Tuesday, October 16, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Donato Mancini

Toronto-born, Hamilton-raised, and Vancouver-resident Donato Mancini is a writer, visual artist and polymath whose individual and/or collaborative works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Cuba, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. He has written extensively about music and contributed more than 600 articles to http://www.allclassical.com/ from 2001 to 2004. His poetry has been published in such magazines as Matrix, Broken Pencil, Vallum, Grain, W, Rampike, and Queen Street Quarterly. Mancini has published eight chapbooks; his first full-length book is Ligatures (New Star 2005), and his second, Æthel (New Star) is but weeks old.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Mainly, it's just led me to meet many people I wouldn't have met otherwise. Young poets probably expect more from a first book than they get.

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

I moved to Vancouver in 2001, having shifted for 5 years between Victoria, BC and Burlington, Ontario. It would be impossible for me to articulate the effect of geography per se, but I'm sure I would have written very differently if I had stayed in Ontario. The social context - the "baggage" if you will - is quite different in every city. Unless you're completely insensitive to the other writing that has been done in the city, and the social politics of the city, those things will affect what you do and why you do it. Race and gender, like class, inflect everything poets write, at all times - disavowals of this basic principle by certain poets notwithstanding. However, gender actually is one of many topical concerns in my new book Æthel - as suggested in the androgyneity of the title. Early on, I remember being told that my writing was "boyish", an observation I didn't understand at the time. Later, I understood it better (and very differently) in terms of how concrete poetry is tied to modernism, and specifically in terms of the genderedness of modernism. Modernism was plagued with heroic machismo right to the end. Concrete poetry, because of its implicit ties with modernism, has the social and stylistic stigma of being a boys' pastime, like collecting Hockey-cards. This in spite of the many women who work, and have worked, so brilliantly in concrete. So when I write a line like "Semicolons Sap and Impurify Our Precious Narrative Fluids" I'm addressing (humorously, I hope) the frequently masculinist context of modernism, which concrete poetry always evokes. (Remember Jackson "Jack the Dripper" Pollock - a man who was said to "paint with his penis" - and remember General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.) In that line I'm both admitting my implicatedness in the context, while rejecting it as an framework. I dislike intensely the tough guy stances men still take over questions of literary style and position. Getting back to Vancouver as an influence, one of the first things I noticed about KSW-related writers is that most of them rejected the modernistic cultural heroism that still energised certain figures in the male wing of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E project. At KSW, vanguard heroism was (in most cases) dropped in favour a sociality both more conscious of its implicatedness, and more anarchic in its cultural stance. (Neither did the KSW ever allow the modes of textuality they picked up from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to become retro-fitted as mere "style", without an attendant social dialectic.) Thus, while retaining the critical force of the project, KSW helped me think of "inventive" poetry (as Bernstein would say), in terms other than an "avant-garde" and all the ugly business the term entails as a spatial, military, and cultural metaphor.

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?

My writing always begins with a problem or an observation. It's rarely a problem of a production biography, such as "wouldn't it be neat if I were to write a _____?", but some issue that fascinates, or annoys me - usually both. The spark (or "precious particle") can come any time at all, but it often comes while either reading, writing, doodling, thinking, daydreaming, or night-dreaming. Developing those ideas is a different thing altogether. I've given my process names before, but I'm not sure if they'll be helpful for anyone else. The imperfectly synonymous terms are "recursive questioning" and "negative iteration". Making poetry in the 21st century is a forbidding prospect partly because poets can do practically anything they want to do. (The few taboos that still constrain North American poetry, much more than contemporary art, are weakening. You can see proof of this in the growing acceptance of trans-disciplinary poetics.) Rather than a problem of inspiration, then, this creates a crisis of plenitude. A core artistic puzzle for poets today is how to eliminate possibilities, not how to discover new ones. So the process I sometimes name "recursive questioning" or "negative iteration" is basically a negative feedback loop, if you can imagine a feedback loop that steadily consumes/eliminates the feedback. Sometimes this questioning is where a piece of mine begins, more often it's part of an interrogation strategy I use after the piece has begun. It helps me work through the ramifications of every potential decision. Through negative iteration, I block out a sequence of refusals, to determine what the work will not do, and I manoeuvre it towards its final form.

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

I love listening to good poetry readings. Sometimes even when I find the poetry sneezeable I still enjoy hearing it read aloud. My feel for Vancouver as a place (cultural site, and geographical place) is bound up with my memories of the recordings in the KSW audio archive - those voices, those imaginary rooms, haunt my Vancouver.

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 think you should be careful about how you phrase this question. Poetry is not really about providing, or even discovering, answers as such. Poetry can be productively compared to science in some ways, but unlike science it doesn't advance by hypothesis, test, conclusion, etc, towards building a determinate body of knowledge. In that sense, science does seek and answer questions; poetry absolutely does not. Poetry is a discourse, a conversation, a practice, a praxis. As Gwendolyn MacEwen said, it is "a total profession". So the "theoretical concerns" a poet has are completely embedded in the work. The concerns are actually indistinguishable from the work, they aren't "behind" it, or driving it. I think that the social functions of poetry and theory are very similar, so it's a profound mistake to suggest that the two should be, or even can be, kept in separate cultural drawers. There's a misconception (or deliberate obfuscation) not only that theory "ruins" poetry (by killing the buzz of The Poetic), but that any poet who draws from theory is only using poetry to demonstrate preconceived theoretical principles. (Contemporary artists are lucky they aren't subjected to this humiliation anymore) It's as if the poem is only a tool of a pedagogy, a rabbit-out-of-hat magic trick / object-lesson. I mean, it infantilises poetry. So the problem I have with the form of your question is that, although I know you don't subscribe to it yourself, your language sustains that imaginary separation. Even when artists think that their work is didactic, there is always tremendous leakage, spill, and overflow of meaning that undermines the most literal messages a writer could write. The "general economy" of language (as Steve McCaffery's calls language's constant oversignification) means the work is always implicated in many more "theoretical concerns" than the mind can hold.

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

I constantly show friends my work as it develops. Their responses and spontaneous reactions are essential to my process. An adage I fully believe is: "Books are written by communities."

