An excerpt from his work-in-progress “THAT HEAP” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “THAT HEAP.”
A: Centuries in the future an archeological team unearth a caché of 500 messages which become the foundational text of the culturally hegemonic corporation Human Effluents And Plastic, and are known as The 500. These messages, all of which are 500 characters long and range from weather reports, advertisements, diary entries, etc, trace the early days and months that follow an apocalyptic event called The Great Coagulation. The earth having become a trash-ball, soon begins to take on monstrous proportions and abilities, thanks to everyone’s favorite corporate empire and its founder, Summer deGuy. The impetus for this project was an attempt to verbalize a pet conceit of mine, that landfill contains the packaging of our collective unconscious, the trappings of our desires, and the materials of our desires when they have been superceded by new material. And so as I tried to find a form the idea began to grow with a bunch of hypotheticals such as, what if trash-ball earth is a body-without-organs, what if water can only be obtained from microscopic deposits, etc. After a few tries at different forms, it was the Mastodon character limit that finally gave this project the conatus to grow beyond a few sketches.
Q: How does this work-in-progress compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: I am beginning to often feel that the separations between projects, are the result of the perceived need to neatly package a product for consumption, and that my projects are not a disparate as I make them out to be. I do have a few different processes for writing, but I don’t work consistently at any one process, so I find myself reading several books at once and putting thoughts to page/screen in blocks or strings of short text in unrelated sequences. It seems this method lends itself to the 500 character, or 140 syllables, or 100 words, or 14 line, or there about poem/sonnet, that I seem to keep rewriting. It is when the second draft is made that a restraining form is decided upon, sorting into thematic, stylistic, and natural groups, for submitting.
Q: How do you see your projects relating to each other? Do you see your projects as disconnected, a sequence of groupings or something larger, with many, multiple moving parts?
A: My work seems to circle a few concerns, no matter which formalities are being used. These sublime elephants in the room are most often colonialism, climate crises, the bâtise bourgeoisie, and associated effects. I’m sure there are pathological revelations to be had at my expense as well. It is for my own therapeutic reasons that I write, whether disrupting narratives of past traumas, a rewording of something I'm struggling to understand, or just an intellectual exercise of puzzling through a restraint in language. Of course, there’s a large dollop of, “project? I have no idea what I’m doing! Let’s see if this sticks to the wall?”
Q: With three chapbooks under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: I definitely hum and haw over poems I’m working up more now than when I my first chap was published, and the anxiety of leaving something out has changed into its opposite. Looking back, there was a single tone single gimmick to much of my work, which I have been trying to disturb with more humour and forms. There was a time when I saw chapbooks as a stepping stone to trade publication, some presses more than imply this, but as I have had time to read more contemporary collections from the library, plus enjoy the couple of chapbook subscriptions I can afford here or there, I have come to look for where poetry is going in chapbooks, and where poetry has been in collections. Admittedly though, I hope to gain the coveted Triple Spine (a trade pub in poetry, fiction, nonfiction) one day.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What authors or works, if any, sit at the back of your head as you write?
A: I’m not sure I follow any specific models, but lately I’ve had on my mind George Woodcock and his brand of Anarchism’s connection to the vision of Canada as espoused by the leaders of the Freedom Convoy. It seems this may also point to some of the more poisonous parts of the Romantic tradition past and present. There so many authors I get excited about, a few being; Dionne Brand, Marilyn Dumont, Gary Barwin, and Amanda Earl, each has a unique use of humour, whimsy, and/or irony, that grabs my attention. Adding a manual typewriter to my poetic repertory was the result of the national anthologizing of bill bissett, and bpNichol, by Jack David and Robert Lecker, in 1982, reprinted in 1994, when casual racism, Indigenous exclusion, among other issues, should have given the publishers pause before continuing this version of nation building. Over the last month a couple of my favorite borrows from the public library have been: Resisting Canada; An Anthology of Poetry, ed Nyla Matuk (Montreal, CA: Véhicule Press, 2019), and Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st (McClelland & Stewart, 2020).
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: If I find myself struggling to write I often turn away from the page for reenergizing. A wander around the garden or the woods, is often enough, but I enjoy painting, and listening to music staring at the ceiling, as well. Even though it’s been a few years, I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves at least a dozen times, and Derrida’s corpus if only because a lot of his work remained nonsense to me, but over the last bit, I haven’t put down Dionne Brand’s new and collected poems Nomenclature since it arrived a little while ago, after the once through (a second for sections of it) I find myself returning to Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia for a master class in epigrams and biting wit.
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