Grant Wilkins is an
occasional poet, printer and papermaker from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.
His poems “Fragments from: Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” and “Becoming (after Stuart Ross, after Paulette Claire Turcotte)” appear in the forty-second issue of
Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “Fragments from: Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” and “Becoming (after Stuart Ross, after Paulette Claire Turcotte).”
A: Both of these illustrate my general approach to creative projects, which, in addition to always being processual in some manner, often involves sponging up other people’s good ideas, or glomming onto any interesting figments, fragments, strategies or devices I happen to encounter, and using them as a starting point for something of my own.
To take the second project first, “Becoming” came out of an idea I picked up from Stuart Ross during one of the very cool series of “Razovskyville” livestreams that he made through the first spring/summer of the pandemic.
(I continue to hope that Stuart eventually does more of these – he’s a really engaging guy, and I found his deep dives into poetry and poetics incredibly interesting)
Anyway, somewhere along the way Stuart mentioned this “writing between the lines” strategy – maybe it was a writer’s block solution, or maybe it was an exercise he taught to students, I can’t recall – but the idea was to find a poem you liked, and then write a line or two of your own in between each line of the poem – something that worked with the poem, something that fit structurally, thematically, rhythmically or whatever – and then erase all of the original lines, and use that as a starting point.
I quite liked this idea when I heard it, and filed it away for future reference.
Sometime afterwards, I encountered Paulette Claire Turcotte’s remarkable poetry – first through her chapbook
SAID OR said, from the late John C. Goodman’s Trainwreck Press (2021), and then her book
What the Dead Want (Ekstasis Editions, 2019), both of which blew me away. After reading through Turcotte’s work a couple of times, I think Stuart’s writing exercise popped into my head simply as an excuse to stay engaged with her poetry for a while longer, to dig a little deeper into it.
Anyway, “Becoming (after Stuart Ross, after Paulette Claire Turcotte)” is my “writing between” take (as opposed to a “reading through” or “writing through”, which are two of my more usual approaches) on Turcotte’s “LEAVING: I” poem from
What the Dead Want.
*
I’d describe my “Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” project as the final state of the serial accretion of several different approaches and ideas that ended up getting piled on top of each other in a vaguely geological sort of way.
Originally, it started out as my entry in the 2022 edition of CV2’s 2 Day Poem Contest. My approach to that was to do a rough-and-ready diastic reading-through of the two sources I was using (Margaret Atwood’s
The Circle Game and John Dee’s
Hieroglyphic Monad), randomize the results, and then use this raw material as the starting point for the contest poem.
I wasn’t crazy about my first take on the poem, and although I tried re-editing the result after the contest was over, I was never very happy with the way that worked out. I really did like the way the raw material I was using worked together though, how it had been configured by my process… so, as with “Becoming”, I stashed it all away for future consideration.
(Although the specifics will vary from project to project, my diastic “reading through” method often results in many pages of text fragments and lines that I’ve sifted out of my source texts, randomized and broken up into blocks.)
Anyway, a while later Chris Turnbull passed along a book of Leslie Scalapino’s poetry & images that she thought I’d be interested in… and she was right:
Crowd and not evening or light (O Books, 1992) hit me like a ton of bricks. I loved the fragmentariness of it, the elusiveness, the implied stoppages and silences, and the focus on little shards of often lexically insignificant text.
This general form seemed like a perfect fit for my collection of fragments, so – because I wanted to generate a bunch of short pieces without over-thinking it all, I went through my blocks of sifted text with different coloured pencils, circling, squaring & underlining the different fragments I wanted to use with different poems. After assembling and tweaking these fragments, I ended up with a sequence of a dozen pieces that I thought worked quite well – including the four you’re printing in
Touch the Donkey.
After I finished this, I realized that I also really liked the look of the multi-coloured circles and lines on the pages of my sifted-text blocks… so I reprinted the pages in a large type size, redid the lines and shapes in more brightly coloured ink pens, and then went at the blocks with whiteout, removing a fair bit of the text.
The resulting pieces still seemed incomplete somehow, so I dug through some Phyllis Webb poems looking for questions… which I tacked to the bottom of each piece, one question per.
