TtD supplement #287 : seven questions for Nicole Markotić

Nicole Markotić is author of five poetry books, including Bent at the Spine (Book*hug), Whelmed (Coach House), and her most recent, After Beowulf (Coach House, 2022), which takes on that iconic hero in fun, funky, and freak-loving ways. She has published three novels, Yellow Pages, Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot, and her Young Adult novel, Rough Patch, and has edited a collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch’s writing, Robert Kroetsch: Essays on His Works. She was poetry editor for Red Deer Press for six years and on the NeWest literary board as one of its fiction editors for over a decade. Markotić currently edits the chapbook series Wrinkle Press, and lives and teaches in Windsor, Ontario.

Her poem “a certainty of bumbles and plumage” appears in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “a certainty of bumbles and plumage.”

A: Well, what’s more “certain” than those two categories?

Also: my way of getting to the bees and the birds...

Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Hmmmm, not sure I can answer that... Sometimes I think I’m working on a series, and one or two poems just don’t fit the rest of what I write (or at least what I’m writing at the time). And sometimes I think I’m trying something entirely new, only to find strange overlaps in my notes or long-forgotten drafts of other pieces.

Poets are perhaps least able to see what we’re up to (at least in the midst of the writing).

I do try to change my habits/modes/methods/form/etc as much as possible as I move through the pages, but I also catch myself falling into familiar patterns (ie, I can’t help but riff off a word’s sounds and suggestive syllabics).

To recap: how the hell should I know?!

Q: What does the process look like for you, feeling your way through new work? Is it a slow assemblage that eventually reveals itself, or are you deliberately pushing through different structures?

A: Well, except for rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, I’m not sure my writing process is ever the same! I often start with a word or sound or phrase that gets to me for some reason. For the “bumbles and plumage” poem, bird sounds took me from the air onto the page, though I didn’t want to replicate the sounds birds make, but rather follow the vitality of those sounds.
 
I would say I do push through structure, with every poem. My first two books of prose poetry tackled the lyric by avoiding it entirely! As all poets do, I need to think about every line break, every indent. At the same time, changing even one word can change the way the whole thing looks on the page. I will choose a word/phrase because I like the look of it, spend days making it “fit,” and then cut it because I’ve edited another part of the poem and this word/phrase no longer makes “sense” for the line. Or: I remember the lyrebird, able to mimic not only other birds, but lawnmowers and camera clicks, which leads me – in a circuitous route – back into the lyric as a generative form.
 
Language reveals not just what we’re thinking about, but how we’re thinking about particular issues. I approach all writing with a political slant (wanting to resist misogyny, racism, attacks on 2SLGBTQIA+ people, class oppression, and ensuring that poetry takes a stand for justice), but I always approach every topic from the level of language. How does this particular word work in this particular context? How does a changed context undercut or reveal the underbelly of each word? How does spelling variation, archaic definitions, grammar, technological typography, punctuation, etc. create a context through which we read supposedly innocuous language?
 
And then: rewrite again!

Q: I’m getting the sense that sound is important to the way you approach writing. How conscious are you of the way a line, a poem, might sound as you work?

A: This one is a bit tricky as I do pay attention to sound as I’m writing, but: I don’t really foreground that awareness until I have a viable draft. Then I read aloud, emphasizing different syllables and line breaks, and see what I hear going on. For example, in that same Touch the Donkey poem, I chose the word “whacked” for the way it sounded in my head, but then changed it to “quack” when I heard it out loud in the context of other words and lines.
 
I’m always envious of poets who play instruments, as I think they have a direct line to musicality that I’m missing. In Fred Wah’s MHT #108 (“Loose Change”), he plays with rhyme and awkward syntax: “I for be was as can set these el em en t’s” to both beguile and cajole the reader. Or HD’s parsing of rosemary into “rose of memory” in By Avon River. My sound appreciation resides at the level of a pun or word-twist, or even just weird quirk in a word that (erroneously) takes the reader off on a sonorous tangent. Or that sonorously takes the reader off on an erroneous tangent.
 
