TtD supplement #17 : eight questions for Stan Rogal

Stan Rogal is going through late mid-life crisis in that he decided to adopt a dog while simultaneously knock out the back section of the house – this, in order to build an Art studio for/with his partner Jacquie – while at the same time work on a new manuscript. So far, plenty of dust and fur in the house, though few words on the page. A 12th collection of poems, after words, appeared from Guernica in the fall 2014, marking his 20th book.

Rogal has published two poetry chapbooks with above/ground press—In Search of the Emerald City (1997) and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2004), as well as an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS (#44, March 2006).

Three poems from the unpublished “Celebrity Rag” appear in the fourth issue of Touch the Donkey, with two more to follow in the seventh issue.

Q: Tell me about the manuscript “Celebrity Rag.”

A: I had this idea to write poems about celebrities and celebrity life that would incorporate the good, the bad and the ugly, especially around the issue of fame. I also wanted to mix in the literary/artistic types with the strictly no-talent “famous for being famous” types. I decided to use the long line in keeping with the theme of near exhaustiveness of subject matter. I hoped if the manuscript was published it would be in landscape/postcard form, again keeping with the cheap celebrity/tourist/fan idea. The poems are written in a Renga style, alternating three lines and two lines with one stanza building on the previous. I chose Renga because it implies a single, never-ending poem—a suitable metaphor for the celebrity complex—and ties in nicely with Jack Spicer’s dictum that poets write a single, long poem in their lifetimes.

As a stepping off point, I took the particular celebrity names and turned them into fractured homonyms and emcrypted them within the poems, ie: Leonard Cohen might become “lend her a coin” or Paris Hilton, “prayers are hell town.” Many of the homonyms became very fractured, almost unrecognizable, and I added various clues, such as works surrounding the celebrities, biographical details or sound bites and gossip from newspapers and magazines. In other words, an accumulation of fact, fiction and my own private philosophical take on things.

I decided to write six stanzas per page for sixty pages, providing a total 360, indicating I’d come full circle and a return to the theme of a (contained) infinity alongside the more common notions of running in circles chasing my tale and the overriding theme that when it comes to celebrities, nothing changes except the cast of characters, otherwise it’s same-old-same-old, whether Kim Kardashian or Mother Teresa, one day your face ends up recognized on a bagel and it’s sold to the highest bidder and stuck on a display shelf to collect dust until the next best thing comes along.

There’s probably more, but I think these are the key points.

Q: That’s an enormous amount of activity going on in these poems. Is this process of selecting a series of baffles for projects a normal part of your composition?

A: “Baffles” is a good word. Can be used as “to perplex” or else to constrain or contain materials, liquids or sounds. I’m not sure I want to be baffling so much as I’m always looking for ways to break the balls of logic and distance myself from the more common straight narrative lyric form. I don’t want to confuse the reader so much as I want the reader to be interested in the pieces themselves and get some joy from how they bounce off each other to produce something else. It’s not so much how the pieces fit together as how the reading produces an overall Gestalt, whether gut or intellectual reaction or both. Meaning, I want the excursion to be entertaining, even if not fully comprehended.  

I suppose I prefer the term “collage” to describe much of my work. I tend toward a theme and use it as a sort of coat rack upon which to hang things in a fashion I find aesthetically pleasing: mentally, visually and aurally (yes, I do work at changing the rhythms, tone, “voice” in my poems so there is a sense of musicality). And as I am a bit of an eclectic, the taste can run from the sublime to the ridiculous. In Sweet Betsy From Pike I began with the cutesy folk song of the title and infused it with issues of ecology and the paintings and theology of Breughel. Of course, there is always a mix of pop culture tossed in for good measure. Geometry of the Odd borrowed from Chaos Theory as well as Douglas F. Hofstaedter’s book, Goedel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. The Imaginary Museum began with Mallarme’s notion that each of us has a museum in our heads where we store art that we love. I included books of symbolism and images/Art of the grotesque. The book launched in September, after words, is a tip of the hat to folks who have affected me and/or my work and range from C&W singers to artists to poets to philosophers to movie stars.

Also, I don’t necessarily know exactly what I’m going to use when I start out, it simply accumulates with the process. I don’t know if people might consider me a maximilist, I do know that I want each poem (even the smallest ones) to be a type of portmanteau that unpacks differently to everyone. I like the dictum of Frederich Nietzsche, who said he wanted his aphorisms to contain as much material as most writer’s novels. I don’t believe I ever reach that point, though I strive toward the goal.

Q: Your work very much exists in the book as your unit of composition. How did you start working this way? You mention Jack Spicer, for example. For the sake of difference, have you composed individual “occasionals,” poems that might not fit anywhere else?

A: Hm… It’s like the old chicken and egg question. In several cases, I didn’t know I was writing a complete book along a particular theme. What generally happens is that I write a poem—occasional or otherwise—and it often leads to another, then another and so on until I think, hey, this is looking like a collection. This is especially true if I’m working from a reference(s), as in the Chaos Theory poems.

In my book of poems, ( sub rosa ), Jacquie Jacobs sent me a photo of an art piece of hers and asked me to write a poem around it. I wrote one, then I thought—what if she hates it?—so I wrote a couple more using a similar theme and similar images, though altering enough to make them separate poems. She sent another photo which led to more poems. By the time we’d collaborated on a half dozen pictures with poems, the collection begged for completion.

Having said this, I don’t think I ever write a poem as a ‘stand alone’ piece. I’m always thinking about where to place it in a larger context, meaning, in published book form. Even when someone asks for a poem or there’s a magazine contest with a specific theme, I write it to also suit my current project. Let’s be honest, I never win contests, I rarely get grants, yet if I tough it out and apply to numerous publishers, I seem to have been lucky enough to finally see the poems collected in a book.

Q: After a dozen or so poetry collections, what development have you seen across your work? What do you think you have figured out, what are you working towards and where do you think your work is heading?

A: I believe I realized early on that I didn’t want to write the same poem the same way in the same voice for an entire manuscript. I find this boring to read personally and the last thing I wanted to do was bore myself and/or anyone else. What I did want was for all my poems to be identifiable and/or recognizable as the work of Stan Rogal. A theatre professor at SFU—Peter Feldman—always said to strive to find your own personal signature. In terms of development, I’ve tried to play with various forms and still maintain my particular (peculiar) identity. I’ve always been a scavenger and assembled poems as collage, including found lists, quotes, pop culture and trivia and so on. I’ve always included a few prose poems and made use of the dramatic voice, due to my theatre training, I suppose. In my latest collection, after words, there are several prose poems and a couple of dramatic monologues, so perhaps I’m expanding my idea of what a poem is or might be. I have another completed manuscript—which I signed a contract for to be published and the editor/owner suddenly went AWOL, so its future is uncertain—comprised of five long poems. So long, in fact, they each exceeded word counts for contests and I’ve had to submit edited versions. I wrote them simply to play with the long form and knew they would be difficult (if not impossible) to publish and was thrilled when a publisher said yes. Now, the manuscript languishes on the desktop.

Ah, the life of the poet...

I don't think I’ve figured out much beyond the obvious: poetry is slow, hard, painstaking work that generally goes unnoticed and unrewarded and it’s getting worse, not better. I was told by one of my publishers to submit something new to them, though not poetry, as they were cutting back their already slim output. I hear the same from other publishers. That said, it’s difficult to publish anything that even smacks of the literary these days and I notice many established so-called ‘literary’ magazines and presses publishing M-O-R, mediocre, easily digestible, trite and often badly written, long on plot, short on style and no discernible voice poems and prose. 

