Her poems “guzzle VIII,” “guzzle XI” and “guzzle XVIII” appear in the fifty-first issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “guzzle VIII,” “guzzle XI” and “guzzle XVIII.”
A: These poems were written as part of an extended sequence responding to Canadian poet John Thompson's 1978 collection, Stilt Jack. I had gone through a period of writer’s block, during which I only seemed able to write poetry in brief fragments – couplets, specifically. I filled several notebooks with these disjointed stanzas, which didn't seem to be adding up to anything. One day, I encountered Stilt Jack and was fascinated by Thompson’s use of juxtaposition, as well as the allusive, imagistic register – a superpositioning of the physical and metaphysical. While my poetry is rhythmically and tonally different, I felt a kinship with Thompson’s subject matter and emotional intensity. His use of unlinked couplets offered a structure through which I could at last sort through my notebooks without becoming overwhelmed, paring them down to my favourite stanzas and giving these space to coalesce into poems. Stilt Jack opened a door through which I could finally approach my own thoughts.
Thompson characterizes Stilt Jack as a collection of ghazals. However, English is structurally very different from the languages in which ghazals were traditionally written, such as Persian, Urdu, and Arabic. Traditionally, ghazals rely on highly constrained and intricate patterns of rhyme and repetition to craft a sonically rich, musical poem. But since English is a rhyme-poor language with a different grammatical structure, attempting to apply these exact same strictures can risk sounding stilted and fussy rather than songlike.
Poets such as Thompson (and, later, Lorna Crozier and Phyllis Webb) chose to adapt the ghazal into English by emphasizing other elements, especially the use of unlinked couplets. “Translating” the form across language and culture, these poets sought to honour the work of predecessors such as Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib, and Hafez, without exactly replicating their technical elements. Opinions vary on whether this was successful; some writers and scholars, such as Agha Shahid Ali, have been critical of what they see as a cultural misrepresentation of the ghazal. I wished to pay homage to Stilt Jack and to the ghazal tradition without claiming my work as an authentic ghazal. Thompson, in letters to friends, had called his poems “guzzles,” and so I borrowed this language – something that resembles, but does not claim to be, a Real ghazal (to use Agha Shahid Ali’s term).
Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: This series is quite fragmented and minimalistic, which isn’t typical of all my work. I've also been writing long, flowing, expansive pieces that are part of the same manuscript. I seem to alternate between lengthy, breathless poems and highly truncated pieces. Together, these disparate poems are all intended as part of the same collection exploring themes of displacement and alterity, looking especially at neurodiversity and madness, and at how the figure of the alienated artist has been mythologized, othered, and romanticized – tropes which I hope to critique and complicate. There are several ekphrastic and research-based pieces, responding to the lives, work, and biographic myths of figures such as Japanese haiku poet Santōka Taneda, Canadian painter and poet Matthew Wong, English artist Tracey Emin, and, of course, Thompson. I’m currently working on a piece responding to Agnes Martin’s paintings and writings, though that poem is still in its delicate larval stage and may or may not ever see the light of day.
Some of the poems are longer narrative pieces, while others operate more on sonic play and free association. Rhythmically and aesthetically, I’d say most are quite different from the Thompson ones, but they do return to the same ideas – the instability of discrete selfhood; tensions between faith and the material world; the desire to relate to others and to a shared reality, and how that need for commonality can both nurture and complicate the pursuit of existential meaning. I am interested in notions of egolessness and non-attachment, but also in the limits of these as strategies: how does one live in the world, create art, care for oneself and others, when that very “self” through which one experiences the world has become abstracted and detached? To me, these poems are attempts at conversations: a speaker reaching towards other minds and other voices to try to understand how people before them have made meaning.
