12 or 20 questions: with Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick is an internationally acclaimed and award winning poet, media-artist and author of six books of poetry and poetic theory: The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), as well as 4 videopoems all available on YouTube. All her work is marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries.

For over 20 years her linguistically provocative, philosophically complex wordplay continues to excite audiences nationally, internationally and locally, and she has recently been granted the MPS Mobile Award as being the world’s first “Mobile Poet” whereby her work is being made available on mobile devices (cell phones and smart phones) throughout the world. Her writing has been described as "electricity in language" (Nicole Brossard), "plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory" (Charles Bernstein) "a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak" (Globe and Mail) and "opens up the possibilities of reading" (Vancouver Courier). She is Professor of Poetry and Cultural Theory at City University of New York. Forthcoming is Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book, The Empress Has No Closure came out in 1992. It changed my life only in that it enabled me to tour and perform internationally with an actual bound text. I was living and teaching at the Gütenberg Universität in Mainz at this time and when I got it, the first thing I did, was book a performance tour with bill bissett through Europe! It was all so very exciting to finally have your life work finally packaged up; all paginated and thick with multiple fonts and a firm spine. But, I have to say it was more of a personal sense of fulfillment and accomplishment than any “real’ or marked difference in the outside world.

2 - How long have you lived in New York, 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 NY for 10 years now. And it’s not so much geography but its social political climate that impacts on the work. All is poignantly rugged, marked with high energy, swelling with urban collisions, contradictory discourses and punctuated with an underlay of atrocious politics.

Besides socio-political concerns, being a Jewish woman plays a huge role in all that I do. Consciously or subconsciously, I am often importing the Kabbalistic practice of letter combination and alphabetic permutation, and using mystical source texts as base materials for say, homolinguistic translations. All of these sacred, secret semiotic procedures and practices are outlawed for women. So, engaging in this transgressive poetics all speak to pushing the parameters of what’s permissible.

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 usually begin on airplanes : ) Most often they begin with a verbal cluster that I can’t get outta my head combined with some psychologic/emotional philosophic or theoretic issue I am trying to work through. These days, most pieces run roughly 2-6 pages. I rate their “performability” as I am writing them, but always, in the back of my mind I know they will eventually be collected into a book. But often I don’t know until well into the collection where it will go – ie what direction the book will take. For instance, Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth, (which will be out with Talonbooks, 2009), started with a commissioned piece for a NY Art Gallery that wanted a poem about food. As I was totally consumed with the discourse of war, I wrote this lengthy piece which is kind of a mash up of food and politics. The book proceeded with funny juxtapositions intersecting the discourse of war with fashion, with love, with pop culture – basically asking how we make meaning navigating through all the swirling contradictory information.

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

Reading in public is a chance to bring the work out into the world in a very real physical way. It’s a chance to feel what works, what doesn’t. Often what seems brilliant and layered on the page does not always translate to the stage. And, sometimes, what works on stage, is not “weighty” enough for the page. So reading it aloud in public definitely helps give me perspective -- what to edit, cut, expand…

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?

My work is usually energized by questions of “truth”, “history” “contamination” and “closure”. It foregrounds how everything is intertextually layered, full of traces and absences, sparks of light, shards, fragments of culture. But mostly it’s about the production of meaning and questioning consumerist notions of “readability”.

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

As a writer, I find I am often working in a bit of a vacuum -- so it’s great to get new perspectives, see things from a different angle. But, at bottom, it is essential that you and your editor are “on the same page”.

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

Well, you find that you always want to challenge yourself. After 6 titles, and with recent technologic advances, the concept of ‘the book” has shifted dramatically. So, I am always testing the boundaries of what “book-making” is or can be. In recent years, I have taken the work out; performed with musicians and dj’s and dancers, with slide and video projections; made videopoems (all available on You Tube) – and actually most recently, I have been granted the MPS Mobile Award as being “The World’s First Mobile Poet” – and my work is being made available on cell phones and smart phones throughout the world! But as a traditionalist, my first love is “the book” --beautifully bound, inky-stained and thick-spined. And I am always looking at ways to bring it alive. Make it more interactive – whether that’s simply with color collage infusions, inconsistent pagination, constantly changing fonts, or books (as in the case of Mêmewars) that have not one, but two front covers, so it endlessly begins (or never ends). My idea for Amuse Bouche, is to have constant insertions, infusions of otherness – scratch-and-sniff stickers, a pull-out-menu, in full color. Though probably not very cost-effective, in an ideal world, this is my dream…

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

Last nite. Anjou. Roasted with pecans and beets in a divine goat cheese salad.

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

Trust your own mind. Warren Tallman via Olson via Pound, repeated by Ginsberg.

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?

Nothing is typical in the house of Adeena. I write anywhere. Anytime. Usually on scraps of paper, barf bags on airplanes, on buses, trains, subways. In readings, in bathrooms. In the middle of lovemaking, or in class. Everything gets later transferred onto computer where it is heavily re-edited.

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

Ancient Jewish texts.

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

It’s more accessible. Drawing a lot on pop culture – language, food, wine, consumerism, love and war.

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

I am influenced by the contemporary music scene, dj culture, the downtown NY art world, deconstructionist and feminist theory.

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

13th century Jewish mystics like Abraham Abulafia, the soaring transcendence of both the concrete and sound work of bill bissett and the politics and aesthetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and both Hélène Cixous and Rachel Blau Duplessis, writing out of the feminist avant garde.

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

Jump out of an airplane and be surrounded by fiery letters falling from the sky.

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?

I think I would have made a great copy writer (writing copy for advertising).

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

It chose me. There was no choice. There’s nothing else I would rather do.

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

Last great book: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. Last great film: the re-release of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Final touches on Amuse Bouche. A book called, That’s Sooooo Cliché which tracks through the anecdotal history of common and overused phrases. Papers and presentations for upcoming conferences on performance and videopoem-making, and In the Psalm of My Hand – a kind of homolinguistic translation of the Song of Songs.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with RM Vaughan

RM Vaughan is a Toronto-based writer and video artist originally from New Brunswick. He is the author of seven books and a contributor to many anthologies. His short videos play in festivals and galleries across Canada and around the world.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I think I'm supposed to be very cool and detached about having my first book published, way back in the early 90s, supposed to say something about how getting published is not a validation but that the validation must come from within ... but the truth is, it was fucking great and I loved it and I immediately knew I wanted more. I was not happy with a career limited to chapbooks and poems published in obscure lit mags (not that getting a poetry book out made me any less obscure, but, you know, baby steps, baby steps). Why write if you don't want to be published? I've never understood that attitude. And I kinda don't believe people when they adopt it.

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've been here for about 15 years, maybe more. I didn't land here and stay, I kept going back and forth between here and NB. I'm fairly certain that had I continued to live in NB, my interests would be different. I am most comfortable in congested urban spaces, because I need the distractions, and I think all that noise has, conversely, made my writing a bit quieter, less showy.

The gender (by which I assume you also to some extent mean sexuality?) issue is so big, I don't know where to begin. Some days I feel like a "gay writer", some days I feel like a "writer who is gay", some days both. It's all context. I do know that being queer and growing up in a remote, non-urban place definitely gives me an outsider perspective, which is good and bad. I never, never feel like I belong anywhere, even when an event or space is constructed around me. I wonder if that feeling will ever go away? Part of that also comes from being an adopted child, but that's a whole other deal. But, back to the gay/gender question: in practical terms, I can say without a doubt that there is a "lavender ceiling" for writers in Canada, and being an out queer writer myself, I've had my nose pressed against it more than once. Gays in Canada are not supposed to be serious writers, unless we stay closeted or semi-closeted, we're supposed to host decorating shows.

3 - Where does a poem, play 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?

Both. Things start usually when a series of connections presents itself to me, or, more likely, when I finally wake the fuck up and notice the connections, and then off I go. But there is no system with me, no pattern. Projects arrive and leave randomly, and I pursue them, or don't, for a variety of reasons. I'm not very good at being strategic.

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

I used to tell myself that I would not publish a poem until I had read it publicly once, but that's a hard rule to keep. I have gone back and changed poems and fiction after hearing myself read it, or actually changed it onstage, in the moment, because it suddenly strikes me how to word it.

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?

Theoretical? Well, I studied all that stuff when I was an MA student, butI'm sure that all that I learned is now out of fashion - nevertheless, core questions about the trustworthyness of language are always in the back of my head, plus I'm a chronic second guesser.

I'm not trying to answer questions so much as convince myself to stop asking them.

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

Aren't all editors outsiders? Essential, of course - because I don't always know what's best, nor would I want to. And because I write newspaper articles for money, I have learned how to accept editorial imput and not think every comma change is the end of the world.

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

It's about the same. And every new book needs a new making/selling/promoting scheme.

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

About a week ago. A "Chinese white pear", according to the label. It was very bitter, for a pear, and the skin was oddly sharp. I think it was calleda Ya pear.

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

Sky Gilbert, on why nobody was coming to one of my plays: "Honey, if you're going to write a poetic, non-linear play about a 19th century novelist nobody reads anymore, don't expect the tour bus to show up."

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

It's not easy at all, but it's the only way I'm happy. Some subjects are better as plays, some as poems, etc - or at least I think so. I've probably been wrong every time about this. For instance, my next book, Troubled, is a memoir written in poems. If I had any smarts I would have written it as non-fiction and gotten some real money (see comment about absence of strategic thought above).

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 at all. A typical day begins with letting the damned, beloved cat out, sipping coffee, considering and rejecting the healthy breakfast idea, and reading newspapers on line. It takes me forever to get started. And, I can't work at night. Just can't. So, when the days are short, not much gets done.

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

Anonymous sex. Works every time.

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

It feels more blunt, less evasive and "clever" than my previous books. This likely means it is a career-ender.

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?

Visual art, constantly. Movies, bad art, newspaper articles, porn, friends.. but nature, almost never. I grew up about 100 yards from the Bay of Fundy, where, at least when I was a kid, every 3 months somebody drowned, usually a fisherman (and they were all men back then). Nature was dangerous, cold, wet and unfriendly, not inspiring. And the rotting fish smell coming off that bay at times would stop a clock. Nature is cute, at best, but overrated as an inspiration.

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

Anything by Henry James, because it's such a chore to read, and I like that. I read a lot of so-called "trash" too. Anything with vampires works. I also read as much as I can about ancient cultures, because I find it comforting to know that people have always been stupid and easily distracted.

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

Lose weight. But that would involve getting away from this desk. It's a conundrum.

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 love to get in on the Cash-For-Life program at the CBC, where you just pick your feet all day and once a week file a story about whatever is going on in New York. Had I not been a writer, I would have been a painter, at which I sucked.

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

Failing to be good at painting.

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

Book - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (skip the film, it sucks). Film - Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, purely by accident (somebody suggested it) - full of operatic fury and really cute guys with full beards.

20 - What are you currently working on?

An article for The Walrus, an article for Canadian Art, last wrap-up stuff on Troubled, a new video about my obsession with Sterling Hayden.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Susan M. Schultz

Susan M. Schultz is a poet, critic, and publisher who lives in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i on the island of O`ahu. She is author of Aleatory Allegories (Salt, 2000), Memory Cards and Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001), And Then Something Happened (Salt, 2004), and the forthcoming book, Dementia Blog (Singing Horse, 2008). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 1995), and wrote A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Alabama, 2005). She edits Tinfish Press and teaches at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I'm not sure that my first book changed anything for me, but I was able to keep my job because of it.

2 - How long have you lived in Hawai`i, 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 Hawai`i since 1990. Hawai`i has changed me in numerous ways, not so much because I write about it (I do, but not exclusively) but because it has forced me to rethink everything I once thought I knew. It does that on a daily basis. What do you mean by everything? you ask. Gender, race, the role of the writer, language, you name it--all of these are in play here.

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?

Where I used to sit down every day and write out of whatever was going on in my mind or in front of me, then weave together collections of poems, I now work on book-length projects. My collection of essays, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, worked a bit differently. I began with a coherent project, watched as it broke apart over the course of many years, and then realized that the pieces fit back together into a stuttered narrative. More recently, my project on dementia (my mother's and the nation's) began accidently, as part of a blog I was writing for family and friends, but quickly assumed a form and a shape that sustained itself over months. Either way, each project has an obsessive core out of which come poems or essays that talk to each other through time and then space.

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

Public readings are important, although not all writing works out loud, and not all on the page. Since I began reading in public, I think my work has gotten more voice-oriented. And living in Hawai`i, where so much writing is reverse transcription (voices born on the page but coming out of a culture that is off of it) has made a difference, as well.

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?

Questions! How do public and private concerns intersect, and how can they be addressed without aggrandizing the personal or diminishing the public? As something of a synthesizer, I also want to bring together avant-garde concerns with more rear-guard ones; how can we create meaning inside poems that stands a chance of living outside of them? Some of my concerns are spiritual, though usually driven through the matrix of “meaning” rather than a higher power. Other of my concerns are politics and family, never separately.

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

Working with an outside editor seems to be more important in my critical than in my creative work. I notice that as an editor, too, I tend to intervene more in prose criticism and less in creative work. On the creative side, though, it seems to be important to me to circulate the poems/prose I'm writing; the mere fact of audience is crucial in ways that are hard to explain. Perhaps that has to do with the farflungness of my literary community more than anything. That said, I just spoke yesterday to Lisa Howe, who is editing and publishing my forthcoming chapbook with Bill Howe, and our discussion was really productive. So I may have overstated the case in sentence #1 of answer #6.

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

I think I know better when there is a book coming, but it's not much easier to write them, no.

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

Funny, I just ate a pear. Maybe it's because I read these questions yesterday, or maybe it's because there was a pear on the counter.

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

Advice? I don't know. These days, I mostly dole it out! One of the best questions I remember hearing someone asked was: “what have you learned from a poet whose work you don't like?” That strikes me as a good opening, and I repeat the question often to my students. As for whether that's advice or not, I leave it to you.

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

At some point in the late 1990s, I moved from poetry to prose poetry and now poetic prose. I'm not sure why it happened, though it may have had something to do with starting to compose on the computer rather than on paper. It may have had something to do with getting older and more focused on particularity, detail, kids, job, and so on. Whatever the reason, I have a hard time now thinking of myself writing poetry with lines. I still write essays, which I like because they are the work of explication--how does this work, how does it not work? That kind of prose is the under the hood kind. Grease is good. So the appeal would be in the altering of frames, that some writing needs to be in the moment and some needs to be at odds with it.

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?

It's gotten harder and harder to keep a writing routine. I'm at my computer constantly, but unfortunately a lot of my writing is email, a lot of my reading political blogs and journalism. I no longer write for the sake of writing, which I did in my late 20s and early to mid-30s. When I have a project going, though, I write often. And sometimes I write blindly toward a project, as I did when I composed a travel blog for friends and family that turned into my dementia blog that turned into a book.

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

These days, when the writing gets stalled, I allow it to happen. I'm more at peace with the necessity of not writing than I was when I was younger. The introduction to my book of essays is about the significance of the silences, and the first prose poem in my Memory Cards & Adoption Papers book is about making the block into the muse. So, while I'm obsessed with writer's block and feel hostile toward it(!), I also think it has real purpose. Time to breathe, be. Also worth considering for its political implications; why am I as a writer feeling silenced now, and how I can write about such silencing? This is another concern Hawai`i has sensitized me too, as many (older) writers here have had a primal scene of being silenced by a teacher for using “bad English” or not writing marketable prose.