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

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

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

Paraphrasing something John Cage's dad said to him: "If someone says "can't", that shows you what to do." Like Cage, I never heard that as Tony Robbins-type power-talk, but as a perfectly reasonable, sobering instruction.

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

Often when I write, I experience a minor crisis. It might just be that I can feel my own mortality winding around me as I age, but it usually feels like everything is at stake. I'm confronted with an opportunity at each outing that will never be repeated, and so I'm forced to consider everything I could learn from the process, everything that might be said, everything that the writing could do. It's not a rehearsal, as they say. So, while I'm not someone who tries to own all the meanings of his work, I do feel I have to "own up" to as many of its potential implications as I can. Any poetics today must, like it or not, bear all the weight of history, and the horrors of contemporaneity, whether it bears them lightly or heavily. Thinking through these implications is a major part of what's laborious in writing. In these senses, my critical work and my poetic work are in direct dialogue. The dialogue is what keeps both of them moving, changing, improving. You see, my critical-poetic work is always in dialogue with the social, even when it seems most aesthetic.

Now, to flip your question, let me reiterate (after George Bowering) that "genre" isn't the issue here, except that poetry risks becoming a mere genre when readers and writers have expectations of it that are too specific. When the "poetic experience", the "particular magic of poetry", the "poetry buzz" or whatever, is too recognisable (if not articulable), poets start writing "poetry", or "creative writing". Readers then come to expect a certain kind of bump from it, and poetry becomes a mere genre. What characterises genre literature is that the writer-reader contract contains very specific clauses. A reader's pleasure, in that case, derives largely from slight variations in how the writer fulfils very specific expectations. Ready analogies can be found in music, with the Blues or Baroque music. Listeners know exactly where they are, and largely what to expect, after only a few notes. The pleasure is in the teasing play with the tensions of expectation. Poetry-readers should not be enticed to recognise The Poetic so easily. When they can or do, "poetry" becomes merely one of many fine luxury goods merchants have on offer, like apricot jam, or red wine. It becomes a genre. Poetry loses its criticality, loses its social pertinence, loses its power.

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 can't tell if I have a routine. I probably have a lot of habits, if not routines. When I'm writing, I'm not watching myself write, so the place in my life where my writing happens is (necessarily) a blind zone. What I can say is that I binge whenever some time opens up - for a few days in a row I'll spend most of my waking hours at the desk.

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

I just do something else, and return to the stalled work later. Sometimes a piece will hang around for years before I can finish it. Sometimes I lose interest and just let it go. There are enough other things to write, read, think and experience that I don't overvalue every one of my efforts.

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

My last book was published on Friday, today is Monday. It will be months before I can answer this question.

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?

My writing comes out of a triangulation of music, contemporary art and social critique. Music not so much as sound, but as structure and temporality; contemporary art not so much as visuality, but as concept, practice, mood, and value; social critique as the core of any significant poetics today.

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

My friend Rolf Maurer and I agree that a poetry collection is like a record collection. That is to say, consumable cultural products like popular fiction, movies, and light non-fiction are mainly set up on the assumption that the consumer will read or watch the product only once. Therefore, the work has to have the potential of full disclosure on the first encounter. Hence, it has to be direct, clear, simple, etc. With a poetry collection, I think, a reader like a music-lover instead develops a very intimate relationship. You keep books around to re-read as often as moods take you, and different moods lead you to different parts of your shelf.

I'm not going to give a list of my faves, but I can say that almost every book to which I've formed a longterm attachment also took me a long time to learn to read. My eventual favourites often completely baffled me at first, including easy-readin' writers like David W. McFadden, whose humour was so alien to me that I had to become a different person before I could even read him. Bafflement, puzzlement, difference, strangeness, unfamiliarity - rather than scaring me away, they stir my curiosity and invite longterm engagement. In reading poetry, and in teaching poetry, I think that this is the principle that should always be emphasised. Poetry is not a consumable. The primary imperative of poetry as a life practice is not in reading (first encounter, first impressions) but in re-reading.

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

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I had to decide at a certain point whether to spend most of my time composing music or writing texts. For at least 6 years I really thought I was going to be a composer-poet like Guillaume de Machaut (1300 - 1377), Giacinto Scelsi (1905 - 1988) or John Cage. When I looked back, in 2003, and realised that I hadn't composed any music in almost 3 years, I also realised that I probably wouldn’t be composing music in the future. I still have ideas for compositions, and I still hear music in my dreams that I don't have the time (or skill, usually) to write down. As a kid I wanted to be either an underwater cinematographer, a field biologist in Africa, or an actor - but I also wrote radio plays, stories and graphic novellas (i.e. Godzilla vs The Octobazardi).

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

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

I'm a student at the moment, so I've been reading a lot, a lot of it has been amazing. A very recent book of poetry I'm going to keep is Clint Burnham's Rental Van. There is also a wonderful book from 1995 called Free Exchange, which is a long a conversation between sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the German-American artist Hans Haacke. Haacke's artistic strategies wouldn't work well in the poetry world, but his attitudes, and his courage are inspiring. For example, on the question of democratic consensus, Haacke says something that has direct bearing on literary cultures, with all our prizes, our institutions, our celebrities, etc: "A democratic society must promote critical thinking, including a constant critique of itself. Without it, democracy will not survive." A kind of uneasy non-consensual democracy is vital in cultural practices like poetry. Or, on art and implicatedness, and the propagandistic nature of art, Haacke says: "Whether artists like it or not, artworks are always ideological tokens, even when they don't serve identifiable clients by name. As tokens of power and symbolic capital … they play a political role. … It strikes me that insisting on the 'form' or the 'message' constitutes a sort of separatism. Both are politically charged. Speaking of the propaganda aspect of all art, I would like to add that the meaning and impact of a given object are not fixed for all eternity depend on the context in which one sees them."

20 - What are you currently working on?