(I was surprised by how few questions Phyllis Webb asks in her poetry)
Anyway, the full “Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” sequence is now a small chapbook manuscript of seven of the text-fragment pieces (like you’re printing in TtD) and seven of the coloured-circle pieces. I like the way it works and looks, though I realize that by adding colour to the equation I’ve made it much less likely that it’s going to find a publisher.
Q: I’m fascinated by the engaged and recombinant collage aspect of these responses. How did you come to reworking such overt engagements with other works? Most writers might be attempting variations on work they admire as a way to think through new ways to approach work, but rarely so overt as “response works” in their pieces as yours. What brought you to working this kind of poem?
A: One strand of this, I think, comes out of the fact that I am exclusively a process poet, and that everything I do necessarily begins with words that I’m not the author of. Depending on the project this can be a text – or a piece of a text – that another writer has written and that I’ve applied some sorting, sifting or transformational process to. Sometimes it will be text that I’ve gathered on my own in some other way – words or lines I’ve seen or heard in passing, signs, menus, headlines, etc. I’m often inclined to think of myself less as a writer and more as an arranger – or maybe a re-arranger – of the work I do and the words I work with.
Although the “Stutters and Space” sequence did end up as an unexpectedly extreme example of serial reprocessing – like a text caught looping back and forth between parthenogenesis and cannibalism – it still ultimately followed the general approach that I first came to through bpNichol’s
Translating Translating Apollinaire (Membrane Press, 1979), and from there followed back to John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, and their range of chance, indeterminant and non-intentional forms of writing.
I’ve found Cage and Mac Low’s general approaches particularly appealing, in that they worked to remove – or at least to minimize – the place of the writer’s ego in their work. Ultimately, I’m not a poet who writes from inspiration or aspiration: I don’t have much I'm trying to say as a writer, and except in the broadest aesthetic sense I don’t really have an agenda I’m trying to carry forward.
I – as a subject “I” – don’t need or want to show up in any of my poems. They aren’t about me – they are about whatever ideas, images or meanings my processes and poetics have managed to sort out or shake from the texts I’ve chosen to work with. To quote Cage from his book
Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961): “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I need it.”
The other, more prosaic strand to this is that I came to poetry writing after having spent quite a few years focusing on letterpress printing and papermaking – both very physical and very material forms of art-making – and I can see this way of working with poetry as being very much in the same vein. In many respects, the materiality of moving little bits of lead type around in a galley to set an Archibald Lampman sonnet is quite similar to rearranging words and text fragments extracted from a Margaret Atwood poem.
To maybe address your question about “response works” more directly – ultimately, I don’t think I view most of what I do as actually being responses to the writing or the writers I’m engaging with.
(There’s an asterisk here: the “Belonging” piece certainly was a response to Turcotte’s poem – a respectful one, I hope – but it’s also probably the least “processual” thing I’ve written in ages.)
Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but to my mind, the idea of “response” in this way entails an element of intentional interrogation that I don’t think I’m usually engaging in.
The specifics will vary a lot from project to project, and the results will vary a lot from process to process, but what I think I’m doing is using my process to shake images, ideas and meanings out of texts that were already there – even if just in some atomized state.
In many respects it is, as you noted, a form of collage-making. Depending on the project, I may just let these newly sorted images and sequences stand where they emerge, with not a huge amount of editing – the text of
Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (above/ground, 2022) – came out that way, as the result of a straight diastic reading-through of the book, with no intervention to the “index” words and as little as possible to the “wing words” that accompany them.
In contrast, the first “Stutters and Space” sequence involved the reading-through of the Atwood and Dee texts, with the resulting fragments then being thoroughly randomized, resorted, and laid out in blocks of ten lines. I then went through these blocks with an eye to picking out bits and pieces that looked like they’d work with the sense of fragmentariness I was trying to get. After I’d assembled the dozen pieces that came out of this, I did some further editing to both break things up even more, and to smooth things out… with the four pieces in TtD being amongst the final results.
In the end, the two source texts provided a lot of the images and imagery that show up in the final pieces, and the contents of the source texts certainly provide the backbone of both parts of the text of the larger project… but I don’t really see the final result as being a response to either of the original texts or the authors in any useful way. Maybe it’s a reinterpretation, after a fashion, but I don’t think it’s a response.