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

My forthcoming book Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008) feels most like Memory Cards & Adoption Papers (2001), in that it's in poetic prose and concerns the day to day (in this case, the course of my mother's--and the country's--dementia). But it's less jumpy from sentence to sentence. While there are lots of bits of it (strophes or paragraphs, whatever), within each section there is often a sustained meditation. MC & AP was deliberately discontinuous from sentence to sentence. At that time, I was trying to get away from the tendency of my poetry to bring everything together into a wide metaphorical net, to allow the pieces to remain pieces. Once I realized that the pieces qua pieces still floated in the same system, I was able to bring that back into my writing on the level of syntax, use one sentence to lead to the next. And then a break of paragraph!

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 about to teach a course I call “Reading Like a Poet,” where we'll read Susan Howe's Dickinson, Stephen Collis's [see his 12 or 20 questions here] Howe, Baraka's blues, and so on, and then students will perform their own creative critique of another writer. So yes, I believe writing feeds off of writing. One aspect of my Dementia Blog that surprised me as I wrote it was the strong presence (nay, intrusion!) of Wallace Stevens. Here I was trying my damnest to be faithful to what I saw happening in front of me, to note it down, and it was the poet of the imagination who was talking back. So I made that a conscious part of the writing, started talking back to him. I like that process of writing as a way to correspond with (or refuse to correspond with) one's traditions. As for other forms, I listen to a lot of music, and my husband is always talking about science, history and sports are obsessions, and I do go to museums. But I'm mostly a word person, for better and for worse.

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

Other writers? Depends on what's engaging me when. I've gone through cycles of reading everything I can about adoption, for example, or about dementia, or about Cambodia. So a lot of the reading is prose, and none too lyrical at that. But I also read a lot of poetry; it's my job.

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

I would like to do something else for a year or two, and then return to life as it is, which ain't bad.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would have liked to have coached the St. Louis Cardinals. Actually, I did twice--once my son's team of 4 year olds, and then his team of 7 year olds. But really, coaching or writing about sports. If I hadn't been a writer, I might also have been a lawyer or historian. Well, that's a writer too . . .

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

Who knows. Writing seems to be a biological process more than anything.

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

The last great book? The last book of prose that moved me was Barack Obama's Memories of My Father. It's about growing up in Hawai`i as someone who doesn't fit (hardly anyone does, come to think of it). His search for his father strongly resembles many adoption narratives I've read. The rhetoric is sometimes close to overblown, almost 18th century, but I really love that about the book. Kind of like Pam Lu's autobiography. The last great film (I confess I don't see many films, and most of them are decidedly not great) was the Battle of Algiers.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on an essay about Hawai`i's literature since 1959 and on syllabi for next semester. Also editing Dementia Blog for publication by Singing Horse later in the year. Oh and there's an AWP talk that needs doing . . .

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Natalie Simpson

Natalie Simpson was born in London, England and left at the age of six weeks. She lived in Holland until she was about two years old, and then moved to Calgary, Alberta. She’s half French Canadian, and half proficient in French. She has a BA in English (minor in Latin) and an MA in English, both from the University of Calgary. Her MA thesis dealt with sentences and their centrality in Gertrude Stein’s writing. She was poetry editor and then managing editor for filling Station magazine, between 1999 and 2004. She moved to Vancouver in 2004, completed her law degree at UBC, and then moved back to Calgary, where she worked most recently at a non-profit doing human rights research. Her poetry has been published in West Coast Line, The Capilano Review, Queen Street Quarterly, dANDelion, as well as the anthologies Shift & Switch and Post-Prairie. Her first book, accrete or crumble, was published by LINEbooks in 2006, and her chapbook Dirty Work is being re-issued by above/ground press ALBERTA SERIES.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It made me realize that publishing a book doesn’t change anything. I think I’ve relaxed a bit since then. I stopped writing for a while, and now I’m starting to realize that Creeley was right when he said only write if you find writing fun.

2 - How long have you lived in Calgary, 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 Calgary the majority of my life, except for three years I spent in Vancouver. I don’t think place really had much impact on my writing, until recently – being in Vancouver made me really notice details of place. Like the difference between the Alberta side of the Rockies and the mountains in BC. Or how as much as I love the ocean, the prairies have a grip on my psyche. So does the big sky. I’m not sure how those things affect my writing, but I’m sure they do.

Similarly, I think gender is starting to have more impact on my writing than it used to. I’ve noticed that more and more of the writers I admire are women, and I want to write poetry that the women I read would respect.

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?

All my writing begins with the blank page and resolving to fill it. It’s pretty much a crap shoot whether I write something I can shape into a poem or not. I’m definitely an author of short pieces, which don’t necessarily combine into a larger project. I’m most comfortable with poems or poem series of five to ten pages, and I have a hard time sustaining cohesion in anything longer than that. I’m pretty angsty about it, too – I’ve always admired writers who can pull off really tight, thematically centred books. Like Karen Mac Cormack’s Quirks and Quillets, Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM **k*t, Lisa Robertson’s The Weather. I wish I could do that.

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

Reading in public is a huge part of my creative process. First, readings provide deadlines that force me to whip whatever I’m working on into decent enough shape to read. Second, my poetry is all about sound, so the words on the page start to fulfill their potential when I get the chance to read them out loud. And third, I like the sense of performance, of trying to captivate listeners, and the energy I get from the audience when I know they’re really into it.

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?

Oh, theory.

The questions I work with are: What makes a perfect sentence perfect? How much should I try to mean or not to mean? Is this pretentious? Who cares?

I think some of the current (perennial) questions have to do with who is reading and why. Also who is writing, and why.

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

I haven’t dealt with an outside editor in any substantive sense. I’ve always thought I would like to work with an editor, to get a really thorough perspective from someone else.

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

The process varies, depending on who’s involved. Overall, I think the book-making is generally easier than the book-writing.

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

A couple of months ago, probably. I bought some pears this morning, but they’re not ripe enough to eat yet.

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

Don’t be so hard on yourself.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I fall into writing routines occasionally, but as soon as I congratulate myself on writing regularly, I tend to stop.

Days for me begin begrudgingly, I have a really hard time getting out of bed. I have to approach important tasks slowly, lots of meandering on the internet and fussing over coffee before I can work.

The days when I have a lot of time to devote to writing, and I’m excited about writing, and I’m optimistic enough not to be discouraged by flaws, or futility, or the perfectionistic tendencies in my approach to writing, are very good days.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

At home, with laptop, in bed or on the couch. I was writing in coffee shops in a notebook for a while last summer, but I was way too conscious of being a cliché, I couldn’t lose myself enough to write well.

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

Hard to say. It’s not something I can really force. But going to readings definitely helps.

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

My most recent book is my previous work. I’d been shopping some of the poems in accrete or crumble around for several years. It was a huge relief to publish that book, because I wonder about the currency of poetry, whether certain poems have expiry dates.

My more recent writing is sometimes funnier, more self-deprecating, less deliberately obscure.

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?

Good question. I don’t think so. I’m influenced by more pedestrian things, the way people speak, turns of phrase, intonations. Rhythms of language everywhere, especially bad translations, wrong grammar, awkwardness. I’ve carried bits of things I hear people say in my head for months until they come out in poems.

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

Juliana Spahr, Harryette Mullen, Robert Kroetsch, Lisa Robertson, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Gertrude Stein, Wilfred Owen, Julian Barnes, Jeannette Winterson, Ali Smith, Ivan E. Coyote, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sina Queyras, Rachel Zolf, Jill Hartman, ryan fitzpatrick, Julia Williams, Jason Christie, angela rawlings, Fred Wah, Jordan Scott, Nicole Markotic, Louis Cabri, the hundreds and thousands I’m not remembering…

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

Accept things as they are. Understand that my life has started, it’s not waiting for me somewhere.

Also travel more.

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

Well, I’m currently attempting law, which is a form of writing. I’ve worked as an editor. I started to be an academic once. I don’t think I’ll ever get away from text, sadly.

If I could carry a tune, I’d be a singer. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a dancer, and I’ve always admired yoga instructors – maybe I’d try to stop camping out in my head and move into the rest of my body.

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

I don’t think writing is opposed to anything else. If all I did was write, I’d go insane. Or I’d be profoundly depressed. I try to let everything else I do (jobs, school) feed into my writing. Writing is my ulterior motive.

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

Dennis Lee’s yesno.

I saw Juno recently – not quite great, but definitely good. I watched Midnight Cowboy on Christmas Day, it was a great mood enhancer.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A short series of poems with the working title of Chump Redux. A slightly longer series about living on the West Coast. Some found poetry that comes from law sources. Thinking a lot about paper and design, plotting chapbooks that may or may not materialize.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Mari-Lou Rowley

Mari-Lou Rowley has published six collections of poetry, most recently CosmoSonnets (JackPine 2007) and Viral Suite (Anvil Press 2004), and her work has appeared in journals anthologies in Canada and the US. Rowley has performed her poetry across the continent, from Harbourfront to Hornby Island. She also appeared at Bumbershoot, Seattle’s annual arts extravaganza with musician and sound designer Roderick Shoolbraid, where they released the CD Cellular Logic. A science geek and avid star gazer, her favourite constellation is Orion. Her favourite cosmological phenomena are binary pulsars. In 2006 she moved to Saskatoon from Vancouver to be closer to the sky.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I felt like a real poet after all, and the wait was worth it. But it was more than personal validation, it was a confirmation of the way poets see/feel/hear/ the world and that it is somehow essential to the human experience, and yet what we convey is much more than experiential.

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

I moved back to Saskatoon just over two years ago, after 13 years in Vancouver, ten in Toronto and seven in Edmonton. I grew up in Saskatoon, so I was apprehensive about moving back at first, but I think it is easier to return to one’s roots when you’re doing what you want to do. For me, moving back here has been one of the most positive experiences in my life. I have always loved the prairie landscape, the space, sky, light. It is where I am most productive as a writer. Both of my last two books were drafted at writers/artists colonies in Saskatchewan. The writing community is very active, inclusive and generous. I do miss the rush of the city, cultural events, activities, green grocers, anonymity. To live in the prairies does mean a compromise. But it’s one I’m comfortable making at this time in my life. I have a house with a yard and garden only three minutes away from the wild rambling river valley of the South Saskatchewan. I never imagined that I would own my own home (notice the rhyme, repetition and assonance in that statement). I’ve never owned anything more expensive than a computer. Still don’t have a car. On my river walks I see eagles, otter, coyotes, deer, pelicans. There have been cougar sightings along the river. I've even seen bear scat, though no bear. I love living in a place where the weather is still a main topic of conversation because here there is a direct connection between weather, livelihoods and life. And the weather, insects, wild animals, and isolation can kill you if you’re not careful. "Nature" is still relevant, a phenomenon not an idea, not just something you watch on television. And here, on average, nature is more dangerous than humans. For me this is a comforting thought. It also necessitates a sense of community in the larger sense. All of these things nurture the muse for me. I suppose I’m a phenomenologist at heart. Maybe even a pantheist.

So far race and gender, although they are issues that have entered my work in subtle ways, have not been major themes in my work.

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’ve become a serial poet. And idea or concept grabs me and won’t let go until the creative impulse is spent. It can be from four poems to a book-length work. I still write the occasional one-off poem, but I generally don’t find them as interesting, or as inspired.

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

Yes. Love them. What is the point of writing books and putting them on the shelf? I believe readings should be performative. They are where the poems are put to the test. Do they connect? Do they sing? Do they resonate?

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?

Right. I think the best way to answer this is to excerpt an abstract of a paper on Ecopoetics as Enactivist poetics that I presented recently in Toronto and will be presenting, in a mutated form, in Brussels this spring. Is the muse affected by climate change? Does poetry have any function in the current political—environmental debate? I really believe that a poet’s world and work is shaped by observation, physical experience, memory, and the environment (in) which she/he creates. Poets are by nature interdisciplinary. It is the poet’s job to make associations and juxtapositions—often disparate and provocative. I'm interested in the poet’s role as interpreter, witness and communicator, and the challenge for ecopoets to bridge the chasms between art, science, philosophy, and politics in order to help catalyze change. I’m not interested in writing in a vacuum.

So that's a major concern, bringing poetry back into the public/political arena. The other one is bridging the language–lyric chasm that has fractured the poetic community in Canada. I want the best of both, the cerebral challenge of language poetry and the visceral impact of lyric. Again, I think Alice Fulton's fabulous essay "Fractal Poetics" in her book Feeling as a Foreign Language is a must-read for all creative writing students and aspiring poets. As is Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity by Fred Wah.

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

For me it is essential, and enlightening. I owe a debt of thanks to Paul Dutton, David Lee, Fred Wah, Michael Barnholden, Don MacKay, Di Brandt and others who have provided valuable feedback and insights into my work. I don’t always make all the changes suggested—an author's prerogative, I guess—but I consider every suggestion very seriously. That's how we grow as writers.

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, in a way. I have more confidence in my own poetic voice and I'm more inclined to try new things, although I’m always afraid of saying the same thing twice, or running out of things to say.

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

I dislike pears. But I had wonderful pear-fennel soup at Paul Dutton’s place last October.

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

I had a dream just after bp Nichol died. I had my first ms. out with Underwhich Editions and hadn't heard back from them. In the dream bp said "it's good but it needs polishing before it will shine." So I guess the best advice is spit and polish. Also Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke, and "Projective Verse" by Olson were really important for me as a developing writer.

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

I don’t as a rule. I have no interest in writing fiction, at least not yet, although I have been writing more essays lately. But that is a very different experience. Since a lot of my time is spent writing freelance science and technical material for a living, writing poetry is a euphoric experience for me. When I have time to spend on creative work, I want to it to be the buzz of poetry.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It depends upon what freelance work is on my plate, and how much energy and time I have left over at the end of the day. So I tend to write in concentrated spurts, often at retreats. Once I am working on a project, it seems that the poems are already half written by the time they appear on the page. Not to say I don't research or revise, but for me the first draft of a poem comes relatively quickly. Prior to that I need lots of time for quiet and contemplation, for the poem to percolate.

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

I read—classics, obscure texts, philosophy, non-fiction on science and ecology, other poets, literary/cultural theory—in that order. If I'm on a retreat, I'll turn to dictionaries, lists, old notebooks to jog something. But the poems come when they come and I usually don't worry about it too much. I'm more interested in quality than quantity. Force-fed poems end up fatty and pale. I want lean, taught poetry that you need a knife, not a fork, to cut into.

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

In the past year I've been working on a manuscript called "Suicide Notes," which will be published by Anvil Press in Fall 2008. Unlike the poems in my last book, Viral Suite, which were inspired by concepts from my science writing, there is nothing premeditated about these poems. No concepts, no quotes, no interwoven texts to draw from. Just a kind of primal memory. They were written out of a sense of immediacy—rather like panic mixed with euphoria. And in relation to my last book, Suicide Notes is more visceral scream than intellectual interplay. Although I strive for a balance between the cerebral and visceral in my work, these poems are mostly entrails, drawn out with quick precision. This is the way the poems want to emerge. As if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off of the ledge.

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

Yes, yes, yes, and especially yes. I lived with visual artist Robert McNealy for eight years, and we recently collaborated on another book, CosmoSonnets, published by JackPine Press in Saskatoon. He was and still is one of the most important influences on my creative work.

Again, science has informed much of my work, as I've mentioned. It's difficult not to be inspired when you interview some of the top scientists in the country, or world for that matter, and write in depth about their work. I realized that their process and mine are very similar—the contemplation, research and serendipity that leads to discovery or art or poetry.

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

Whew, that would be a truly unmanageable list. Perhaps I will just acknowledge who first inspired me and who is most inspiring me now. My early mentors were Anne Szumigalski, Christopher Dewdney, Paul Dutton, Anne Michaels, Steve McCaffery to name a few...

What I find inspiring right now is the work of Maturana and Varella, Robert Bringhurst's new book of essays The Tree of Meaning, anything by Tolstoy, Baudrillard, Plato's Timaeus, Stephen Hawking's God Created the Integers (what I can grasp of it), and anything by Cormac McCarthy. Poets I’m reading now include Nicole Brossard, Sheri Benning [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Christian Bök, Ilya Kaminsky. Poets I read regularly are Don McKay, Lisa Robertson, Ken Babstock, T.S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetayeva (Feinstein translations)… etc..