An M.A. thesis. I'm surveying reviews of postmodern poetry in Canada since 1961 (when the first national review of TISH was published in the Canadian Forum), as a way of approaching problems of literary ideology. I'm studying how certain recurrent tropes, metaphors and figures of thought, such as craft, intelligibility, verity, and Canadianness, shape the arguments, and the extent to which these determine reviewers' responses. Cognitive science has shown us (as popularised in the work of George Lakoff) that language is infused with metaphor. Metaphor is both something that we consciously deploy - i.e. saying "candied pork is heaven on your fork" - and something so embedded in syntax and vocabulary that we're usually not aware that we're being metaphorical at all. In the latter case, you might say that instead of using metaphor, our metaphors use us. Language speaks us, so it goes. That is the specific aspect of Canadian literary ideology that I'm studying. I hope to learn a lot about what the basic Canadian conception of The Poetic actually is, and how/why the postmodern in Canadian poetry has often been positioned as an insult to that concept.

12 or 20 questions archive

Sunday, October 14, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Tony Tost

photo by kathryn l. pringle

Tony Tost was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1975 and was raised in Enumclaw, Washington. He received an AA degree from Green River Community College, a BA degree from College of Ozarks, and an MFA from University of Arkansas. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in American modernism and the relation of (new) media and poetics at Duke University. He is the author of two full-length collections, Complex Sleep (Iowa 2007) and Invisible Bride (LSU 2004), and one chapbook, World Jelly (Effing 2005). With Zachary Schomburg, he co-founded and for several years co-edited Octopus Magazine, and in 2005 founded his own online journal called Fascicle. He and his wife Leigh live in Durham, North Carolina and await the birth of their first child in January.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I was insanely lucky. My first book, Invisible Bride, was selected by CD Wright for the Walt Whitman Award, during the last week of my last semester as an MFA student. It was the first time I’d sent out a manuscript to a book contest. So, an insane turn of luck. Right around the same time, I fell in love with Leigh, who I am now married to, and moved from Arkansas to North Carolina with her after we’d been dating for a couple months (she was coming out here to work on a Ph.D.); this was sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision, so I came out here without any sort of plan or contacts, and apparently having an MFA is a pretty big turnoff for employers because I couldn’t even get hired by grocery stores or other retail outfits, even though I’d had about a decade of experience working at fast food places, drugstores, grocery stores, ice cream shops, hotels, etc. Anyway, so while waiting for the book to come out, I worked as a counter of automotive and pedestrian traffic, and then when Invisible Bride actually did come out, I was working at a coffee shop. (After a couple years here, I eventually decided to go back to school myself).

So, my response to the publication of Invisible Bride was a kind of mental vertigo, as one part of me was elated and still shocked to suddenly be someone with a book: not only a book, but one published via the only first book award I truly desired. Another part of me felt bewildered and estranged, as I was also suddenly in a town where I knew no one (yet), and no one knew me as a poet or a creative person like they did in Arkansas (where I felt I knew everyone), and I found myself back in the kind of work I did before and during college (food service), and more depressingly back in the kind of exhausting social relations that reign in a customer-oriented environment.

This pronounced divide between what my expectations were at the time I found out about winning the Whitman (“now I’m suddenly a successful poet”/“everything is going to be different now”) and what the actual experience was at the time of the book’s publication (“I’m anonymous again”/“nothing has changed”) really kind of sucked, but has also been pretty instructive, and now it stands as a strong corrective to any thoughts I might have about finding repose in a privileged social status (within the smallish social space of poetry and poets) as a suddenly institutionally legitimated poet.

It’s probably not coincidental that at about this same time I became obsessed with Charles Olson, who stands as an exemplar of much for me, including the importance of re-imagining social relations and social selves through poetry, as opposed to using poetry as a means of cultivating some kind of social capital.

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

I’ve lived in Durham, North Carolina for little over a year; before that, I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for three years. I am certain my geographical locale, and my overt reason for currently being at this locale (I’m now a grad student at Duke), guide much of what I do, and I’m sure that the strongest guidance is exerted in a manner I’m not cognizant of, least of all in the act of writing.

Gender and race make a big impact, as does my nationality and sexual orientation, because I’m so often so oblivious of them (as categories of representation) that they are always at the tip of my tongue, without my sanction; or, perhaps, race and gender can seem to be so normal or natural or a given for me that I end up performing a series of variations and explorations on/through them, as themes, when I think I’m just toying with language or poetic conventions. The cloud of unknowing that surrounds also reveals us, I think.

This evening, my guess is it’s like this: that a lot of the interesting impacts of race and gender on the writing of poems will occur indirectly, when the poet thinks he or she is doing something else, because it’s then when these issues or categories will direct the creation of some kind of a creative whole that ends up expressing more than conscious aesthetic intent (at least as I wield it) is able to.

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?

Somehow, I’ve become a kind of serial or sequence poet. It hasn’t been an intentional thing; things sort of accumulate around an impulsion. I usually have a series of threads going at once, and will kind of patch together some of them into a working manuscript while they’re all in-progress, and then I’ll take some things out, or write something new, all the while writing in response to other things I’m writing. And different sequences will end up in dialogue with one another, hopefully resulting in some kind of charged tension between the sequences.

Sometimes I suspect it’s too overtly pursued, but I try to cultivate a poetics of internal consequence: meaning, if I write something and publish it, I want my future writing to have to face up to it, to some degree, even if it’s in such an oblique manner only me and my shadow will know.

A poem will begin anywhere for me: with a line, with a concept, with some itchy text in my psyche, with some emotionally-tinged hum. The big central sequence of my current manuscript, a sequence called “1001 Sentences,” began with the idea of writing a piece with that title and with an opening sentence that reads “I have to write a thousand more sentences.”

I want to write a long poem or sequence called “Poem for the 4th of July,” which would be a sincere attempt to write a patriotic poem that is aesthetically compelling, but after a number of false starts, it’s clear to me I don’t have the proper entry to it yet.

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

When I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas doing my MFA, I gave just a handful of readings, but I would always try to write a big, ambitious poem right beforehand (often, the night before), as the kind of capper for the reading. One of the stronger pieces in Invisible Bride, called “A Halo Best Described as Oceanic,” was a product of this approach.

I only give readings once or twice a year, and if I get a chance to read for more than 10 minutes, I usually try to approach it as a chance to re-invent myself to myself as a poet, either by revising old material or writing something new, or by simply constructing an unexpected set list. Other times, I just read whatever I’ve written the most recently and that I’m most excited about.

