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.

12 or 20 questions archive

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.

12 or 20 questions archive

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.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Mairéad Byrne

Mairéad Byrne is 50. No-one can mess with her now.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Well, it meant I could stop writing it forever. It’s kind of a blast from the past now because I would never have a book with a black cover. The good thing is that the cover also has a painting by my old friend Michael Cullen. The painting is called “The Pillarfish,” and it’s actually a collaboration between Michael & myself: he painted it on taped-together fax sheets of my poem “The Pillar.” The framed painting is hanging on my dining room wall and is one of the few material constants in my life.

2 - How long have you lived in Providence, 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 Providence longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life. It’s my home. I love Providence. It has a big sky & huge trees. You can imagine what it looks like right now. Insanely beautiful. Salvador Dali need not even try. Leaves: smattered to the ground—pink—yellow—ivy green—a sudden vortex mid-air or still bristling on the trees. The mix is intense. The color is show-stopping.

Before I lived here, I lived in Oxford, Mississippi, before that Ithaca, New York, and before that Lafayette and West Lafayette, Indiana. I’ve lived in Providence longer than I’ve lived anywhere except Dublin. I feel I have entered the middle ground. To know and to be known is an amazing experience.

I’m an immigrant and a migrant. Providence is quite close to my own home environment of Dublin, at least Dublin before it became prosperous. South County Rhode Island is uncannily like South County Dublin. When I look out over the bay at Narragansett I expect to find Howth and am disoriented not to.

I’m very aware of place but move on easily, or at least have so far. But I still think about the places I have lived; and the places members of my family have lived: all their smells & atmospheres. I have very acute memories of my older sister’s first flat in Dublin, in the late 1960’s. That was the first place I ever smelled curry. The first place I ever saw an eggplant, or tamarind. I remember the smell of America when I first came to New York. That was an apartment, not a flat.

I value mobility. When I was a young journalist, I had nothing, materially, but I had access to those who had less than nothing, and to those who had a lot more. I came to America with $400 and a 7-year old child, knowing no-one, not even being able to drive. I kind of believe in the American dream, and I still believe in America. I teach at Rhode Island School of Design, a private school, and that 7-year old child, a daughter, is now a Junior at Brown, studying Applied Math & Economics.

I’m still an inbetweener. I work in a situation of privilege. My colleagues and students are predominantly White or Asian. I live in a situation much closer to poverty, and there is much poverty in Providence. My neighborhood is predominantly Hispanic, and Black, as is my younger daughter’s school. Black America has had an enormous influence on me, ethically. Also Black music and poetry. The America I emigrated for was Black rather than White. These terms seem harsh when I write them; the reality is harsh too but not quite so stark. The fabric of my work is quite similar to the fabric of my life. The relationships are visible.

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?

The poem often begins with the title, I just note it down and it’s there for me to conjure from when I go back. Of course if I don’t go back, or if I don’t go back soon enough, the titles stop coming. I’m probably an author of short pieces, in lots of modes, i.e., a range of books developing, though that sounds like all your birthdays coming at once, plus Christmas, or something, which is a bit arrogant.

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

Public readings are integral to my practice and process. In my job as a teacher
at Rhode Island School of Design, we’re constantly talking about interdisciplinarity. That’s where language comes in. In order to collaborate, or work for someone, you need to be able to talk and listen. Readings are a type of interdisciplinarity, or collaboration for me.
I did a reading with Trevor Joyce at Brown University recently, it was sponsored by RISD. There were students from RISD there, students from Brown (including my daughter and a few of her friends), faculty and staff from RISD and Brown, my friends from Providence, Mark Weiss from New York, my ten-year old daughter, her friends. The reading was in a theater in a university but there was a mix beginning to happen in the audience.

There was one thing I would do differently if I had the chance again. When I walked into the theater the first person I saw was one of my friends from Providence and her beautiful baby daughter. When I started to read, this beautiful baby started cooing and exclaiming. I am used to that and just continued reading, not against the baby but not with her either. Very soon, my friend left, maybe not wanting her chatty baby to disrupt the event. Afterwards I was so disappointed when I thought about it. How often will I have a talkative baby at a reading I give? I wish I had acknowledged her, and maybe read to her rather than past her. My friend might have left anyway, and may have had somewhere to go, it was late, probably the end of a long day. I’ve been there. I’ve been outside readings with babies and other very good company. But what I was thinking about afterwards was the rare opportunity offered here. I’d somehow missed it, and might never have it again.

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?

The main question I’m thinking about is audience. I get a big kick out of poetry as a meeting place for a diverse group of people, in terms of age, experience, and interest in poetry. There are some poems I read and when a deep laugh comes, I know: that person knows the score of that particular poem. It might be a poem about poverty, though the word is never mentioned, and that person knows what it’s like to be poor. Most people in the audience might think, if they think at all, that the poem is kind of odd and eccentric. But that person recognizes the territory and laughs.

Tim Peterson said I wasn’t funny but nonetheless people laugh. I should be thinking about global warming but I like to laugh. Laughter makes more priestly audiences nervous but some of our greatest virtuosos and experimenters are funny: Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Michael Basinski.

I’m very interested in color. Almost the most important question I ask every morning is about color. Often I would just like to stop there, considering tangerine, or vermilion, all day.

I’m interested in silence, in shades of meaning; poems that are actually three poems; small poems that are large; language that lies on the surface of meaning; aposiopesis; flatness; the inability to speak; prose which is poetry; poetry outside language. Last night I had a great dream about commonality and difference, how a comparison between every single thing can hatch both (and how politically preferable that is). I think about metaphor a lot. I love the applications George Lakoff makes. Applied work interests me more than any other. Which does not exclude the absurd.

I think about sound.

I’m probably more temperamentally pre-disposed to asking questions than answering them. I’m more of a student than a teacher, which might be annoying for my students (because I’m also more of a teacher than a student in some irksome ways!).

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

I’ve hardly ever had the experience, since my days as a journalist 25 years ago. I mainly worked with sub-editors then. I had a bad experience with an editor at the Village Voice, twenty years ago, where my work basically seemed to be raw material to be shaped according to her prejudice.

In poetry though, editors are generally your best readers. It’s generally at a micro rather than macro level, though book design is consummately important (and Randolph Healy once shrank a full-length book manuscript to a 14-poem chapbook (but what a chapbook!)). Deborah Tall was a wonderful editor—the Seneca Review was a work of art, the fact-checking was phenomenal. Randolph Healy, of Wild Honey Press, was my editor for three books. Randolph not only published my first book, he connected me to a whole community, the Wild Honey list, of which I am very proud to be a part. I cherish my alliance with him. I feel the same about Kenny Goldsmith, sort of like I died and went to ubu.

Nobody knows your work like an editor does. He or she makes that journey over semi-colons and italics with you, patiently, exhaustively. Jane Sprague was endlessly attentive in formatting An Educated Heart. That book is something I can sell with pride. It’s far from easy to describe and resolve through email minute issues of spacing and font. It takes a lot of describing to specify tiny visual or formatting issues. You’re not standing side-by-side with editors, pointing something out. Almost everything is communicated through language, via email. It requires real patience. Every small visual decision, if problematic, takes a lot of describing.

Kenny Goldsmith just kept saying, I want you to be happy with it, we’ll get it right. The pdfs for SOS Poetry went back-and-forth dozens of times. In the end, it is a book I’m proud for people to steal. Really, it is like that equation where two percent of the world’s population own more than half the world’s wealth. With editing, the tiny questions take the most time. They diminish but never seem to end. But if you keep winnowing, you do get to a point where you know it’s madness to go further. Third Policeman country. But the pay-off for going as far as author and editor can possibly go together is a book without typos. A book which is as carefully formatted as vision and resources permit. A job well-done, even a microscopic level.

