TtD supplement #293 : seven questions for Monroe Lawrence

Monroe Lawrence was born on Vancouver Island, Canada. They grew up in Squamish on the traditional territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw. They are the author of About to Be Young and Gravity Siren.

Their poem “Silt” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Silt.”

A: “Silt” dreams an art practice where genres blur, gender toggles and shimmers, dance intersects with (and becomes) architecture, and the sky is recruited as a grafting and projecting of intention onto weather. To make “Silt,” I drew on my experience as audience member to various kinds of art-making in and around public spaces in Colorado, and on memories of films and poems I once experienced in Canada and in Greece. “Silt” is interested in artworks so capacious in their sense of diegesis and surround that a random bird flying overhead might take on the glimmer of the intended, so the frame dilates to include an entire world. As I composed, I spliced together images and affective clusters of language taken from dreams and walks and reading (and a friend’s doctoral thesis) to produce a vision of an oneiric elsewhere. What, in that elsewhere, might art look like? What might architecture sound like? How might buildings or parks feel to be in? And in “Silt” the presence of spaceships and motherships and cockpits—as much as beaches, crabs and wildflowers, the beloved details of our present—helps us, bluntly, ask if that elsewhere might feature in our future, distant or near.

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

A: “Silt” resembles the longer, untitled poems from my forthcoming poetry collection Gravity Siren—some lines long, some short—but here “Silt” has a title, obviously. I like how titles make a poem feel unarbitrary and forthcoming, like a pronouncement, instead of some scrap of unknowable language the reader has stumbled upon. (That’s how I sometimes want my other poetry to feel.)

Q: Has your sense of the poem shifted at all since putting together book-length manuscripts? How do your poems come together to form books? Is it an intuitive process, or something more deliberate?

A: Yes, publishing books has changed how I think of poems. It’s helped me trouble my (and perhaps the reader’s) sense of where the aesthetic “zones” end and begin. I like to think about the arbitrary, conceptual forcefields we erect around poems, around books. What’s less arbitrary—the category of the ‘poem’ or the category of the ‘book’? Gathering text in a codex seems less arbitrary, for me, sometimes, than some idea of a language event truly starting right here and truly ending over there. 

In a practical sense: At the end of many months of polishing hundreds of pages of ‘scraps’, I throw away over half, and spend a final month ordering the remaining scraps into the sequence that is the book. It’s all intuition. But that sequence contains many other possible sequences…

Q: With a couple of published collections under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: One thing I can say is that I tend to prioritize the excitement of a fresh challenge over the execution of something I know how to do. This explains my attempts to write stories, chapbooks, peer-reviewed scholarship, book reviews, etc. And it certainly explains my turn to fiction. There, I’ve been trying to learn a whole new regime of language use, one that is often entirely at odds with the disjunctive poetic regimes in which I’ve marinated. Building and blocking out a world (“representational” language) calls for sentences that are so different, for me, than the sentences that draw me to poetry. (Often my poetry is not interested in sentences at all.) The free-wheeling excitement of cramming objects and characters and dialogue into paragraphs is for the time being the most exciting literary endeavour. But it’s hard. I wonder if I will ever succeed in unlearning my poetic training and elaborating a new writerly capacity. Anyway, poetry once felt very hard… Perhaps my next poetry project, whenever it arises, will constitute a kind of admission of defeat in some sense—returning, if not to the known, then at least to an unknown I know how to face.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: This is a question that has preoccupied me for a long time. There was a stretch in my early twenties when I was extremely concerned with eschewing “influence” of any kind—intentionally setting out to prevent my work from imitating or resembling anything I’d seen before. I’m sure I was unsuccessful. But I think that rejection of influence was an entirely fair reaction to some of my previous, even more misguided efforts to mimic writers I had nothing in common with, Cormac McCarthy or Tao Lin for instance. So I did go through the meat grinder of trying to “avoid” influence for a while, which may have been in some way admirable. 

During my MFA, though, I realized something that astonished me: Most writers were, by contrast, picking one or two of their favourite writers and shamelessly emulating them as closely as possible. I was shocked by how good, and how actually original, the results were. After an initial period of bitterness, I kind of gave in and started doing this more, too, and often do compose with certain writers in mind. Nearly ten years post-MFA, I sense that this method is actually how the majority of even quite good literary writing is created. Setting out with the express purpose of mimicking another writer, you often sort of “can’t help” but be yourself along the way, and you end up with a novel linguistic creation that, paradoxically, is largely your own. It’s possible I am describing a just basic, Bloomian structure of titrating influence, but anyway. 

I recognize I am sometimes doing something much more groundbreaking than at other times, and sometimes I am just vampirically repurposing someone else’s invention. But I’m less and less bothered by that. My recent poetic efforts (like “Silt”) are extremely involved with the work of J.H. Prynne, his The White Stones, for instance, but that book is so beautiful that I hope that even if my emulations are unoriginal, the resultant surface beauty might be worth it. So influence can carry a sense of duty even if it sometimes carries a sense of guilt.

Q: I would think that writing—in structure, certainly—can’t help but come from writing. Why would you think influence “sometimes carries a sense of guilt”?

A: I think I mean that in a very informal, pragmatic sense of how it feels—to me—to navigate the socially-oriented experience of reading and writing, rather than elaborating some watertight view of what literature is or can be. It’s possible I have a feeling that some writing (of mine as much as of others) is coming too much from other writing—repeating past patterns of thought and language rather than transforming or inventing or intervening. Pound said “Make it new!” and I maybe let that utterance take on the status of all-encompassing, ahistorical injunction. (Probably not the kind of thing you want to do with Pound’s comments.) So the guilt or perhaps shame is a better word emerges out of a cluster of impulses pertaining to originality rather than a distaste for writing that flows from other writing.

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

A: Once upon a time I took a kind of dietician’s approach to literature—very targeted (and enormous) inputs, with the hope of engineering specific and calculated outputs. So if I was writing minimal fragments, I would go on a diet of minimal fragments; if I was writing prose in first-person present tense, I would go on a diet of first-person present tense texts. This is a similarly linear structure of thinking to my response to the “influence” question. I had a sense that if I imbibed enough of x, it would—excuse the image—be extruded out as an excellent version of y. (As you can see from these questions, my approach to poetics is fairly psychotic.) But lately I’m less interested in that input-output phenomenon. I know I’ve read enough to fuel my ongoing projects, and I have less of a sense that I need to “desperately read everything or I’ll die.” I watch a lot more TV, pay attention to the beats, the scenes, the narratology. I read a lot more non-fiction. I see reading as an end rather than a means—the pleasure located more completely in the present than in some belief (also pleasurable) that I’m “hard at work.” My friends Alex Toy, Anna Bonesteel and Lee Cannon-Brown are some of the most fascinating writers and thinkers on earth and I’m blessed to be in daily dialogue with their work.