Q: I know you worked for some time with jwcurry as part of the sound poetry and performance choir
Messagio Galore, as well as doing your own solo sound performances. How did the experience of working with curry affect the way you approach your current work? How did your ongoing work with sound affect your current work with text?
A: Certainly, getting involved in curry’s
Messagio Galore project (I participated in
Messagios # 6, 7 and 8) turned out to be incredibly important to the way that my writing and performance practices have developed, and in the people and ideas I’ve ended up connecting to.
From my perspective, the first one –
Messagio # 6 – was the most significant. The idea of me performing – anything – in front of an audience was simply not something that had been on the books before that, so the way that it worked out (with the largely sound-based
Messagio performances) opened up avenues for me that I hadn’t thought about before, and that I’m still exploring. I’m never going to be really comfortable in front of an audience – but now I know that there are things I can do and ways I can do them… which helps a lot.
As a performance,
Messagio # 6 was wrapped around a multi-voice reading of John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.” I’d been aware of Cage before then, but getting to see the other performers working with this text on an almost granular level gave me a huge appreciation for Cage, and led me to further explorations of his work, his ideas and his influence – to the point where now, as already mentioned, he, with Jackson Mac Low and bpNichol, are main anchor points of the literary universe I work in.
The opportunity to interact that closely with the other members of the
Messagio group also turned out to be very important to me. Sandra Ridley, Carmel Purkis, Roland Prevost and the late John Lavery were the other members, along with curry, the host/arranger/leader of the project. I already knew everyone involved at the point that we started, but it was still a tremendously enlightening and formative experience getting to see these folks working on the material we were performing up close and personal like that – and Sandra and Carmel in particular have remained important voices in my ear.
Possibly the most important result of my participation in
Messagio # 6 is that – as well as leading to my taking part in iterations 7 and 8 – it led directly to an invitation to join in the literary responses that visual artist Michèle Provost commissioned for three of her gallery exhibitions, via Max Middle’s AB Reading Series.
The first of these – ABSTrACTS / RéSuMÉS (
http://www.micheleprovost.ca/abstracts) – required me to write poetry in a much more focused and considered way than I had before, and not just as the sporadic experimentation that I’d been doing up ‘til then, which had been largely for my own amusement. In hindsight, it was exactly the motivational kick that I needed, exactly when I needed it, and ultimately, I think, that’s what really got my writing practice going.
In terms of sound and my current work, I am still playing around with sound poetry and with ideas about the making and arranging of sounds. In recent years I’ve also begun to pay much more attention to how the rhythm, rhyme and metre of my non-sound poetry works as well – and have gained a greater appreciation for how these things can inform the way a piece is read on a page, as well as heard. So for me, perhaps belatedly, sound has become relevant textually, as well as sonically, for a lot of what I do.
My experience with sound work has also led to have a finer appreciation of – and an interest in working with – elements of voicing, vocal space and breath… as may or may not be evident in the way the “Stutters and Space” pieces are composed.
Q: With a handful of published chapbooks and journal publications under your belt, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: One significant element in my progression as a poet has been to fully accept the fact that the processual route that I’ve taken in poetry-making – or the mode that I’ve chosen, maybe – is broad enough and allows for work that’s expansive enough that I no longer worry about the fact that I don’t write “real” poetry, in any traditional sense.
I am not, and I was never going to be, the sort of poet who wrote because I was inspired by the sight of a sunset, a snowstorm, or an ancient vase. That whole Wordsworthian “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" thing (recollected in tranquility or not) just doesn’t work for me – I’m never going to be a poet who writes pithy observations about the world as it goes past my window, or who feels compelled to write about my unhappy love affairs, my traumas or my latest meals.
I’m not knocking poets who can do this – good poetry can be written about anything – but I can’t do it: my little brain just isn’t wired that way… and this is something that it actually took me a while to come to grips with.
Fortunately, having initially started writing poetry using very mechanical modes of word, text and sound sorting, I’ve been able to broaden my approach to and my understanding of the notion of processing. Getting into the work of writers like Erín Moure, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip and Lisa Robertson in more recent years has really helped to expand my thinking about, well, the process of poetic process – and to inform and fill out the model that I first built out of the work of bpNichol, Cage and Mac Low.