Editors are your best readers. They know the poems better than anyone except the author. They have to have endless patience and stamina. I love my editors for the journeys they were willing to take, the places where they were willing to meet me—the hard shoulder of the emdash, the tower block of justification.

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’re talking about writing books, I find it easier. If you’re talking about publishing books, that’s easier too. If you’re talking about how I feel about the end product, well, there’s generally an upward curve there too. My most recent book was Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007). A mistake was made in the first printing, the cover came out highlighter-yellow. But Keith Tuma did a second printing, with the originally selected apple/lime green cover. I am very happy with the look of the book: small, square, vivid, fun. Some day I would like to have my own operation, in the attic, i.e., to publish my own books. I like the idea of Leaves of Grass as a model, a living, breathing book, expanding and contracting over the course of a life. I think Talk Poetry has the potential for that.

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

Halloween.

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

Turn up the music.

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

I love poetry. I love theatre too and would love to return to the spaces of stage and auditorium. I’m writing a little play at the moment, for Stephanie Young. The working title is Factory of Terror. I’m very interested in writing essays, almost to the point of need. I have written about Frederick Douglass, and would like to continue my work in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Room of Boston Public Library, where I’ve always been completely happy.

I like when things are more than one thing. My poetry is written in prose. Brendan Lorber asked me to do a talk/reading at the Zinc Bar a few years ago and the piece I did for that, “Some Differences Between Poetry & Standup” has persisted as model for me: a talk studded with poems. All the relevant words have degrees of movement within them. “Public” can be a space for intimate connection. “Talk” can be invested with poetry. “Poetry” can be outside language. I love genre. I appreciate categories. I think of most of my writing as poetry though, and poetry seems infinitely generous and tolerant about that.

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?

My life is kind of horrific, time-wise. Rhode Island School of Design is a very intense place to teach, and work. Twelve hour days, 7 days a week, are not unusual. I’m also a single parent; it’s almost my identity. And I do a lot of readings. A typical day begins at 5am, with me doing what I was too tired to do the night before. And it usually isn’t writing poetry.

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

Standup.

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

My most recent book is Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007). I felt it was a breakthrough. Patrick Kavanagh used to talk about wanting to “play a true note on a slack string.” There’s some of that in Talk Poetry. The book just before that, SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007) is visibly leading to Talk Poetry. But some of the strands in SOS Poetry—very short poems, for example—I would like to continue. The textured, collaged, appropriated work of my chapbook An Educated Heart (Palm Press 2005) seems a long way from me now; that chapbook constitutes half a book, which I have to finish.

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?

Music. I adore music. I listen to music in my car. Today it was Louis Armstrong—one of those Hot Five or Hot Seven recordings, with Lil Hardin. She was a professional piano player before it seemed possible a woman—or young girl—could do something like that. You don’t hear much good about her—she was Louis Armstrong’s second wife. But I have a lot of admiration for her. One of my babysitters, Hannah Ressiger, is a rap artist, so I’m listening to her. Van Morrison. But mostly I listen to Bob Marley.

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

I don’t know exactly have a life outside work. But I’m working on it. The boundaries
are blurry. We just finished reading The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien, in my Literature & Composition class. So that book is as assigned text, but it has also been essential fuel for my own imagination for so long I had forgotten about it. Until I read it again in this class, and then began thinking of another possible class—Brian Merriman, Laurence Sterne, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien: an Irish comic imaginative tradition to which I myself could belong. Designing courses allows me to build or rebuild structures to frame crucial aspects of my aesthetics and understanding in an interactive, communicative, even integrated way.

My life outside work is principally my family. That can actually be a lot of work too, with a wide range of interesting reading, some of it from banks.

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

I’d like to be rich. I’m not sure I could handle it. But I’d like to give it a shot.

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?

Well I would have liked to play with the Wailers. I would have liked to dance at the Savoy. If I wasn’t a writer I probably would have ended up just being a writer or something. I might have liked to be an obstetrician. Or a pediatrician. But I mightn’t have been able to stand seeing children in pain. Well, it would have been great to have been a comedian. A painter. But I work in an art school. I’m happy.

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

I was tempted. I tried lots of other things. I managed art galleries. A theatre.

I worked in hospitals. I was a cleaner in many cities. Maybe I should have stuck to all that but I was tempted to write. It’s a lot of fun. I loved being a journalist, the design problem of the word-count or the page, having my work published overnight, seeing people read it, getting free passes into things. I adored writing plays: I loved theatre space. What I learned when I wrote plays was that there was no point in squandering that great opportunity on anything resembling real life. You could do anything with theatre, so why not? I feel like that about writing too. It’s a miraculous form. I was in a Chinese restaurant in L.A. one Saturday night recently. It was filled with big round tables around which sat exhausted families attended by even more exhausted waiters. I would have loved to film it. But you can film it with your eyes, and write it, very cheaply, if you have time.

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

I re-read Aristotle’s Poetics a couple of weeks ago, that’s a great book, even in fragments. My last great movie saturation experience was the complete 54 hours of the South Korean TV series Dae Jang Geum.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Right now I’m working on hope.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Victor Coleman

Victor Coleman was born in 1944 in Toronto. His first real job was as the late Ken Thomson’s mailroom clerk. He then went on to work for the Toronto Star (where the night editors mocked him for reading Joyce and Olson), and at Oxford University Press (a virtual apprenticeship in book design and the business of publishing), before jumping ship to become linotype operator for The Coach House Printing Co. and Coach House Press editor in chief (from 1966-1975). He was also once co-owner of The Bohemian Embassy, programmer for Queen’s University’s National Film Theatre, Executive Director of A Space, publicist/programmer for The Music Gallery, and editor of The Blue Book for Community Information Toronto. Since 1999 he has been the chief editorial mucky-muck for the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art’s Canadian Art Database (http://www.ccca.ca/). Before the unions made it impossible for practicing writers with no degrees to do so, he taught CanLit and Creative Writing for the Toronto District School Board and at York and Queens Universities. He has received grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and in 2001 was given the Harbourfront International Writers’ Festival Prize. In 1996, when the Coach House Press had been run into the ground by various committees, he and Stan Bevington started up Coach House Books and http://www.chbooks.com/, the world’s first simultaneous print and online publishing venture. Ultimately there was nothing in it for him. Meanwhile Bevington’s on his third Porsche. Over the years he has broken bread, smoked dope and otherwise hung out with such significant contemporaries as bpNichol, Milton Acorn, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Raymond Souster, Artie Gold, Gerry Gilbert, George Bowering, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, joel oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, John Wieners, Jonathan Williams, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Basil Bunting, Barbara Guest, and Robin Blaser. His five children have produced seven grandchildren. He likes to summer in Rieux-Minervois, near Carcassonne in the southwest wine region of France.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I was able to present a copy to Glenn Gould at a salon where I read the work.

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?

That’s two questions.

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?

Book.

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

I’m semi-retired and only read in bars where poets seldom go.

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?

That’s three questions.

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

Difficult is 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?

The making is easy, it’s what happens after that’s hard.

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

That’s two questions.

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

Never answer questionnaires.

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

None.

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?

Breakfast, coffee.

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

Underarms. (Sorry, I thought you said perspiration.)

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

ICON TACT wraps up the conventional verse, the rest is Oulipo.

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?

Who’s David W. McFadden?

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

Michael Boughn, the Mickey Spillane of Language poetry.

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

Die.

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?

Trapeze artist.

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

Couldn’t play the piano.

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

That’s two questions.

20 - What are you currently working on?

