TtD supplement #304 : seven questions for Steven Ross Smith

Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling with words and books in Victoria, BC. His writing, swayed by experimenters in early Toronto days, juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven-book poetic series Fluttertongue. His decades-long westward migration through Canada’s landscapes implanted continuing amazement and many poetic influences. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, from Radiant Press, 2022. Most recently, The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall appeared in 2024. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. He is currently absorbed in a rappy-spoken-word album project, as SloLo Smithy, streaming on BandCamp. Also, he’s at: fluttertongue.ca and stevenrosssmith@me.com

An excerpt from his Petal & Fracture, section “sp/lt nds” appears in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about Petal & Fracture, section “sp/lt nds.”

A: Petal & Fracture. This three-part work captures three longish poems, wherein the structures and content of each vary considerably. Each has allowed me to explore language and ideas beyond the edge of my zone of familiarity. I like to think of the works as poetically adventurous. I’m playing with meaning and expectation, personal and political musings, references and prompts, poetic form and structure. These notions seem to be consistent through my writing career of over five decades, though I try to make each visitation go – for me – through a new door. My approach to language as material is heavily influenced by associations in my formative years with other ‘experimenters’ including bpNichol, Fred Wah, and Robert Kroetsch; and by reading such as e.e. cummings, Lyn Hejinian, Roland Barthes, and others; and by the historical movements of Dada and Surrealism; and finally, by movement and sound. In Petal & Fracture I have initiated each section using different starting points and modes. The poems experiment: with verbal and syllabic fracture, play, and meaning; with line and phrase structure; with logic and disjunction; with the concept of verse; with the authorial “I”; and with rhythms that flow and bump. 

The selections submitted to Donkey are from section ii, “sp/lt nds”, which explores, among other things, the fragmentation and breakdown of language, of words and phrases in a leaping kind of way, while still holding or suggesting some form of ‘meaning' or association, coherence within incoherence – how they could link or disrupt, and create a jagged rhythm. It is meant to trouble the reading process, while inviting the reader into a form of self-created – or at least collaborative – play. That’s my summarizing glimpse, though a reader might see other windows.

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

A: It’s hard to say how this work – a couple of years old now – compares to current work. The poems from Petal & Fracture that we’ve selected here, for a ride with the Donkey, seem to reflect several of the elements that run through my work, regardless of the poetic forms and textures I explore – language’s materiality, nature, music, concerns of the day. My attention and my mind seem not to be single-focussed, but rather, carry simultaneity. Otherwise, and regardless of content and form, I find, as I think I’ve said, I write by ear, with attention to the sounds and rhythms of language. Those are what propel me into content (such as it is.) I like mistake and thought’s errant capacities, and I lean to irregularity and a mode of improvisation as compositional drivers. These bents seem to have been with me in some form or other since my start as a poet. My newer work seems to be more prosaic, documentary – I call it “un-diaristic” – but it seeks to hold compositional elements mentioned above.

Q: How do you see this work in relation to, say, the multi-book Fluttertongue? There’s a similar element of the ‘catch-all’ to what I’ve seen of the Petal & Fracture manuscript. Do you see this as an extension to Fluttertongue, or entirely separate? How does one work on something so expansive, and then attempt to move beyond it?

A: Each of the seven Fluttertongue books has a guiding concept or series of prompts – constraints or frames – though with more or less latitude depending on my intentions/unintentions. That work was, yes, expansive, but as said, there were some operative nodes that ‘held’ each individual book. I stopped the series and its uber-title at the 7th book, so I could stop being so self-conscious as I moved along. And I have an affinity with the number ‘7’. So, I made that a punctuation point. A full stop. I wanted new, ‘open’ explorations. I wanted to be – in a newer or different way – more open to ‘receive’. 

I’d not thought of my work as “catch-all”, but I can see how that term might fit. To me “P&F” is separate from the ‘flutters’, but might still be a net; however, I’m not working with pre-set constraints or forms – such evolve now as my ‘pen/mind’ moves. Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 was already moving in that direction. 

Yes, moving beyond one kind of expanse into another is …. expansive? …. unnerving…? How to gain confidence in the work that is unfamiliar? Of course, that’s always a question with new work.

But, back when Fluttertongue began it was a response to a flash in which I felt that all my poems were just one poem, and that ‘one’ poem just intermingled with my previous work, and with all the other poets’ poems drifting in the poetry river, as I thought of it. So, in that sense, I’m just continuing my ‘one poem’ …and rivers are dynamic, absorbent, and constantly changing, but are still water.

Sometimes I feel I’m writing un-poems. But I flow and flutter on.
 
Q: With numerous published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Well, I half answered this in my previous comments, but to elaborate: Who knows? Is it progress or just change? Is it wheel-spinning? Where do I head? … into the unknown. I’m always starting again. To quote from Fluttertongue Book 3: disarray: 

“In the un is where to begin. I beg un.”

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

A: I don’t have any ‘hard’ models, those to imitate in the forms and flows my poems take (I’m not into imitation anyway), but there are writers, always hovering in my creative and compositional sphere – should I say ‘in my head’ – who inspire and challenge me as I write. I’m thinking of bpNichol who boldly explored modes within and without poetic convention, and who, in friendship and poetry, mentored me. I think of e. e. cummings, (or is he E. E.?) whose shapes and breaks sit in my eye. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonics and rhythms ring in my ear. Paul Celan’s intentional play with opacity, with ambiguity, gives me the courage to work in, around, and outside clarity. Fred Wah’s, and Gerald L. Brun’s, and jazz musicians’ notions of improvisation push me. And there are all the other writers I admire – Marlatt, Kroetsch, Barthes, Hejinian, Lilburn, Willis – whose narratively adventurous nodes beckon me. Then there’s Dada, sound poetry, John Cage, and Blues. I could go on. But a final tip of my flat cap to Phil Hall, to the influence of his distinctive work, to our friendship over a stretch of time, and to our recent collaborations over the past four years, which have refreshed and re-set me in my poetic explorations.