I’m unsure as to where my work is heading. I’m finishing off a couple of prose projects at the moment and I expect that if I attack the poetic form again it will be as a continuance of after words with more pieces of appreciation to those whose works and/or lives have affected me.

Q: A couple of years ago your Dance, Monster! Fifty Selected Poems (Insomniac Press, 2011), edited by Paul Vermeersch, appeared. What was the editing process like for the collection? Did you have any input, or was it a collaboration between you and the editor? Do you consider it to be an accurate portrait of your poetry up to that point, or was it aiming to be more of a ‘greatest hits’?

A: I was obviously thrilled to be approached by Paul to publish a Selected Works with Insomniac. To be asked/invited to submit with the promise of publication occurs so rarely that it’s difficult not to fall down on your knees and simply be grateful for whatever appears. As it was, Paul had threatened for years to publish such a fetish object and when he finally had the opportunity, he lived up to his word. Thanks Paul and Mike at Insomniac!

The process was pretty straight-forward. He asked me to make a list of favourite poems gleaned from my assorted collections, he would do the same and we’d see where there were intersections and separations. In fact, there were fewer intersections than we might have expected. I could see that Paul’s bent was toward similar sounding and formed poems that were more narrative and contemplative. For me, I wanted more variety in order to reflect the different uses of form and tone. There was much haggling as he didn’t really care for my noisier poems whereas I wanted to make sure there was at least a smattering, especially as I knew I’d be asked to perform live readings and always it's nice to provide a balance. In the end, we found a compromise which I believe accurately reflects certain aspects of my poetry oeuvre, if not the entirety.

I don’t think it was ever meant to be a favourite hits as there’s really nothing to judge by, so completely subjective. If I it to do again, I’m sure many of the poems would be replaced by others. I think the collection may have been served better if Paul, as editor, had added a preface wherein he described why he chose me and my work, and maybe offered insights into some of the specific poems. Or, had asked me to write something. I did such an exercise for my book of haiku, Love’s Not The Way To and you were kind enough to write a preface as well. I think it served to round out the collection and give it a context. Or maybe I should have simply re-titled it, Dance Monster! Fifty Shades of Grey.

Q: It’s true: I’m always complaining about selected poems that haven’t introductions, whether yours or the selected poems of Dennis Cooley and Monty Reid. At least you’re in good company. Given much of your work is book-length, weren’t you worried about the ability of certain poems to live on their own?

A: I wasn’t too worried about this since I always write the poems as stand-alone, though perhaps becoming more...what? Approachable? Vibrant? Re-readable? My hope is that, within a collection, the individual poems resonate one to another. Also, I liked the fact that the Selected was divided by the titles of the individual books and each title contained several poems, so it gave a small taste of the whole.

Q: Who are you reading recently that have had an impact on your work? You’ve mentioned Spicer and others as poets who helped you early on, and that you continue to return to, but what other writers have come up more recently?

A: I read that 90% of all language development occurs by age five, after which we progress in small increments. I would hazard this is the way with my development as a poet. I discovered mentors early on—generally tragic figures, suicides and fuck-ups—who left their imprint and now it takes a stick of TNT for even a minor shift to occur. Marjorie Welish was a later influence. Her intelligence and precision. Judith Fitzgerald for her rawness and precision. Don McKay for his juxtaposition of the pastoral with the demotic. Other poets I enjoy, though I don’t find their work so much impacts my own as complements it somehow: Steve Venright for his quirky humour and twist of phrase. Stuart Ross for his surrealist humour and playfulness. I appreciate and enjoy your excursions in the Open Field, though I don’t feel compelled to try my hand at it. In terms of literary exercises, Greg Betts’ take on the Shakesperian Sonnet, The Others Raisd In Me, was fun. Christian Bok’s Eunoia was clever, visceral and funny and I enjoyed the Dadaist form and the conceit of Ubu Roi. Whereas similar work by someone like Anne Carson bores me to tears and comes across as academic posturing, dead and plodding and mired in Antiquity.

Otherwise, I scan the magazines sent to me and if something strikes me immediately, I read it, if not, I move on. As I mentioned, I’m working on some prose projects right now and mainly reading Don DeLillo and Roberto Bolano, both excellent storytellers and stylists.

Q: I suspect you’re already picking at the manuscript that follows “Celebrity Rag.” What are you working on currently, and how does it fit in with everything that has come before? Do you really feel that you are writing a single, “life long” poem?

A: The last poem I wrote was lifted from one of my long poems in Howl Down the Moon and re-worked to be used as my disclaimer before live readings. This poem was then included in the recent after words book. The poem was dedicated to William S. Burroughs, in time for the 100th anniversary of his birth. You see how it all comes together in one continuous line derived from my particular consciousness and all reflective of my basic metaphysical existential themes: the nature of reality, the nature of identity, the dichotomies of good/evil, truth/falsehood, life/death, is language an adequate vehicle for communication or is it true that we convey more with nonsense sounds, body tics and silences than the actual words, is there a Dog, and so on.

Al Moritz once described my poetry as “stream-of-consciousness” which it can seem like, though isn’t. Everything is placed in a certain order and for a purpose. In fact, I believe that most people exist with numerous conversations going on in their heads—juggling career, family, friends, holiday plans, shopping lists, dreams, pet peeves, affairs with co-workers—and it’s rare for anyone stick to a straight narrative except for short periods of time. I try to mirror this in my poetry. Straight narrative proves to be more fiction than fact and is the stuff of most movies and novels—a rare exception being Ken Sparling’s lovely odd novel Book—and people seek these for the precise reason that they crave some order in their otherwise chaotic lives and thought processes.

In this way, yes, I do believe I’m writing a single, life-long poem, maybe broken into segments. Allan Briesmaster commented that all my books are different, yet they are all recognizable as works by Stan Rogal, which I appreciated, since it's something I strive to attain.

As I mentioned previously, I’m not working on any poems at the moment—still feeling a bit burned about the AWOL publisher—and if I do, it’ll probably be a continuation of the after words pieces, knowing I still have a lot of people to thank.

Currently I’m trying to complete a novel. It’s meant to be my vitriolic response to all those ‘growing up Mennonite on the Prairies/mother dying of cancer’ sentimental stories that generally grab all the media attention, grant money and awards in this country.

Bitter? Maybe a bit. Perhaps I should try to sweeten my lonely crust of bread with a little mayonnaise…?

Touch the Donkey : fourth issue,

The fourth issue is now available, with new poems by Maureen Alsop, Stan Rogal, Laura Mullen, Jessica Smith, Lise Downe, Kirsten Kaschock, Gary Barwin, Chris Turnbull, Lisa Jarnot and Nikki Sheppy.




Six dollars (includes shipping). Oh, Shakazaramesh, will you never learn.

TtD supplement #16 : seven questions for j/j hastain

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j, simply, hopes to make the God/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon. j/j hastain is the inventor of The Mystical Sentence Projects and is author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), The Non-Novels (forthcoming, Spuyten Duyvil) and The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance of Experimental Realisms, as well as a chapbook through above/ground press. j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin, Aufgabe and Tarpaulin Sky.

hastain’s poem “queer nuns who collaboratively leave their vows for all kinds of decay” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “queer nuns who collaboratively leave their vows for all kinds of decay.”

A: How to tell about a poem when the poem tells of the pulls, the pooling, the need for female pierce.

When one part of your name does not correspond with another part of your name unless you do something to make them correspond. You are more God-like than the others know. Take Lesbian further into the body, since nun has been there for many years and has obviously not gotten you into the bed of your sister as a lover—not yet, at least. What will happen next?