My obituary.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Sean Johnston

Sean Johnston is the author of A Day Does Not Go By (Nightwood, 2002), which won the 2003 ReLit Award for short fiction, and the novel All This Town Remembers (Gaspereau, 2006). He’s also published two chapbooks: A Long Day Inside the Buildings (with Drew Kennickel; JackPine Press, 2004) and Bull Island (Gaspereau, 2004). He lives in Kelowna where he teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Okanagan College.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It did a couple of things that kind of counter each other. It legitimized my work somehow and gave me more confidence. It also made me realize how much luck is involved. The manuscript Nightwood liked was the same one that had been rejected everywhere else. So it helped me to feel like someone was interested in my work, but reinforced the resolve that this interest cannot be all I am working for.

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

I started teaching at Okanagan College in Kelowna this semester, and moved here for this job, so not long. Geography is important in my work, but mainly the Saskatchewan landscape I grew up in and go home to. For me there is prairie and not-prairie. I suppose it’s like that for everyone who leaves home. There is home and not home. And the prairie landscape is in my work in its stripped down description I think, in the space it allows for the reader’s imagination.
Race and gender are a part of my work too, but not necessarily in obvious form. Some young writers seem to think only their personal experience is “authentic.” One I read, I think in your 20 questions interviews, called using a narrator that is not your gender or race, or any narrator that has a point of view outside your own experience, “pretentious bullshit.” God forbid a writer should use his imagination. This kind of sentiment is ridiculous and short-sighted. There are people and situations in this world that are far outside my experience and if writing is to be human at all it must acknowledge the greater world and not just be a little paper representation of the author’s limited world. So I do like to interrogate power relationships of all kinds, including those informed by gender and race. It’s easy to ignore these questions but ignoring them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

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 am not sure where poems and stories begin. I usually write small scenes until a character, or the speaker of a poem, is silenced by some kind of desire, then I begin from that desire and work it backward or forward, trying to figure out, like in the Talking Heads song, “Well, how did I get here?”

Except for the novel I have written and the one I’m working on now, I definitely work on short pieces, not books. I love assembling the pieces into a manuscript later, but it does often feel a bit forced in the beginning, until it begins to work and then it’s really heartening to see the way these stories and poems work together.

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

For poetry they are really a big part of it. I cannot write poems without imagining them spoken. I have little aptitude for creating work that exists first on the page. I suppose that’s the same with the stories.

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?

The central question in all work, I think, is what does it take to be human? I suppose I believe Flannery O’Connor’s notion that violence reveals what is essential about being human, but I don’t think the violence must be physical. I like to explore the emotional and spiritual violence that is a result of certain social situations. I like to question the assumptions that underpin the violent situations. Why is it so easy to sell the notion that capitalism is Christian and Christians are capitalist, for example? I think if you make people question their perception in your writing, you may help them question their perception when they look at other narrative forms, like 90 second news stories, which for some reason are accepted as natural. I think it’s the artist’s job to make the artificiality of accepted narrative forms obvious. Pretending forms are neutral is dangerous.

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

This kind of works on a case-by-case basis. Some stories seem more finished than others by the time they get to an editor and I don’t know why. But I definitely appreciate another sensitive reader. It’s never been difficult for me. I’ve had good editors everywhere. No bad experiences or even difficult ones. Kate Kennedy at Gaspereau was especially helpful because by the time she read the ms. I was so close to it there was no way I could see it truly. I was still reading things into it that I had deleted three drafts ago. So for the novel, an editor is essential, I think.

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

It hasn’t changed. I still write the same way and worry about how it makes a book later.

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

That was a long time ago. Things used to be simple. There were pears in a basket hanging in my parents’ kitchen. I bumped my head into the basket, so I ate a pear.

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

I think I learned most of what I’ve learned from Journalism school. I don’t know if anyone ever said it in so many words, but what I heard was Shut up and tell the story. Keep yourself out of it, which is impossible, but is the ideal, I think. Keep your ego out of it.

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

The biggest thing moving between genres does for me is give me something to work on when the main project gets more difficult. Sometimes a novel project is very discouraging while you work your way out of some problem. It feels like it cannot be done. So to be able to switch to poetry, which is not easier but calls for a different kind of focus, is encouraging and energizing.

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 routine which I stick to whenever possible, especially in the summers (or the winters when I was in construction). I get up early, put the coffee on, walk the dog, come home, pour the coffee and sit at the computer and type out what I’ve written in a notebook the night before and/or what I have printed out the day before and edited. Then that leads to more writing directly on the computer. In the afternoon or late evening I will return to this and write in my notebook again. I’ll type that the next morning. I can usually stick to this routine for a couple of months and then I need a break.

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

I usually read poetry to get back on track, even if what I am working on is prose. I read Jorie Graham most times, or Karen Solie. Sometimes, Donald Barthelme or Faulkner, or Kundera or Marquez.

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

My most recent book is my first novel, so the size is an obvious difference. Maybe a bigger difference than for a lot of short story writers who write novels, since my short fiction tends to be quite short. It’s quite different stylistically from anything I had done before because of its interiority. Everything I had written up until this book was written from a much greater distance, even when it was first person. In the novel every awkward stutter of the main character’s mind is there. He’s a deeply flawed man and the reader is closer to him than any other character I’ve written, I think.

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 think I am an anomaly in this way. Most writers I know have some talent in other arts or an incredible appetite for scientific knowledge of some kind. I don’t have any aptitude for another art form and no special desire to know physics or biology or anything. I think the only thing outside of books that influences me is overheard conversations, gestures, facial expressions, those kinds of things.

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

Some poets (some new to me, some I return to often): Jorie Graham, Dean Young, Jake Kennedy, John Newlove, Karen Solie, C.K. Williams, Sarah Den Boer, Sharon Olds, Jan Zwicky, Michael deBeyer, Sharon Thesen. Some authors: James Kelman, Barry Hannah, Faulkner, John Lent, Donald Barthelme, Peter Carey, Ismael Reed, Eudora Welty, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, Robert Kroetsch, John Barth, Madeline Thien, Francie Greenslade . . .

Too many. These I return to when I should be reading new books, but . . .

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

As far as writing, I like what I’m doing right now. I don’t look ahead too far. In the rest of my life there are too many things to mention. I will not play in the NHL. Since I got over that, I don’t really set goals except simple ones – finish the story or poem that’s in front of me right now.

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?

Well, I teach Literature and Creative Writing, but those are related to writing and reading, so . . . I would be an engineering surveyor, as I was for many years, building roads up north somewhere, living in motels and camps, writing on days when it rained.

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

This is the most difficult question to answer. I have no idea. It’s something I have always done and it’s always been the centre of my identity. I feel incredibly lucky in this, to know what I am supposed to do. I would feel luckier if it was a thing that made me money, but that’s okay.

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

The last great book I read was Beloved by Toni Morrison. I just finished teaching it and I am just amazed each time I read it how rich it is, how beautifully written it is, how difficult and how moving. I don’t watch a lot of movies for some reason. The last one I thought was great was Stranger Than Fiction.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I recently finished an introduction for an enthralling book by Robert Kroetsch and John Lent. The book is called Abundance and it’s and entertaining and enlightening kind of guide book for writers that takes the form of a five-day conversation. It’s a really marvelous and instructive book and working on the introduction, and rereading some of Lent’s books and Kroetsch’s books really energized me to get back to work on my main projects: I am working on a novel called Listen All You Bullets, revising and editing a short story ms. called What About How Blue the Sky Is? and a group of poems without a particular book in mind.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Tom Konyves

Tom Konyves was born on July 13, 1947 in Budapest, Hungary. He escaped with family after the October revolution and landed in Halifax in January, 1957. He lived in Montreal, went to Concordia University, lived in New York for a while.

His books of poetry include No Parking, Poetry in Performance, Ex Perimeter and Sleepwalking Among the Camels: Selected Poems.