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 have sets and sets of theoretical interests, which sometimes get addressed directly in my writing, though I suspect these interests or concerns pull my writing most strongly when they get manifested in the logic of image, or phrasing, or relation—as opposed to direct utterance—within the poem.

I suppose the major question for me is this: How can I create a consequential poetic experience?
And so if I were to diagram the varying circles that pass through the coordinates of “create” “consequential” “poetic” and “experience,” those circles would encompass the majority of my concerns.

Another way to answer your question is to say I’m really, really, really interested in the creation and expression of values, and the senses of scale that attend to such creation and expression.

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

The titles of both of my books were changed at the suggestion of editors/judges. Invisible Bride was called Unawares when CD Wright selected it; her only suggestion was to change the title (which I had anyway, by that point). Complex Sleep was accepted by Iowa under the title Amplifier for Hercules, and was actually twice as long as its eventual 100+ page length. The change in scale and tenor necessitated a change in title. Iowa’s decision to not run Amplifier for Hercules in its original, behemoth conception was really painful at the time, but I’ve come now to consider it a wise decision, as I’ve now got material together for a third book, called Consequence, which I think will be several large steps up from what I’ve done so far. On the more micro level, Ben Doyle (my saintly editor at Iowa) had a number of excellent suggestions on the line and detail level that I’ve happily and gratefully incorporated.

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

Well, I don’t think it’s had any effect on book-making in terms of the actual writing; like anyone, I get immersed enough in trying to write something compelling that that trumps any sort of publishing savvy I may have acquired. But the idea of finding a publisher who would do right by a manuscript of mine seems a little less impossible than it did five years ago, but I also know that my good luck on that account could end at any point.

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

Pass.

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

I do not subscribe to the kind of knowingness or correctness or narrowing of experience that advice lends itself to. Information and even instruction can be valuable, but advice has this air of self-congratulation that makes me want to punch things.

That said, the language of advice can make for interesting poetic material, especially when dramatized aphoristically. A favorite line from Complex Sleep is such a number:

One can only know so many things (stay away from Little Rock girls).

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?

No writing routine, really. Did you know that William, Henry and Alice James’ father, Henry Sr., composed each of his books on religion and Swedenborg at a table in the middle of the house, within the bustle of his large family? That sounds like a routine I would like to follow.

I would like the boundary between my writing life and my family life to be as slight as pragmatically possible.

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

Inspiration is a great word. I’ll turn to Nietzsche, John Dewey, Gertrude Stein, Olson, John Ashbery, Frank Stanford, Pascal, among many others, for inspiration.

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

Complex Sleep is tuned closer to Can’s Future Days, while Invisible Bride was tuned more to Guided by Voices’ Alien Lanes. I’d guess Consequence is tuned somewhere between Judee Sill’s Heart Food and Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon.

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?

Books come from books because reading is one mode of experiencing the world that, like other modes, filters the wholeness of experience that writing itself attempts to express. But if that’s the only mode of experience that writing comes from, or confronts, then I think the writer is closing his or herself from a whole hell of a lot.

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

Some prose texts that I swear by: Olson’sHuman Universe,” Call Me Ishmael and The Special View of History; Stein’s Lectures in America; Dewey’s Art as Experience; Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato; Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture & Speech; Guy Davenport’s Geography of the Imagination; William James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism; Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Matter & Memory; Robert Creeley’s A Quick Graph; Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson; Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast; Joseph Mali’s Mythistory; Toronto Research Group’s Rational Geomancy; Clayton Eshleman’s Juniper Fuse; Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism; Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience; Alfred North Whitehead’s Process & Reality; Goethe’s botanical writings; Edna Sarah Beardsley’s The Word: a Philosophy of Words; Laura Riding’s Anarchy Is Not Enough, Rasula & McCaffery’s Imagining Language; Nijinsky’s diary; Keats’ letters; William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain and Spring & All; Frank Lentricchia’s Modernist Quartet.

Also, prose by: Aby Warburg; Blake; Jerome Rothenberg; Walter Benjamin; Rosmarie Waldrop; Edward Dahlberg; Robert Duncan; Lyn Hejinian; Coleridge; H.D.; Anne Carson; David Rosenberg; D.H. Lawrence.

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

In the next ten years I’d like to write a long narrative work, a meaty in-depth work on country music, a collection of short lyrical poems, and an exhaustively researched critical project on various projections and representations of immediacy in American poetics.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I were to rewind a little bit and not have writing as an option, I probably would pursue some sort of career in sports management and tried to become one of those hot shot young GMs in baseball.

Alternately, I think I would enjoy and also be really good at writing for a sitcom.

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

Writing and reading with any kind of seriousness came pretty late for me. While at Green River Community College I took one creative writing class, which was so-so, and some literature classes, most of which were also so-so. In the interim between community college and going to College of the Ozarks to get a B.A., I worked at a grocery store and somehow started reading Franz Kafka and got pretty obsessed, and began trying to write noir-surreal screen plays in the evening.

When registering for classes at College of the Ozarks, you would go from table to table in a large gymnasium and talk to various professors about what classes were offered. Once I enrolled there, I had a vague sense of wanting to go to law school, but in wandering around the gym I ended up talking to Bradford Crain, a very gregarious and gifted teacher, and sort of decided to become an English major on the spot. In one semester I read Moby Dick, King Lear, Wallace Stevens and WB Yeats all in a short amount of time, and that’s what ultimately converted me, the notion of possibly writing something as strange and beautiful as these works I’d read. I also started reading around a lot on my own and was seduced by WS Merwin, James Wright, Charles Wright, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop and others.

I also was really into Flannery O’Connor for a while as an undergrad, one story in particular: “Enoch and the Gorilla,” which was in her The Complete Stories but was also an episode in Wiseblood. I thought the final image of that story was haunting, comic and beautiful, of a dimwitted man who stole a gorilla suit and was now in the woods, having buried his own clothes, wearing the suit and practicing shaking hands with the empty air. I always thought that that was a shining example of the perfect ending to a story, but recently I went back and re-read the story for the first time in ten or so years and was shocked to discover that that’s not actually where the story ends but rather is just where that particular page end: the story itself spills over for another paragraph or two on the next page. I guess I just assumed it was the end of the story because it was at the bottom of the page and was a perfect ending! So, Flannery O’Connor and the arbitrariness of page layout also helped make me a writer.

