same as anything you’ve already written.

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?

At the moment it is 8:56 AM. So far today I’ve risen, having been awakened by Cole, had a shower, got dressed, woke up Reid, got the kids dressed, made breakfast for the kids, coffee for me, checked my email, made Reid a lunch, walked him to school, walked home, and now I’m hanging out with Cole pretending to work on assignments but actually writing this. Eventually I’ll work on typesetting a book for a while, answer millions of emails about books people want to buy, try to read a manuscript or at least think about it a little, and then I’ll go to class. After class I’ll go teach. I haven’t written a poem in months. Come to think of it, why am I doing this? I need to.

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

I enjoy doing all sorts of things, so I tend not to worry about it. There’s always an interesting book to read, or a good piece of music to listen to, or a good film to watch. I can go for a walk or talk to Hazel or take the kids to the park. I’m not worried about writing. Easiest thing in the world, being a writer. Especially poetry. If I were writing novels it would be different. I’m too stupid to write a novel. In some languages stupid means the same thing as lazy. In others it means the same as busy.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

It feels new. Whereas the older work feels, well, old. When regarding the older work it has become very clear to me which poems work, and which ones fail, which is why I think it would be interesting to go back and revisit my early work clearing through it, giving the decent poems some room.

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?

Generally my work comes from books about nature, or books about music, or science, or visual art. Sometimes work even comes from several different kinds of books at once. And all of that bounces off my life in one way or another. Mostly I’m just curious about where all these word came from and why.

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

Most of them are people I know. Early important discoveries were Canadian Experimentalism, the second generation of the New York School, the Toronto Small Press Group, The Coach House Press. Isn’t it interesting that it’s only literary history from the 60’s onward that plays such an important roll in current poetic practice? There’s a nice sense of amnesia pre-1960 floating around. This is a thought I’ve just had about my own work, but I wonder if it isn’t really a widespread phenomenon.

One of the biggest influences on my work has been a particular woodlot located between the seventh and eighth concessions of Tilbury Ontario in Essex County. But I guess that isn’t another writer, really, unless you’re willing to expand the definition. Are you?

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

Write a novel. Travel or even live outside Canada.

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?

Since we are generally defined by what we do to earn money, writing is really my hobby. There are many other things that I do as well. If I were just a writer I think my life would be pretty dull.

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

I’m currently working on an MA of Information Science at UofT, which has been an interesting introduction to a world that I’ve been generally avoiding for 36 years. What is that world you ask? Imagine taking a class on how to be a middle manager and realizing that you’ve never held a position of any kind or worked for a company that had more than 4 employees your whole life. It’s pretty stunning. Some people I’m sure would think, wow, that’s cool, but anyway, what difference does that make? I’m answering your question in this round about way because I’m not sure I understand it – if I were a writer I would only write, I would be paid to write and I would be able to life comfortably from my writing. But this isn’t the case. Which is why at the age of 36 I’m taking a professional degree that will lead to particular employment. But will I not be a writer once I’m employed in that profession? I doubt it. The writing has always been there; I found writing, and the writing found me, and we’ll always be there together in one way or another. Which is why I love it. But it can’t define me, lest I become an author.

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

Right now I’m reading Will Self’s Great Apes. I’m not sure why I never read Will Self before, but I’m enjoying it now. The last film I saw was Super Bad. Which is not to say that these are great books or films; I’m not terribly interested in making such verdicts. I’d rather experience them and let them work their magic.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on my marriage, on raising my kids, on an MA on Information Science at the University of Toronto. Also Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, BookThug, and teaching “poetry” at George Brown. And I’m working on DEMTENED POEMS, a young adult novel for my son and a prose work called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Dinosaurs.

Monday, November 19, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Christopher Doda

Christopher Doda lives in Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Among Ruins (2001) and Aesthetics Lesson (2007), both from the Mansfield Press. He is also an editor at Exile: The Literary Quarterly and Exile Editions. In addition he is the book review editor for an online poetry journal, Studio. His reviews have appeared in Arc and Books in Canada among others. Currently he works in the Information and Privacy Office at York University.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I imagine that this is a common response but it provided some legitimacy to all the scribbling I’d been doing for years, to why I didn’t take a more practical post-secondary education. When I graduated high school I had won the awards for both English Literature and Business Administration. There was some questioning around the wisdom of my decision to continue with my studies of English Lit. at the expense of the other.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I moved to Toronto from the small hamlet of Belfountain when I was 21 to attend university—quite a sharp adjustment. I’ve lived here ever since, apart from a year at McGill, so it’s nearly 16 years now. Toronto suits my temperament: its reputation for coldness and formality is somewhat deserved and I think that feeds into my style of ‘de-personalized’ poetry. I adored living in Montreal and I’m even developing a certain cagey fondness for Ottawa, but I doubt I’d feel at home in either of them.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of shortpieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?