In 1978, coined the term “videopoetry”, a genre he pioneered as a member of the Montreal avant-garde group, the Vehicule Poets. His first videopoem was Sympathies of War, using slides, live performance and typed text on the screen. His most recent videopoem is Poem for the Rivers Project, a collaboration with his son, Alexander. Videopoems 1978-2004, is available on DVD (AM Productions, 2004).

He initiated public poetry projects, such as Poesie En Mouvement (Poetry on the Buses 1979) and The Great Canadian Poetry Machine (Expo 86), curated Montreal’s first Concrete Poetry Exhibition (Vehicule Art, 1980) and gave numerous poetry performances, including In A Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound (1979) and Marie the Poem (1981). He wrote and performed Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light (1979) a collaboration with most of the Vehicule Poets.

He left Montreal for Marlene, and Vancouver, in 1983. He started up a video production facility, wrote and produced numerous TV programs, including the widely-broadcast documentary, To Return: The John Walkus Story (Global Totem Pictures, 2000). He now teaches Screenwriting 111 and Word and Image 165, a creative visual writing course at UCFV in Abbotsford, BC.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

The first book, No Parking, was a passport to a certain City of poetry, call it Avant Garde or Experimental Poetry; in my case it was Dada-Surrealist – a passport which entitled me to walk through walls – narrative-emotional-political-nostalgic-domestic, even formalist walls (I kind of fancied myself as a formalist). The freedom I enjoyed, wandering through the streets paved with the stones of old Montreal (well, at least the sidewalk turning the corner at St. Urbain), led me to work in other media, videopoetry and performance poetry. By the time I realized what I was doing, it was too late to have second thoughts. I was led down the path and set free.

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 lived in Vancouver from 83-88, when we moved south to White Rock, near Crescent Beach. Many poems found it difficult to survive the long wet winters without sun; and of course, on the day that the sun did emerge, the poems were thrown in the back seat and off we flew to the soccer pitch. Race and gender have not.

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?

Every poem has its own unique beginning. As some events demand a poem to mark their passing, I have written the “occasional” poem. I collect poems for a book by stuffing them into a large manila envelope until they all reach a certain “maturity”.

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

Hearing a poem is not like reading a poem in a book; there’s a wonderful sense of freedom the moment a poem is launched into the air, the freedom to decide when to hover over words and when to rattle them off the tongue, to stress or not to stress, to tilt the lines in the “westcoast” way, with a curl at the end, or read in a monotone to remove any trace of colour and intent – the reading/performance of the poem demands the writing breathe and skip from beginning to end.

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 would like to think that there exists a poetic state to which a poem aspires, an altered state of consciousness, a state altered by the poet’s ability to manipulate the form. I’m always after new forms for poems. I enjoy seeing a poem reflect simultaneity (the poem becomes multi-directional, multi-layered) and the process of thought (when the poem includes disruptive elements).

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

I find the inside editor difficult enough.

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

I know, I know. Plenty of fruits and vegetables. The last pear I ate was probably in July. I prefer peaches from the Okanogan Valley, there’s even a place there called Peachland.

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

Take risks.

Patience in publishing is also a virtue, as in: “This book shall not be published integrally until the author has acquired sufficient experience to savor all its beauties in full.” – Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician.

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

I am inspired by images, imagined or seen, by sounds, heard or remembered, by language, printed or in my mind. When I turn to the printed page to express the poem of these inspirations, the “translation” become words on a printed page.

When I turn to video to express the poem, it’s the brewer facing his cauldron: I add words, considering their appearance, positioning and duration; in judicious amounts, I add images and sounds. The process is also a reaching out for the image, or the word, or the sound, juxtaposing the three in a creative act of… juggling. It’s the rotation of appearances and reappearances at an even pace, or hurling one to suspend it longer in the mind’s eye (or ear). There is a time to turn my back on the audience, to lull them into a trance, to leap and chase the fiery wands, to mystify and confuse, but most all, to surprise. Mostly I enjoy the simultaneous presentation of words, images and sounds, and the ability to manipulate the viewer’s experience using all three of these elements – instead of just one.

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 have no routine for writing. I do walk down to the beach here almost every day, and I have a Moleskin notebook and a fountain pen in my backpack, just in case. A typical day for me begins with an alarm.

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

Ah, the writer’s block. I once wrote a series of poems, Ten Poems Around the Block, which enabled me to nullify the ‘block’ with a single play on words. My latest block was addressed by writing haiku poems (23 Skidoo). For me, it’s finding a new form which releases the creative flow.

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

My most recent book, O.O.S.O.O.M. (Out of Sight Out of Mind), is a surrealist novella, a series of prose pieces written in the late 70’s which I found only a couple of years ago. Compared to my previous work, it’s all in prose and there is a thread of narrative from beginning to end. There is also a sense of free use of the narrative form and it’s amazing to me that I was able to sustain it for as long as I did.

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?

Books could be one of my influences but I wonder what has not influenced me; after all, I respond to so many stimuli it’s hard to say where the influence stems from. For example, I see nature and visual art at opposite poles of perception yet both continue to influence my approach to my work, whether it’s seeing the repeated swell of waves from the shore or the gesture of a figure in a Picasso painting; I am moved, and perhaps I will respond with a repeated swell phrase or an elaborate gesture of my own.

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

Once upon a time, I enjoyed reading the Romantic poets, especially Keats. Then I discovered Blake who opened wide the window of my imagination. My youth was all Jarry, who threw me for a loop; I recovered with the help of Breton, Picabia and Tristan Tzara. Rimbaud brought tears to my eyes, Eliot straightened me out, Gertrude Stein urged me to repeat myself; Joyce threw me over the falls, Beckett and Kafka made me appreciate my absurdities, Ginsberg opened my mouth, Simic confirmed my lines were authentic at a time when I needed it most. Roth humbled me with his technique, and Saramago put magic back into my world. And, of course, it was my real life friend, Ken Norris, and the rest of the Vehicule gang, who helped me celebrate the joy of being a poet.

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

Run a perfect 147 on the table. But I’ll settle for 90.

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 be a carney.

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

The women. From beauty to beauty.

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

Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. Putney Swope by Robert Downey (The Prince).

20 - What are you currently working on?

A new book of poems, Perfect Answers to Silent Questions.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Lawrence Upton

Lawrence Upton: Born 1949. Poet; sound and graphic artist; performer: has been making poetry for over forty years, prolific in a variety of genres. The diversity of his artistic practice increases with the passing of time.

Previously a computer professional (networking, database design & an academic head of department), he has been a full time artist since the mid 90s when he resigned his academic post.

He divides his time between Greater London and emptier places, particularly west Cornwall and Scilly.

He continues to perform and give talks; and welcomes professional invitations.

He made solo and collaborative sound works (1974 - 1978) at Föreningen Fylkingen, Stockholm, then West Square Studio, London. In that decade, too, he co-founded jgjgjgjgjg; and, later, Bang Crash Wallop.

His collaborators include cris cheek, Erik Vonna-Michell, Lilian Ward, Bob Cobbing, Alaric Sumner, Jennifer Pike, Rory McDermott, John Levack Drever and others. His wide-ranging collaborations with the composer John Levack Drever are continuing, his second largest collaboration so far.

Upton worked extensively with the late Bob Cobbing, first in the 1970s and then from the early 1990s until Cobbing's death, producing 12 collaborative poem / books, including the massive, sometimes infamous, visual poem “Domestic Ambient Noise”; and co-editing “Word Score Utterance Choreography in visual and verbal poetry”, a primer on performance from visual poetry, all from Writers Forum.

He was elected twice as Deputy Chair of The Poetry Society in the 1970s, resigning the second on principle.

He directed Sub Voicive Poetry from 1994 for ten years.

He has been co-convenor of Writers Forum Workshop and co-director of Writers Forum since 2002.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I am not sure that it did change my life greatly; although almost every act one makes may make a change. Must do.