Anyway, the more time I spend exploring notions of poetic process the wider and more adaptable this mode of making seems to be… and the happier I am to continue going in this direction.
In terms of where my work is headed… there was a not-yet-fully-formed idea about breath & breathings that came up while I was working on the last stage of the “Stutters and Space” sequence that I think will require further exploration. Of course, I’ve also been feeling like I want to do some more mesostic pieces... which will require a source text/texts and a general approach… I’ve also come to appreciate the potential for collaborative projects… and I’ve also been thinking about the idea of manifestos… So, who knows where I’m going, really?
Q: Do you see yourself attempting larger manuscripts, whether in terms of a larger-scale project, or through assembling certain of your shorter texts into a book-length structure?
A: I do have several projects that have ended up as book length manuscripts, more or less unintentionally. One wasn’t so much a poetry project as it was a faux translational thing, but I do have a poetic response sequence (a response to Michèle Provost’s
Roman Feuilleton exhibition (
http://www.micheleprovost.ca/roman-feuilleton) that resulted in my going through the alphabet twice, generating 48 pieces running about 70 pages or so. I’ve also used the diastic reading-through approach of my
Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology chapbook on all but the last book of
The Martyrology. Book 9 is giving me trouble because so much of it is musical score, which I haven’t figured out how to handle yet. Once I get that sorted out though, the whole thing will certainly be book length.
Ultimately, I tend to approach my projects as just that – projects – as texts and processes to be combined, as ideas to be worked out, as experiments to be run. I’m not usually thinking about things like length, form or final destination when I’m in that mode – I’m mostly just concerned with whether or not they’ll do something interesting, whether they’ll teach me anything, and whether they’ll be interesting for anyone else to read.
One side effect of this broad approach is that a fair number of my projects end up being awkwardly sized or inconveniently formatted, from the point of view of trying to get them published. It’s not that publication isn’t on my radar when I’m writing – I’m always really happy when something I’ve written finds its way into print – but I tend to see it as something to worry about later, after the thing has been created, and something that will be dependent on the quality of the work – which is what I prefer to work towards.
Having said that, one of the things I’m going to try to do this summer is to finally put some effort into knocking some of these projects into coherent shape, and get them out the door, looking for homes.
Q: You seem to wrestle with calling what you do “poetry” and with the designation of “poet,” so I’m curious as to how you consider what you do. Do you see your work entirely as non-authorial but recombinatorial? At what point does reworking another text turn into authorship? In the context of the kinds of work you’ve been doing, is this sort of naming important?
A: That’s one of those questions, right? Naming and labeling this sort of thing isn’t usually very important… except when sometimes it is.
As I think I implied earlier, it took me a while, but I did eventually to come to grips with the idea that what I am doing is best described by the phrase “writing poetry.”
I realize that this comes off sounding like a tremendously precious bit of head-up-my-assery, but I was – and still am – very much aware of the fact that what I write isn’t in the same ballpark as – and isn’t even really the same sort of thing as – what Sandra Ridley writes, or what you write, or what Sneha Madhavan-Reese writes, or what Stuart Ross writes. There doesn’t really seem to be a better label for it though – or at least not one that wouldn’t always immediately require a long explanation. So, because I’m not interested in making these things more complicated than they need to be, I just kind of uncertainly go along with the idea that yes, OK, this is poetry, which
ipso facto tra-la-la-la-la must make me a poet.
To be honest, I expect that a large part of my uncertainty about these labels is simply a hangover from the fact that for the first 15 years or so of my hanging around the edges of the literary world here in Ottawa I didn’t write poetry: for a long time it was entirely normal for me to go to a reading and be the only one – or one of the only ones – in the audience who wasn’t a poet. So maybe this is just me still just trying to convince myself.
Having said all that, the labels “poet” and “poetry” are actually fitting a little better with what I do these days. As I said earlier, the work of Moure, Bergvall, Philip and Robertson have been particularly helpful in showing me new approaches and paradigms, and in giving me new contexts and models through which to view the notion of authorship – poetic or otherwise. Everything I produce still starts with text that I’m not the author of – but the longer I do this the broader my take on what constitutes poetic process becomes, and the more flexibility and nuance I discover in how I can work with texts, and what I can do with or to them.