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

The last great book I’ve read that I haven’t name-dropped yet is Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, which is, along with Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein bio, the most affecting and inspiring biography I’ve ever read. A great recent book of poetry is Camille Guthrie’s In Captivity.

I’m probably drawn more to movies than films. I like sort of macho movies with some sort of psychological underpinning, so in the last few years, I’d count the following as my favorites: Eastern Promises, Casino Royale, The Departed, Batman Begins and the Bourne movies. I also think a great warts-and-all work is David Milch’s John from Cincinnati that ran for just one season recently on HBO.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Preparing to become a father in January; studying for my prelims in the spring; Consequence.


12 or 20 questions archive

Friday, October 12, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Rob Budde

Rob Budde teaches Creative Writing and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Northern BC and has taught previously at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba. He has published five books (two poetry—Catch as Catch and traffick, two novelsMisshapen and The Dying Poem, and, most recently, short fiction--Flicker). In 2002, Rob facilitated a collection of interviews (In Muddy Water: Conversations with 11 Poets). He has been a finalist for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the McNally-Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year. In 1995, Budde completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. Coming out in November 2007 is a book of poetry titled Finding Ft. George, a collection of poems about Rob’s growing relationship with Prince George and Northern BC. He is currently working on a science fiction novel called The Overcode and a book of experimental poetry called declining america. Rob lives in Prince George with his partner, Debbie Keahey and four children: Robin, Erin, Quinlan, and Anya. Check out his online literary journal called stonestone (http://stonestone.unbc.ca/) and his poetry blog writingwaynorth (http://writingwaynorth.blogspot.com/).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It didn’t really. The process of writing the book was important; it taught me all kinds of things about genre (and its artificiality) and composition, novel and long poem. Made me eligible for more grants. Ha. I also knew I was going to write many more so it was a brief experience before I got involved in the next. I wrote the book for Dennis Cooley, Robert Kroetsch, David Arnason, and Dawne McCance. I still write my books for them, but also others now. I do remember the shock of misrecognition when the book appeared in hand; it was something else now, oblique, suspicious, a bit like a picture of something intimate that doesn’t look right. Neil Besner edited that book and he remains a dear friend. If anyone gets a chance, go see him at the University of Winnipeg and ask him to sing you a song with his tremulous alto.

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

It has been six years now. Physical geography, landscape, etc, hasn’t particularly affected my writing. I am not a big believer in environmental determinism. Yes, certain aspects have entered the content; there are distinctive markers of the place—names, streets, plants, geology, etc. George Stanley (and Greg Lainsbury after him) make the case that the main commonality of this community of poets is a resistance to the hegemonic south. The writing context, the other writers here, and the political environment has certainly changed my writing. The mentorship of Ken Belford and Barry McKinnon has certainly matured my writing in a certain direction, a direction that seemed meant to be. Probably the one component of a poetics that I have gained from these writers is a sense of compositional entropy—the ability to let the poem arrive without a controlling or pre-existing form or end in mind.

Race and gender enters my writing in its exploration of power dynamics, the unsettling of status quo language formations, and examinations of the identity of the privileged class, which includes/implicates me, maleness, the university . . . It’s an area of thought that is both crucial to what I do and an area of thought that I feel I must tread lightly; it is easy for privilege to foreclose on the real work being done in the search for social justice.

3 - Where does a poem/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?

Usually, a piece of writing begins in a book I am reading. Texts begin as notes, then longhand, then at some point (when I have more time) it gets edited into a Word file, then these pile up, then the shape of a book emerges and it becomes a folder. I have had many starts that have never gone beyond a ten page foray.

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

They are places where I rediscover pieces. Often readings are launches of books of writing that are a year or more old so reading them is a reminiscence of a previous encounter with the sounds and patterns of the piece. A reading is also usually populated by other writers so it is a opportunity to network and talk poetics, something I am addicted to. I teach a lot and read a lot in those classes. It is a chance for the ear and tongue to know ideas parallel to the eyes knowing.

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

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

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

Half an hour ago. BC Bartlett. Sah-weet.

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

Ken Belford told me to think of writing as an athletic endeavor—to eat well and exercise so I can write better. The body is not disconnected from the brain—it is all one.

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

It is all poetry really. They aren’t that separable for me; they speak to each other so often and in so many ways. I am not really into thinking about genre at all.

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?

No routine really. I have 4 kids and teach and do lots of organizing of various disruptive kinds. I write notes in small moments: between meetings, during meetings, on the bus, on airplanes, on the bedside table, etc. I tend to do more concentrated editing work late late at night, say midnight to 3:00 am.

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

Never been stalled really. Don’t believe in writers block. Tell my creative writing students it doesn’t exist so it’s not an excuse for late portfolios.

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

Finding Ft. George (Caitlin 2007) is my first BC book. It is entirely written in and about Northern BC.

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?

Not a lot but sometimes science/technology essays, Lacan, The Weakerthans, Monk, films, politics, world events. Most of my writing comes from other books though.

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

I would like to write a rock song, make an indie film, and run for political office.

15 - 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?

From last question, a politician but, alternately, I’d like to open a little cafe/bookstore/restaurant and cook good food (local sources) for people and host readings and talk about books in comfy chairs with challenging art on the walls and spices wafting about. One of things I derive the most joy from is serving people food.

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

I almost became a high school teacher but realized, at the last moment, that I really wanted the time to think and read and think. High school teachers don’t have that. I’d be brunt out by now. (We need to support those teachers more btw)

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

Roger Farr’s Surplus
Linklater’s Waking Life

18 - What are you currently working on?