I recall Mutation (not my first book, but one of the earliest I still list as being worth reading) being published in 1977; and the effect on me when I realised the amount of time the publisher had spent on it, trying to get it just right and as good a production as he could, getting the papers right, hand-binding it etc. It shook me. It shook me to be treated with such respect as a poet. Poets are too often taken for granted.

Having that book increased my confidence in a number of ways; but perhaps the most important was the awareness that someone other than me wanted my work to be read!

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

I was born in London and have been based in the area for the bulk of my life. My birth was at what was then called “General Lying In” – St Thomas’s Hospital. By the river. My mother had been born in Vauxhall, nearby.

Her parents came from southern Ireland (mother) and Scilly (father).

My father was born on the other side of the road from her. His father came from West Sussex; but both sides of his family are said to have come from “near Falmouth” a generation or two before.

Over my life I have moved steadily towards the periphery of southern Greater London – I am typing this there now, on the edge of the North Downs, having just got in from Hampshire.

I was on a beach below Tennyson Downs on the south coast of the Isle of Wight this morning. Shelter from the wind and growing cold aside, I wish I was there now!

I have been back a few hours and, already, I want to get out of Greater London! and I haven’t yet been to bed yet.

During the 1990s, and in this decade, I spent increasing amounts of time in Cornwall, land of my mothers at least, which is not really England; but I came back up to Greater London frequently – for small visits, workshops, for instance, often going back within the 24 hours. It takes between 5 and 8 hours each way; and, noisy passengers permitting, I get a lot of writing done on the trains, in both directions. I like looking out of the windows.

Geography impacts on my writing in every way. Yet I am not sure how to explain.

I see the voices I invent and write up in my poems as persons in landscapes. The landscapes may be urban (e.g. in my book Wire Sculptures – Reality Street 2003) or rural. We don’t have wildernesses any more.

The landscape(s) are not just big relief maps to be peopled. They are part of and products of socio-economic systems; so there is an historical dimension. e.g. Cornwall is not, despite what many believe and the tourism advertisers encourage, mysterious, legendary and so on – a bit Celtic (undefined) and hazy. The decaying mine buildings that some rave about are signs of economic decay resulting from changes in world markets. They are also the remnants of ecological destruction which the owners just left for the community to clear up. A few years ago a whole block of social housing began to sink into an undocumented mine shaft. The owners did not care what they were doing; their attention was fixed on what they got out of what other people were doing for a low wage.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, I believe, pilchards finally seemed to catch on that going inshore was a bad idea; and they have had to be pursued out into the ocean.

Whether they just fancied a different route or really did begin to pass on data to the next generation (cf Wm Burroughs on rats and mice telling their kids about traps and poisons), it damaged the economy too, from another direction.

Just now the well-heeled from S E England are trying to turn Cornwall into a park, as they ramble on about quality of life and indirectly tut about the Cornish still being there. We’re getting kerb stones and pavements across the moors.

So, I suppose it’s all geography… It was only after I left school and got a brain that I realised how useful a starting point for thinking the subject Geography could be.

Gender impacts directly. And how one does avoid the impact of “race”? Where do we start? (Those who would never think of risking general statements about those of African descent are quite happy to make racist remarks about the Cornish. I know, they make them to me sometimes. I have an English name and a London accent and am often in London; so they assume they know my racial self-image…

I think racism is to a great extent a part of us as a tendency, a product of our apparently innate desire to generalise from our experience. That is, not “it’s human nature” as some seek to explain away our behaviours; but, more, it is a perturbation of our natures which grows if we do not monitor ourselves. It’s not our nature; it’s one of our cancers, something which started benign and goes wrong.

Anyway… er… I am white and male. As well as being decidedly middle-aged.

When I taught secondary school in inner London, most of my class was black – but that is much to do with how sink schools’ intake correlates with economic discrimination and deprivation. The day after “the Brixton riots” in the early 80s, the bulk of my class wasn’t there. They were in police custody. That was a big problem both on the morning and, taking account of all the circumstances, in general.

It’s a problem to say the least.

Where I am in urban Surrey, on the edge of London, the racial mix is wide but different – what a difference a few bus rides make.

Walk south from here and quickly the houses get bigger and, at election times, the conservative party advertisements proliferate. What a difference human stupidity and selfishness makes.
Gender – yes, it’s there all the time. It’s in the language, in the perception. Often, when I say “I” I am not referring to me as such; but what mode of the first person singular might that indicate? (A first person singular being inherently gendered as well as classed –and inclined to see itself in terms of an idea known as race.) “I” / “we” must lead on to “us” and thus to “them”. It’s ok; but it needs watching.

At the very least one needs to ask if it might not be appropriate to ask if we have a male or a female speaking…

There is an impact there, yes, because I am aware that it matters, it being race, it being gender, it being class . I cannot write without that awareness being involved; but the how of that is very complex

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?

It varies; and varies somewhat according to the manner of writing and I use a range. Taking you literally, I would say that a poem usually starts when I am walking; or, hardly moving; but rarely anywhere in between.

I would say that I build up logically from small pieces and am wary of saying I am writing whole books until I have finished them or got very near to it – last time I did that the book stopped for months

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

I write to perform. Often, with solo work, I have no particular immediate prospect of performing that particular piece – apart from, that is, at the Writers Forum Workshop.

Collaborative work is more likely to be related to particular performance opportunities.

I write the solo work and it goes into a pool from which I choose what to read, with an emphasis on recent 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?

The practice precedes the theory. As to the questions, I try to work out what the questions were when I have the answers in the form of writing.

In Messages to silence, some of which I have read this weekend (Letter to Eric # 1), there developed a set of questions about the meaning and purpose of using personal autobiography. But I could also assert that the questions concerned narrative. Or metrics!

Really I work out what I am doing after I have done it; but I am daily / monthly / yearly becoming more aware of the theoretical possibilities of what I am doing. Currently, I am thinking hard about visual poetry as notation. I have been for some time.

In my collaborations with the composer John Levack Drever, we do tend to set ourselves new formal and methodological limitations.

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

Depends on the editor. A bad editor is worse than useless.

Just this weekend, I was speaking to a colleague about my frustration when the late Bob Cobbing assured me that he was confident he could trust me to know what I was doing as a writer submitting to the press – actually I tend to believe that he was trying to make me feel good rather than outlining an actual policy. No, I said, I want you to say what you think of it.
Magazine editors’ selections can be a good first test of new work, especially when different editors all pass over the same poems!

In the case of my critical writing, I have had pretty good editorial intervention which has improved my writing.

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

In so far as I am beginning to learn, harder

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

Sunday lunchtime, I think. My hostess advised against the apples.

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

Don’t trust anyone. Sooner or later they will betray you. Or let you down.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between your own writing and the time you spend as a publisher? What do you see as the appeal?

The movement between writing and publishing is easy enough for me.

I am not sure about the appeal…. I want to see the press continue…

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 get up. I write. I go to bed.

Sometimes I go to bed in the middle of the day and then get up and work into the night. If it helps me write, I am for it. The edge of dreaming is particularly productive of metaphor, I believe.

If I am on the move, I take a notebook.

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

I try to avoid that. If I stall I do something else – switch from one ongoing set of writing to another. Always at my back I hear…

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

How does it compare in what way? I wonder. There are so many viewpoints on any piece of writing.

I must answer regarding unpublished books as I have a number available and awaiting a publisher! They are very different from each other. I have a book of Snapshots; and a book of Portraits; and a book of descriptive pieces. There are others, but that’ll do.

I can see, as I learn (I like to think), changes of ability and method running through the sets; but because I do tend to keep revising, those changes – their strata lines -- are quite complex. Often what I learn in one set can be applied to another.