For all the figures I write to and about, what perhaps stands out most is that despite their cultural mythologies as outsiders, their art and lives were sustained by relationships. Thompson sent poems to friends in letters; Santōka relied upon food, money, and clothing gifted by loved ones; several of these artists only survived as long as they did because people who cared about them advocated for their medical care. So, although the poems in this project explore alienation, they are ultimately attempts to reveal and honour the relational nature of art – to express my appreciation for artists whose work has, to put it simply, helped me to live. Writing cannot exist without relationship. Language itself only exists though our connections with others: every word we have is a gift that has been crafted and received through conversation.
Q: You suggest your poems don’t usually work so fragmented or minimalistic. Are you noticing a difference in the possibility of your poems through attempting such structures? Has what you are attempting to articulate shifted due to this particular exploration through form?
A: I’ve been surprised by the conceptual leaps in the fragments, and how stanzas with seemingly totally incongruous imagery can nonetheless crystallize into a poem through shared emotional affinity. It’s been interesting to see the themes that come up repeatedly, and to realize how my thinking around those themes has shifted over time. The biggest difference for my sense of possibility was simply realizing that writing was possible – indeed, was often already happening – even when my thoughts felt dampened, disjointed, or uninspired. I think writing in fragments allowed more of the unconscious to surface in these poems; they remind me of dreams, and how much the mind still works to try to understand our experiences even when we aren't intentionally deliberating over them.
Working in this form necessitated moving away from logically trying to puzzle my way through to a message or answer. At the same time, it also made me realize that uncertainty is a necessarily difficult space to occupy. The poems can’t simply say that embracing uncertainty is the answer, because that would also be an overly certain claim. The speaker in these poems, and in the larger collection, is fascinated by the otherworldly and at the same time trying very hard to make a life in the shared material world. Working in this form, and seeing how the otherworldly kept returning, led me to imagine how the speaker might come to live alongside their desire for transcendence, unable to fully realize nor to fully escape that longing for more, while also still living a life in the world. After all, where else can they go?
Q: Obviously you’ve mentioned John Thompson, and a history further back through the ghazal, but have you had any other models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Furthermore, what is it about the ghazal, specifically, that attracts? What do you see as possible through this particular form that might not be possible otherwise?
A: I’ve been very moved by Phyllis Webb’s ghazals and anti-ghazals, as well as inspired by poetry that uses rupture and recombination in its methodology. Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and Schizophrene excite me in their use of reassembled and pared down sentences. Assiyah Jamilah Touré’s Autowar, compiled of writing from the poet’s notes app collected over time, also offered a model through its focus on fragmentation and duration.
I was very moved by Thompson’s introduction to Stilt Jack, which describes the ghazal as a way for the mind to move associatively rather than narratively; as someone interested in mad and disability poetics, I am wary of how narratives about people who experience divergent mental states tend to be told as either stories of inspiration or tragedy– of “getting better” or “getting worse.” People’s lives aren’t that linear or binary. While the ghazal isn’t the only form to offer nonlinear possibilities, it is one that bears an especially rich and enduring tradition of non-narrative poetics and intense affective states.
In his introduction to the ghazals of Mirza Ghalib (another of my influences), Shamsur Rahman Faruqi writes about how the ghazal has traditionally embraced melodrama, full of tropes like “wandering far and away in a forest or wilderness” or “weeping tears so copious as to produce a devastating flood.” It felt liberating to have a mode that leaned into this intensity. While there is a risk of romanticization (as is apparent in the biographic mythology that circulates around Thompson), it also felt like there was a paradoxical truth in embracing the artifice of melodrama – an ability to go deeper into emotion, not because the poem is uncomplicatedly “confessional,” but because the persona allows me to get beyond my self-consciousness. Instead of worrying about performing a personal identity and how others may receive and judge it, this form allows me to prioritize the affective texture of the language. My hope is that deliberately, conspicuously foregrounding a persona can move the work beyond romanticization, signaling the role of craft and study rather than uncomplicated personal disclosure. In how I engage with Thompson’s experiences and those of the speaker, I want to prioritize intensity without capitulating to voyeurism or salaciousness.