A cyberpunk novel called Overcode, a novel about fascism and jails called A Long Way Off, and editing a book of long poems called declining america.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Heather Haley

• POET • Born in Matapedia, Quebec, HEATHER HALEY was composing songs and stories by the age of six. • SINGER & PERFORMER • Haley is an accomplished spoken word artist and musician, performing for audiences at the Vancouver International Writers Festival, Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver Public Library, Word on the Street Festival, Western Front, Thundering Word Heard, Bukowski's, West Coast Poetry Festival and Vancouver City Hall. She sang and wrote songs for an all-girl punk band, the .45s (with Randy Rampage of DOA) and HHZ—Heather Haley & the Zellots—praised by music critic Craig Lee as one of “Ten Great LA Bands." She’s played the Smiling Buddha Cabaret, Mabuhay Gardens and Geary Street Theatre in San Francisco, the Hong Kong Cafe, Blackie's, Club 88. Club Lingerie and the John Anson Ford Theatre in Los Angeles. Upon her return to Vancouver in 1993 Haley worked the streets as an official BC Transit busker. In 2004, she teamed up with guitarist/sound designer and dj Roderick Shoolbraid to produce a series of live shows • RECORDING ARTIST • and an audio CD of spoken word songs called Surfing Season. • AUTHOR • During a decade-long stint as an expatriate, Haley was employed as a staff writer, editor and arts reviewer for the LA Weekly. The spoken word was her beat and she published many of the city's finest in her own section of the popular, alternative journal. Haley's poetry has appeared in numerous North American periodicals and anthologies and Anvil Press published a collection of verse called Sideways in 2003. Digital publications include e-poets.net, the University of Manitoba's e-zine, Treeline, Tales of Slacker Bonding and Assemblage-The Women's New Media Gallery. • MEDIA ARTIST • She will also launch an AURAL HEATHER cd of spoken word songs called Princess Nut. In 2003, Haley's videopoem, Dying for the Pleasure, premiered at Pacific Cinèmathéque. Dying for the Pleasure toured the festival circuit and was screened at Milan’s International ArtExpo, Kalingrad’s National Centre for Contemporary Arts and at the National Poety Therapy Association conference in the U.S. 2006’s Purple Lipstick has garnered much kudos having been selected by VideoBardo in Buenos Aires, the Zebra International Poetry Film Award in Berlin, the NFB sponsored Female Eye Festival in Toronto, (a memorial of the Montreal/École Polytechnique Massacre) and the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Germany, from 2000 entries. • AFFILIATIONS • Haley is a member of the Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture, the BC Federation of Writers, Women in Film & Video, the League of Canadian Poets and the Bowen Island Arts Council.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I like to think it lent credibility to my writing.

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

I’ve lived here on and off since 1993. Geography does indeed impact my writing. There are several references to Vancouver, Bowen Island and Howe Sound in Sideways and a suite of island poems in Window Seat. I’ve led quite a peripatetic existence and was an expatriate for fourteen years. By now I’m surely a citizen of the world with the ability to move, adjust and thrive where ever I hang my hat. It’s been tough, settling down, but required since becoming a mother. My son is on the autism spectrum and does not respond well to changes in routine. I’ve had to curb my wanderlust. However, I have a far longer-reaching outlook than I did in my youth. I know ten years is not a long time, frightening as that may sound. My fondest childhood memories are of my time the Kootenays, both parents gone in essence. My sisters and I spent long days playing in the woods, climbing trees, building forts and rafts. In the winter we skated every day until dark on the ice surrounding the train tracks. My father was an outdoorsman and I’m grateful he instilled in me an affinity with nature. We almost always lived in the thick of it and he took us hunting and fishing. I’ve written about being a white girl. I lived in Los Angeles for many years and survived the Rodney King riots so it would be hard not to. I write about gender and sexuality as well. My experiences as a woman provide much fodder which I see no reason to exclude.

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 find it difficult to describe process. It’s so nebulous and I avoid examining it. When I do manage to carve out a small chunk of time, I just want to write the thing. I go through phases. Sometimes the beginning is staring at the horizon or stumbling across an intriguing image, or finding a weird synchronicity between things. Once a word or a concept is brought to the fore of my consciousness, it seems to pop out at me everywhere. I realize this is not uncommon, especially with artists.

I sporadically keep a journal, mining it later for a word, phrases, sparks. Often a poem will start from a line or two from the journal. Other times I start with nothing and it feels like nothing until I can infuse a narrative, however peculiar. I like to play with lists, nudge the subconscious with random words. I’ve been experimenting with spam, approaching it as found poetry, you know, the kind that tries to slide past filters with a jumble of text.

With poetry, I don’t write a book. I write poems and after, will organize them into as cohesive an entity as possible, a manuscript, with any luck. With fiction—and I’ve only written one novel—I had a pretty clear idea of its story structure from the git-go and thought more in terms of a book.

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

Neither really. I don’t rely on them as part of my process; neither do I view them as counter-productive. Often I dread public readings as I am setting them up! People laugh when I insist that I’m shy, but I have to force myself to get out there despite a tendency to retreat. Any kind of performance is exciting of course, useful, really, because after over twenty-five years onstage, I’m still being challenged. I feel strongly too that if you’re going to read your work it’s important to be engaging. I’ve seen too many poets stand stiffly while droning on in a monotone. They’re really doing their work a disservice.

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?

Yes, my concerns are just the fundamental questions, the eternal questions. My son asked the other day “why are we here” both of us knowing I did not have the answer. Still, we had a lovely conversation. I write from my gut and wind up addressing issues, like the loss of personal values in a consumerist society, domestic violence and sexism while carefully dodging didacticism and rhetoric. I’ve been criticized for “eschewing the quotidian,” while Karen Solie—whom I had the privilege of working with during my residency at Banff in 2005—said that though I write a lot about domestic situations, my work is not domesticated. Go figure. My poems can be explicit, provocative, but they are most certainly about things I have seen and isn’t that we what we do best? Observe? I know I’m a voyeur. From the time I was a young girl, I have been peeking into people’s windows when passing their houses in the night. They fascinate me. I am always drawn to the photograph that contains a face, or faces.

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

I don’t find it difficult at all. I feel fortunate to be in that situation. I’ve learned so much from editors. I can’t be objective about my work or imagine completing a book without input from an astute editor.

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

A good pear is hard to find. I keep trying though and attempted eating one a few weeks ago but wound up tossing it because the texture was woody.

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

That writing is hard work. Plain, simple, homespun advice like Jack London saying, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” There is no magic. If you are blessed with the talent then the most important aspect of writing is the application of butt to seat, as they say. I learned this the hard way while writing for the LA Weekly. The deadlines imposed upon me were critical to my development as a writer. I found out that I could produce the work regardless of how crappy I might be feeling. I was no longer at the mercy of the muse and learned to summon her at will. She’s been dodging me lately though.