Re the descriptive pieces, they currently have the title St Ives Harbour from The Malakoff and other poems. Catchy, no? It started as a thing I did while I was waiting at the Malakoff Bus Station at St Ives, which is a good viewpoint for the harbour, the bay and the ocean beyond. I did that for some years – largely throwing the outputs away – but recently added some other viewpoints – across St Ives Bay from Barnoon Hill, for example.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I made a set of writing called Written Graphical which did start theoretically to some extent – as I tried to find, if I could, ways of writing that were like the apparent ways of telling in the films of Dziga Vertov, Stan Brakhage, Chuck Jones and others. What I am doing now is more to do with my interest in being a painter if only I could; and also to see what it’s like to take a process from one area of artistic activity and try to use it in another. It’s less programmatic, more direct and visually tactile (if you’ll allow me such a phrase)

The current writing feels very different to that of 15 or so years ago and I am happier now with my 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?

All of that, particularly nowadays music and painting

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

So many. Including those I have been concerned with in publishing, what I have written about…

And Peter Riley is in my mind at the moment. I have a lot of time for his poetry. But so many more.

For my work? Well, to answer that well, I would need to see my writing objectively.

Browning. Auden. August Strindberg. MacDiarmid. Shelley. Robert Duncan. These are in the order that I decide to include them. Oh blimey, Bob Cobbing.

Denise Riley. Maggie O’Sullivan

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

I’d like to be a writer in residence – one of those where you can get on with writing without being sidetracked (but without fear of the bailiffs, thanks to being paid). I don’t mean not having to do anything. I do mean not being expected to dissipate one’s energy on nonsense or inessentials. Productive demands just encourage writing energy

and

I’d like to go to Greenland and / or Spitzbergen

and

I’d like to spend time in other parts of Cornwall!

Come to that I’d like to see more of Canada. I have seen very little of it; and I suspect that many of my cousins are spread over the continent.

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

A musician.

I could also have said “archaeologist”

17.5 - Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

A basket case

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

See above -- I go madder if I don’t make poetry

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

I really don’t know about greatness. I was very impressed indeed by Adrian Clarke’s Possession (for which I made the cover images). I was very impressed by Confidence in Lack by Allen Fisher, which Writers Forum published.

I reread Pinter’s The Birthday Party not long ago. It is very good.

Films…I have no TV and find it hard to afford the cinema. I go in Cornwall, where it is cheap, when something decent turns up there – Pirates of the Caribbean # 2? Maybe Wallace & Grommit and the were rabbit. I’m serious, but I am laughing too. If “great film” means anything then The Third Man is a great film and I saw it not long ago; but that was hardly the first time I had seen it

20 - What are you currently working on?

More than one thing. Including --

John Drever and I have a performance next spring (2008) and I am working on possible texts for that – for discussion for that – while John is engaged on other projects

I am writing a set of poems around and about the person of Elidius, a Celtic saint known only on Scilly. The poems are about him and sometimes spoken by him.

This has involved me recently in writing some prayers for him. That may seem surprising to those who know me personally!

I can talk about that if you want.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Janet Holmes

Janet Holmes is the author of four books of poetry, F2F, Humanophone, The Green Tuxedo (all published by U of Notre Dame Press), and The Physicist at the Mall (Anhinga Press). She has received the Anhinga Prize, the Ernest Sandeen Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, and grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and Minnesota State Arts Board. Her poems have twice been included in the Best American Poetry volumes. Since 2000, she has been editor of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry press at Boise State University, where she is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. She lives in Boise with her husband, poet and novelist Alvin Greenberg.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I was working at a financial printing corporation in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1993, eight years after getting my MFA, in a job that required a lot of travel. I’d just been told by one of the vice-presidents that they wanted to move me into “client development,” which they thought of as a desirable promotion but that I knew was going to require a sacrifice of my writing time, which the corporation tended to view as recreational or frivolous. When I learned that Joy Harjo had selected The Physicist at the Mall for publication through the Anhinga prize, I realized that with the book and my MFA, I could begin to look for teaching jobs that would let me focus more on my writing; the nice thing about academe is that you’re supposed to publish. I had no network, so spent the next two years doing adjunct teaching to increase my classroom experience for my resume. In 1998, the year before my husband retired from his teaching job at Macalester College, I went on the job market and was hired at Boise State University as the first poet in their new MFA program. By that time I had a second book, but without the first one I don’t think I’d have had the impetus to plan a strategy to enter the academic job market.

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

I’m beginning my ninth year in Boise. I don’t believe I’ve lived in any one place long enough for geography to make much of an impact on my work, though I certainly am aware of my whereabouts and reflect them to some extent in my poems. I’ve lived in or around Chicago, Ft. Lauderdale, Durham (NC), New York City, Charlottesville (VA), Santa Fe (NM), St. Paul, and now Boise—all distinctive landscapes, but none with a particular claim on me. Of the places that have ended up in my work, the New Mexico landscape and the north shore of Lake Superior have made the most inroads into my poems.

The fact that I’m a white woman certainly has an impact on my work, as does the fact of being working class and (in terms of American poetry) unpedigreed: no Iowa or Harvard or Brown or Buffalo in my background, no mentors, and no champions. Still, I’m privileged culturally. In my poetry there is nearly always a feminist perspective, but class and being an outsider also play roles.

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?

There’s no single place. I do tend to work on a “project,” though not necessarily book-length, because it helps me think as I work. F2F and my current book, The ms of my kin, started as projects; Humanophone didn’t start out that way but became one. Half of The Green Tuxedo is a project. I think that “project” is another way of saying “obsession.”

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

Readings themselves don’t have anything to do with my process, but the traveling and meeting people that accompany the events do. Readings are their own thing—like theatrical events. I try to present my work so that people can see where it came from.

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’m concerned with the current insistence that poetry be entertainment that’s so prevalent in the U.S. It seems some right-wingers in the poetry establishment here felt we poets weren’t getting our fair market share of the readers’ book-buying dollars, so we needed to lighten up, point and laugh, show that we too think intellectuals are ridiculous—and they’ve virtually hustled contrary aesthetics to the margins. I look at my own writing as trying to create works of art, pathetically unironic as that statement may seem. I prefer to think of art as a medium that (in the words of Harry Partch) “instills ferment” into the current culture: that raises new questions instead of answering old ones. I never really believe the answers people try to give me anyway.

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

I’ve never really worked with an editor. I have friends who help me when I’m stuck, and I suppose I find that essential—but again, I’ve never not had friends around to do that. Could I write otherwise? Good question. I think it would be lovely to work with an editor sometime. I certainly enjoy filling that role myself.

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

The one thing that’s easier is believing I can do it, that I can complete it. The rest is pretty much the same as the first time, since I’m not trying to do the same thing over again. That is, it’s still a difficult if exciting discovery process.

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

September, at the Farmer’s Market.

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

“All judgment is subjective.” As in, don’t get too torqued up about rejections.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between writing and editing/publishing? What do you see as the appeal?

If you mean psychologically, it’s easy enough. The appeal is that you can champion work you are inspired by, that you believe the world needs to see. On the other hand, there are people who know me as an editor who couldn’t care less whether I write poetry. I find that myopia pitiable.

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?

My routine is better in summers than when school is in session. Basically, during summers I can write four to six hours a day, and do. During the school year I’m lucky to catch that much time per week. I don’t have a talismanic set of behaviors, though. “Make writing a priority” is the best phrasing for my process that I’ve heard, but I also don’t feel I can do that at the expense of my obligations to others.

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

Classics of poetry, ones I haven’t read in a long time.

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

My latest, The ms of my kin, is a book of erasures based upon Emily Dickinson’s work from 1861 and 1862, when the Civil War was at its start. I’ve made it into poems about the start of the Iraq war—really the only way I could get my head around writing about this tragedy. It’s completely different from my other books because I am entirely given over to Dickinson’s vocabulary, restricted in a great variety of ways. I haven’t yet sent it to my publisher; I’m afraid they’ll say, “this is the end of the line for you!”