The abbey—the architecture in which the change occurs, weeps teat-shaped tears.

Q: What do you mean when you say “the need for female pierce”? Are your poems responses, in your mind, to a particular series of needs?

A: Absolutely, they are responses to needs. Needs are cosmic potentials for communion in form.

To me, language is a place as potentially wild as it ever is structured. It can free us from the ache or insanity of unmet needs by meeting needs within us—but, I feel that we have to be open to treating words as mist and mystery rather than history in order to enable that ages-old magic of cosmic bibliomancy by way of letting narrative or shape-of-a-tell, be led by methods more enigmatic than typically schooled.

Female pierce: that long-awaited moment of inebriation when the woman whom has come to you for the third night in a row, meeting you in the perfume of your dark room to do the holding rite in response to your particular crisis—when this sister who is letting you wail and quake in her strong arms, finally lays you back on your own bed and makes love to you under your long-standing comrade: Christ on the cross...

Something is forever changed now. Both sisters can feel it. Is it that Christ looks at them differently? Or does he just look different to them? Something special is spreading—

Sure, it’s the legs of women whom, for so long have tried to ignore their bodies, but it is also a buttery sound, a guttural sound of female breath bursting. It is louder than the abbey bell.

Q: You seem to favor a particular flow of poetic, abstract language that exists as poem-essay--as the rush of language. Where does a poem originate for you: in the flow of language or in the core of an idea you wish to explore/articulate?

A: Yes poem-essay as rush is a good way to get at it: Niagara or any other rush that is not just a rush but a rush that could take you.

What I feel most strongly about is that a feeling be able to be embodied during the work with language, and then by way of that embodiment, some strange communions come about. What kinds of somatic surgery are possible? What is really taking place here cellularly—and are there any ways to narrate that without forcing it into harsh light?

As a queer person with synesthesia I have sound to sight connections and other kinds of inborn crosses, which can be too overwhelming to bear if another sense is there trying to command them. So—for me, writing is as much an emancipation from traditional sense, from the dominant forefather blabbing his history book and forcing me to leave my door open, as it is simply a work with language because language is one of my favorite lyrical places in the worlds: one of my favorite ways to make worlds.

Are my pages dependent on chance, chaos? Possibly. Are they dark matter being made more possible to manifest as bizarre or queer moments, red vigors on the fringe, by various nudges and mirrorings of a human, in the beauty-making risk of posturing on what is the brink for them? Yes.

Sharon Doubiago said “to wilderness where marriage is possible”—I would say that the site of origination for anything to which I apply my energy and power in order to support it in showing itself as art (be that pages or embodiments or...) is all about the wild richness, the dream spot leaking over, the relief when a grass patch tells you “pick me pick me—I am ready” and you realize that is why you had to take the dusk walk into the woods, that tell-toward-share is the way I could turn that grass patch into a ruddy crown I wear with a fat exhale and Gaia dripping down my face while I make my way toward home.

Q: I’m intrigued at the idea of incorporating your synesthesia in your poem-as-response, something Ottawa poet Amanda Earl has also discussed about her own work. The idea of attempting to articulate the space and confusion between two senses could be extended to your explorations blending literary genres and exploring the space between genders, as well as in your collaborations with other poets. What is it about the clear boundary—whether personal, sexual or literary—that pushes you to resist? What are you aiming to explore?

A: Interesting—I mean as someone with synesthesia, it is not that I necessarily incorporate, as in, intentionally try to experiment with what is already here and a reality for me, like—this is not “experimental” per say—but it is that the nature of how I experience reality as blended, as a saturation state in which aspects between are merging and mixing, in which voices of fragments come through in order to come out: the between and the mix are inherently a part of anything that will ever come through me.

Art coming through like offspring? Yes. And if we are someone who does not identify with carrying and labor then we are the doulas for ourselves. The point is, when this passes through me it carries my DNA onto the page.

The clear boundary in which I rebel, frankly, is the boundary which forces me into a waiting state in which I am abandoned at the mercy of too much inner-data-inter without any love or holding from the exterior which is imposing. That is just not fair. It is pushing the animal body too far. To bite singular into multi-sensory is my animal right.

In other words, why is it within another’s power—a system’s power, to leave me in some faux singularly, in some state in which I must struggle because that state does not include this kind of sensory skew?

Do I blend literary genres? Do I embody the space between genders? I guess so, but I guarantee you that all along, what I was trying to do was be myself and offer all that I can muster in any given moment, for the sake of how who I am, could open, bless, enliven, stimulate and arouse space and architecture: environment.

Life.

Q: How does this poem fit in with the rest of the work you’ve been producing? Is it part of a larger project or longer thread, or does it stand alone?

A: I think, both.

But I hope I generate enough page-communion and variable resonance that no piece ever has to stand alone—we all know what kind of social pressure that put on the cheese. Dear cheese, dear piece: I’ve got your back. I am a practicing Priest/ess beside you.

This poem was written during a green winter. It is interested in the overlaps, the places where two things, perhaps unforeseen in contexts with each other, can touch.

Is it odd and bright like many of my other works? I think in that context it is part of the general whole, yes. But my ultimate dream for any page would be that it be found in the ground, partially readable, partially un, and in the un—that a teenager is able to sound out something deeply ‘in’ for them.

What is content for?

Perhaps it’s not at all to tell anything, but to have somehow led us to where we are going next.

Q: After numerous books, chapbooks, collaborations and other works, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work is developing? Where do you think you are headed?

A: I hope I am headed up toward the bright mother and, at the same moment, down toward the dark mother—in other words, into sacred geometry and flourish-sites as well as deepened Priest/ess practice whereby I can actively embody spiritual poetics.

Books are gifts from the forest: sites in which we can offer love back to lost trees.

Collaborations are agreement fields which, upon first glance at the form of an agreement field might not seem to indicate any magic or potential passion, but once merge occurs, reveal that they are ripe for ongoing energy exchange and transmutations of many types!

I feel wonderful about how my work is progressing. It feels like the motile home I have always wanted: the only cosmic home which could truly suit me at all times. I feel I have made a new quality of space in page whereby I, and others who don’t fit some limit of the prescription, can find community and space and reprieve.

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

A: I read video clips of Tatsumi Hijikata. I read the markings Joan leaves for me on the cave walls. I read the pace of the plants. I read the particles for the transitory faces of the deities.

I read a lot of books. I read the body for musics.

I have some dears with whom I collaborate page and breath: t thilleman, Max Wolf, Sam Ace, Marthe Reed. They continue to support and stimulate me in this plane as I straddle worlds. I am lucky to be with them and I want to buy them flowers. They each offer a particular sensory weight to which I offer back sensory weight.

I want to buy you and Amanda Earl flowers, too.

TtD supplement #15: five questions for Emily Ursuliak

Emily Ursuliak is the current fiction editor, and a member of the board, for filling Station magazine and an executive producer for the literary radio show Writer’s Block. This spring she was given the Volunteer of the Year Award by the Alberta Magazine and Publishers Association for her work with filling Station. She recently completed an MA in English at the University of Calgary where she worked on her first novel and collection of poems. You can find her work in Warpaint, Blue Skies Poetry, FreeFall, No Press and the anthology The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual. Her chapbook Braking and Blather was recently published by above/ground press.

Her poem “Tourists” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Your two-part poem, “Tourists,” originally appeared separately in different places. Do you see the poems working equally well apart as together, or was the goal always to have them appear as a single unit?