I can’t say how conscious I am during the writing, but certain words or phrases “feel” right. That doesn’t mean I go with the first thing that I think of; I usually try to steer away from my own writing habits that may trap me inside my too familiar routines. But if a sound reverberates through the next words or lines, then the writing process itself helps generate the ongoing anarchy and commotion that I identity as poetry.

Q: Has there been a shift over the years in how you approach that first moment, and then, to the viable draft? With a handful of books and chapbooks and individual works going back more than thirty years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Ah, these impossible questions! 😊
 
I don’t know if I’d call it a shift so much as a deliberate inconsistency. I sometimes start with a word:
 
My entire book Whelmed began because I think it’s funny that certain English words don’t exist without their prefix. I began with a few words (whelmed, couth, gruntled, gregious) and wrote poetic “dictionary” entries for them. Then I discovered just how freaking many words we use that make no sense without their prefix. How do we have words like “refrain” but not “frain”? Or “impervious” but not “pervious”? Suddenly an idea to delve into a few anomalous words turned into an entire book about a strange language quirk that happens over and over and over in English, and we barely notice!
 
I began After Beowulf because the persistent presence of this male hero fascinated me: I notice there’s very little difference between Marvel’s Thor and Beowulf. How little heroic masculinity has changed since the beginnings of narrative poetry intrigued me. And at the same time, there’s been so little narrative attention on Grendel’s mother, a truly neglected literary antagonist. She and Grendel both function as the Other in an otherwise very homogenize society. Yet Grendel becomes a compelling antihero, and Grendel’s mother gets forgotten, or worse—in some books, she can barely articulate a sentence; in some, she’s not even depicted as human (although her son is always humanoid).
 
Some of my books hold together as a cohesive project (as do these two), some collect a bunch of shorter pieces by way of sound or organization or ambition. In Bent at the Spine, I think my main purpose was to make the lineated pieces narrative and the prose pieces disjunctive!
 
My first book, Connect the Dots, I began as a way to take on the lyric address in prose: each section invokes a different “you”: as a way to address the “lover,” as a way to address the actual self, to address plural listeners, as a form of colloquial “one,” etc. Some drafts had a “Horoscope” section, because those always announce to readers that “you” will experience something today. But as much fun as I had with that horoscope one, I cut it (and a few others), because the book evolved into one of family interconnections. So, the initial idea of playing around with lyric address stayed, but some pieces didn’t fit as the book settled into a certain structure.
 
As for the future, I’ve never been great at predictions! At the moment, I’m working poem by poem. They may congeal into a (semi-solid) book, or become one section of a larger manuscript, or get dumped altogether if I come up with something else that ensnares my mind. Poetry is so challenging, and I want to keep challenging myself. To mangle Pound: On with the new!

Q: Your responses hint at the idea that you approach each project, each potential manuscript, as a kind of study. As in the case for After Beowulf, for example, how deep did your research extend? Did you require an amount of research before you began, or is it more organic, through the process of composition?

A: Well, I certainly don’t mean to make my books sound like homework 😊. But, yes, there’s an element of “project” for most of my writing. As for research, don’t get me started on how many Beowulf translations I found! Each one had something to offer, and I usually read and wrote with about seven books (and three online texts) in front of me. There are some incredibly innovative versions, but my favourite to work with were problematic translations: older ones that insisted on a replica hemi-stitch caesura, staid ones that insisted on narrative summation; ones that cut out all the female characters because they just “didn’t matter” to the story. Some of the most useful were children’s books; one represented Grendel as exaggerated and cartoonish masculine humanoid, but Grendel’s mother as an octopus monster. Yes, I may have taken advantage of the worst translations for some of the more humorous portions of my interpretation…
 