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 book Humanophone was closely tied to music, through the work of composers who invented their own instruments (Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, George Ives (father of Charles)). Science and visual art are terribly important to me, but I think their influence is much more subtle. I don’t really think that being influenced by other arts means that you write about them.

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

Dickinson, certainly. The British modernists—Joyce, Woolf. Samuel Beckett. Jorge Luis Borges. The Southern writers—Faulkner, Porter, McCullers, O’Connor, Welty. Stevens, Berryman, Nabokov. I realize I’m listing lots of fiction writers, but they’re the ones who made me pay attention to language.

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

Make a great painting. Become a gourmet chef. Learn to live on 3 hours of sleep per night.

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’d have gone into some kind of scientific field—physics or biology, I think.

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

I wrote & I did lots of other things, too (painting, business). I just happened to be better at writing.

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

In poetry, I think Erin Moure’s body of work qualifies as great. For film? I loved The Lives of Others—but I also found myself thinking about Michael Clayton quite a bit.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Love poems.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Rupert Loydell

Rupert Loydell was born in London, and trained in creative writing and painting. He started Stride magazine and press in 1982, and has many books of poems, collaborations and prose poems in print. His paintings have been shown in solo and group shows throughout Britain, Europe and the USA. He currently lives in Cornwall with his wife and two children and lectures in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

it didn't. I was already aware that the small press world was just a way to get work read and a networking tool.

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

Under two years - we moved becuase I got a lecturing job. I think the social structure of our village [I have previously only lived in cities] informs my work, as does the pleasure of living near the estuary and owning a canoe and sailing dinghy. So i've found water imagery creeping in to my work recently. Race and gender? Well, I'm sure british humour and xenophobia drifts in to my work, as does being a hetersexual white man; but not consciously, no.

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?

a vague theme or sense of needing to enlarge upon a number of connections or random phrases. I often work in sequences and series: a book tends to be a number of those gathereed up. I also write individual/occasional poems.

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

hen I am invited to give readings and have an audience who want to listen, they are very much part of a creatiuve process. But i no longer do big festivals or cabaret performances. I prefer poetry on the page.

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?

How to write in a multimedia society. Democratic anarchy, love of language, postmodern processes made approachable, spirituality, faith and doubt, the nature of poetry, how to be an author without foregrounding ego - the normal stuff really.

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

I'm lucky in that i usually deal with editors [who publish my work] who say yes or no to submission. I have a network of email friends who critique and respond to poetry-in-progress; I wouldn't dream of asking for an editor to interfere with my finished work once it is finalised.

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

easier. I often plan and initiate solo and collaborative projects and sequences.

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

i hate pears. Probably when I was 3 or 4 years old.

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

"Ignore advice"

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

Not at all easy. I find it impossible to write sustained narrative, or even sustained prose. The longest work I have written is a fragmented prose piece called 'Headland'. I do very much like the prose poem as a form.

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?

Get the kids breakfast and off to school. drive to work and give lectures and/or seminars. I write when i have to, so always have notebooks etc. I then get the stuff onto the compture and on paper in a working file. I spend time on drafts and revisions most days, until the work is completed - which often takes 2 or 3 months.

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

Music and novels, visual arts [I paint as well]. But I don't worry if I'm not writing or painting - there are enough poems in the world without forcing them out.

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

I think i have finally reached a place where I meld process with content, the domestic with large issues. I'm not self-content, but I am fairly convinced I've found the place I want to be and the way I want to write: a mixture of collage, improvisation and hard work.

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 very interested in contemporary classical, jazz and improvised musics, and much 20th century art, particulartly formal and free abstraction. Although I can't articulate the links, the structures and processes at work there certainly inform my writing.

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

I constantly return to poetry by Robert Creeley, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Berryman, Robert Lax and many others. Nearly all the books I've published through Stride in the last 20+ years. I consume contemporary fiction, and receive a large number of art and poetry books for review. I read a lot about contemporary music as well. I think I just enjoy seeing what can be done with language and the arts. I have found Anne Lauterbach, John Wilkinson, Tony Lopez and Marjorie Perloff particularly useful recently in the field of poetics. My immediate circle of poets for critique, dialogue and correspondence would include Peter Dent, Luke Kennard and Robert Garlitz; many of my creative writing students are helpful and useful when discussing poets and poetry, as are the Stride authors I am in touch with.

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

Retire! Umm, I'd like some kind of selected poems. I'd like to live in New York for a few months.

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 probably should have become a lecturer earlier on, life and my bank balance would have been easier. I'm not sure I think of being a writer as an occupation, it's what I do (or one of the things I do), not how I earn my living. It's always been running workshops, giving talks and readings that have raised income, not the writing itself.

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

I've written since I was a teenager, but one big point of encouragement was the college poetry group where I did my art foundation course. I suddenly realised I was okay at writing poems, that people responded and thought I was good at it.

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

Great book? hmmm. I think the new part of Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Drafts from salt is pretty stonking - that's a great ongoing project. Cormac McCarthy's The Road was depressing but superb. 'great' isn't really the kind of word I use about books, sorry. I don't really want a canon, even a personal one. I like discovering new authors for myself, up and coming, established, obscure or ignored. I don't get to the cinema I'm afraid (and if I do it's usually for and with the kids). I've been rewatching Twin Peaks on DVD though, nothing else comes close. Lynch and Derek Jarman for me!

20 - What are you currently working on?

I recently finished shaping An Experiment in Navigation, which Shearsman are publishing in 2008. I am working on a series of 'download poems', using phrases and titles from music i download as a starting point and reource for short poems. I'm editing an anthology of poetry and poetic manifestos for Salt, and I'm putting the finishing touches to a Creative Non Fiction unit I will be teaching at university in the spring. And I'm trying to find time to do some planning and fundraising for Stride.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Kim Goldberg

Kim Goldberg is a poet, journalist and author who has supported herself from her writing since 1978. Her articles on politics, environment and social justice have appeared in Macleans, Canadian Geographic, This Magazine, Vancouver Sun, Georgia Straight, The Progressive, New Internationalist, and numerous other magazines and newspapers for many years. In 1997, after joining a T’ai Chi club, she lapsed into a writerly silence that lasted eight years. When the words returned in 2005, they came as poems. Since waking from her T’ai Chi coma, her poetic output has appeared in PRISM International, The Dalhousie Review, Tesseracts Eleven, Rampike, filling Station, Front, The New Quarterly, The Arabesques Review, and other literary magazines in North American and abroad. In October 2007, she participated in Random Acts of Poetry along with 36 other poets in Canada, reading poetry to strangers in public places and giving away free books. She is a frequent performer at Wordstorm (Nanaimo) and other spoken word events. Her latest book, Ride Backwards On Dragon: a poet’s journey through Liuhebafa (Leaf Press, 2007), charts her own journey into and out of silence with a series of poems structured around the 1,000-year-old martial art she has been studying for ten years. She is also the author of four nonfiction books – two from New Star Books (on community access cable television), and two from Harbour Publishing (on the Nanoose submarine testing base, and on Vancouver Island wildlife, respectively). In early 2007, she launched her own imprint, Pig Squash Press, to house her structural poemage (poetry+image+physicality). She holds a degree in biology from University of Oregon and lives in Nanaimo’s Historic Old Quarter.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book (The Barefoot Channel, 1990, New Star Books) clarified for me that I was going to spend my life as a writer, even though I had supported myself as a freelance journalist for a number of years prior. It also enabled me to join The Writers’ Union of Canada, which was my first real connection with a community of fellow writers.