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

I find it difficult to move from fiction to non-fiction, preferring fiction. I do bounce around a lot. As I mentioned, I was a journalist for a time and along with a lot of poetry have written song lyrics, screenplays, essays and phone-sex scripts. The appeal is the inherent challenge in switching. It keeps me on my toes.

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 try to have a routine but our family schedule changes season to season. Domestic duties have taken over my life and writing takes a back burner to child rearing and all that it entails. I’m home schooling as well so I suffer from a dearth of writing time. When I have a few hours there is such incredible pressure to use it constructively that often my impulse is to run away. Of course I must always dance the procrastination dance. I’ve developed some helpful rituals but it can still take hours before I’m able to assuage my anxiety, sit at the keyboard and compose. I need an elf! Or two, or three. A few summers ago, I was able to go away and book a room with an (ocean) view in a quiet B&B in Sechelt. After the first day of wandering around feeling like I’d lost a limb, I settled in and was able to produce some work. It’s pretty hard to book time off that like that though. I manage to persist. I have to, I suppose. It’s probably why I like to work in various media. Music and videopoems are also replete angst but collaborating with other artists provides momentum.

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

Books, mostly poetry books.

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

I’ve experimented quite a lot probably because I feel more confident.

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?

I have a pair of binoculars sitting on my windowsill. I don’t do yoga anymore or find time to meditate but I have quite the vista, an ever-changing tableau due to our wacky west coast weather, so often I stop to gaze at the sea, clouds, birds and deer. I’m a musician and that certainly influences everything I do, not just my writing. I would like to study more the correlations between song and verse. Perhaps it’s odd but I have a knack for some of the sciences. I excelled at biology and chemistry and was an aspiring anthropologist at one time. Obviously there exists an overlap between art and science. I think of Leonardo da Vinci. Art and science both involve exploration, experimentation, inquiry and the artist’s studio is a kind of lab. I study people, myth, and culture, much like a scientist, as a way to generate ideas, narrative. The visual arts influence me very much, especially painting, film and video.

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

Some writers that spring to mind are Andre Breton, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Cocteau, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Steinbeck, Octavio Paz, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sarte, ee cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Dostoyevsy, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, J.D. Salinger, Hemmingway, Melville, Anne Sexton, bp nichol, Earle Birney, bill bissett, Susan Musgrave, Jamie Reid, George Bowering, Nathanial West, Germaine Greer, DH Lawrence, William Burroughs, Philip K Dick, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marshall McLuhan, Anais Nin, Robert Stone, Darcey Steinke, Wanda Coleman and the two Margarets, Lawrence and Atwood.

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

Trace my ancestry—especially my French ancestry—reside in France for a time and become fluent. I’m a Beliveau.

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?

An anthropologist. I even went on an archeological dig but dropped out of college to sing in a band.

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

The devil? I don’t know. It’s always been there, a hankering to tell stories, through song, prose or verse. I harbour a romantic notion that I inherited it from my mother, a consummate queen of the blarney.

18 - What was the last great book you read?

Don’t think I recall but the last novel I thoroughly enjoyed was The Corrections and as for non-fiction, The Golden Spruce.

19 - What was the last great film?

That’s hard because I’ve seen so many great films and the chronology is a blur but I did watch Blade Runner recently on a sleepless night.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working hard to get my new book and cd of spoken word songs out into the world. The book is Window Seat and I’m really hoping all indications are accurate and that it comes out next spring. My AURAL HEATHER cd, Princess Nut is due in the spring as well. My producer Roderick Shoolbraid and I and the band (his brother Malcom on drums an unknown bass player) will tour to promote both. I’m also re-writing my novel, The Town Slut’s Daughter then going to serialize it on my blog/website. I really want to direct another videopoem but will need to find funding. My deadline is July, 08. I want to enter the next Zebra Poetry Film Award.