The research also took me down very distracting but fun rabbit holes: articles about and artwork depicting Celtic knots, the vital role of freoðuwebbe, a woman who “weaves” together sparring tribal adversaries, usually via marriage (although the word only appears once in Beowulf), same-sex attraction and depictions of sexuality in Mediaeval Anglo-Saxon cultures. I didn’t begin with that kind of research; as I said, much of it was fun diversion. But, my composition process overlaps with how I read, study, explore, and plummet into poetry. I worked with dictionaries beside me, and often stopped “writing” my poetry in order to “translate” a particularly muddy passage. I worked on traditional-type translations to better understand my own approach; and I worked on wildly off-kilter translations, to get at livelier language. After Beowulf is a translation, but (I hope) of the poetics as well as the poetry, using a feminist methodology to weigh in on a feudal society represented as hyper-masculine, and critiquing the way some (often hilarious) critics preserve this jellied text.
 
To be quite honest: I didn’t know I’d undertaken this canonical, epic poem as my next manuscript until I was at least a third of the way through working on it! I wanted to understand Beowulf, definitely in ways he didn’t understand himself. I wanted to loosen Grendel’s mother from the background landscape and relocate her to the foreground of readers’ imaginations.

And: I wanted to write about a dragon!

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Again, this is a question that depends on a specific moment, on what I’m writing or editing (or even what I’m teaching). And I value too many poets as “influence” to list them all. But, yes, there are some writers that constantly and instantly revive me and my writing… This list could go on and on (and on), but to begin: Marie Annharte Baker, Nicole Brossard, Wayde Compton, Michael Davidson, Roy Kiyooka, Robert Kroetsch, Harryette Mullen, Sachiko Murakami, Bob Perelman, Fernando Pessoa, Gertrude Stein, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Miriam Waddington, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb. And that’s with me leaving out sooooo many poets that have (and continue to have) shaped me!

But this list also depends on how we define “poetry”: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter completely recalibrated my brain, especially in terms of what a “novel” could achieve. Sometimes a line from a novel, or an article, or even a review changes what I think is possible. Dennis Cooley’s Bloody Jack proposes poetry, but also a curious and curiouser narrative, full of curious and curiouser word-play (bonus influence mention: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!). I frequently open bpNichol’s Selected Organs for prose that entices with narrative anecdotes and paronomastic wisecracks. Oscar Wilde’s ridiculous banter and drôle puns allow humour onto the performed page. The first line of Thomas King’s Medicine River, “Medicine River sat on the broad back of the prairies,” introduces a book of stories that is also a novel, but also about how language transports the reader. And sometimes, for no reason, Greta at the stove pops into my brain, turning hotcakes and reaching for coffee beans in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. Grinding away James’s voice.

Oh, you’ve got me started… Stevie Smith’s “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock,” showed me how to take on the canon and carry on with other, distracting thoughts. I fall in love a.rawlings’s gorgeous work on soundscapes every time I encounter them. Jordan Abel surprises me with every repeated repeat. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! guts me with every read. To return to returning: I constantly pull Kroetsch off my shelf for his wild Pessoan romp of characters conjuring up other characters (and author) in The Hornbooks of Rita K; and I return to his “Sad Phoenician” again and again, for “the one who runs after doorknobs” because “the world is not so round as she would have it.” His lines hurtle through the alphabet, enticing with hints of narrative, but ultimately staying on this side of the poetic line, all within an anaphoric delivery that never quits. What lovely and treacherous language!
 
Ugh, knowing this is the final question, I feel the need to mention everyone! Which sounds very erudite and all, but I also delve into children’s books (see Alice reference and Beowulf research, above), street signs, old letters, dictionary entries, history tomes, the comments section on the Bored Panda site. I guess I’m saying I don’t know how to cull my reading sources, or my bookshelves! I’m tempted right now to go and pull handfuls of my old friends down, page through, and see what new wisdom they may communicate to me. Like Lou in Marian Engel’s Bear, I love “old and shabby things,” “things that have “suffered,” and I will dive and dive again into any story about them, and about us.