Q: Had you attempted collaboration prior to that project with Phil Hall? Obviously, you’d worked with Richard Truhlar, Michael Dean, and David Penhale as part of Owen Sound (1975-1984), although that was some time ago. How do you approach collaborative work in terms of your larger writing process? Is it a way to help expand muscles once you return to your own solo works, or is it something else, something other? Were there any surprises while working this project with Hall?

A: My work with Owen Sound, in creating collaborative performance compositions for almost ten years (1975-85), taught me about collaboration – how one contributes, accepts, yields, and weaves the work of several minds. That has stuck with me and been further revealed through several projects: in “DUCT” with five musicians; with Hilary Clark and Betsy Rosenwald (Pliny’s Knickers, JackPine Press); with Ted Landrum, Jennifer Still, Colin Smith, (Table for Four, Jackpine Press). I love to collaborate – it pushes me beyond my own ego. And in most cases the authorial “I” is given up as lines or verses, or spoken elements become communal, not individual. It creates not a bounce back and forth, but a blend. In fact, even if I’m going solo, I’m collaborating, in a sense, with all the other voices in the poetry air – whether I'm aware or not.

To me, the collaborative work and solo work are almost seamless – there might be differentiating concepts or constraints or processes in each mode, but all the acts/actions draw on and develop my poetic and compositional modes. Sometimes a collaboration will draw me into a method – phrasing, subject, structure – I might not have probed otherwise. And in collaboration I bring some solo moves into the pool, but they will likely be shifted too. As for my poetic muscles – yes, stretching and flexing in response to another’s ‘prodding’ has expanded my palette, giving me more to draw on as I set down my arrangements of the alphabet.

Phil Hall and I have, for a long time, been on what I might call a simpatico wavelength, even though our works have been quite different. We met in Toronto in the ‘70s, or maybe the early ‘80s. We’d had off and on contact over the years, but I always kept an eye on his work, and he, I understand, knew of mine. A few years ago – perhaps a decade back – I can’t recall exactly what prompted it – I suggested the idea of collaboration. We finally began such in 2023 when we were each in separate parts of Costa Rica. We initiated a kind of call and response creation over the mountains and jungle canopy by email. We’ve rolled along on a couple of projects since. 

Surprises … I think they came with every line. My method in that Coast Rican collab, in responding to Phil’s lines, was to act quickly on receiving his email, to capture my ‘thoughts’ suggested by his lines, without overthinking or even striving for continuity. I reacted quickly, intuitively, keying in my responses, with the censor turned off, kind of like quick-sketch. Then there would be some refinement. The surprises were the unpredictable notions and words, references and lines that popped in the poetry popper. The result was The Green Rose which you, rob, published with above/ground in an extended chapbook. In it, one fun thing is that no lines are attributed to their creator. The work stands; our names are on it; but there is no individual ‘claim’. You could say the work is by Steven Phil Ross Hall Smith.

Phil’s friendship has become indispensable to me and my poetic gestures nowadays. Our collaboration renewed, reset, propelled, and lifted my poetic impulse from a trough. Our colleagueship expresses community, where poets labour together in their often thankless role. Collaborations also show me there is room for fun – whether light or dark, punning or singing, leaping or following, serious or not, sensible or non. I like a bit of fun.

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

A: I’ve already cited many of the writers I read and return to, but here’s a re-visit. Some years ago, to get back on track, I read eagerly through Jerome Rothenberg’s huge multi-volume anthology Poems for the Millennium. This may be my most-returned-to collection, though I reread Celan a lot too. I read PftM to discover and remind me of the scope of possibilities that can be called poetry. It is an astounding and enlightening gathering, and it swings the poetry door wide open. Otherwise, and to find energy, I rely on reading – along with ‘older’ work by writers noted already – new work I stumble upon – often as a reviewer. (I have a piece in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild’s upcoming Freelance issue called “The Riches and Challenges of Reviewing“.) Among the interesting new books I’ve read and written about (often for British Columbia Review) are Eimear Laffan’s (about)ness, Neil Surkan’s Empties, Kaie Kellough’s Interpositions, Jan Zwicky’s Say It, Michael V. Smith’s Soundtrack, the Costa Rican poet Luis Chavez’ Equestrian Monuments, David Martin’s nightstead, and Tim Lilburn’s Numinous Seditions. I’ve read a lot of Lilburn. I’ve mentioned Phil Hall. These writers and books, and many others, for me, expand the scope of poetry in new and different ways, exploring and exploding its potential. They open my own thinking about poetry. 

Most recently I’ve been thinking about poetry as a community – a community extant and forming since the first utterances, even those not called poetry, and now identified as such, and that have taken many shapes that in themselves define “poetry.” It embraces and forms one of the oldest human communities linked through time. It has unfurled myriad expressions, textures, modes, emotions, concepts, representations, and activities. I wish I could engage in the impossible act of reading, seeing, or hearing it all. This community’s creations – ancient, old, younger, and current – all offer and enable discovery. Such are essential nutrients for my own poetic effort, my own engagement and contribution to and within the community that I have somehow found myself a part of. Therein is my re-energization.