Poems start in fragments and lines. Like most scribblers, I carry a notebook around all the time and write little bits and pieces and impressions as they come. I’ll start on a poem when some of the fragments have something in common and work from there. And I certainly don’t think ‘book’ from the very beginning; I’m not nearly prolific enough to afford that luxury.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Outside of the strictest concrete poetry, poetry should be read aloud, out of homage to its origins as an oral medium and its association with verse. As for the creative process, they’re largely separate though I’ve found that I will reconsider lines that seem fine on the page if I stumble over them in public.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

As I mentioned earlier, I favour a de-personalized poetry and an avoidance of direct expression of emotion in verse that likely stems from an early interest of the ‘objective correlative’ from TS Eliot and the dramatic monologue from the Victorians. Even when I speak from an “I” perspective, it is to avoid the personal, anecdotal, prosaic narrative in poems. History, mythology and violence have always been at the forefront of my thinking, along with the rise and decay of cultures. For us in the West, the rot of culture from within, the lack of respect and interest in the culture and values that spawned us and are now largely taken for granted is a source of deep disquietude. In poems, I sometimes adopt a persona (like Lazarus or Nero or Helen) in hopes of doing my part in reinvigorating those stories for the contemporary world. But the role of art has taken a backseat to work and entertainment, which I regard as a dangerous set of circumstances. When a society treats art like a convenience rather than a necessity, it is doomed.

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

Essential. I generally don’t work with an editor until I’ve got a manuscript ready and by then each poem has likely been through 10-20 drafts, so I like to think I’m fairly easy on my editors. Mansfield publisher Denis de Klerck and Richard Teleky, one-time editor at Oxford Press, have helped me with both my books and the work is better for it. As has my partner Priscila Uppal, who has a wealth of brilliant ideas. I work as an editor myself, which probably helps too.

7 - After having published a couple of titles over the past few years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

With the second one, I knew what to expect. When my first book was being prepared it was like each stage took the work farther from me. I write my first drafts by hand, so they are wholly mine. After 4-5 drafts, I might type out a copy on my computer and work from that. Already one level of distance has been built into the process, and then another once a collection has been typeset, another at proofs. Once it comes back with a cover and makes its way into the shops, it’s like it isn’t mine at all anymore; it belongs to the world, however much the world is interested.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

I have no idea. Much to the chagrin of my spouse, fruit rarely enters my diet. Hello, scurvy!

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

When opportunity knocks, get your lazy ass off the couch and answer the door.

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?

Thanks to my 9-5 desk jockey lifestyle, I do most of my writing on weekends. Because I live with another writer and we used to occupy very small apartments, I cultivated an ability to write outside of the house, a necessity when we had only one desk. I usually write at the Atlas One Café or the Regal Heights Bistro, both on St. Clair Ave near where I live. I’m fussier about space when I write, rather than the specific time of day, though I can’t write into the early hours of the morning like I once did.

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

There are a few possibilities. I find it wise to work on more than one thing at a time, so if I stall on one, I can just turn to another. I’ll also pick up a new poet, do some reading and hopefully be spurred enough to return to my own work. After that, there’s wine.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? Howdoes it feel different?

My new book is (hopefully) more mature and less on the pyrotechnic side than my first.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor visual art?

Art galleries are some of my favourite places in the world. Some of the theoretical concerns around art and mimesis in the 21st century are relevant to poetry, but really I approach art more as a viewer than anything. That said, I’m just as exhilarated by the work of an artistic genius like Max Ernst or Clyfford Still or Francis Bacon as I am by great poetry.

As for music, I listen to a great deal from rock and metal to industrial to classical (Niccolo Paganini and Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine have more in common than might be obvious). Many years ago, as a teenager, I played the drums, which I think had an impact on the way that I write poetry in that I’ve always paid attention to the rhythm of language as much as content. Both are essential in the creation of meaning.

When it comes to science, let’s just say I didn’t win that award in high school. Some of the theoretical problems around physics are fascinating but the math completely eludes me.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

As for poets, the list would be extensive (I sometimes feel like I’m jogging behind a small of army of very talented people). TS Eliot and WH Auden immediately spring to mind. As do WB Yeats, John Donne, Czeslaw Milosz, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tomas Transtromer, George Faludy, Miroslav Holub, Wallace Stevens, among others. I’ve recently discovered Nissim Ezekiel, whom I’m enjoying a great deal. As for novels, I should mention two that radically altered the way I view the world: The Trial by Franz Kafka and JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition.

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

I should improve my terrible French both for myself and so I could some translation work.

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 younot been a writer?

I do not make a living as a writer. I am trained as an archivist and currently work as a records manager. I was fortunate to find a profession that suits someone with a vaguely misanthropic streak; sometimes I prefer the records of people to people.

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

A certain sense of loneliness. I grew up kind of isolated so I had to cultivate an inner life fairly quickly to stay occupied. I was always creative in some way, though as a boy I kept sketchbooks and thought I would do that. The switch to words came when I was about 15-16 years old.

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

I face lengthy commute to and from work every day, so I read a lot of novels (poetry is not conducive to the TTC) and I’ve had a pretty good run lately. Highlights after a day of pencil-pushing have included: Blindness by Jose Saramago, The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, The Tenant by Roland Topor, Seven Japanese Tales by Junichiro Tanizaki and Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen. At the moment I’m 120 pages into Witold Gombrowicz’ enigmatic, terrifying and hilarious Ferdydurke and loving it.

As for films, I’d like to mention The Lives of Others, which won the foreign language Oscar last year over some good films, including Pan’s Labyrinth. That was very good, but for once the academy made the right choice. David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises was fantastic and makes a neat companion piece to A History of Violence.

19 - What are you currently working on?

The final stages of Aesthetics Lesson in the summer were fairly intensive so I didn’t write much immediately after. I’ve only started to think about poems recently. I concentrated on reviews in the meantime.