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

My family moved from Oregon to Nanaimo in the 1970s so my brother would not be sent to Vietnam. I have supported myself from my writing since 1978, and have lived in Nanaimo the entire time. I have lived within spitting distance of the Pacific Ocean most of my life and cannot conceive of living inland. I am not sure what correlation this has to my writing except that I feel extraordinarily aware of boundaries and edges and am a sucker for pushing, testing, or transgressing boundaries. Would I have this same level of edge awareness if I were living on the prairies? Race and gender are so integral to one’s identity that they will inevitably be embedded in one’s creative output, whether the writer is aware of it or not.

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?

Since awaking from my T’ai Chi coma (see #10), I have been awash in a stream of linguistic and visual experiments that later arrange themselves into larger projects. Once a larger configuration reveals itself, that triggers further relevant material. As for where individual poems come from, it starts with the language itself – an instigating line/word/text that becomes a seed crystal around which other lines/words/texts want to aggregate.

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

I love reading/performing my work to an audience. But only work that feels complete. I never read/perform unfinished work because I don’t want to contaminate it with external energies, thereby foreclosing on what it (and I) might otherwise become. My creative process is completely solitary. Throughout the 30 years I have been writing, I have deliberately never taken writing classes or workshops or participated in informal writing groups. I believe that exposing my work to others before it is fully formed would inevitably pull me back from the boundaries and edges I seek to explore, no matter how open-minded or progressive the group may (claim to) be. A group by definition is bounded.

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?

What is poetry? Is it limited to text? If the voices of homeless people are transcribed onto roofing felt that is then folded into the shape of a house (voices outside), is that a poem? Does our subconscious mind process the anagrammatic content of words and phrases? Will a poem constructed entirely from the component letters of “Combat is the only option” reveal to our conscious mind something that our unconscious mind already knew and was acting on? Do genres actually exist? Or is genre merely an arbitrary and self-limiting construct we cling to to prop up hierarchy and forestall our surrender to the unknown? Is it possible that the distinction between so-called nonfiction and so-called poetry is also the distinction between Newtonian reality and quantum reality? A language of answers vs. a language of questions? Certainty vs. infinite potentiality? Is it possible to write a poem that has no paradigm? And why is there such a paucity of lit mags probing the boundaries while a whole herd paws the dirt in the overgrazed centre? The security of the known? Safety/validation in numbers? The juggernaut of PoBiz?

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

Nobody expects a visual artist to let someone else come in and slap some more paint on the canvas before the work is hung. Nor is a musician expected to turn over her score to a music buff to re-jig a few bars before cutting the CD. A potter doesn’t hand off the bowl to someone else for those final turns on the wheel. Yet if a writer speaks out against this ludicrous intrusion into creative process and artistic self-expression, she’s an amateur, a prima donna, a cranky piece of shit.

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

Easier, but mainly because I have redefined my terms of existence since awaking from my T’ai Chi coma (see #10). My creative goals no longer require the cooperation of others. I am just letting my own creative energies chart the course these days. When it comes time to get it out there, self-publishing is always an option, and every bit as practical as going with a small press for poetry. Ironically, this independence of attitude seems to attract publisher interest. I was in the process of laying out the cover and pages for my latest book (Ride Backwards On Dragon, 2007, Leaf Press) when a publisher approached me, so I went that route instead. Autonomy, it would seem, creates its own power and magnetism.

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

A couple of months ago, and sadly not from my own tree as the weather was wet and rainy throughout the blossoming period back in spring, thus grounding the usual cast of pollinators. My attempt to trick nature with hand-pollination via sable brush was equally unsuccessful. The wet pollen just clumped.

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

“People are sheep” – given to me by my former T’ai Chi teacher. (Okay, it’s more of an observation than advice. But many things become remarkably clear when viewed through this lens.)

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

If we would call a 10-year T’ai Chi-induced coma with no income and no written output easy while I tumbled down a metaphysical mineshaft straight into a cauldron of internal alchemy, then my shift from nonfiction to poetry has been a piece of cake. Since it didn’t kill me, I am now immortal. That must be the appeal.

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?

My mind is freshest upon waking. But that doesn’t help me much with poetry since poems generally arise from an instigating line or phrase or sound-concept. And those usually require some contact with the world (although occasionally an instigating line will awaken me at 3:00 or 4:00 am). A poem is most likely to start locking into place while I am out walking around. My day begins with a cup of black tea and a spoonful each of bee pollen and lecithin to kick-start the neurotransmitters. When the library opens at 10:00, I walk downtown and check my email.

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

The act of constructing and hanging weathergrams in city parks is enormously clearing, perhaps because it drags me into the moment and won’t let me go. A trip to the estuary also resets me. The estuary with its slick, salty, matted, fibrous surfaces and torn membranes and black canals of slack water is like the inside of a body turned outside. I feel like I am physically exploring an internal landscape when I wander across the estuary dikes (if duck hunters don’t pick me off). Roaming around back alleys and underpasses with my digital camera also seems to spark ideas and new projects. I spend a lot of time every day just walking around. Eventually something happens.

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

My latest book (Ride Backwards On Dragon) is a series of 66 linked poems recreating my personal journey through a landscape of outer silence and inner alchemy, using the 66-move structure of an ancient Chinese martial art I have been studying (Liuhebafa). On the surface, this book would appear to have no connection whatsoever to my prior life and work as an issue-oriented investigative journalist and nonfiction author. But lately I have begun seeing this book as a piece of investigative writing as well. Retracing a journey is certainly some kind of investigation. And the book includes 28 pages of endnotes decoding the Taoist symbolism (anatomical and metaphysical) of the ancient titles of the 66 movements/poems – information never before published in any systematic way. So perhaps I am still doing the same old thing but with different tools and a different focus. Getting back to the estuary experience of question #12, I cannot help but feel that inner landscape and outer landscape are merely different configurations of the same substrate – enfolded and unfurled.

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?

Nature, science, philosophy, visual art, architecture, newspapers, film – each of these has as much influence (if not more) on my work than do books.

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

Nine Gates (Jane Hirshfield), The Tao of Physics (Fritjof Capra), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), The Holographic Universe (Michael Talbot), Going Out of Our Minds (Sonia Johnson), The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon), Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar), Walden (Henry David Thoreau), Native Son (Richard Wright), The Man in the High Castle (Philip Dick), The Reason for the Pelican (John Ciardi), The Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America (Ed. Barbara Howes). Lots more, of course – Brecht, Kafka, Lem, Strugatsky brothers, Mrozek, Borges, Calvino… But each of these books in particular has transformed my life or writing in some way.

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

See the aurora borealis. Build a house with my own hands entirely from scrounged and salvaged materials.

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 like to find some governmental agency that would fund me to collect definitive proof that sasquatches exist. Authorities with PhDs have stated there are 200 sasquatches on Vancouver Island alone. I find it mind-boggling that, for all the many testimonials of sasquatch/big foot encounters in Canada and the U.S., there is not a morsel of hard evidence. Obviously the creatures exist. I mean, what are the odds that all these witnesses are hallucinating or lying? This is a vocation I could get excited about.

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

Apart from loving language and its assembly, I also require maximum autonomy, minimal possessions, and minimal expenditure of money in my life. These are the reasons I live alone, never had kids, and quit my last wage-slave job in 1985. With these requirements, what else am I good for besides writing? It may sound flip. But anytime I considered any other path, it mandated a level of enslavement (to a schedule, person, bank, company, institution, equipment) that made my stomach knot. The act of writing just takes a brain, a heart, and a pen. I could do it in a tent if I had to.

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

I’m drawing a blank here, rob. Apparently greatness eludes me.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A poetic research dossier documenting the guerrilla insurgency of the quantum universe as it chews away at the rotted underpinnings of Newtonian reality. I also continue to produce structural poemage (poetry+image+physicality) under my imprint of Pig Squash Press.

12 or 20 questions archive