A: The two sections of “Tourists” can work separately as they are each individual portraits of people that Anne and my grandmother Phyllis encountered on the road. However, by appearing together the two sections emphasize the road-weariness of Phyllis and Anne at that stage of their journey, and also their sense of irritation at being treated as a spectacle, or tourist attraction, by fellow travellers. I prefer them together as a unit because it demonstrates the repetition of “tourist” behaviour that the two women encountered. They were stopped a number of times so that they could be photographed, or questioned and while the tourists might have thought that these interactions were flattering, they were in fact inhibiting to the women’s progress on their trip.

Q: “Tourists” appears to apply a similar strategy of sketching out short, lyric narratives as your chapbook/poem, Breaking and Blather (above/ground press, 2014). What is it about composing such lyric portraits that appeals?

A: I think the subject of the poem often drives what form it takes, or at least for me it does. “Tourists,” “Braking and Blather” and the other poems in the collection The Diamond Hitch are lyric narrative poems because their source material, my grandmother’s travel diary, has a strong narrative running through it. The poems tell the story of this somewhat rebellious and unconventional journey Phyllis and Anne took. A number of the poems are portraits as well because the two women encountered so many rich and unusual people in their travels and in many circumstances had to rely on the unusual relationships they developed with this people in order to survive. So there’s that reason, and I also seem to be naturally drawn to writing lyric poetry. I think this might be due in part to the fact that I also write fiction. I’m relentlessly attracted to the idea of narrative and it’s interesting for me to explore how I might tell a story through poetry as opposed to fiction.

There have been times when I’ve felt insecure about being a lyric poet. I live in Calgary which is known for being a hotbed for experimental poetry. The work of these poets, many of whom I count among my friends, is intriguing and inspiring to me, but I've always been more interested in bringing experimental concepts into my fiction instead. I’ve heard it said a few times in the experimental camp that lyric poetry isn’t pushing at the boundaries to the extent that experimental poetry is, that we’re becoming too lax and that our poems aren’t doing the real work of poetry anymore. I used to feel insulted and irritated by that sentiment, and while I don’t agree with it, I consider it a friendly challenge now. As a young poet, still in the process of developing, my work might not yet be pushing at any boundaries, but by continuing to tackle topics which for me feel engaging, or at times may push me out of my comfort zone, I hope to do so in the future.

Q: Considering that Erin Moure, one of the more engaged experimental poets in Canada, has repeatedly called herself a lyric poet, I would suspect there’s still far more to be discovered within the lyric. And I think the whole notion of experiment actually begins with the idea of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Given the rich nature of the stories you’re working to tell, I’m curious as to why you chose to tell the story in the form of lyric poetry over, say, fiction or non-fiction?

A: I guess thinking of yourself as being either in the “lyric camp” or the “experimental camp” might be symptomatic of living in Calgary where there does seem to be these separate groups of poets that don’t cross-pollinate a lot, which is something I find frustrating. Each group has something to offer, and while it’s probably natural for literary communities to break off in this way I think it’s unfortunate. That’s not to say that everyone stays within their own little “camps,” there’s plenty of others that feel the same way as I do, but it would be nice to see more engagement between these different groups.

Why is The Diamond Hitch in poetic form instead of the alternatives? That’s a tough one and it’s something that seems to come up quite a lot. I remember telling derek beaulieu about the travel diary once while a bunch of us were out for drinks. He said, “You should definitely write a novel about that!” and then when I told him I was actually turning it into a collection of poems he seemed puzzled, although he’s been very supportive of the work that resulted from it. I’ve also had someone suggest that it would make a great screenplay. Maybe at some point I will pursue telling the narrative in different forms, but I don’t see that happening in the immediate future.

I think it came out as poetry because prior to starting it I had written this small collection of six poems about the residential school just north of Edmonton. After that experience I enjoyed the idea of working on a number of poems that were unified around one topic instead of just “one-offs” and the travel diary had always been something I wanted to explore. I started working on the poems the summer before I got into grad school at the University of Calgary and I don’t think back then that I was as critically aware of what I was trying to do as a writer, it was a lot more instinctual at that point. Now, looking back at the source material the poems came from, I’d say that there’s a lot of poetic moments within the diary that I wanted to use. One of my favourite poems ends with a piece of found text from an interview my grandmother did with a reporter shortly before they left for the trip. It was quite clear from the article that the reporter didn’t take my grandmother and Anne seriously when he heard about them, but came away feeling somewhat intimidated by them. One of the last questions the reporter asks is if they can talk a bit about the 1927 MG Roadster the two of them co-owned and were planning on driving for the first half of their journey. My grandmother rattles off an impressive list of engine specs that seemed like pure poetry to me, it just required shifting a few of the lines around and arranging the text the right way to bring out the natural cadences that were already there.

Q: I’m presuming The Diamond Hitch is the title of the work-in-progress that includes both “Tourists” and Breaking and Blather? How far along is the manuscript? What has been your process of putting your first full-length poetry manuscript together? Was much of it mapped out beforehand, or has it been more of an accumulative process?

A: Yes, The Diamond Hitch is the title of the manuscript that both “Tourists” and Breaking and Blather are a part of. The manuscript is technically completed, and I have been sending it out, but after a very helpful rejection letter that Goose Lane sent me a few weeks ago I think I might be revisiting some of the poems in the collection to give them a bit more polishing. The thing I’ve found most difficult about being a young writer with your first manuscript is knowing when the hell the thing is actually ready to be put out there. When you’re just starting out you’re very reliant on the advice of more experienced writers and what can happen sometimes, and what’s been happening to me, is that I’ve received advice on both ends of the spectrum. Some have told me the manuscript is very strong and I need to get it out immediately, and others have said that I need to go back to the drawing board and spend several more years on it. I’ve realized I just have to trust my gut. I feel that the manuscript is pretty much ready to be out there, but that it could be stronger than it currently is and finding weak points to strengthen is a good plan before resubmitting.

The manuscript came together in a year-long poetry manuscript class that I took with Christian Bök in the last year of my masters degree. That class was pretty transformative for me. Christian and I are very different people and I don’t always agree with him all the time, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for him as a teacher. I’ve tried to think about how I could describe the effect that class had on my writing and the best way I could put it is this: you have an instrument that you fiddle around with because you enjoy music, and maybe you learn how to play a song or two by ear because you have a natural instinct for it, and then someone comes along and teaches you how to read sheet music and the way you look at your instrument and its potential is completely altered.

The manuscript was kind of already mapped out in that I was working from this travel diary that both Phyllis and Anne had taken turns writing, as well as a few newspaper articles and photographs of their journey that were included along with it. They wanted to go on an adventure and at the same time buy some horses, so they drove their 1927 MG roadster from Victoria, British Columbia to central Alberta, bought a horse each plus a pack horse and then rode them back through the mountains. For two women in their twenties to want to do something like this back in the early fifties is pretty outrageous and they were/are both very literary, witty women so the source material was terrific to work with. I basically read through the whole diary once, and then went back through and flagged moments that seemed fitting to interpret into poems. There were a few poems that didn’t make the cut, and a couple more that I might still decide to take out. Basically the process of creating the manuscript in the class involved a hell of a lot of writing and a hell of a lot of intense editing and I felt a bit alarmed that at the end of the class I’d actually produced this manuscript-length thing, and even more alarmed when people told me that it was almost ready to start sending out. There was one last draft of it that I did over the summer after the class had finished that involved adding some new poems and working from Christian’s suggestions on the final version I submitted for the class. He was gracious enough to meet with me over the summer to look over the changes I’d made and make a few more suggestions about the new work that I’d added.