Monday, October 8, 2007

12 or 20 questions: with Anne Simpson

Anne Simpson's most recent poetry book, Quick, was published in spring, 2007. She has published two other books of poetry, Loop (2003), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and Light Falls Through You (2000). Her first novel, Canterbury Beach will soon be followed by a second, Falling, due out in 2008. She is currently working on a book of essays, drawings, and poems. She lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where she works part-time at St. Francis Xavier University.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
Well, I didn't think my first book would get accepted, or at least I thought I would go down a long list of publishers before getting an acceptance. My friend and I figured out a list of five or six publishers. We were having coffee -- she was giving me advice -- and we wrote out the list on a napkin. So I guess I didn't expect a publisher to accept it. I expected to work my way down that list on the napkin, getting rejections as I went.
What changed for me was that things could be accepted, first of all, by publishers that I didn't expect would want my work. I had been trying to get a novel accepted around the same time, and it took longer to find a publisher (for the novel), so the idea that my poetry might be accepted was pretty mind-boggling to me. Somehow I didn't expect my work to go out into the world and find readers. That acceptance made a huge difference, almost more than the publication of the book itself. It gave me the confidence to write another manuscript.
2 - How long have you lived in Antigonish, and how does geography, if at all,impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
Well, I live in a small town. At first, I didn't know what I'd be able to do, in terms of work. But I realized I could work part-time, and also do things I'd wanted to do. I started painting big canvasses (I'd go to the Art Department at StFX University and paint there in the mornings when there was no one around). I saw that I could live creatively in a small place, though I did feel pretty isolated at first, as a young mother with two small children. After I had my second child -- my daughter -- I took a night class in creative writing. It was the first creative writing class I'd ever taken (though I'd written before -- I used to go to Bronwen Wallace's house in Kingston, Ontario, where she helped a group of us with our writing). The night class helped give me the impetus I needed with writing. And soon I was spending more time on my writing than on my painting, though there wasn't much time for either, since I was with my kids a lot.
I've lived here for nineteen years -- longer than I've lived anywhere -- and Atlantic Canada has become very important to me. It's rugged, and beautiful, and not as developed as other places where I've lived. It has fewer resources, and this has a tendency to make people more =resilient, I think. I'm far removed from a "scene" in terms of writing, but I don't think about this very much. It allows me the time and space to write.
Being a woman who writes is something that I take into account all the time. Women weren't able to give voice to their imaginations until quite recently, though there were wonderful exceptions to this, of course. A great many women have started writing in the last fifty years or so. And the newness of this -- the fact that we have a voice -- I think this gives women strength of purpose in their writing.
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?
As far as poetry goes, I write what I want to write and put all those things together. Then I begin to see what I've been concerned with, what's been on my mind. At times, I can't let go of a bigger idea, and this usually stays with me for a while until I know how to work it out as a long poem.
Sometimes I think my poetry is one long book, divided into smaller books. Like so many poets, I go back to some of the same ideas, even as I'm working on new issues, new problems.
In terms of fiction, the novel I'm finishing now was never clear to me. The writing of it was like jumping out of a plane with a parachute, with no idea of where I was going to land. But then, gradually, it became a novel. I began to know the characters. Then, with revision, I began to know them better and better. I knew what they might do, given their passions.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
Public readings can be wonderful. And yes, I think they're creative. What's difficult, sometimes, is trying to communicate to the media. Breakfast television is not exactly designed for thoughtful exchange.
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?
In poetry, I see things visually, so it's almost as if I see a poem in three dimensions. Yet it has to be on a page. So I'm always trying to play with a poem so that it has a structure -- a shape -- that is at one with what I'm writing about. This is not simply an interest in form; it really is a deep interest in the complex shape of the "telling" of a given poem. Someone might object -- "oh, well, that's not a theoretical concern," but for me it is a fundamental theoretical concern. And it's happens to be fun working it out -- it's a kind of play.
Fiction is not like this, though I'm fascinated by how the narrative line can be arrested. I'm very interested in showing the different landscapes of a character's mind. So, for instance, if it's a character who is having a breakdown, I want to emphasize this by showing how language and syntax begin to break down. If a character thinks differently, as with the character of Elvis in the novel I just finished, I have to find a new way (for me) of telling things from this point of view. This idea -- of showing how thinking can change from character to character -- is perhaps my most pressing concern.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Editors are like choreographers. We couldn't do what we do without them. And a good editor gets a writer to see what's possible; a really good editor helps a writer take quantum leaps. I've worked with Don McKay on my poetry -- he's one of the finest editors I know. And with regard to my fiction, it was just a superb experience to work with Jennifer Lambert. So yes, I think editors are essential.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
Oh, it's always very hard - starting a new manuscript is hard. We all know what it's like. I think the hardest thing for me was my second novel. It was the hardest thing, but also the best thing -- I've never learned so much as I've learned in the writing of it, because I came to an impasse with it. I simply could not write it. And then I found a way to go on and through revising and revising, I found what I wanted to say. And so I discovered it in a way I never would have guessed.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
I ate a pear with a friend while we were on a beach in late August -- a very good pear. When was the last time you ate a peach?
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When my husband once asked Don McKay about the best advice to give students who wanted to write, Don answered that they should be advised to take Tylenol -- that the problem might get better by morning.
The best advice (for me) was not to throw out something just because I thought it wasn't good. I was told that it's a lot harder to keep the bad writing in order to find out why it's bad and see if there's any way to work with it.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Fiction takes longer to write. When you write a novel, you inhabit a world. (So it can be hard to finish a novel -- you have to let go of this world.) Someone said to me not long ago that fiction is social, that it's binding. For me, one of the most wonderful things about it is that I can go inside a character's mind. But this character is also acting within his or her world with other characters, so the writer is always exploring relationships. But things happen -- this is the beauty of it -- one thing happens, another thing. A mistake is made by one character, and the repercussions are felt everywhere. In other words, I think that fiction enters into the sphere of moral dilemmas, the sphere of the moral. By this, I mean that characters have to decide things that aren't easy. They act; they suffer the consequences.
Poetry is not like this. It doesn't need to follow a narrative line. So it's not, say, horizontal, in that it doesn't move from A to B to C to D. It slices through that narrative line because it has much more to do with the moment.
I love the difference between the two. And I am violently addicted to both.
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?
A typical day begins as it would for someone with a regular working life. I'm usually at my desk by 8:30. I take a break at noon -- or 1 or 2 -- to take the dogs out for a walk. Then I work again in the afternoon, and often in the evening for a bit. But I'm not always working. I'm very easily distracted.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Getting stuck -- well, now that I've been stuck with a novel, I know it's also possible to get unstuck. It's as if I had to keep writing to get out of that sand trap, and then, gradually, the writing improved. During those "stuck" times, I haven't been able to go to a particular writer, a favourite writer for help -- I needed to figure it out on my own.
13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
I guess I keep reaching out for what I can't yet do. (Quick felt like a reach for me.) I keep exploring. So I don't look back and compare all that much.
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?
Yes, of course, all of these things and more. But mainly visual art and science (when it comes to poetry).
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have old favourites when it comes to poetry -- Jack Gilbert, Robert Hass, Charles Wright, Louise Gluck. Reading Anne Carson makes me want to write. Erin Moure is so inventive that she teaches her readers how to be inventive. I read widely, from lyrical poetry to more experimental stuff. Right now I'm reading Dan Tysdal.
In terms of fiction -- when I'm writing fiction I can't read contemporary fiction, because I can be easily influenced. So this has led me back to the classics... I read and re-read Tolstoy, for example. But there's no question that Canadian fiction compelled me from the beginning -- Ondaatje, Munro, Atwood, Laurence, et al.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd like to get to the Maldives. I'd like to try hang gliding.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would have been an artist, though I wouldn't have made much money at it. Because I like teaching, I'd have taught on a much more regular basis than I do now. Sooner or later, I'd have had to switch to interviewing writers on breakfast television.

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

I read something in a book of short stories (meant for teachers of creative writing). There was an essay at the back of the book by a writer, whose name I forget, who talked about living in a small town in New Hampshire. She had a choice, she said. She could watch television or she could write. Those words goaded me into action. I could imagine wasting years of my life sitting on a couch, watching television, because I lived in a small town where there wasn't a whole lot to do. Or I could write.

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

Middlemarch. I'm re-reading it. And in terms of films, I really liked Manufactured Landscapes.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A book of essays.