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

See Machu Picchu. I had a recurring dream about the place before I actually saw a photograph. The dreams were amazing. The times I reached the top felt like I had reached Nirvana. I still have the dream, but now the place is commercialized, with tourist info and handicraft stalls along the path to the top. Hmm.

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?

Mathematician or theoretical physicist. I would love to take remedial math classes and then attempt some university math courses. Math, trig and geometry were my best subjects in high school. When I was at Banff I met a young mathematician, Matt Baker, who was also a poet—a very good one at that—and he said he just didn’t write much poetry because of the demands of his profession. Perhaps it was just as well that I ended up a poet and not a scientist, I’m not sure I have the stamina or could stomach the politics, but I love the language of mathematics and the concepts of physics. I recently wrote a poem in the form of a mathematical formula. Of course now there are websites devoted to poetry and code. I love that.

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

You should really ask: What other occupations have you had in order to feed your writing habit? Cocktail waitress (what they called us in the 70s), cook’s helper on oil rigs, advertising and marketing executive, court reporter, arts administrator, temp. Whatever…

Actually, to answer your question, what inspired me to become a poet was Leonard Cohen’s Flowers for Hitler, which I stole from my high school library. It is still on my book shelf, and I still pick it up occasionally.

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

No Country for Old Men. Ditto. Talk about banality of evil.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m finishing my manuscript Suicide Notes for Anvil, and also working on another manuscript loosely themed around cosmology.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Steve McOrmond

Steve McOrmond was born in Nova Scotia, grew up on Prince Edward Island, and now makes his home in Toronto. His first book of poetry, Lean Days (Wolsak and Wynn 2004), was shortlisted for the 2005 Gerald Lampert Award. His second collection, Primer on the Hereafter, also published by Wolsak and Wynn, was awarded the 2007 Atlantic Poetry Prize. While studying creative writing at UNB, he worked on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and co-founded the literary journal Qwerty. His work also appears in the anthology Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

For a number of years prior to my first book, it seemed terribly important to get published. An analogy might be the anxiety one feels at a certain age about losing one’s virginity. Perhaps the change, having experienced the gone-in-sixty-seconds anticlimax of first publication, is that I no longer feel that kind of intense, paralyzing anxiety, or not nearly so often anyway. When I do feel it now, there’s a line by Glenn Gould that I try to keep in mind: “The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”

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’ve lived in Toronto for ten years now, though I still feel a bit like a tourist in the city. Often I just stand and gawk, overwhelmed by how exhilarating, alien, terrible and sublime this place is. Writing, like accounting, is often historical. I’m still working through stuff from my childhood and early adulthood in the Maritimes, and still writing out of that landscape a good deal of the time. So, while the city and its geography and social fabric have definitely influenced my work on a number of levels (subject matter, style, structure), it may be too soon to gauge the full impact.

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 write poems, not books of poems. My approach is piecemeal. Any kind of organization comes only once a fair number of poems have been written. It’s usually only a later stage that I begin to see certain connections between poems and realize that I may have a larger project on my hands. As to where the poems originate, I might say that, while some poets write out of ideas, I often seem to be more concerned with people and places. My work is peopled by many different voices or characters, some real, some imagined, whom I’ve felt compelled to evoke and memorialize. Likewise, it’s important to me to capture a specific time and place as best I can. Already, some of the places I’ve written about have ceased to exist (been bulldozed and redeveloped etc.) so there’s an elegiac or archival impulse: to look back, to record, to remember.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I enjoy public readings both as reader and listener, though I do wonder whether readings haven’t taken on an exaggerated importance in our culture. I’m wary of how easy it is to judge a writer based on their ability to perform when this has little or no bearing on the quality of their work. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve purchased a book at a reading, after having been struck by the personal charisma of the writer at the mic, only to be disappointed by their work. Likewise, there are superb writers who are just terrible readers, and sometimes terrible human beings as well. In an interview in Jacket, C.D. Wright says, “I no sooner decide I am forever committed to someone’s work than I see them in the flesh in a setting I can’t erase and which forever galls my reading.” Because I’ve had similar experiences with writers whom I admire, I prefer to encounter them on the page where my experience of their work is unmediated by their public face.

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?

Ecological thought informs some of my poems. The current question might be the one posed by Tim Lilburn and the Thinking and Singing Poets: “How to live in the world as if it were home” or more simply, “How to be here.” I’m very interested in notions of place and how place shapes one’s identify and vice versa – Milton Acorn’s figure in the landscape making the landscape. This preoccupation with place is something you find in a great many Maritime writers. Sometimes it manifests itself as pastoral: a looking back and a longing to return to the garden. It’s interesting to read John Thompson’s Stilt Jack and David Hickey’s In The Lights of a Midnight Plow with an ear for how these poets veer toward and away from the pastoral tradition.

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

More essential than difficult. I’m of the era where workshopping one’s writing is pretty much the norm, so wrestling with an editor holds little apprehension. I’ve always had a small group a peers and mentors with whom I’ve shared my writing either through workshops and correspondence. These fellow writers have been among the most thorough readers, toughest editors and fiercest critics of my work. With friends like these…. Sometimes I do daydream about what it might be like to work with an outside editor in the truest sense, an editor whose aesthetic lies well outside my comfort zone. How might my poetry benefit if Erin Moure, for instance, were to pop the hood and start tinkering with the engine? (Erin, if you’re listening…)

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

Harder, because your ambitions for what you hope to achieve in your work become more grandiose. It’s no longer sufficient simply to make a poem (in itself, no small feat), but you want to push your work in new directions and make the great poem.

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

A couple of months back. Sliced pears drizzled in maple wine from Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Vineyards for dessert. God, my mouth is watering.

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

“Instead of advancing, we too ought to try and rise.”
– Serge Fauchereau

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I like to work in the mornings. I try to get up early – around 7 a.m. – and write until about one in the afternoon or so, though sometimes I’ll get caught up in something and will still be at the keyboard when my wife gets home at 5 or 6 p.m.

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

I’ve written very little over the past year, so I wish I knew where to turn or return. The old stimulants – reading John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens, listening to Glenn Gould, getting out and walking around – seem to have lost some of their potency.

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

I suppose the rhetoric is a little more assured in Primer on the Hereafter than in my first collection, or so I’ve been told. I am more conscious of wanting my recent unpublished work to be different from what’s come before. My work naturally tends towards the lyric-narrative and I’ve been trying to push against this tendency a bit.

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?

All of the above. Whatever gets caught in the sweep-net of my consciousness makes its way into the poetry eventually: Scientific American, Nick Cave, Peter Mansbridge, snatches of conversation overheard on the subway. You name it.

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

Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, Alden Nowlan, John Thompson, Don McKay, Stephen Dobyns, Louise Glück, Margaret Avison, Robert Hass, Mary Oliver, James Wright, John Berrryman and Tomas Tranströmer have all been tremendously important to me at different times in my life, and I return to these writers over and over again. In a sense, they are survey markers that help define the circumference of my poetic practice. More recently, I’ve been obsessing over Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Michael Palmer, James Schuyler, Jack Gilbert and C.D. Wright. It feels important to my craft to try and figure out what makes these poets tick.

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

Travel to Scotland to see where my mother and her family came from.

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?

Graphic designer.

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

No idea. If I did know, would I still be attempting it?

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

The last great film is easy: The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. I’m a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and this adaptation of his novel is haunting and sublime. As for books, you’ll have to settle for a shortlist:

Jim Crace, Being Dead.
Jim Harrison, The Shape of the Journey.
Ron Silliman, The Age of Huts (compleat).
John Smith, Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove.
C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil.

Ok, let’s move on before I change my mind.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m knee-deep in a collection of poems about the end of the world called The Good News About Armageddon. I hope I have time to finish it before the subject overtakes its scribe. The title poem, which alludes to a Seventh Day Adventist pamphlet hand-delivered to the door, is a long sequence of poems loosely informed by the North American ghazal tradition. The voice of this poem is mercurial—by turns bitter, querulous, self-reflexive, dejected, ecstatic, profane, prophetic, aphoristic, hectoring. The collection also includes a number of dramatic monologues.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with William Allegrezza

[photo credit: Sarah Lang]

William Allegrezza edits the e-zine Moria and the press Cracked Slab Books. He has published four books, In the Weaver's Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile Replacements, and Covering Over; one anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century ; seven chapbooks, including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament Sense (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He curates series A, a reading series in Chicago dedicated to experimental writing. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book did not change my life much, for by the time it was published, I had been editing Moria for several years. Beginning Moria had a more profound impact on my life; it pulled me into an active literary discussion/world. When my first book came out, it seemed like just another piece of that discussion. In fact, later works, like Fragile Replacements, have felt more significant to me, and they are perhaps read by more people.

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

I recently moved from Chicago to Kalamazoo, Michigan—it’s a temporary place for me since I’ll be moving again this summer. I was in Chicago for seven years, and the city was important to my development as a writer. In Chicago I came to know many wonderful poets like Ray Bianchi, Simone Muench, Garin Cycholl, Kristy Odelius, and Chris Glomski. Reading their works and getting to know them pushed me to write and explore new ways of writing.

The geography of the city also influenced my writing. For six of the years I was in the city, I spent part of the summers crewing on racing boats. The experience of sailing on Lake Michigan has filtered into many of my collections since.

As far as race and gender, I’m sure that both impact my work, but I do not consciously focus on them.

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 don’t have any set way of beginning. I write as much as I can, and occasionally the writing seems to work. If I think it works, I keep it. That’s probably how most of the writing I’ve done gets started. Often I find that I’m concerned with several themes and theories at one time, so the writing I do will often address those ideas.

As far as working on a book, usually I do not, but I have on three major occasions. The first was the chapbook temporal nomads. In that work, I knew that I wanted to write poems for one month dealing with my reaction to the works of Deleuze and Guattari. The second time was with In the Weaver’s Valley. Again I used a time constraint to guide my writing. I wrote five poems a day for fifty days. The last instance was with the first long poem of Fragile Replacements. I wrote a poem for each section of Dante’s Vita Nuova. In that long poem, I was meditating on the loss of a relationship and how one moves past the loss.

Beyond these instances, I usually just write and see what I come up with in the process.

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

They are part of the process only in that I realize I will probably do them. I’m not an especially good reader, and I often feel compelled to read the most assessable works.

I more often write with a reader in mind than an audience at a reading.

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

I have many theoretical concerns behind my poetry. The critical texts of the language poets have especially influenced my work, as has Postmodern thought including writers like Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Benjamin, Adorno, and Virilio. The Black Mountain Poets also are very important to my writing.

Lately, I have been looking for ways to rethink the lyric. Basically, I’ve been trying to reconfigure the lyric for the contemporary mind while retaining some non-commercialized individual presence in the poem. Trying to write new thought constellations has long been important to my process.

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

Most of the time, editors do not touch my poetry, so they do not seem difficult to me. The few suggestions that I have received from editors have been very helpful. For example, Eileen Tabios (of Meritage Press) told me with Fragile Replacements that she thought it needed a long section at the end to balance the book, and she was correct. When I finished the long poem for the end of the book, it helped.

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 most ways, easier. I know what to expect now, and I understand the pace of my writing. I also have a lot of design experience. Looking for new directions is the main hard part now. When I look back over the innovative writing of the past hundred years, I find it difficult find new avenues for exploration. I’m not suggesting that is my main goal, but if I’ve seen someone else do something well, I don’t often try to repeat it.

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

About two months ago. I was standing above the sink in my kitchen. The lights were off.

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

Jen Karmin told me once that she believes that writing poetry is a karmic activity, that you receive back much of the energy you expend. Considering my experience, I think she’s right. When I try to help other poets in a generous and open way, I receive help in spreading my own work.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write whenever I have a spare moment, and if I do not find a spare moment during the day, I write at night. Often when I’m working on the final stages of a project, I do little else but scribble notes and play with the pieces. I become so focused that I shut out everything else to work.

11 - Where is your favorite place to write?

My desk at home in front of a large window. That said, I write anywhere I can, and some of my best poems have been written on trains or at tables at conferences.

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

Sometimes collaboration with other poets, sometimes Dante, sometime I just turn inward and try to write my way through to a new idea.

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

Fragile Replacements feels less playful to me formally. The work in it seems easy to access. My older works are more opaque and multi-referential. In this one, I was hoping to go in a new direction, but I’m not convinced I’ll write more works quite like this one.

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 came to poetry from music. Initially as a teenager, I started writing song lyrics for a band that I was in, and I eventually became more interested in the words than the music. Since then, music has remained an influence on my work.

Other arts influence my writing as well, especially painting and architecture. My list of favorite painters is probably as long as my list of favorite poets.

As far as nature, I do not consider myself a nature poet, but I love being in the open air. I have long been a hiker and backpacker, and one of the great benefits of my current residence is that my porch looks out over a nature preserve. I hike in it whenever I have time. Images of nature, thus, filter into my poetry.

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

The list of important writers for me is long and includes writers like Whitman, Neruda, Sappho, Bernstein, Ungaretti, Montale, Dante, Hejinian, Huidobro, Levertov, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Duncan, Olson, Vallejo, Porta, and Howe (this list could go on). I think of my writing as engaging in a conversation with the writing of other writers.

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

I would like to work on collaborations with other artists, especially painters and dancers.

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?

Some type of researcher or preservationist.

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

I felt and still feel compelled to write.

19 - What was the last great book you read?

I’m rereading Homer’s Odyssey currently to teach it. Besides that, Noah Eli Gordon’s [see his 12 or 20 questions here] Novel Pictorial Noise was quite good.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Garry Thomas Morse

Garry Thomas Morse lives in Vancouver and has two LINEbooks of poetry published, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007).

His as of yet homeless prose works include Death in Vancouver (a book of city short stories that come to a bad end), The Book of Art (a short novella about aesthetics) and The Chaos Suite (a tetralogy of four pretty fucked-up right here novellas).

In homeless poetry, manuscripts of note include Discovery Passages (Kwak'wala myth and potlatch history), Gadgetalia (tech talk), Go Medieval (riffs on Malory/Beroul), and After Jack (rewrite of Jack Spicer's After Lorca). These are in addition to twenty odd chapbooks of poetry.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I'd like to say my first book dramatically changed my life, but not really. By 2006, I'd already written a number of diverse manuscripts and LINEbooks decided on two of my poetic oeuvres for this first book, so it became a sort of calling card to help attract attention to my other esotextica. In terms of what the book contributes to poetry (hence changing and saving lives!) I feel compelled to challenge your review, which associated my work with a 'transelation' theory. I far prefer a notion of the text as palimpsestuousness sediment in which the bookworms turn, in this case, Rainer Maria Rilke, C.F. MacIntyre, Karl Siegler, and myself from an earlier translation attempt. These souls all happened to fuse in the summer of '06 and at the same time, there is Cocteau's Orphic sense favoured by Jack Spicer, with each word slowly coming out of a radio (or customized personal gadgetalia of choice). The other half of the book 'the untitled 1-13' is the opposite, since it is more about that Blaserian invitation to the OPEN, where particulars appear before the poet and are allowed in. 'the untitled' is intended to my lifelong work, and it is a place to put all the leftovers from my other poems or serial works. The story of my father's hospitalization and rapid mental decline closes the thirteenth part in that book, and it is more the book that has documented these peculiar changes in my life.