The funny thing is that when I came to the University of Calgary to do my degree I was only planning on writing fiction. I worked on a novel as my thesis, but prior to starting the program I had about ten really rough pages of poems for The Diamond Hitch. I was afraid that if I got too wrapped up in working on the novel that my “poetry muscles” would atrophy and I'd never actually do anything with these poems. Christian was teaching this class and, though I’d never taken a class with him before, I knew him from the writing community and he managed to convince me that I should be in it. It was a lot of work to do both a poetry collection and a novel at the same time, but it ended up working out well. I wrote the novel under the mentorship of Suzette Mayr and thought I enjoyed working on it, and am still enjoying the puzzle of trying pull it together into something publishable, the material I was dealing with for that project was really dark and at times emotionally draining for me, and the poems were a bit more playful and light-hearted so it gave me some balance in my writing life.

Q: Given some of the material you’re working with and from, what kind of responsibilities are you feeling for the original facts? Perhaps this might apply more to the poems you composed about the residential school than to the facts around your grandmother’s trip and her journal entries, but I’m curious if, when dealing with real events and real people, you’ve allowed yourself to shift detail for the sake of the writing.

A: I feel a high level of responsibility, and as you suggested, that responsibility felt a lot more heightened when I was working on the poems about the residential school. That project was one that I did a long time ago for a senior level English class for my undergraduate degree when I was at Red Deer College. I was lucky for that project in that I had a good professor who advised me on how to tackle it. It was a class where we could do what we liked for our projects as long as they were responding to the theme of the class which was Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. I decided to write this small collection of poems and then started to have a lot of anxiety about it. Was it something I was allowed to write about if I had no First Nations ancestry? My professor’s advice was to study the angle that I wrote from and be respectful. Doing research for the poems was incredibly difficult. Often my sources would contradict each other and I wasn’t sure who to believe. The poems became more about the impossibility of writing about the tragedies that occurred in residential schools and wrestling with this dark history. I also went and visited the site of the residential school just outside of St. Albert and the mass grave there as well as the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, which was an abandoned building that they’ve only just started to tear down. The Camsell Hospital played its own disturbing role in the history of the residential school system. There was some indication that another mass grave was located on the hospital grounds, but officials will not address those claims, so it it’s hard to know where exactly the truth lies.

The uncanny thing about that project is that every time I read those poems at different events around Red Deer there was always at least one First Nations person in the audience, and every time I noticed that I’d get very worried about how they’d respond, and at the end of every event the First Nations audience members would come up to me afterwards and were incredibly warm and kind. I spoke to people with both Cree and Blackfoot ancestry and all of them said they were happy that I was writing about it, and that as a white person I’d treated the issue with respect. I think the most meaningful conversation I had was with a man that told me his grandmother had been abused and used as a test subject at the Charles Camsell Hospital and that he didn’t think people even knew what had gone on there and that he was happy I was telling others about it. I’m not happy with those poems anymore because they feel very amateur to me now, but I learned a lot from the experience. I workshopped them in a class I took up in Edmonton about a year after writing the poems and I promised myself that I would visit the site of the mass grave again and pay my respects. So that was a very profound part of the process. After my course was over I bought a bouquet of flowers and visited the site again to honour those that are buried there.

The biggest concern for writing The Diamond Hitch was how I would portray Phyllis and Anne as these characters within the poems when they’re both people that I care about and love very much. I wanted the depictions of them to be as honest as I could. When I was a kid I watched Phyllis and Anne interact a lot, they were like two teenagers constantly teasing each other, making silly jokes and annoying each other. I wanted there to be some of that chemistry in the poems. Also my grandmother could be a bit stubborn and difficult and I wanted to stay true to how she actually was. My grandmother can’t call me out on anything that happens in the poems because she passed away back when I was finishing high school after she fought a second, heroic battle against cancer. I feel like she would be happy with the collection though. Luckily Anne is still with us. I sent her a portion of the manuscript when I was still in the process of writing it. She had a few factual corrections to make, but seemed thrilled that I was writing about it. I've emailed her the manuscript in it’s entirety, but haven’t heard from her. I’m not sure that she still uses her computer much anymore. I’m hoping to have her read everything and get her blessing before the book gets published though, that is very important to me.

As far as the other parts of the narrative there are sections where I’ve invented details that aren’t actually there in journal entries. For instance the stories that Mr. Richter tells Phyllis and Anne in Braking and Blather are invented. The journal entry said that he regaled them with local gossip all the way up the road, but didn’t provide any details. For the most part I stay pretty true to how things actually occurred within the journal and just add a few details or flourishes where they’re needed. 

Q: You say that you’ve “always been more interested in bringing experimental concepts into my fiction.” Why the division between your poetry and your fiction? I’m also curious at the models for your writing. What authors and works influence the kind of writing you’re currently working on?

A: I imagine that the division between the work I do in fiction and the work I do in poetry will probably dissolve more and more as my practice matures. I suppose that right now I still think of them as separate because I approach them differently. Fiction is a place where I can let go and the words flood the page, whereas poetry is a far slower process that involves a lot of ruminating on different combinations of words before I decide what sounds right.

I guess when I talk about wanting to bring experimental concepts into the work I do in fiction I’m thinking about a project I hope to do in the future that’s very inspired by the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The best way I could sum up Miller and Cardiff’s work is that they’re interested in the narrative potential of ambient noise. While I admire their work I find that some of the narratives that they layer over ambient noise aren’t as sophisticated as something a writer could produce. I want to find my own approach into this kind of work with more of a writerly concern driving what I’m doing. At the present moment the project is this delicate fetus and I have other things I need to get done first. The funny thing is that I’ve labelled this project as a “fiction project” and now I’m realizing that’s kind of an arbitrary category to put it into.

In terms of fiction Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace was definitely a model for what I wanted to accomplish with my novel, which is also historical fiction. She has a way of using very evocative, contemporary language while still giving you the feeling of being in the time period in which the novel is set. Suzette Mayr’s work has also been an influence for me. I knew that I wanted her as my thesis supervisor after reading Moon Honey. When I read that book I noticed the physicality with which she explores her characters; you get the sensation of being very rooted in their bodies. That was something my own work used to really lack and I think being mentored by her allowed me to get more into the flesh of my characters, which has been fun, and at times a bit disturbing. I’m a big fan of the work of Miriam Toews and Sarah Selecky as well.

I have to confess that in terms of poetry I’ve been a bit lazy in the past about actually reading that much of it. This is something I’ve made a concerted effort to change, and part of the reason why I decided to take up the 95 Books challenge this year. I think Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid was very helpful for me when working on The Diamond Hitch. I remember someone recommended that I read it while working on my poems and I almost didn’t want to because so many people had gone on and on about how that book changed their lives. I thought it was too over-hyped and the work wouldn’t have any effect on me, but I was wrong of course. The prose poems from that collection informed how I wanted to approach the ones I was working on. Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue is an old favourite of mine. I have the 2004 version of it with the wood engravings by Jim Westergard. It’s probably some kind of cliché now to be an Albertan poet who says they’ve been influenced by Kroetsch, but I feel sincere about it. There’s lines from Seed Catalogue that have stuck with me, and not all poetry has the power to do that for me. The book that I read most recently that really blew my socks off was Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré’s translation of White Piano by Nicole Brossard. The powerful precision of language in those poems is something I long to have.

TtD supplement #14: six questions for Roland Prevost

Roland Prevost has been published by Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant, The Toronto Quarterly, Dusie, Ottawa Arts Review, among many others. He has four chapbooks: Metafizz (Bywords, 2007), Dragon Verses (Dusty Owl, 2009), Our/ Are Carried Invisibles (above/ground press, 2009), and Parapagus (above/ground press, 2012). He won the 2006 John Newlove Poetry Award. His first trade poetry collection, Singular Plurals (Chaudiere Books), appeared in September, 2014. He lives and writes in Ottawa.