Q: With a published full-length collection, 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’ve become more confident in the voice, as well as more interested in experimenting with persona. While my first book attempted to more overtly convey social messages, such as critiquing ableism and misogyny, my newer work focuses more on inhabiting experiences and trying to linguistically replicate how it feels to embody these different cognitive/emotional states. That isn’t to say the social and political meaning isn’t still important to me or present in the work. But, through responding ekphrastically to others’ poems and writing – as well as to paintings, movies, and video games – it feels increasingly like engaging in a conversation with multiple voices, rather than the poem as a singular voice attempting to persuade the reader of one perspective. The poem becomes a space to approach curiosity, rather than an attempt to dispense wisdom (though I still hope readers will find something to value in the poems’ reckoning with endurance and transformation).
I hope to keep moving towards this curiosity, using poetry as a method of inquiry to engage with art I love (or simply have strong feelings about!), recognizing that while the unknown can be a source of difficulty, it can also be a source of excitement and surprise. While there is a lot about the world to critique, I aspire for my writing to approach critique as a force that remains grounded in love for the world and its inhabitants.
Q: Robert Kroetsch described literature as a “conversation,” and your ekphrastic explorations seem part of a similar kind of perspective. What brought you to this particular approach?
A: Initially, what drew me to writing was the opportunity to explain my thoughts with a depth I couldn’t access when speaking aloud in face-to-face conversations. I’m more articulate on the page, where I have the chance to gradually compose and refine my ideas. And I’ve found poetry especially valuable in how it operates in a space where atypical language (and emotion, cognition, sensation, and so on) is approached with interest rather than automatically pathologized and corrected. Taken together, this meant poetry offered a mode through which I could engage openly and at length with ideas, instead of becoming trapped in a self-conscious loop of attempting to perform the thoughts it seemed like I “should” be having. It feels deeply alienating to constantly scan your behaviour to gauge if you’re acting like a “normal” or “real” person; poetry became a space where I could put down that fear.
Once I was able to accept and experience my own thoughts instead of constantly monitoring them and shutting them down, I also became more curious about others’ thoughts – “curious about” as distinct from “fearful of” or “obsessed with.” I came to conceptualize other people, including other writers and artists, as equals rather than as superhuman superiors. At the end of the day, we are all just people who live in this world and are trying to make sense of it. I realized that idealization is itself dehumanizing, in that it constructs other people as a fundamentally separate species from myself, as Others who I can’t even begin to comprehend. Appreciating an artist’s skill neither necessitates nor benefits from that framing.
In light of this shift, I became increasingly interested in artists’ lives, particularly the relationship between their artmaking and quotidian reality. I sought out memoirs, artist statements, interviews, journal entries, and other contexts where artists talked about their creative processes, both in terms of psychological/existential stakes and the material reality of how a work condensed from an idea to a shareable object. Art, to me, is fundamentally about communication, even if what it communicates is ineffable, and even if it’s only communicating with oneself, or the spiritual universe, or an imagined audience who may or may not one day come to exist.
I see my poems as acts of relation: in any writing, I am implicitly or explicitly engaging with what others have created and expressed, whether that’s direct engagement through ekphrasis or a subtler connection through shared form. Seeking creativity in this point of contact, rather than attempting to dredge up fully-formed poems from some nebulous place entirely inside myself, has led to more surprising work, and helped to incorporate joy into the writing process through researching and contemplating works I love. It’s grounding to engage with the same questions as other artists – about creativity, reality, meaning – even if we come to different answers. Like emerging from a hall of mirrors into a clearing where I can see beyond myself.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers; Anne Carson’s Short Talks; Joanna Klink (all her poetry but also her beautiful academic writing on Paul Celan); Paul Celan; Molly Brodak; Christina Baillie; t. liem; Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language”; Paige Lewis’s Space Struck; Hiroaki Sato’s translations of Santōka; definitely countless more I’m forgetting! And I’m currently reading my way through Sue Goyette’s work and am enthralled. I can’t recommend Ocean, The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, and Anthesis highly enough.