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 have lived in Vancouver all my life. With the disjunctive urbanity surrounded by our mild coastal beauty and mist and rain, it's hard not to enjoy Rilke and hear Wagner in early morning foghorns. And I think the geography contributes to a sense of luxury. With my heritage being part Kwak'wala and Cockney Jew, I find it amusing that I spend so much time ingesting European classics and regurgitating them onto the page. In terms of race, my thinking reels back to Margaret Atwood's writing on representation in Survival, where she talks about our Canadian love affair with victimization. George Bowering has said that American images portray people by a river and Canadian images portray people under the ice. In many novels, particularly portraying First Nations folk, I often feel that the characters are these totemic or idealized representations and not anything like real people. They are used more as devices to forward some didactic moral or plot. More generally, with Canadian cultural narratives, Christian Bök has used the word latkes, presumably to mean this formulaic all too precious slice of life stuff, unless he meant to say dreck. I don't mind this material as content, but I object to predictably canned and contrived narrative and verse styles that reduce individual characters to worn-out tropes and stereotypes. I would say that in some of my prose, I tend to parody the genre of identity politics, which receives plenty of attention in our city. If you are caught answering the call of nature, I guess the best excuse is to say you were trying to find yourself. I think in terms of my Kwak'wala background, rather than reach out to any community, I am trying to get back to the original tremulous energy of their art in terms of the Dionysian and the daimonic. This often rubs people the wrong way, but I think the poet is an oppositional figure whose temporary theatrical madness is at once genuine and necessary. If there is value or entertainment in what I do in exorcising this energy from the OUTSIDE, or what the Kwak'wala call nwaluk (a sort of spiritual intuition), then hopefully I will be forgiven or at least humoured and welcomed back among the others through a taming ritual. It helps to keep in mind that the trickster (or raven or coyote or Loki) is not just some narrative device in critical theory. In Der Ring des Nibelungen, Loge is useful to Wotan precisely because he might burn Valhalla down...or Vanhalla for that matter...

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 don't seem to write those lonely one night stands anymore. I'm not very fond of piecemeal collections. Somewhat like Aristotle, I believe that a work of art should have some cohesion, ideally that every cell should be a microcosm of the whole. The work often leads me instead of any overarching idea. I write serial poems most often now. I might guess at the number of them, especially if the work is intertextual to another serial work, but the process is more conversational in tone, at least internally. I am a strong believer in its linear organic development, not in cutting and pasting and collaging things together. Even in my prose narrative, there has been a sense of the serial radio play, a polyphony of voices and meta-suspenseful continuances...

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

I think that public readings run counter to my creative process, or at the very least, are a lukewarm distraction. There's usually a narrow window in which I am excited to drag people out to listen to me, but it never seems to be in sync with an appointment, which has all the appeal to me of a tax filing date. Also, my whole obsession with writing tends to make me rather anti-social. I suppose I believe that poets who just read for other poets they know start to dilute the visionary aspect of the individual. In terms of 'the public', it is often hard to understand why people are at a reading, but it is usually for some other reason than to hear poetry. And the serious sympathizers will be the same faces and what can they possibly learn from one another that they didn't already take (or teach) in the same course?

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 feel that the poetic or writerly demi-urge should be strong enough to erode some of the theoretical concerns. Books written by theorists for theorists make me logy. If writing is just a Q&A routine, then the imagination has little or no part to play. I like how George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 here] says not to start with what you know but with what you don't know. That's writing. I might wonder why she touched my arm on that particular evening or who the hell called and woke me out of that lovely sleep-in yesterday. That's usually the kind of question which the writing and the imagination chooses to answer, although often without my knowledge until hours or days or months later.

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

So far, I haven't run into any detrimental interference from editors.

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

Book-making sometimes feels hard and sometimes feels easy. But it is always there, while for me the world of publishing in any form is external to the act of writing, save for when editorial standards play their part in the creation of a work. The creation of a work seems to me easier and more enjoyable than trying to find a suitable home for it, which is an exhausting and arbitrary process. At present, I have a number of manuscripts that are floating around publishing houses, getting lost, propping doors open...

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

For the riveting answer, see my book Streams, poem #62.

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

Goal-oriented existence drives way faster than contemplative ecstasy. Merge, fucker, merge!

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?

For years, I used to flood notebooks in a number of Vancouver pubs, but excessive drinking every day took its toll on me and due to my personal chemistry, I had to pack it in and restructure my glutamate cells and senses until I was able to create new subroutines for filtering in the entire passing universe. Of interest to me was that I could sit somewhere by myself and have a drink and be pretty bored, but once I took out my notebook, I would be there for hours, ordering drink after drink and writing incessantly and freaking everyone out. I have very obsessive tendencies, so I really enjoy routines. Oh yeah, I also haunt the Vancouver Public Library and I've observed that Wayde Compton [see his 12 or 20 here] favours the same quiet floor. Sometimes we end up sitting quite close without speaking. Maybe someone will write a cross-cultural romance about it! This is of course the best way for writers to co-exist without abrogating the psychical space. After all, what is there to say? Shhhh!!! I've switched to working on the computer first instead of on notepaper and I've adapted myself to write in the mornings, although in those periods when I am between nine-to-fivers, I often stay up until dawn or so, when my brain feels most active.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

Home.

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

My writing doesn't really get stalled. But I work best when I switch between different kinds of writing in progress, so that I don't get stuck on one long project that feels like an interminable thesis. If I don't feel like writing one thing, I usually feeling like writing another, and another, and then I switch back and everything is fun fun fun...

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

I think each book is in part a homage to a Canadian poetic work. There's Karl Siegler's Sonnets to Orpheus influencing my first book and then there's David McFadden's Gypsy Guitar influencing my second book. I am happier with my second book Streams, since it is a complete serial poem (or series of prose poems) with a sense of expanding consciousness moving through the work. This time, my book documents the passing away of my grandmother last year, who was always more dear to me than the estranged parents who had no hand in raising me. However, even she fuses with a number of images in my literary consciousness... Beatrice's smile in La Divina Commedia, Marcel's grandmother in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, George Bowering's grandfather in his well known grandfather poem. Perhaps the point of this book is to re-assert the aesthetic imagination as a living entity, since it seems to create reality for those sensitive to its whiles, and is not limited to the more narrow margins of reality.

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 really love the unit of the phrase, and in terms of form, they often have phrases in books. I would say that classical opera and music has a strong influence on my writing, but formwise, this is hard to trace.

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

Poets: Anacreon, Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Dante, Cavalcanti, Shakespeare, Milton, Rilke, Lorca, Nerval, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Pound, Williams, Spicer, Zukofsky...

In terms of poetry and prose, I especially favour late nineteenth to early twentieth century stuff, from French symbolist stuff to modernist/surrealist experimentation. Joyce, Proust, and Woolf are favourite re-reads, but lately I've been inspired by the rather elusive Robert Desnos. I love those prose style pioneers too, like Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, and Huysmans. Lately, I'm liking Lawrence Durrell.

Either of Kierkegaard's Either/Or has had a huge influence on my aesthetic approach.

A list of contemporaryish poets would be hella long, and although this is a plug for LINEbooks, I have felt very honoured to have my work appear alongside the poetry of Natalie Simpson and Kim Minkus. I find there is an unapologetic love affair with language and an exquisite craftiness to be disclosed within each of their works. Their books are bright refreshing gems in a damp city full of overpriced gewgaws, where there is often a self-imposed hyperconsciousness about having to write for a particular audience, group, or community. I feel that these innovative books celebrate the relationship between language and the individual, and this is also a credit to the good taste of the editors at LINEbooks for including these two poets.

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

Imagine 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?

I have a small software business, and do the same kind of work for jobs. I actually find my obsession with poetry and writing a distracting irritation, in terms of lost opportunity costs. In spite of all I do, I never seem to have two beavers to rub together. Also, the writerly part of me is troubling and often gets in the way of what I would deem normal human relations and interactions. I think there's something parasitic about the act of writing. If I were not a writer, I would like to imagine that I would be happier or more relaxed, but perhaps I would just lack the outlet of this particular form of sublimation.

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

I think I lack talent in other areas, or lack the time/concentration/inclination to work harder in those areas, but writing feels very natural for me, more so than even speaking. A friend of mine once told me that I love words, which really meant a lot to me. I mean that I don't write things to mean things, or to say something I feel is important to me. Another friend would say if you have something to say, why not write a treatise, why write a poem... I guess I only write because I love words.

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

La liberté ou l'amour! and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, he exclaimed. In films, La Moustache and Sorry, Haters.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Recently, I've been toying with new unstructured sonnets based on Spenser's amoretti, swished about with some nifty Latinate backwash, and working titled the ossessioni.

I've been working on my novella tetralogy The Chaos Suite for about a year and a half. I've finished three parts, Minor Episodes, Major Ruckus, and Rogue Cells, which are more or less satyrical surrealist speculative fiction. I am currently in the middle of writing Minor Expectations about a bed-cam star who uses the much coveted tachyonometer to travel through several historical epochs in order to win her lofty inheritance. This tetralogy is already garnering some excellent rejection letters from Canadian publishers along the lines of the following:

This is interesting, arresting, courageous work. I am sorry to say, however, that it is not really the kind of thing we publish.

Latkes, it ain't.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including The Boston Review, Fence, Alaska Quarterly Review, Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New Republic. He teaches poetry as a member of the permanent faculty of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New School, and works as an Editor for Wave Books. In Fall 2007 he was a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas. He lives in New York City.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It made me stop thinking every fall about going to law school.

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

I move around a lot. I've lived off and on (a lot of it off) in NY for about 8 years of so. I've also lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, California, and most recently, Marfa, Texas. A lot of the poems in both books take place in various neighborhoods and familiar locales in New York, but also are very affected by the landscapes (urban and rural) of those other places. For me, there's always a very powerful feeling when I return to NY, as if I am caught up pleasurably in some big engine. I usually find myself very excited and wanting to write a lot. Then again almost any change in location or circumstance can produce that feeling in me, which probably explains the peripatetic nature of my life.

I don't know how to answer the race and gender question. Surely I naturally benefit in all sorts of obvious and subtle ways from being white and male in a society that sadly privileges those two attributes. Being Jewish (culturally more than religiously, at least at this point -- I'm not much of a practicing Jew) probably has a lot to do with my writing and who I am, but I have very little insight into that aspect of myself.

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 try to write a lot of poems and hope that eventually the best ones will start to accumulate into an inevitable momentum towards something called "a book." I don't think conceptually about what I am doing: I usually just try to write from my current interests, personal preoccupations, physical surroundings into the most interesting places I can get to. I love the feeling that I am discovering and metabolizing as I move through poems: I have no interest in working on anything like a "project."

Unfortunately probably for me, critics and academics love to be able to talk about projects and concepts. It's more natural to them than simple close readings that begin and end with a kind of humanistic acknowledgment of the pure value of clear mystery.

I think a lot of awful or at least boring poets are discussed incessantly because their work, either accidentally or intentionally, lends itself to highly analytical discussions that subordinate the poetry in the poetry to some "higher" pursuit, like philosophy or ethics. This is usually unintentional on the part of academics, but they just can't help it. Then again, the most famous poet in America is probably John Ashbery, and his work is almost impervious to particular common types of analytical discussions. Which is of course not to say that his work is not serious or valuable: in fact, I think that very imperviousness is central to what makes his work so essential and exhilarating to me and so many others. One awaits a critic who can find an interesting and productive way to address that central quality of his work.

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

Part of. They are a way of testing out the value and impact of my poems before actual human beings who are not beholden by genetics or common law to profess admiration.

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

I am trying to answer the question of what it means for me to be aware and alive, and how my experience can connect with and illuminate and be illuminated by the concerns and everyday lives of others. I'm not even sure what I mean by that, except that I need my poems to be intimately connected with the everyday lives of other human beings.

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

I didn't have any editorial guidance for my first book, which I think was good because it had already had a lot of readers. My second book had a great editor, Michael Wiegers at Copper Canyon. He didn't suggest a lot of changes, but he did go through the book very carefully, and asked me to consider certain recurring poetic moves which threatened to become habits or stylistic tics. At the very least, he made me reconsider my tendencies. And there were several line edits he suggested that I'm very happy about. So for me it wasn't difficult, and in fact I guess could be considered essential. I think poets in general can benefit greatly from thoughtful, respectful editors, who can reflect back what happens in the poems, and get poets to go that last way from good poems and books to truly great ones.

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

Well, I'm in the middle of writing my third book, which for me just means trying to sustain the daily practice of writing poems. Sometimes I find that incredibly pleasurable and easy; at others, it seems impossible. For me book-making is just writing poems.

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

That's kind of a personal question.

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

Drink lots of water.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I get up, drink coffee, try to find a good sunny spot (like a kitchen table or a good spot at a cafe), do a little reading (usually of a poetry book), and then try to write for a couple of hours.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

I like to write in public, as long as it's not too terribly noisy. I find some tumult and music and ambient conversation to be productive for my work. At some point in the refining or editing of the poem I usually need to retreat to a quieter place to work for a while.

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

My own panic.

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

I think the newer poems are engaged in the continual process of finding ways of bringing in more of the world. I think that's the challenge for me, to find ways to keep the poems essentially beautiful and mysterious (without those two qualities they aren't poems -- or so said Keats, and I'm sticking with him), but also to fill them with familiar objects and language and life.

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 those things provide the inspiration, content, catalysts of interest, for me to write poems. Usually it is the language within those other texts or phenomena that interests me, more than the ideas. In other words, the texture of language in wall text in a museum or in nature or science writing or song lyrics can give me new ideas about possibilities of syntax, rhythm, etc., and launch me into speech pattern or vocabulary that I can harness or be harnessed by to move into more intimate concerns.

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

Books and writing are so bound up in my life and who I am and what I think that I'm not sure I can really answer that question other than to say what I've been reading recently. I read as much as I can, which is not enough. I've been reading a lot of William Carlos Williams lately, a biography and his collected poems. A recent book that made a huge impact on me personally but had almost no affect on me poetically (I don't think) because the poems are so different from mine is Graham Foust's most recent book, Necessary Stranger. Jose Saramago is one of my favorite novelists, and so is Haruki Murakami. The writings that have been most important to my life, and work, are those of my friends and fellow poets, my contemporaries. They give me ideas and inspiration and the strength and motivation to continue working.

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

Be grateful for my life over a long period of time.

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 like being a poet and a teacher, as well as an editor, and feel my life is extremely full and varied. I feel quite lucky to do what I do. So when I try to think of an answer to that question nothing really comes to mind. If I hadn't been a writer I suppose I probably would have been either a professor (of English or Russian, which I studied in college and graduate school), or a lawyer (my father was a lawyer, and there are certain elements of my mind and personality that seem to fit with that profession). But honestly it's very hard for me to imagine doing either of those things and not feeling like a fake person.

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

I tried as hard as I could to do other things and I just kept coming back to writing poems as being the only way that I could be a full and integrated person in the world.

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

The last truly great book I read .... probably Kafka on the Shore by Murakami. Film, no question about it, No Country for Old Men. Incredible, perfect movie.

20 - What are you currently working on?

New poems, teaching, editing, and being a decent person.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Maxine Gadd

I was born in 1940 during The Blitz, the all out attempt of the Luftwaffe to invade England. My mother, pregnant with me was evacuated to an old village in Dorset. I don’t know exactly when I went back with Mom to London. I do remember being conscious with a lot of other people in the basement of a house in London during the last and most exhausting air raid of robot bombs called Doodlebugs by the English, Cherry-stones by the Germans who sent them in 1944. When we went back up to our attic suite the ceiling plaster had crashed to the ground and killed our kittens. When we went outside a nearby house was collapsed and burned. I think we went back to my Grandmother’s cottage in Somerset and I got to attend a wonderful one room school house. Mom and my Dad, when he had come home on leave from being a soldier in Europe had taught me to read fairly early. But I didn’t learn any arithmetic.