His piece “Oh, to What Feeds” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: What is your relationship to the poetic fragment?

Depends on the fragment. But in general, I see such fragments as an opportunity to keep the writing ball in play. They stimulate my imagination. I can extemporize 'off' a fragment, sort of like a jazzist can riff off a bass progression, say. Even if keeping the same bass, there are almost endless spontaneous jam arrangements possible.

There's a sense in which poetic fragments have a holographic nature. By this, I mean that a poetic fragment still contains a version of something larger than itself, much like a small section of a holographic plate still contains the whole 3D image, just less sharply defined.

I sometimes like to take fragments from other sources, from the writings of others, my own writings, or even short passages of entirely made-up literature that I then build into poems of their own. For an example of the latter, see the long poem Hat_Pulse (Singular Plurals (Chaudiere Books, 2014)).

Starting from the other end of the spectrum, I sometimes write pieces that seem whole and complete, but whose texts take on additional meanings when woven into the larger context of a chapbook, or book of poetry, or possibly even a life's work. I'd like to imagine that the same holographic principles apply, and that this wider meaning of a poem in a new context was somehow enfolded in it, all along.

Q: Tell me about the impetus of the poem “Oh, to What Feeds.”

A: It’s nearly impossible to be aware of all the antecedents to a poem. So, we adopt a kind of a fiction and name the most likely sources.

Likely, the most salient source of emotional energy behind “Oh, to What Feeds” relates directly to my very recent experience with throat cancer. Without getting into too many unpleasant details, one of the side effects of my treatment was that I had to live for two months entirely on liquid supplements. Nutrition was greatly simplified, and its crucial importance for survival was brought home to me in a visceral way. This poem tries to express that importance, not just for actual food, but in all the different ways we get nourishment for body, psyche, culture, etc.  You can see this in such lines as:

    Oppose the draining charge.  Dimming
    battery.  Endings.

A second side effect of going through that condition has been a palpable increase in feeling “glad to be alive”: a strong realization that I should not take life for granted. This causes a general opening up in a person, which is also an emotional undercurrent of this poem.

            Eyes, windows,
    doors, all open.  Welcome.

So many folks helped me get through this challenge that I also got a strong impression of community, and of our being in this thing together.  This third emotional thread finds expression in the text as well.

    Build what’s greater
      than any one.

There are many examples for each of these emotional veins in the poem, but these quotes should be enough to show the connections.

As for the style of this poem: for decades, when the subject calls for it, I've adopted what I’ve called ‘tight-form writing’. Roughly this results in a kind of telegraphic, shorter version of English. When this text tightness gets applied along aesthetic lines, this results in the type of poetic grammar seen here. It fits the emotional content of the poem in that it praises each individual breath.

Q: What is it about the “telegraphic, shorter version of English” that appeals?

A: Telegraphic or as I now refer to it “tight-writing” developed first while taking notes, as a way of dealing with motor-mouth lecturing professors when I first arrived at University. It seemed impossible for me to catch every sentence they uttered, and tape recording their lectures for later transcription more than tripled the amount of work. So I quickly had to develop a very condensed way of taking notes in order to come close to keeping up with the knowledge stream.

Three examples from Astronomy course notes, 1976:

    Hubble thought: classification system, mistake.
    Big Bang Theory – correlates to Universe expanding.
    Relativity meant: static Universe impossible.

Not long after, in the pages of my logbook, I noticed that certain awareness-based experiences were also overloading my capacity to write, if I tried to transcribe them live. As with the University notes, there was simply too much happening all-at-once for me to catch any meaningful percentage of it in ink. So I adapted my note-taking way of writing for ‘live stream capture' in my logbook. I noticed there was quite an important difference with these ‘live in the moment’ texts, with a particular advantage in capturing the core of an experience. Tight-writing had been adapted to logbook writing, in other words, for those cases where I wanted to capture experiences in the stream as they flowed.

Examples from my logbook, sometime in 1989:

    Must drop soul-garbage. Detritus. Past does not bind.
    Accept. Answerless in world of changes. Can be done.
    As inside, so outside. Pile of fragments, not EZ.

At a much later time, when writing poetry, I had to try to capture my picture-imagination. I once again had to find a way to catch very fast - almost kaleidoscopic - image changes, in text. There were many more tweaks and adaptations required this time, since there were many aesthetic considerations to maintain. However, I began to associate this condensed form of writing with imagination. Even when later editing my ‘pixmind stream captures', I tended to keep these pared down tighter sentence fragments, their focused attention to unadorned details. That’s the genesis of my use of a ‘tight-writing’ aesthetic in poetry.

Example from the long poem Parapagus (above/ground, 2012):

    We are reduced to call upon the eye and ear.
    Dicephalic Parapagus: one body, two heads.
    Their locked proximity, a theft of each other's lives.   
    Female adult remains. Survival to maturity
    Suggests an acceptance of strangeness.
    At the root of meanings: like humane, or superstitious.
    Speculations too easy.  These painless imaginings.
    Guards protect the site. Day and night shifts.
    From a global Fame to beat Lucy’s bones. 

This same style was also applied to "Oh, to What Feeds." It seems to fit the immediacy and intensity of the emotions expressed there.

Q: You seem to have developed a comfortable degree of writerly instincts. I know you’ve been working on a daily “log book” over the years, where first drafts of much of your work emerges. How does the daily practice of composing your “log book” translate into finished pieces? Do you consider yourself a writer of poetry, or a writer of a “log book,” some of which might be carved out and reworked for the purposes of publication?

A: My successful logbook journey began at the age of 15, after half a dozen failed attempts to keep a daily journal. Somehow on this particular try, the habit finally took hold. If I were to guess at what made the difference, I’d say it was a sense of exploration. A huge drive to understand the world, this life, and awareness. Though the logbook contained many rough drafts of works of fiction, short plays, short stories or poems, these for many years took a back seat to working out insights, discoveries, and understandings. The creative writings were a means to an exploratory end. Their texts were probes, existential experiments, and not aesthetically meant for public consumption.

At around age 45, that is after 30 years of this, I felt like I'd gotten a decent preliminary look around. Also, along my travels and explorations, I’d discovered that the concept of human culture had taken on a growing importance for me. For the first time, I felt I could and perhaps should give priority to creative work.

I've always considered myself an explorer first. Trying to map out what was mappable, and beyond that, trying to encapsulate what was meaningful in a multitude of other ways. As such, all writing consists of a single thing, for me. Logbook, emails, essays, songs, stories, and poems. All of them: instances of bearing witness in some way or other. It's not exactly that I consider myself a logbook-writer who then catches certain parts to craft them into poems. It's a bit wider than that. I've been an explorer all along, and only some of these explorations end up in written works of various kinds. Some of them in logbook pages, and more recently, others in poems, depending on the subjects and treatments desired.

The main difference between the logbook and a poem is that, whereas they both share my drive to “encapsulate meaningful awareness-tunings,” with poems, I'm trying to do so in an aesthetic medium, and sometimes also, for the purpose of placing the work on River for a potential eventual re-animation by others.

Everything goes into everything else, when it comes to writing. Explorations into ink, and ink into a myriad of forms, including logbook and poetry. In actual fact, in a human mind, everything seems to interact anyways. Might as well put that into one's design for being, and therefore also, for writing. Seems to me.

Q: You make it sound as though you came to poetry and the use of the poem-fragment rather organically, and yet, I know you’ve done an enormous amount of contemporary reading of poetry. Over the years, what writers and works have influenced the way you approach a poem? Who have you been reading more recently that have had an influence on the way you work?

A: Over my entire lifetime, there’ve been quite a few poets of influence I guess. But of particular note “over the years” would be: e.e.cummings for his willingness to play with and re-invent grammar, Charles Olson for his attention to the percussive nature of poetry, Jack Kerouac for his freedom and awesome poetic travelogues, Irving Layton for his in-your-face uninhibited attitude, bpnichol for the sheer fun of word shapes and sounds, Leonard Cohen for the clear and powerful vision of his songs, Robert Creeley for his willingness to kick holes through our typical boxes, William Carlos Williams for the sculpted power and simplicity of his words, T.S.Elliot for the wide modernist grandness of his sight, Margaret Atwood for her mean-but-true fishhook barb end twists, and Robert Kroetsch for his organic experiments with creating better vehicles blending sound and meaning with form. These, off the top of my head, would probably represent my main writing influences, lifelong.

As for more recently, the poets who are clearly influencing me at the writing chair in practical ways: Gil McElroy for his always inspiring and ongoing Julian Days series of poems, Dionne Brand for the mysterious tone of her book Ossuairies, Mary Jo Bang for her seminal mix of grammar and emotion in her poem The Opening, Monty Reid for his ability to find the perfect distance while providing rich multi-levelled perceptions in The Luskville Reductions, anything by Margaret Avison (whom I’m re-reading) for the sheer spark and fresh/gentle wildness of her sensibilities, and rob mclennan for his ongoing willingness to show us finer details, yet still let them speak for themselves. This list of active present influences keeps changing all the time, but this represents my present roster.

Q: How do you feel the poem “Oh, to What Feeds” fits into, or even expands, the rest of your writing? And now that you’ve a first trade collection under your belt, as well as a small handful of chapbooks, where do you see your writing headed? What do you feel you might be working towards?

A: There’s been a progression, to be sure. A gradual re-working of voice and tone, coupled with a paring down of considerations. I’d describe it as a shorter distance between awareness and text. I’ve written a few poems recently that have this character: “Oh, to What Feeds” (Touch the Donkey #3, October 2014), “We Verb Nature” (Dusie, expected online Nov 2014), and “Knack to Promise” (Chaudiere Books, National Poetry Month, April 2014) represent three examples of such works. That’s where my writing’s going, stylistically.

As I’ve written elsewhere, with poetry I’m trying “to create and encapsulate meaningful awareness tunings in aesthetic language, for later re-animation by a future self or others down River.” At the writing chair, I’m attempting to increase clarity, while still “enshrining the mystery.” I’m more aware of eyes and ears other than my own, and I'm starting to feel the writing implications of this.

As an activity, I increasingly see poetry as much more than a transcription of what’s already perceived. Instead, it’s an actual forging of awareness, somehow improving it, making it more rich, increasing its reach, titrating its possibilities. In other words, adding new windows to my dwelling-place. This feels more fully aligned with my life's explorative drive.

That’s why there’s a second – and the beginnings of a third – poetry book manuscript in the works. Certain recent health challenges have honed things down significantly, simplified things, as such challenges often do. I find there’s very little that truly matters. It’s from this fresh and sparser sensibility that I hope to approach future writing and manuscripts. At least, that’s where my compass points.

TtD supplement #13: eight questions for Megan Kaminski

Megan Kaminski’s first book of poetry is Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012). She is also the author of seven chapbooks, most recently Wintering Prairie (Dusie Kollektiv, 2014), which was recently reissued by above/ground press. Her current work Deep City explores the body and the city as architectures in crisis. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas and curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence.

Her piece “Sister // Deer” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the extended poem “Sister // Deer.” How did it originate?

A: My second book, Deep City, is going to be coming out next year—I’ll have an official announcement soon—and “Sister // Deer” is part of my new/current project Gentlewomen. The poems in Gentlewomen play around with and revise gendered domesticity through a re-imagining of the voices of female allegorical figures, specifically Natura, Providentia, and Fortuna—giving voice to particularly feminine desires and appetites. The poems consider the kinds of wildness and incivility that arise from a rejection of various forms of cultivation. They also celebrate feral longings and weedy appetites as counterforces to productivity and as a means of reclaiming the wild. As I’ve been working on the project, I’ve become particularly interested in sisters and the idea of sisterhood, in the relation of the allegorical figures to each other and also the relations of the various other women who inhabit the book—lost girls, icy mothers, drowned and ghosted children, and also the two sisters who get their own long poems, “Dear Sister” and “Sister // Deer.” While “Dear Sister” and her correspondences (there’s an excerpt here at Two Serious Ladies) live very much in the suburban domestic sphere, “Sister // Deer” rejects that world. While I think of her poems very much as spoken utterances, as a kind of response to her sister, they are also language eroded through a kind of self-erasure. A resistance to pleasantries and the types of usefulness and meaning that create the language of her sister. The poems aren’t conventional utterances, and they aren’t the type of responses one might expect to correspondence, and “Sister // Deer” herself perhaps isn’t quite human.

Q: Is this a normal part of your composition process: writing around and through a particular subject/idea?

A: I don’t typically start out with a particular subject—at least not an encompassing and defined subject. In this case I started thinking broadly about voice, examining and playing around with the authority of voice and questions about who gets to speak/who gets to be heard. I’m particularly interested in how these questions play out along lines of gender, class, race, and ecological systems. So I guess I had these set of concerns in mind when I started writing. Gradually the voice of Natura came out in the poems—this loving and at the same time brutal mother and sister. That voice developed in the poems, and as I was writing, I started doing research—a whole ton of research. Research into literary history, literatures and theories of the feral, various ecological systems, philosophical explorations of nature and fortune, and allegorical depictions of women throughout history. That research fueled my writing and the project. I guess this is how my compositional process always goes. For me writing poetry is a way of thinking, about the world, about language, about bodies, about architectures, about capital, about how they all fit together. I’m always thinking, and I'm quite often writing, and every once in a while something comes along that coheres into something interesting enough to pursue as a creative/intellectual project. I’m always thinking and writing and doing research—only a small part of the work I create makes its way into the world.

Q: You give the impression that you are very much working within the framework of the book as unit of composition. Is this a fair assessment, or do you focus more on the individual poem, or handful of poems? Are your books constructed as complete units or more as a collection of disparate parts that eventually cohere into larger projects?

A: Sometimes I write a poem or poems and sometimes I work in larger units. I’m always looking for connections, ways in which poems are thinking through something. Sometimes that thought works itself out in the duration of a single poem, though often the initial thread develops into something larger—a series or even a chapbook or book. I’m always looking to raise additional questions and to develop resonances outside of the initial moment or thought. Since I’m hard at work on a book length manuscript, I am currently very much focused on the form of the book. That said, each book manuscript that I work is part of a larger process of inquiry. The book-to-be, Gentlewomen, is only a small part of the larger intellectual/creative project. There are other writings and creations associated with the project, different ways of thinking through some of the material and ideas that are coalescing into the book manuscript. Some of the writing and research associated with the larger project has developed in the form of book reviews, poetics papers and talks, somatic exercises, and even a textile project. And there’s also a lot of research and writing and thinking associated with the project that will never make its way into the larger world. I’m not so interested in being efficient or productive in a way that is readily recognizable, each book manuscript is only a small part of what I am up to.

Q: What else are you up to?