We left for Canada in October of 1946 with many other immigrants in the belly of ocean liner called the Aquitania. Mum took us on the train to Hardisty Alberta where she left us with the paternal Grandparents while she went on to find us a place live in Vancouver. In January she came back and took us to the Dunsmuir Hotel which was full of veteran fathers, mothers and children living in single and double rooms. I think I went sequentially to four different schools in that area of down-town Vancouver, three of which have since been demolished. Then we moved to an auto court way out of town and I walked through some enchanted woods to a new school. Then we moved to gerry-built veteran’s housing out in a suburb then called Anzio Heights, then back to two different government housing developments on Fourth Avenue and another school where I got interested in Lewis Carroll and stage plays. By grade Seven I was at Kitsilano High on a hill and stayed there every day for six years. When Sputnik went up Beatnik jazz and poetry houses started to bloom

Went to the University of British Columbia, talked and listened a lot, lived intensely, met future poets, wrote poems, did readings and got published in a UBC journal called The Raven and emerged with my B.A. and a baby. Got married and experienced years of total separation from the scene; ran off with the permission of my husband to California with the baby. In those days (early 1960's) you could do that. Came back when support ran out, stayed in rooms around town with the baby, tried to take a teaching certificate at UBC and had a nervous breakdown. Baby’s dad took charge of the baby. I lived on welfare in dark rooms. Met the art scene again where bill bissett, heroically developed blue ointment press and organized readings. For awhile there were a lot of people organizing readings. I participated by reading my poems. Little coffee houses continued to pop up everywhere. Renaissance in a rainy gloomy city.

I had no telephone. Bill would turn up from time to time with beautiful mimeoed editions of blew ointment press and did two publications of my poetry, Guns of the West in 1967 and Hochelaga in 1970. Produced “Practical Knowledge” in 1969 at Intermedia with the Roneo. Housing got impossible and I moved to Victoria and actually got clerical work with the provincial Public Service in the legislature buildings. Bertrand Lachance did two books under Air Press, one an edition of the magazine Air two in 1972 and one expertly produced in 1975 called Westerns.

Quit my job, deep in depression, then ran off to Galiano Island and serendipitly found a shack by the sea and wrote poems.

Years later, Daphne Marlatt and Ingrid Klassen decided to bring out a Coach House book of my
poetry 1983 called Lost Language.

Stanley, who owned the property a number of us were living on at Montague Harbour on Galiano Island died in 1984 and I had to return to Vancouver. Depression returned mixed with the mania of new environments. Dropped in on the Carnegie Humanities course at Hastings and Main and lived on the edges of the DownTown Eastside culture and the Kootenay School of Writing and found the present place to live where I have persisted for twenty years. Have lost a lot of archives but am presently rediscovering the remains.

Mona Fertig of Mother Tongue Press published Fire in the Cove in 2001.

Rolf Maurer of New Star Books published Backup to Babylon in 2006 and promises to bring out the next few years worth in Subway Under Byzantium this spring. Hopefully he’ll be able to bring things up to date after that. Backup to Babylon got nominated for the BC Book Prize but fortunately for my marginality it didn’t win.

I have a list of magazines and anthologies where my work is to be found. Or was.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I bought a new pair of boots.

Bill Bissett published my first book which he called, Guns of the West.

I was living over the lane of Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano in Vancouver, B.C. on Welfare which had just come into being. (Thanks to a poet named AJ Smith, I am told.) In those days rents were cheap and even cheaper in Kits. Some of my friends had small suites in stone palaces.

One day bill turns up with an armful of my poems beautifully mimeoed with western style decorations called Guns of the West. I guess that started my famous career.

Being a published poet did cast some blessings around me. It would be a long list, that of those to whom I am grateful. I tended to exist in a poor state of development in cold dark places, in a low grade infection which I shared with the communities that accepted me. Depression was a given. But the dark days were sometimes lit up with intellectual and aesthetic and compassionate events of brilliance. Poems issued in the lonely thoughtful darkness that ensued.

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?

Have lived in Canada since 1946, Vancouver since 1947 with different attempts to escape. Geography grinds on me like it grinds on everyone else (the short answer). Sixteen years of trying to make bad software work for me grinds a lot more right now; though since I was a teenager living near the beach at the bottom of the street I have had nightmares of tsunamis earthquakes, volcanoes, comets, and since the 50's, machine debris that can take us all out.
Race and gender have driven me crazy. Which, I guess, is why we have them.

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’ve always believed all people work on the book of life and that there is something called poetry everyone recognizes. So it seems there are many poetries, which I try to study when I can. The poem comes at unknown and unknowable instances though sometimes I can set out on an assignment. I’ve had to value chaos.

I have been privileged to work on it as it came and lucky to to born at a time that Word Perfect would let you create indexes and cursed to be born at a time another software corporation could systematically strip such programmes . The book. All that it can be. The right to express whatever I could wring out..

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

My first audience thrill was in 1946 near the age of six in a perfect little country school in Dorset, England. There was a stage in the class room.. I got to to read aloud Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Goblin Market.” Got a rapturous response from my class mates. I was hooked; though soon separated from my supply.

For me reading aloud was an instant project which proves the work.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?

My only theoretical concerns behind my writing are theoretical concerns. Have been fortunate in the past twenty years of being back in Vancouver, listening slack-jawed to a bevy of magnificent poets and students of theory. Delicately coutured politicity now seems the rage where I hang out.

What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

The current questions are part of the eternal questions, just rephrased more stylishly than before.

The real questions are the ones we can’t posit or admit into our skins. Some of them, sane citizens say, they don’t need and who am I to challenge them? Why do I need to study theology?
As a feminist the psychological question of identity still hangs out there, with a criminal suspicion that there is one somewhere under the skin. I think I know why I keep finding people begging and starving, sleeping on the streets.

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

All of the above.

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

It is still pretty hard. But that’s what we’re looking for–hard copy.

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

I don’t think I can answer this question.

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

Keep moving.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I stay up late into the night trying to gather my thoughts; I sleep with weird dreams and wake up to the sound of “Oh Canada” played on a huge fog horn. I get off the floor and find some clothes and attend my sacred rites, then make tea, microwave my oatmeal. Sit down and try to figure out where to start. . Get back to my own little office, turn on computers.. Do my email, send the massive streams of Spam back to the Spam filter at Vancouver Community Net then try to answer ionic demands.

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

Mood altering substances help me to get back to the Muse, Memory, though lately I haven’t been able to find any.

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

Backup to Babylon is strictly an expansion of Lost Language (Coach House 1982). Some of the same poems are in it. Which points to the brilliant editing of Daphne Marlatt and Ingrid Klassen.

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?

Dance. Science movies on TV. The daily news. Street Theatre. The language of my neighbourhood. My left-wing Aquarian moon parents adopted painters when I was a child and I used to attend art galleries.

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

Kootenay School. Writers: Christine Stewart, Melissa Wolsak, Deanna Ferguson, Lisa Robertson, Susan Clark, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini [see his 12 or 20 here], that goddam idiot, X, Jeff Derksen, Fred Wah, Reg Johanson, Catriona Strang, Marie Anneharte Baker, Daphne Marlatt, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Judith Copithorne, Mona Fertig--, Bill Bissett...... other writers I have temporarily forgotten

I read West Coast Line and Capilano Review and whatever I’m researching

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

Make some audio books.

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

Studying “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion” in a nice liberal theology school.

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

Dying of exposure and violence on the street.

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

Illness.

18 - What was the last great book you read?

PostModern explained to children by Lyotard and Pessoa’s July or the months of astonishment by Christine Stewart [see her 12 or 20 here]. Also the book of essays by Robin Blazer called, The Fire.

What was the last great film?

The medium is so overwhelming I can’t judge it. Have rarely gone out to movies–too expensive.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Poems from 1994. Trying to organize boxes of paper. Contributions to SFU’s collection of “Downtown Vancouver.” Trying to make Linux of some sort work on my machine. Trying to figure out how to live. Like, is the writing I usually do a business?

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Kathryn MacLeod

Kathryn MacLeod lives in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, and works at Malaspina University College. She is currently completing a Doctorate of Education at UBC. Her poetry has been published in journals, books and anthologies in Canada and the US.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It didn’t. I think publishing my first poem in a literary journal, as an undergrad, was more significant for me. An affirmation of the work I had been doing.

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’ve lived on Vancouver Island for the last ten years, in the small town of Ladysmith, after living in Vancouver for a decade or so. Geography does have an impact, of course, because it affects one’s day to day life—the contexts one moves through. There is an island culture that is very different from the urban experience of Vancouver. I think this has affected, more than anything, the language I use. Probably not my major philosophical preoccupations, but the frames through which I explore them.

Gender politics have always been a part of my work, whether explicitly 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?

Short pieces. Time is an issue for me, so writing and thinking about shorter pieces is more practical for me.

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

An integral part. The sound of language is critical to how I work, so I always read aloud as I write. Performance is just another step in the process.

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 is a very large question. Currently, my theoretical concerns reflect my academic work. On a very broad level, I am asking the question of whether art (in its general sense) can do good in the world. I am attempting to answer this question both creatively, in poetry, and philosophically, in academic writing.

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

Challenging. But worthwhile.

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 same.

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

Months ago. I prefer apples. It’s all about texture.

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

I often think about the Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron’s words: Stay, Stay.

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

Very easy. I don’t see the process as all that different. The “rules” of presentation are different, and how one gathers material, but the act of writing is similar.

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 try and write every morning (or at least during the week) for one to two hours when I get up. I get up before five, write until seven, go to work.

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

Reading. Right now I am reading philosophy, which is very generative.

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

I think my poetry has gone through various stages of exploration. When I first started writing, I wrote very traditionally, which corresponded to what I was exposed to. Then I was introduced to postmodernism and the language writers, and was very influenced by those forms. I think now my work comes out of both of those places.

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 art. Visual, written, performance, film. Politics, documentary.

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

Right now, I am reading Kant and Lyotard on judgment, sublimity and aesthetics. They are influencing both my daily life and my writing. In particular, Lyotard’s concept of the différend has made me aware of how much I am seduced by the ideal of closure, even while resisting it.

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

Make a film.

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 have two occupations already, as many writers do. It would be easier just to have one.

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

I’ve practiced various art forms my whole life: theatre, writing, visual art, photography. Writing is something one can always do—it is portable, the equipment is cheap, you don’t need a stage or a studio or supplies.

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

Book: Releasing the Imagination, by educational Philosopher Maxine Greene. Very important for me as both a student of education and as an artist.

Film: No Country for Old Men, by the Coen brothers. Brilliant and painfully bleak.

20 - What are you currently working on?

My dissertation, which includes creative work.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Maxine Chernoff

Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing. She is the author of six books of fiction and eight books of poetry, most recently The Turning (to appear in May of 2008) and Among the Names (2005), both from Apogee Press. Of the latter, Cole Swenson [see her 12 or 20 questions here] said, “Among the Names [creates] a vast and layered network, in short, an economy. Exploring complexities of “the gift,” Chernoff’s is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new.”Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a NYT Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her novel A Boy in Winter is currently in production in Canada by an independent film company. With Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which will be published by Omnidawn Press fall of 2008. She has read her poetry in Liege, Belgium; Cambridge, England; Sydney, Australia; Berlin, Germany; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Glasgow, Scotland; Yunnan Province, China; and St. Petersburg, Russia.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I was very young when a friend, John Mort, a fiction writer at the U of Iowa, did a fine print run of 75 of my first collection of prose poems, The Last Aurochs, for a graduate project in library science. Although it was a tiny number of copies, I sent them to people whom I admired as writers (I remember that this included at the time Robert Coover and Andrei Codrescu, among others), and they wrote back kind and encouraging notes. So I was astounded and moved and felt like the world, quite possibly, had a place for me in it.

2 - How long have you lived in California, 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 CA since 1994 and before that in Chicago. Leaving Chicago has had a more profound and emotional effect on me than living in CA though I certainly appreciate the climate here, the natural beauty, and the relative ease compared. I still miss the vitality I felt as a Chicago resident, a place that I naturally cared about in terms of the polis. I have written a little about living in Northern California, but I still feel as much a visitor here as a resident.

Race and gender:

I’ve always resisted feeling narrowly categorized, but I have written a lot about being a woman primarily in relation to being a mother. Several of my novels are about mothers and issues involving motherhood as are some early prose poems, and I’ve created many female characters, of course. I have also at times, in my prose rather than poetry, discussed issues of race and religion in the Chicago setting, where they are such prominent features. In Chicago I taught English and ESL in the City Colleges, where I saw the struggles of many immigrants and minority residents. My second novel, American Heaven, is about a Polish immigrant living in Chicago, where instead of being a mathematician, she now cares for an elderly black man.

My own childhood was spent in a bilingual household since my grandmother, who had gone deaf from meningitis in Russia, lived with us and only spoke Yiddish. I could understand Yiddish perfectly though I only spoke it reluctantly. I wanted to be as “American” as the next kid though I now realize the uniqueness of my experience.

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?

Since 1988, I’ve been composing “books” or longer series of poems. I began as a poet who quickly turned to the prose poem and then moved toward fiction. When I came back to poetry from fiction, it was with a book length project, an abcedarium called Japan (Avenue B Press) of sound poems, all 27 lines long with five letter titles. Since then I’ve written several longer poems including a series involving the relationship of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz, a series of poems based on Emerson’s essays, and a series of prose poems written as dialogues (all included in my book World: Poems 1991-2001 (Salt Publishing 2001). Then I wrote a series of poems on gift theory (gathered from anthropology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, primarily) called Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005). When I wrote my three novels, I always knew that I was engaged in long work. One uses a different part of the mind for long projects, an architectural sense one needn’t consider for a single poem or short story. I’ve come to prefer longer projects though my next book, The Turning, is composed of shorter works, some of which were longer works that didn’t grow to be quite as long as I’d expected.

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

I do give readings and attend them—-one can’t help doing so in San Francisco. I sometimes feel the urge to write if I’m hearing work that particularly interests me. Readings were more important for me when I was a younger writer wanting to see as many poets as I could. In my twenties there was a very good Monday night series at the Body Politic in Chicago where Ted Berrigan was then living. People would visit Ted and read there or come through town to read at a university and also read at the Body Politic. I attended religiously and even met my husband, Paul Hoover, there.

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?

It would be hard to state what the current questions are other than for myself. My recent books have been engaged with writing more as investigation or research than as result. Both reading about and reading through texts from Emerson’s essays to gift theory to Hannah Arendt to Mike Davis’s brave and angry environmental sociology has engaged me in poetry in a way that’s given my projects renewed energy. We are living in perilous times, and I hope that my writing is exploring and addressing some of these perils.

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

Since I am married to Paul Hoover and both of us are poets and editors of a magazine together (New American Writing), I’m quite used to being on both sides of the process. The only book that I ever wrote that suffered some editorial interference was my first novel, which needed some guidance, to be sure. But I can’t say that either my editors or I quite knew how to improve the book we had decided to publish. It was a frustrating process and had unimpressive results--my first novel still reads like a first novel. Paul and I also serve as first readers of each other’s work, but we’ve never been line editors for each other. It’s more a general nod or a discussion when needed.

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

I think it gets harder as one grows more knowledgeable about the possibilities of what a book can be. At first one is delighted to be published. Then one becomes perhaps more cautious in putting a book together. One’s own expectations grow, not for the reception of the book but for the engagement with it as its writer.

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

I bought two Comice pears today and hope to eat them by, say, Sunday or Monday at the latest—it’s up to them.

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

NO ANSWER TO THIS.

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

It’s always been about necessity for me. When I wrote fiction, that felt “correct” for me at the time. As I said before, the genres and long or short projects engage different parts of one’s brain. Non-fiction has always felt secondary to me. I’ve written literary essays, reviews, and talks if I’ve been asked to--and a few angry political diatribes (my favorite)--, but there’s always a particular occasion for these writings.

The good thing about writing poetry and fiction is how no one expects one to. Marilynne Robinson read from Gilead at my university. Someone asked her what people were saying when she hadn’t produced a novel in so many years (There are twenty-six years between it and her earlier beautiful book Housekeeping.) She said that the nice thing about writing is how little anyone expects from you.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write in spurts. I can be tremendously taken up with something or relatively idle. When idle as a writer, I’m actively reading, of course. Everything one does finally feeds the writing.

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

Lots of reading, seeing lots of good mainly foreign films, and doing other things related to writing like editing the magazine or, in one case, translating 220 pages of the German poet Freidrich Hölderlin with Paul Hoover for a book that will be published later this year by Omnidawn Press.

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

My latest book of poems, The Turning, is an angry book. The war and policies of this government have just about driven me mad, and some of the poems in the book express that frustration. Many books I’m currently reading are about the terrible world that my country has created, particularly in the last eight years of Bush and Cheney. The only fiction I’ve written in seven years is one story about a woman who has decided not to get out of her pajamas until Bush leaves office.

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 in the form of wanting our planet to outlast my children and their children; music in the form of jazz and some world music that I’ve come to know through Paul and my sons, both of whom are musicians; foreign films that are subtle about human relations. I love so many directors and luckily live near a very good “art house,” a vanishing species, where four good films are usually playing at a time. And always visual art. Growing up in Chicago, there was the wonderful Art Institute. Many visual artists are important to me. Today I’ve been thinking about Joseph Cornell’s boxes.

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

Again, more writers than I could possibly name, so I’ll only mention a few. Early in my career, Borges, Cortazar, Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Neruda, Vallejo, Michaux, Mandelstam, Cendrars, Ponge, Pessoa, and in fiction Woolf, Paley, Coover, Malamud, Marquez, Sebald, Lydia Davis. Among important poets are Schuyler, Elmslie, Guest, Dickinson, Creeley, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, and of course Friedrich Hölderlin. My husband and poetry friends are important poetic influences on me. And I’m constantly impressed by some of my best students and the young writers we publish in New American Writing.

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

I’d like to travel more. I’ve been to many places to read or teach or give talks including Australia, Brazil, Russia, Germany. and China. I’d like to keep doing that kind of travel where one gets to see a place and spend time or travel with some of its writers.

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’ve been a writer, an editor, a teacher or professor and a mother forever, so I think I’d like to do less, not more. When I was little, I wanted to be a senator.

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

Writing was a way of thinking on paper. I liked to think and I liked to write. On the other hand, as much as I liked to think, I didn’t particularly want to do it extemporaneously or publicly. So writing seemed to be a way to quietly audit my own ideas and shape them in a direction.

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

I just finished Fall of the House of Bush by Craig Unger. Astonishing portrait of the arrogance and malevolence of this administration. The last wonderful movie I saw (for maybe the fourth time) was Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, where a sound engineer, a comical fellow with a broken foot, goes to Lisbon to work on a movie. But the invitation to Lisbon is old and his director friend is gone, so he spends the days roaming the streets and recording sounds. At night he reads Pessoa. It’s a very beautiful film. Paul has a poem about it in his book, Poems in Spanish. Since answering this question, I’ve seen another wonderful movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, amazing visually, narratively and emotionally.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m in a reading, movie, music phase, having just finished the translating and proofing of all that Hölderlin. I assume I’ll begin a new collection of poems soon.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Logan Ryan Smith

Logan Ryan Smith was born in Sacramento, CA in 1977. He was a c-section baby and thusly has a very nicely shaped head. He attended St. Lawrence Catholic School in Sacto until the beginning of the 7th grade when his family up and moved way up north to tiny Crescent, CA, where he attended Crescent Elk Junior High—a public school. There he began skateboarding, fighting, stealing, drinking, and smoking, as any good Catholic school escapee would do. At the beginning of his freshman year of high school he was once again pulled from his comfort zone and put into a new school, this time on the opposite end of the state, in Brawley, CA. Logan graduated from Brawley Union High School in 1995, weighing 145 pounds, and just reaching 5’7”. Because of a lack of a growth spurt during his high school years, Logan learned to be quiet. Very quiet. Since then, Logan put on 20 pounds, and sprouted to the towering height of 5’9”. Not much else has happened…

Oh, Logan now lives in San Francisco and is the publisher of small town—a poetry magazine—and TRANSMISSION PRESS, a poetry chapbook series. His first book, THE SINGERS, was published by Dusie Press Books in the summer of ’07. Later in that year The San Francisco Bay Guardian recognized him for his publishing efforts in their Best of the Bay 2007 issue. He also released, under the TRANSMISSION PRESS imprint, his own book, STUPID BIRDS—a collection of early chapbooks and long poems. Other poetry can be found in New American Writing, Hot Whiskey Magazine, Bombay Gin, string of small machines, the tiny, Sorry for Snake, Spell, Mirage #4/ Period(ical), The Boog City Reader, and in various other terrific mags, as well as in the anthologies, Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and The Meat Book (Hot Whiskey Press). He can always be found here: theredgummibear.blogspot.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book changed my life in the same way it changes many poets lives in that it made me *feel* like people (other than my friends) were now thinking of me as a "poet". The second someone decides they like yr work and wants to glue it to a spine with a front and back cover, people start thinking of you differently—suddenly yr poetry is a topic of conversation. It’s nice, but in the end, I don’t know if that means a whole lot.

In other aspects, my first book, THE SINGERS, was the first book I'd written of that length. So it changed my life in that it's sort of set me up with the knowledge that I can work out a book of any particular length, whatever the book dictates.

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

I've lived in SF now since August of 1997. I came here to attend SFSU. It's hard for me to say how or if geography really has an impact on my writing. I've spent most of my adult life here in SF, after having grown up in the suburbs of Sacramento and the small towns of Crescent City and Brawley, CA. And since most of my adult life has been in the city, juxtaposing the small town life and thoughts of my youth, I guess it has to have had some effect. My environment does seep into my writing, so there are cityscapes, noise, and people everywhere in my poems. How specific that is to SF, I don't know. Not very, probably.

But outside of the physical geography of my place, I'd say SF has had a large impact on my overall writing. When I moved here I was very green and not very well-read, at all. It took me a while to really let go of my mostly ungrounded conservative concerns about writing and poetry, as well as my “ego”. I made friends with the poets John Sakkis and Brandon Brown around 2002, and they were more aware of the Bay Area's current poetry situation, and also the history of the place. They discussed the idea of the "book" a lot, and I didn't completely get it until I met Benjamin Hollander and Larry Kearney and saw how their books were always a complete unit, and not just a collection of singular, stand-alone poems. Then I read Stacy Doris and Norma Cole and other Bay Area poets writing "books". Then, of course, I really got into Spicer and Duncan, and I think that's cemented a lifelong love affair with the "book". Without the book, I don't think I could complete anything.

3 - Where does a poem 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?

Somehow I've conveniently answered this in the previous question! But, yeah, I am almost always writing a "book" from the very beginning. If I'm not writing a book, I have a hard time figuring out what the point of writing is. Why bother?

The whole process is very organic, so I never know the length of the book, or what it'll be about. It's always a cold start. I sit at the keyboard, I punch the keys until there needs to be a page break, and I continue until basically I get tired of it or just plain tired. Then I'll come back to it again later, sometimes looking over what I wrote previously. But on the whole, I try not to read too much of what I'd already written, and just continue. And I don't do any editing until the book hits the wall and tells me to shut the fuck up.

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

Until recently I haven't had many opportunities to give public readings. So far, I can't say it's affected my creative process. I enjoy giving readings, though. I mean, who doesn't want a captive audience?

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?

As I stated before, the writing process for me is very organic. So, I'm not sure. I kind of have to look at my poetry as I would someone else's. I think I'm trying to find a kind of music in my poetry, but I don't know what questions that music poses or answers, if any. It could just be about the search. I don’t know.

As for theory, if I have one about poetry, it's still developing. Personally, though, I'm not interested in it.

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

When I first began taking poetry seriously, and when I first started writing the kind of poetry that's lead to what I'm writing today, I think I definitely found it essential. I often sent my books to Larry Kearney to read and edit as he pleased, as well as some friends, and that was enormously helpful. However, I think you get to a point after writing for a while that an editor becomes more of an obstacle and a distraction. Once you've got some kind of grasp on what yr doing, you'll see that an editor is usually trying to shape yr voice to theirs. I think having a second or third pair of eyes, or an “editor,” works for minimalist and process or form-oriented poets, but not for me. So, nowadays when I ask someone to look over something of mine, I usually only want to know if they think it works. Usually, if someone starts doing line-edits on my books I want to kick their fuckin' teeth in. Usually. But not always.

That said, I try to always keep an open mind to what people think about my poetry, critically and emotionally. But in the end, I don't believe in perfection, so...

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

Well, I started publishing the poetry mag, small town, in 2001 or so, and then the Transmission Press chapbook series began in 2006. I'd say that the process gets easier, just from repetition, but the repetition begins to get more tedious. But there's always a bit of unbridled excitement, for me, when I first begin to put together someone's book, and then even more so as I finish the book and get it into the poet's and others' hands. All the stuff in between, though, quite frankly, can be a bit of an f’n drag. But, of course it's worth it.

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

That reminds me, I've been doing a pretty good job lately eating vegetables regularly, but I rarely ever eat fruit. Every Saturday, though, I drink a quart of orange juice. Does that even everything out?

But, to answer yr question, I was probably 5 the last time I ate a pear. Five or 15. Maybe 25. I don't know.

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

When I was very young my dad once told me, "Don't eat the yellow snow." To this day I heed that advice, as should everyone.

The other best piece of advice I've heard is one I give myself, and that's "c'est la fuck it".

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I definitely do not have a writing routine. When I am writing I may develop a bit of a routine, though. For instance, I wrote THE SINGERS in June of '05 when I was unemployed and seriously broke and living in Boulder, CO (I lived there for a short 9 months). I made an effort to write every night, with loud music and my bottle of TAAKA vodka ($7 for 1.75 liters) by my side. And when June finished so did the book.

And then with my most recent and unpublished book, IN A STATE, I made it a point to write every Wednesday with a couple bottles of Five Oaks Cabernet ($2.50 a bottle) by my side--and loud music. I only stopped writing into that book when I realized I wasn't writing on Wednesdays anymore.

I see a pattern developing.

But, other than that, I write when I do. Once things start, then I find the groove to which me and the work will fit into.

A typical day, though, begins with me coming to my shitty office job that allows me to keep up on the blogs, emails, cnn.com, baseball news, and to answer questions like these. Which is pretty great, really.

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

My writing gets stalled a lot, as I guess I tend to write in spurts. I guess I often turn to other outlets. I'm a complete amateur in everything, but I'll maybe try painting or writing some music. I will often return to certain poets, though, too, such as Lisa Jarnot, Spicer, Kearney, etc. The classics like THE ILIAD and others get me going, too. Reading a lot is often a good idea. Listening to music is always a big part of the return.

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

My unpublished manuscript, IN A STATE, is quite a different book, I think, than THE SINGERS, and certainly much different than STUPID BIRDS. (By the way, THE SINGERS was published before STUPID BIRDS, but STUPID BIRDS is the older book.) Anyway, IN A STATE drifts away a bit from the dissonant music of THE SINGERS. Its theme is more uniformed throughout and its voice is more direct.

I find that, for me, things do change pretty noticeably from book to book. THE SINGERS was a rather stylistic book, in that the music of it is very loud, I think. IN A STATE, I don't know, maybe is more "content-driven”. As for STUPID BIRDS, that book is really different from the other two because it is earlier work, and is definitely more influenced and reflective of today's idea of the lyric poem.

By the way, do the S's in the titles of my books lead to confusion as to which is which? Are my titles all starting to sound the same? Hmmm.

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?

Music definitely influences my books. When I wrote THE SINGERS I often let lines from the songs I was listening to enter the poem to either be morphed or used as a springboard. Music continues to be an influence because I'll always want to achieve the feeling music gives me, that ambiance or otherworldlyness, and also that wordless, emotional connection (or communication) that's so immediate.

I'm also very intrigued by science and nature, and love reading up on new discoveries, or watching programs. I expect it to have a bigger influence on me at some point. I especially love anything about stars and space and the universe expanding or contracting. It's all so f'n mysterious and adventurous.

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

My friends are the most important.

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

I would really like to see every ballpark in America, and the one they got up there in Toronto, too. And even though I hate the Yankees, I'd like to get out to New York this year and catch a game there before they tear the place down. I've not yet gone to Yankee Stadium.

In regard to poetry, I would have to say: everything else.

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?

I'd really like to play centerfield for the Giants, but they just signed some guy for $60 mil over 5 years; also, my friends say that because I'm only 5'9" that I'd fit in better as a second baseman. However, I think that's bullshit. I've got mad hustle and a fiery spirit. I'd be an awesome centerfielder.

In reality, though, I'm not qualified for a whole hell of a lot. To which I'd like to say: Thank you very much San Francisco State University--oh, and: FUCK YOU. I'm in debt FOREVER!

But, you know.... Um, if this was a parallel world of options, and I had a completely different brain capable of these sorts of things, I think being a scientist, studying space would be pretty neat. I had a very realistic dream the other night where I was being sent into space in a rocket, and though I'm pretty terrified of flying, I remember that in the dream I knew it was worth the risk. Ummm.

I also kind of wish I'd gotten my degree in Classics, so I could have studied them more and also learned Greek and Latin. I might not mind teaching the classics as an occupation, even though I can’t really imagine myself being a teacher at all. I’m not fond of the university system.

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

I'm not good at anything else.

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

Dorothea Lasky's AWE was a seriously beautiful book, full of the kind of breathtaking and powerful lyricism I really enjoy in poetry. That book touched on a lot of large themes that are pretty traditional in poetry, such as love and God, but the honesty to which she met them was so grand, and so full of wild imagination that AWE is a book that stands alone, with a voice that's rarely heard in poetry.

The last great film? That's a tough one as I'm mostly let down by movies these days. I really really loved STARDUST, though. That was the one with Claire Danes and her very nicely achieved English accent. It's a fantasy movie with a fairytale type of love story and it was THE SHIT. I'd put it up there with THE PRINCESS BRIDE and THE NEVERENDING STORY.

In contrast to that, I was also really struck by my recent viewing of DEAD RINGERS, a Cronenburg movie about these twin gynecologists. It was a seriously disturbing tale of narcissism and self-destruction.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I'm pretty much done with IN A STATE. I think it has a fork in it. So, I'm mostly working on a chapbook called THE NOTES, which was written by salvaging some decent lines and stanzas that were cut from THE SINGERS. Originally THE SINGERS was very, very long and I had to cut a shitload from it, and so some good stuff got left by the wayside. I'd never done anything like it—gone back to a part of a book I’d thrown away—but I decided to pick apart the pieces that were cut away already and write into and around them. THE NOTES ends up sounding a lot like THE SINGERS, but it also has a direction completely separate from it. I don't know. I'm only tinkering with it now, though I think it's done.