A: Besides the book manuscript I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a few scattered projects. I’m writing some poems about weeds, bodies, connections, and riots and some poems about the prairie. Working on a lost girls embroidery project. Working on a collaborative project with the poet Bonnie Roy. Reading and thinking a lot about the post-human, citizenry, bodies, crisis, incarceration, revolution, and other things for a residency I’m participating in Joshua Tree. And also thinking about all these things in connection with the poems I have been writing about weeds and weedy connections.

Q: Tell me about this upcoming residency: does this mean you’ll be working on a specific project involving “the post-human, citizenry, bodies, crisis, incarceration, revolution, and other things” while there? What are you imagining this project might look like, or are you still in the preliminary research stages?

A: It’s through the Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange, which is a roving residency program in its second year/incarnation, this summer in Joshua Tree, California. This year’s theme is “Networks of Belonging: Geographies, Citizenries, and the Masses,” and there will be residents, invited guests, and organizers all getting together to collaborate through readings, discussions, presentations, and art-making. I’ve been working my way through the extensive reading list this spring and summer and also making connections through other research that I have been doing on my own. This coming week, we’ll all be together in Joshua Tree. I’ve never participated in something like this before, and I’m excited about the ways in which the residency connects with my previous and current work. I’m also excited about the generative possibilities of this week-long exchange in Joshua Tree and the ongoing exchange after. I’m guessing that this will be the start of something new for me in terms of a poetic project. Mostly though, I’m excited about being a part of a larger community of artists, philosophers, and writers, with all of us exploring and grappling with these larger questions. Writing can sometimes feel like an isolating experience, even if what drives you in your writing is a desire to connect.

Q: After one poetry collection and a small handful of chapbooks (as well as this current work-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? What, if anything, do you feel you are working toward?

A: I don’t really think of my work in a narrative of progress—so there’s not really a goal or an end that I am working towards. When I first start conceiving them, my individual book and chapbooks projects feel like they are doing quite different things—experimenting with different voices, forms, subjects, etc—but as I spend more time with each of them, I see connections. I continue to be interested in various geographies and architecture—of the natural and made world, of the mind, of the self, of language, of larger systems and networks. Though, I suspect that describes a pretty broad and encompassing field of inquiry.

Q: Winter seems to be a thread that exists through your poetry. What is it about the subject that compels?

A: Well, this winter was particularly rough in Kansas, as for much of the country. My recent chapbook, Wintering Prairie (Dusie 2014), is a long poem devoted to exploring the season and how it mediates our relation to place, specifically the prairie that spreads across Kansas. Besides that poem, I’m not sure if winter is more central to my writing than any other season. Though, I am often surprised and startled by the length and intensity of the season, and perhaps summer, too, after spending so much time in more temperate places.

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

A: Oh—there are so many! Some current and sustaining favorites include Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Leslie Scalapino, C.S. Giscombe (especially Giscombe Road), Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series, Fanny Howe, Joseph Massey, Terry Tempest Williams, Bhanu Kapil, Erín Moure, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Palmer, Jennifer Moxley, Gina Myers, Jen Tynes, Ji Yoon Lee, Melissa Buzzeo, Pattie McCarthy, Joshua Clover, Cecilia Vicuña, Michelle Naka Pierce, Stephen Collis, Lisa Robertson—so many wonderful writers. And that’s just who’s on the top of my mind this morning.

TtD supplement #12: seven questions for derek beaulieu

derek beaulieu is the author or editor of 15 books, the most recent of which are Please, No more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) and kern (Les Figues press, 2014). He is the publisher of the acclaimed no press and is the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb. beaulieu has exhibited his work across Canada, the United States and Europe and currently teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and Mount Royal University. He is the 2014—2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary.
   
His piece “one week” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the extended prose piece “one week.” How did it originate?

A: I was invited by Richard Harrison to be a part of the “Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” project with a pair of readings, one in 2011 and one this last spring. Mutanabbi Street is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. A car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on Mutanabbi Street on March 5, 2007, decimating this cultural hub. For the 2nd reading I composed a new piece that applies the ideas of conceptual writing. This piece consists solely of press releases outlining the deaths in Iraq during the week that Al-Mutanabbi street was bombed.

Q: Have you utilized this kind of flarf-esque structure before? What do you see as the effect of a piece such as this?

A: Well, I don’t think that “one week” is a flarf poem in the slightest, it works along more Conceptual frameworks. Flarf poetry is written with an eye to what wikipedia says are “rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry.” Flarf poems are written to be intentionally corrosive, cute, or cloyingly wacky. “one week” on the other hand is closer to conceptualism whereby it scrapes the internet for language and then presents it back without filter—a means of presenting daily language in a way which draws attention to its poetics—there’s nothing cute or cloying about the reporting coming from Iraq.

Q: Given that such a conceptual framework, as the back cover of Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (2013) suggests, “challenges the very idea of reading,” I wonder about how such a piece is considered in various contexts. For example: an audience in an art gallery reading such a piece on the wall might be more open to its conceptual frameworks, but even a highly-literate literary audience reading the same piece in a poetry journal is still subject to a narrower view. Is part of the purpose of the piece to simply challenge the idea of what “poem” is currently considered?

A: I wouldn’t say that the purpose of the piece is solely to challenge our expectations of poetry, no. That said, Conceptual and Concrete poetry both challenge our reading habits. My friend Christian Bök jibes that the reason why so much text art is unsuccessful is that people don’t like to read standing up. I think that in a lot of ways the reading that we do most often occurs standing up—standing on public transit, walking down the street, waiting in line—and that poetry can only benefit from engaging with this new reading spaces.

Q: Have you composed any other pieces along the lines of “one week”?

A: Yes, for the most part it’s the same strategy I used for the majority of How to Write (Talonbooks, 2010). The internet provides an unending source of material, it’s just a matter of where to look and how to choose.

Q: I’ve always had the impression that you predominantly worked on larger projects. What happens with the small one-offs you create in-between, or are they eventually to be part of something larger as well? I’m curious, too, about the piece “from Extispicium” in the uncollected section of Please, No More Poetry. Was it also constructed using a similar strategy?

A: In addition to larger projects like flatland, Local Colour and The Newspaper, I always have smaller pieces on the go in various stages. Those poems are sometimes occasional and sometimes are incorporated in to larger sequences, depends on the piece. Extispicium is a long-term project that combines personal narrative with harvested testimony and phrases from survivors of abuse and bullying.

Q: I’m intrigued at the political engagement of “one week” and the social engagement of Extispicium, elements I haven’t been aware of in your prior work. Is this a relatively new element you’ve been exploring, or simply one that’s more overt? What do you consider, if any, the social responsibilities of art? Or does it live at the level of honest engagement?

A: Conceptual writing (and Concrete poetry) is often dismissed as apolitical. I think that it is, in fact, highly charged within a political awareness of subjectivity, ownership, theft and formulations of the commons. Rob Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling, 2014) is a perfect example—in it Fitterman has crafted a deeply intimate, deeply personal, lyrical longpoem crated entirely from phrases and confessions he scraped from chatboards and internet postings. Subjectivity and ownership—poetic property—are charged spaces. I would say that my work has continuous engagement with the politics of reading and theft.

Q: As a writer, publisher, editor and critic, you are extremely engaged with a variety of practitioners of Conceptual writing as well as concrete and visual poetries across Canada and across the globe. Who would you consider are the current writers that should be receiving more attention? What emerging writers would you recommend we watch out for?

A: I strongly recommend the emerging poets who have been featured in 89+ / POETRY WILL BE MADE BY ALL especially #girlproblems by Victoria Braun and Space Administration by Ken Hunt ... and there’s a tonne more in that great, foreword-thinking series…