I feel I'm ready, though, to get it on with a new book real soon.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Margaret Christakos

photo credit: Zephyr Christakos-Gee

Margaret Christakos is a Toronto-based writer who has published six collections of poetry and a novel. Her most recent poetry books were published by Coach House Books: Sooner (2005), nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Excessive Love Prostheses (2002), winner of the ReLit Award. Three other Christakos titles with excellent small presses are wipe.under.a love (Mansfield, 2000), The Moment Coming (ECW, 1998) and Other Words for Grace (Mercury, 1994). Her novel Charisma was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award in 2001. Three recent poetry chapbooks further her experimentalism with gender: My Girlish Feast, from Belladonna, 2006, Adult Video, from Nomados, 2006, and Retreat Diary, from Book Thug, 2005. She has won the Bliss Carman Award which comes with a very nice turquoise ring. Christakos also works as a creative writing educator with a variety of organizations and institutions; in recent years she has taught at Glendon College, University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and Writers in Electronic Residence (WIER); as well she offered consultation to students throughout her Canada Council residency at the University of Windsor English Department in 2004-05 and taught creative writing from 1992 to 1997 at the (then-named) Ontario College of Art. As a supplement to her writing, she curates and facilitates poetry projects in the Toronto community and, as a paid coordinator in 2003-04, developed a readings program with PEN Canada in support of persecuted international writers living in exile in Canada. For a decade she worked as an editor with cultural magazines and publishers. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from York University (Visual Arts) and an MA from OISE (History and Philosophy of Education). She and her partner have three children. Despite such domestic foolishness, Margaret has sustained a multigenre writing practice, given readings and seminars across Canada, and generally insisted upon the value of poetry to contemporary culture since her first book Not Egypt was published in 1989, a manuscript originally brought to Coach House by her primary mentor bpNichol.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It was a disappointing experience that required me to toughen up. There was very little response. More formative was the reality that bpNichol who’d brought my book to Coach House died the year before it was published. Such a loss. He hinged diverse practitioners together, built an intergenerational community. Most of the other senior writers in Toronto were ego-driven, insecure maybe, exclusionary. I keep that in mind all the time: no matter who’s getting the “goods,” a vibrant artistic community cannot exist without engagement with emerging artists, formally inventive artists and senior artists.

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’ve been in Toronto for two decades, plus I spent 1980-84 at York University.

I grew up with hills, rock, lakes and short cuts. I like living in the west end of Toronto currently near the Humber because the terrain is not a grid. But I do love dense urban cores, and the freedom they afford to me as a pedestrian.

Race and racialization, and concepts, namings and practices of gender, are aspects of human identity and social structure I think about a lot.

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 ingurgitate and project. I love to write and so have multiple projects gurgitating. I generally have an intense vision of structure and conceptual and formal scope for each project, and a completion fixation. It’s funny, I don’t think there’s much use in asking me questions about my work as if you haven’t read any of it. What’s that about? What kind of a conversation can we have. Is the idea that all the writers you interview are blank slates and/or that readers are? I shouldn’t have to start from square one and biographize myself into existence and relevance. Unless I’m trying to pick you up and I’m not. I don’t like to think of readers that way either, seduce them into finding me interesting. I wish the work would get read and then be the platform of discussion. That’s what this country needs, people intrigued with discussing work.

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

They are part of it. I get paid a little for most readings and this becomes part of the patchwork economy on which I can say “I make a living as a writer.”

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 vast questions (vastions!) wrapped up in a couple dozen words. I don’t find it that useful to yak on about this stuff extraneous to an actual conversation. I have a lot of theoretical concerns behind, in front of and inside my writing. I am thoughtful about why write, what write, how write, all of it.

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

Deeply depends on the editor. I really appreciate it when the editor is engaged enough to write a blurb for my book, instead of asking me to write promo text. I hate that.

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

Each book is its own making.

I routinely have depressed episodes where I can’t think of one good reason to publish another book ever. Usually some person says something to me, unbeknownst to them, that encourages me to validate my own artistic seriousness and continue. Actually, I’ve realized I’m becoming less and less eligible to do any other kind of work. Maybe retail. I’m pretty good at math.

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

A few days ago.

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

Calm the fuck down, Margaret.

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

It’s been easy but my earlier fiction was very poetic, coyly so. I had a beef about plot, like plot was too normative. I’m still very attracted to narrative that is built of micro-events, but I am interested in how subjects experience these events, how people move through events and events move through people. I observe more closely the physical world I occupy. I’m starting to be a better fiction writer now, since I started teaching seriously. I’ve had to learn a lot of stuff I never knew or studied in the past.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write continually. I have children who I make breakfast for, so that’s how my day begins.

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

In Northern Ontario there’s an expression: if you don’t like the weather wait five minutes. That’s me and writing. If I don’t have an idea, I wait five minutes. I have never not had things that make me curious and impelled. Although I can get overly hung up on repeating themes and gestures. I’m getting better with that, less knotted.

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

It is continuous and discontinuous from my earlier work. I’ve got two books on the go. Both are better writing than earlier work, is one difference. It’s all much less controlled by romanticism. It’s better grounded in observation, and my innovations are more leaps anchored in the evolution of my peculiar body of work and less regurgitative. I’m better with complexity and much better with simplicity.

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?

Being in the company of children and understanding the way they think and feel is a major influence and passion in my life. I’m also influenced by many other art discourses.

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

Many.

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

So much. Too much. Everything.

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 think I would have probably been in the publishing industry as an editor or publisher. I do lament that I didn’t keep with magazine work—I think magazines are very important. I had twins in 1997 and I became quite focused on domestic labour. Endless and interesting.

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

I love visual communication and art, and/but I seem to need language in a way, like I have a thirst for it that is quite strident. I wonder why that is. Sometimes I think I was in silence too much of the time when very young, I was one of those humans who really wanted things explained in words.

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

Divisadero. A major achievement. I wonder what M.O. will do next. This book will keep teaching me for many years.

I haven’t seem too many films that have startled and shaped my thinking this year. I used to be a maniac for film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I'm trying to figure out how to maintain a livelihood as a writer. I'm paying off taxes and trying not to faint while doing it. I'm engaging in teaching and event coordination. I'm raising my kids and the community that extends from them. I’m working on a new novel, and a new book of poetry. I'm reading and trying to learn. And designing the fourth Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon, which runs April to June at U of T School of Continuing Studies.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Stephen Morrissey

Stephen Morrissey has published seven books of poetry: The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1978); Divisions (Coach House Press, Toronto 1983); Family Album (Caitlin Press, Vancouver, 1989); The Compass (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1993); The Yoni Rocks (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1995); The Mystic Beast (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997); Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978-1998 (The Muses' Company, Winnipeg, 1998).

Morrissey has also published chapbooks of his poems: Poems of a Period (Montreal, 1971); The Divining Rod (Greensleeve Editions, Edmonton, 1993); The Beauty of Love (The Poem Factory, Vancouver, 1993); The Carolyn Poems (The Poem Factory, Vancouver, 1994); 1950 (The Poem Factory, Vancouver, 1996); Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue (Coracle Press, Montreal, 2005), and Remembering Artie Gold (Coracle Press, Montreal, 2007).

Morrissey also published two poetry magazines, what is (1973-1975) and The Montreal Journal of Poetics (1978-1985); in 2000, he and Carolyn Zonailo began Coracle Press, he continues to publish and edit chapbooks for the press. La béte mystique, (Les Editions Tryptyque, Montreal, 2004), is a French translation by Elizabeth Robert of Morrissey’s The Mystic Beast. Morrissey’s poetry has also been translated into French by Pierre DesRuisseaux and published in bilingual anthologies. Stephen Morrissey and Tom Konyves [see his 12 or 20 here] edited the anthology, The Vehicule Poets_Now (The Muses’ Company, Winnipeg, 2004).

Morrissey wrote and published on-line a comprehensive history of his family, Patrick Morrissy and Mary Phelan: Some of their Descendants and Relatives in Canada, beginning in 1837 when the family moved to Canada from Ireland, to the present day. He is the co-author with Carolyn Joyce of The Aquarian Symbols, The 360 Degrees of the Zodiac (Vancouver, Coracle Press, 2000).

Stephen Morrissey is a member of The Writers' Union of Canada, The League of Canadian Poets, and PEN Canada.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I was born in Montreal, a city with a long history of poets and artists. Irving Layton lived a few blocks from our home, and Louis Dudek’s book reviews were in the newspaper most weekends. F.R. Scott was well known as a poet but also as a champion of human rights. When I met the other Vehicule Poets in the early 1970s, I took for granted that I was a part of community of poets: We organized poetry readings, several of us became editors at Vehicule Press, and we respected each other. A friend from high school published a chapbook for me, Poems of a Period, in 1971 and then my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press) was published in 1978. Louis Dudek wrote a short introduction to the book. I received letters, all very gracious and welcoming, from the older poets, including John Glassco and F.R. Scott. Poets in Montreal were working in a tradition of poetry; it was a part of our community, probably more so than anywhere else in Canada. My first book deepened and affirmed my work as a poet that I had begun when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old.

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

Montreal is Ville Marie, the City of Mary, a city of churches and spirituality and poetry. My family has lived here since 1845. Even if I were to live in Toronto or Vancouver—both wonderful cities—my consciousness, my history, my imagination, have been formed by living in Montreal. I am referring to how an apprehension of a specific place imbues one’s work with a personal mythology; that specific place represents something larger, it represents the human consciousness and the human condition.

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

I have always worked towards book length collections of poems. I used to run home for lunch when I was in high school and I’d listen to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band. That long-play album represented what I wanted to do in a book of poetry: It was to sustain a single concept throughout the length of the book. I also remember reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and imagining all of my future work as a single continuum, a single vision of life.

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

A public reading is something poets do to get their work known a bit better, to promote a book, to promote themselves, or to be a part of a poetry community. The writing, the creative work, is done alone. Readings are the work you do because poets are expected to bring their work to the public.

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?

All writers, all poets, have theoretical concerns. There has always been theory in literature just as there has always been criticism, going back to Plato and Aristotle. I don’t subscribe to any current theories of literature, but I am open to ideas from different theories. My theoretical concerns are as a poet-critic, influenced by Jungian psychology, and ideas from a New Critical “formalism.”

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

Some poets can edit their own work, others need someone to edit the work for them; every book is different. Carolyn Zonailo, who founded Caitlin Press in Vancouver, is both a brilliant poet and poetry editor. CZ has edited several of my books and I appreciate the work she has done for me.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

There seems to be more to do as I get older and less time and energy in which to do it; a lot of things are harder as we get older because of this.

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

I remember eating pears at a cousin’s home on Railway Street in Woodstock, Ontario, where we used to visit many years ago. She had a tree with different types of pears grafted onto it behind her house. I always found that interesting, one tree but different types of pears growing on it. Amateur horticulturalists don’t do that type of thing anymore.

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

CZ gives me good advice all the time; she likes to quote the following: Regarding public events, Edward, The Prince of Wales, who later abdicated the thrown in the 1930s, said: “Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down. Always use the facilities when you have an opportunity.”

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?

This depends on my teaching schedule. If I’m not teaching, then I usually write in the morning. I write a diary entry every day, and have done so since January 14, 1965. I steal time from other activities so that I can get the work done.

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

If you are looking for something to do when you can’t write poems there is always translation. George Johnston, who was a friend for many years, told me that when he wasn’t writing poems he could always translate Icelandic Sagas into English. If I am not writing poems, I am always busy with something: writing book reviews and critical articles, writing letters, doing research, organizing papers, publishing chapbooks for Coracle Press, taking photographs, working on web site content, reading, and so on. There is always something to do, and I haven’t included family life and teaching in this. Eventually, if you’re patient, you will return to writing poems.

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

I have a completed manuscript, Girouard Avenue, waiting for me to find a publisher. While I’m still concerned with themes that are in my previous books, the new work is also concerned with geography/place, history, and Spirit.

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?

Poets are fairly porous and many experiences influence them. My old friend Guy Birchard once told me that poets are always working, even when sitting looking out the window. I would add that while it is not done consciously, I am always alert for poetic material, for archetypes, associations, synchronistic experiences, and something meaningful and transformative in awareness; what ends up in a poem usually isn’t known in advance.

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

My reading is pretty much only poetry, biographies or autobiographies of poets, and books on poetics. Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and W.C. Williams have all been important to me.

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

I have never really wanted to do anything in life but write poems. I was lucky to have found a teaching job back in 1976 and I’ve stayed with it and enjoyed teaching. Writing poetry is the activity that I have found most meaningful to my life.

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

Poets have two jobs: The job that pays the bills and the job of writing their poems. Other jobs I have done or could have done: I have done the inventory and archival work for CZ’s fifty-five boxes of literary papers held at Simon Fraser University and the two accruals of my own literary papers, about thirty boxes, including writing the inventory, held at the McLennan Library at McGill University. I have written poems since I was fourteen years old and I have taught since I was twenty-six year old. I am not temperamentally suited for a nine-to-five job.

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

What made me write goes back to a dream, from when I was quite young, that I have written about elsewhere (http://stephenmorrissey.ca/articles_reviews/SM_Mapping.html). I used to think everyone had similar life-changing dreams, but then I learned that they are quite rare. However, I listened to the dream and somehow I knew that it was an important message telling me that I had to record the events in my life or I would lose an essential part of my inner being. Because of the dream, I began keeping a diary; and then the dream also lead me to write poems, which I enjoyed doing because I liked being alone and I liked writing.

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

In the last month I’ve read The Poet’s Work (edited by Reginald Gibbons), a book that had sat unread on my bookshelf for the last fifteen years; I recommend it to every poet. Also James Schuyler’s Selected Poems, he is an excellent poet, recommended to me many years ago by Artie Gold. Last night I reread some poems by David Ignatow, and was reminded how much I enjoy his work. Earlier today I read some poems by Patrick Kavanagh, what a great poet! Two films that CZ and I watch at least once or twice a year are Howard’s End and A Passage to India.

20 - What are you currently working on?

In the last ten years, since Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems 1978-1998 (The Muses’ Company) was published, I have completed a manuscript, Girouard Avenue, as well as worked on other manuscripts of poems. I have written and published, on-line, my family history. This was an enormous task, requiring years of research and study and writing, and the work has deepened and informed the poems I am now working on. I believe in honouring the ancestors and this was my way to do this. The work of assembling the content for my website is the equivalent of writing and editing a book, and I was honoured that my son designed and put both the family history site and the poetry site online. In 2000, CZ and I began Coracle Press, which publishes on-line chapbooks; I believe it is important for poets to control something of the means of publishing their own work and the work of other poets.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Rita Wong

Rita Wong's new book, forage, is now available from Nightwood Editions. Her first book of poetry Monkeypuzzle (Press Gang 1998) won the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award. She has published prose works and poems in Parser (2007), Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury 2006), Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literatures in English (Oxford, 2006), Ribsauce: a CD/Anthology of Words by Women (Véhicule 2001), The Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War (Three Squares 2003), and Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry (Arsenal Pulp 1999), and more. She teaches in the Critical + Cultural Studies program at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and is also a visiting instructor at the University of Miami.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

After the book was published, I went on a tour called Writers for Change with four other writers—Ashok Mathur, Tamai Kobayashi, David Odhiambo and Rajinderpal S. Pal. Organized by Larissa Lai, the tour was a great experience; we visited schools and various venues from Vancouver all the way to the Black Cultural Centre in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. It was a wonderful experience that helped me to better appreciate how writing is both fed by and gives back to many different communities. The readings and talks that have come about because of the book have balanced my introvert tendencies by reminding me of how much there is to learn and enjoy in public interactions.

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

I moved to the unceded Coast Salish lands known as Vancouver to enter the Archival Studies program at UBC in 1994, and ended up staying. I feel strongly connected to both Calgary and Vancouver. When I moved here, part of Vancouver’s attraction was the existence of groups like the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop and feminist publications like Kinesis (which sadly closed down in 2001). My first book was published by Press Gang, a feminist press whose loss I mourn.
Apart from being grateful for the work of feminists, socialists, environmentalistis, and anti-racist activists (and more) who came before me and make my work possible, I am interested in thinking about the ways in which race, gender, and class continue to work in taken-for-granted or normalized ways, and how examining this can challenge power imbalances. Language, perception, and action are all intertwined; race or gender or class are lenses through which to analyse our assumptions and our desires. They are part of a larger picture that I am increasingly thinking about in terms of relationship to land, older cultures and what it might mean to decolonize in this day and age.

The artist Mike Macdonald once quoted an elder, who said the crime in this land was not just that indigenous peoples had their language and culture beaten out of them in residential schools, but that the people who came here did not adopt the culture of the land (in Revisions, Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1992). I feel I will spend the rest of my life trying to learn and articulate the culture of this land. While race and gender are social mechanisms that have been used to divide and conquer (Komagata Maru, Chinese Head Tax, Japanese Canadian internment being historical examples that come readily to mind), focusing on what it means to be a steward of the land, and respectfully learning from the wealth of diverse work produced by indigenous writers and artists is a huge influence on my work.

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?

A poem can begin with a feeling, a word, a sound, an experience, an intuition. I tend to write short bits that accumulate over time. There are recurring obsessions and themes, though they are not always conscious when I begin writing.

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

Public speaking did not come easily to me, but it is a way to contribute to a larger conversation, and when I’ve taken the risk to speak up, I’ve been happily surprised and grateful when people in the audience share their responses and knowledge.

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 want to understand what it means to act ethically in a globalized world. For instance, as someone who relies heavily on computers, I am implicated in the degradation and eventual destruction of ecosystems (mining for coltan, for instance), and I am also related to the labour of people whom I may never meet, but who nonetheless help make my work and my life possible. How do I reconcile my intent (to work toward peace and social justice) with my consumption patterns as a citizen in North America? Writing offers a space to explore these difficult, uncomfortable questions, and the form that such writing takes may also be uncomfortable, but I hope that the reading, research, thinking and feeling that I do will be useful to readers who struggle with these questions. This struggle is hard, but it is also hopeful. Delving into our contradictions involves both terror and courage, and a constant querying of the relations between writing and other forms of action. What shifts in consciousness and behaviour are needed for us to co-exist peacefully with each other and other life forms? We are living in the midst of a mass extinction, a rapidly degrading ecosystem and a warming planet; how we respond to this crisis is a question that pushes me to keep reading, writing and talking. While the problems are serious and daunting, the knowledge and wisdom of many thinkers, writers, and activists is also inspiring (Winona Laduke, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, Vandana Shiva, Dionne Brand, Maude Barlow, and many more, come to mind—I can’t give up when there are so many people doing amazing, compelling work).

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

For my first book, I was very fortunate that Claire Harris agreed to act as an editor. Working with her and Barbara Kuhne (at Press Gang) was a pleasure and an honour, as I reflect back on that process.

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

I packed a Bosch pear in my lunch sometime back in the fall (October? The semester is a blur now), one I purchased at the Granville Island Market. When I can, I buy my fruit from the farmer’s markets. I love to eat local!

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

I’m not sure it’s the best advice, but here’s a recent piece of advice from Rob Brezsny’s horoscope site, which I occasionally turn to for fun and relaxation:

"Dear Rob: Here are my New Year's resolutions. (1) I vow to Siamese-twin together my bad-ass, no-hype, wide-eyed self with my tricky, strategic, puzzle-loving self. (2) I vow to rage on like a dancing warrior in the urban wilderness, keeping peak experiences and total slaphappy victory at the top of my priority list, while at the same time I play hide-and-seek with the dark delicious secrets that fuel my soul's lust for wicked meaning. (3) I vow to deepen the collaborative efforts of my suck-out-the-marrow-and-spit-out-the-bones craziness and my listen-carefully-to-the-flow-of-the-underground-river caginess. -Double Intense Scorpio." Dear Double Intense: Scorpios everywhere will benefit from hearing your resolutions, which is why I've made them 2008's first horoscope.

Gotta laugh and not take myself too seriously sometimes, to balance the hard, serious work. There’s hope and survival in multiple perspectives.

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

Both are ways of thinking out loud in a way that can integrate emotion, body, spirit, and creativity. I like to move around as a writer and reader. The appeal is to give back even a little of what I have been given as a reader. I sometimes say that reading saved my life. I mean it.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a predictable routine, but I admire people who do. During the school term, I don’t get much writing done because I have a heavy course load. In the summers, I would ideally have all day to read and write, but of course, all kinds of activities intervene. I snatch moments to write and scribble regardless of the season, but have more such moments in the summers.

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

I read, read, read. Language inspires. Walking, trying new activities, having time to daydream, talking with friends, watching movies, going to concerts. Meditation. Trips to special places, such as the visiting of old growth forest facilitated by the Utsam (Witness) program which ran for ten years, in which the Squamish Nation generously shared their wild spirit places with urban folks like me. Their work is helping to preserve these endangered spaces, and that is inspiring.

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

Both books have anger, protest, and bewilderment in them, but also joy, love, and humour at times, I hope. Forage continues the process of questioning that led me to write monkeypuzzle. In some ways forage is more experimental in form than my first book, and at times I feel caught between different kinds of readers.

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?

Yes, to all of the above: nature, art, music, science, and more.

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

See questions 5, 16, and 18; I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction as well as poetry. I also want to acknowledge how mentors and writers like Fred Wah, SKY Lee, Roy Miki, Lee Maracle, Jam. Ismail, and Lydia Kwa, have made my writing possible. I could go on forever about writers who matter to me: Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, Ashok Mathur, Walter K. Lew, Marie Annharte Baker, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, Chrystos, Wayde Compton, Roger Farr, Jeff Derksen, Ken Belford, Rob Budde, Si Transken, Louis Cabri, Weyman Chan, Juliana Spahr, David Chariandy, Richard Van Camp, Garry Gottfriedson, Anne Stone, Jacqueline Turner, Phinder Dulai, Garry Morse, and that’s just off the top of my head in no particular order, with many more still missing. The bibliography at the back of forage is also a good place to start. In terms of writing, I also want to acknowledge the importance of dialogues fostered in journals like West Coast Line (edited by Glen Lowry, Michael Barnholden, and others), XCP (edited by Mark Nowak), and more.

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

That’s a secret – I don’t want to jinx it.

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

If I was to start all over again, I wish I could have studied botany. I want to learn more about the ecosystems around me and how they relate to other places in the world—it feels like urgent and necessary knowledge that also happens to be fascinating. Reading books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry has me thinking this way.

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

I love reading and writing, and I followed my heart. This involves good fortune, privilege, and responsibility.

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

I just finished reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which was recommended to me by Wayde Compton [see his 12 or 20 here]. I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction (as you can see if you look at the bibliography at the back of forage), and the images he brings together in this book are going to stay with me for the rest of my life: the North Pacific Gyre, a huge and growing island of plastic garbage that I think will increasingly impact oceanic ecosystems, the Korean DMZ (demilitarized zone) that is full of landmines and empty of people so that birds and wild animals have taken shelter there, among others.

Film:

Bing Ai, a documentary of a woman who refuses to leave her village area even though it has been submerged by the Three Gorges Dam. Her love of the land and her courage is really inspiring.

19 - What are you currently working on?

One, a collaborative poem with Larissa Lai on water. I also hope to teach a course on water next year, and am doing research on that now.

Two, I’m still very involved in exploring the obsessions that forage materializes. I think Walt Whitman spent his whole life writing (and re-writing) one book; I could easily see myself doing that, writing and writing, and someday narrowing/widening it all into one book.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Meredith Quartermain

Meredith Quartermain [Canada] 1950

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Meredith Quartermain spent her childhood in Ontario and the remote interior of British Columbia. At the University of BC she took degrees in English Literature, English Language and Law. After practicing law for three years and then teaching English for seven years at Capilano College, North Vancouver, she left the world of paid employment to write and to run, with husband Peter, Nomados Literary Publishers. Quartermain sat on the collective at the Kootenay School of Writing in 2000-2001, and her work has been loosely associated with the KSW.

Her first book Terms of Sale contains both innovative poetry exploring the non-referential music of language, and poems of place concerned with city life and neighborhoods. Abstract Relations and Spatial Relations continue her exploration of language and innovative form, these works being sections of a longer work in progress shaping itself around the six major sections of Roget's original Thesaurus. The Eye-Shift of Surface is also highly experimental in its form, being constructed in verse paragraphs from materials listed under entries for the letter I and the word eye in the Oxford English Dictionary. In Wanders, Quartermain translates or “transelates” (to use Erin Mouré's term) 19 poems by Robin Blaser – replicating Blaser's syllable count and metrics in her answering poems.

With A Thousand Mornings, Quartermain combined innovative form and language play to explore the streetscape she could see from her window. Rachel Blau Duplessis describes the book as "a serious-playful and engaging work in which she weighs and sounds what presents itself outside a real window, inside language, and through verbal-emotional associations. Written in pointillist phrases, diaristic, notational, associative, punning, funning and just following any track, the work sits down to itself: to the world, and to the self in time."

Vancouver Walking continues her exploration of city life, using what she calls "historical surrealism" to explore the power struggles engraved on the city's face. The book has brought her national attention, with the Toronto Globe and Mail commenting: "Quartermain's poetic tour . . . reads the downtown's every street sign and historical plaque to invoke not vagaries of weather or a sensitive narrator's emotional landscape, but the lived epic of how specific native soil became appropriated to a condition of contemporary real estate."

books of poetry

Terms of Sale (Buffalo: Meow, 1996); Abstract Relations (Vancouver: Keefer Street, 1998); Spatial Relations (Boca Raton, Florida: Diaeresis, 2001); [with Robin Blaser] Wanders (Vancouver: Nomados, 2002); A Thousand Mornings (Vancouver: Nomados, 2002); The Eye-Shift of Surface (Victoria: Greenboathouse, 2003); Vancouver Walking (Edmonton: NeWest, 2005)

1 - How did your first book change your life?

If we think of our lives as just one book (as Friedrich Schlegel did; and as Robin Blaser does, gathering all his poems into one work The Holy Forest), then perhaps we can never answer this question. “Isn’t it unnecessary to write more than one novel, unless the artist has become a new [person]? It’s obvious that frequently all the novels of a particular author belong together and in a sense make up only one novel” (Schlegel, Crit. Frag. 89). One’s whole life an unfolding of a gestural impulse, one’s whole life writing the first and only book.

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’ve lived in Vancouver since 1972 and the Vancouver landscape has been a particular focus of my writing in Vancouver Walking (NeWest 2005) and also in my new book Nightmarker, forthcoming from NeWest 2008. I think it was Creeley who said love, death, and place are three of the abiding themes of poetry from time immemorial. Documenting physical, cultural, poetic geography has absorbed a lot of my attention. It’s impossible not to reflect race, gender and class in one’s work. And can we add species too into that mix, to remind us of our limited view – these coordinates that are our latitude and longitude woven into and weaving the geography of thought and perception. My poems generally are aware of this political geography.

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?

This gets back to the gestural impulse that informs one’s whole being. It’s actually best if you don’t try to control that too much and don’t assume you can master it through rational thought. I’d rather not know where poems come from. On the other hand I rather like Jack Spicer’s notion that they are dictated through me by some sort of energy: “It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message. This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.” He said that in his 1965 Vancouver lectures.

Discovery has always been an important part of my work, writing into what I don’t know, so that the writing takes me to unanticipated places. I have written both collections of individual pieces and book projects but the boundaries of the book project are pretty sketchy at the outset. I generally find I have to write to find out what the project is.

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

I enjoy listening to and giving public readings. Sound patterns are an important part of my writing, and I consciously work to bring them out with a view to oral performance.

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 read philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze or Judith Butler, and I’m currently embarking on a Spinoza reading project. However, abstract knowledge often interferes with moving and interesting writing which emerges as a fusion of heart-felt experience, reflectiveness and wide-ranging awareness of the human condition. Fusion that takes leaps into the unknown, takes risks, gives up control. The workings of language, its possibilities and blind alleys, its illusions and dioramas, its other voicings from other times, the reverence or disgust we give to words – all these are my theoretical concern.

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

A good editor is a gift from heaven – someone who sees what’s emerging in the writing and can make useful suggestions for fine tuning or steer you away from disasters. I enjoy working with ones who see the main gesture, what the work set out to do, and then look at details within that context. In workshop settings, people often focus too much on details like word-choice before looking at the larger gesture in the work and considering how this stands in relation to other contemporary writing, or the goals of the writer.

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

Each book is its own journey.

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

A pair of what?

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

Advice in the abstract, let alone best advice is a nonsensical concept. When you are looking for advice, some will emerge that’s right for that situation.

Over the years, I’ve taped various things to my computer, could be best, could be worst. Here’s one of them:

“The poet is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Here’s another: “To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait: the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait, has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read ‘absent-mindedly.’” (Clarice Lispector).

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

Conventional fiction requires things like plot, unity of view-point, place and time, the building of intrigue or crisis. I don’t write conventional fiction. I’m generally inclined towards ironic juxtaposition rather than the ready-made heroic narrative. My intrigues involve unfolding patterns of words, ideas, characters or inventions in prose poetry. Some call them microfictions.

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’m a morning writer. I go straight from sleeping dreams to waking ones if possible and avoid telephone, email, etc, until mid afternoon. I try to work on creative projects every weekday at least. Later in the day I work on my publishing projects for Nomados.

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

I do research – look things up in dictionaries, encyclopedias, science books, histories. Try to connect to my curiosity which is a form of love. Or I might walk around outside, or do some tai chi. I often find that really good ideas come to me when I stop trying to hunt them down.

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

My most recent book Nightmarker, coming out in the fall from NeWest, is in some ways an extension of the “Vancouver Walking” poems in my last book, involving walks and researches around the city. But Nightmarker occurs in two voices, unlike the fairly consistent voicing of the last book. One voice continues the notebook approach to poems. The other voice comes from an imaginary earth-geist called Geo who writes letters back to the human race.

A second book called “Matter” is coming out from Bookthug and this is quite different from Vancouver Walking. Matter is shaped by the third major division of Roget’s Thesaurus, which is a taxonomy of all the words to do with matter. I have two chapbooks – Abstract Relations and Spatial Relations – which are based on the first two sections of the thesaurus. I was interested in the fact that Roget had created the same kind of taxonomy for words that as a zoologist he used for animals. I was curious about what this means for our sense of matter as distinct from mind. I used Darwin’s Origin of Species as a source book as well.

Poems from both of these books are available on line:

Golden Handcuffs Review 1:7 Winter/Spring 2005-6:
http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh7content/84.html

Green Integer Review 2: http://www.greeninteger.com/green_integer_review/issue_2/index.cfm

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?

Biology, zoology, botany and ecology were part of my undergraduate education and are long-standing interests in my poems. Visual art has been important, too, most recently in West Coast Line 54 where my series “Apprehensions” appears with photographs by Rhoda Rosenfeld.

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

One of my all-time favorites is the Swiss writer Robert Walser – The Assistant, Jakob von Gunten and The Robber are three of his novels available in English. His short pieces in Masquerade and Speaking to the Rose will knock your socks off. His hilarious and heart-rending irony is unbeatable.

I am also very fond of Gertrude Stein, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Gail Scott and Erin Mouré.

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

Go to the Acropolis.

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?

A painter.

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

The funny thing is I had no idea until I was in my mid-30s that I would write. Looking back, though, I recall writing poems when I was in highschool. My father constantly wrote letters, diatribes and Ginsbergish poems. Not for publication, though I think he may have wanted to be a novelist. Maybe that’s why I started writing. Or maybe it was the fact that I ended up studying the work of Creeley, Olson, and Duncan in my undergraduate years. I was very drawn to Robert Creeley’s work, and was lucky enough to meet him a few times.

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

The Shovel by Colin Browne, just out from Talonbooks.

It’s been so long since I saw a really really good film! The History Boys was pretty good.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently just finishing another manuscript of prose-poems or microfictions called Recipes from the Red Planet. These pieces definitely enter new territory for me, working with narrative, and a lot of invention rather than factual material. I’ve had a lot of fun doing them, and had a good time working on them with Nicole Brossard at the Sage Hill Writing Experience.

12 or 20 questions archive