Bert and Ernie, OGs
July 31, 2009
The writer-nerd in me can’t help but note that the proper title would be “Bert and Ernie TRY Gangsta-Rap.” For music historians, the song is “Ante Up” by M.O.P. (Mash Out Posse).
8-Ball: Solomon Nagler
July 28, 2009
Solomon Nagler’s films have played across Canada, and in the U.S., Europe and Asia at venues such the Centre Pompidou (Paris), L’Université Paris Panthéon Sorbonne and Lincoln Center in New York. His work has been featured in Retrospectives at the Winnipeg Cinematheque in August of 2004, at the Excentris Cinema in Montreal in August of 2007, the Festival De Le Cinéma Different in Paris in December 2005 and 2007, The Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers and The Canadian Film Institute in 2009. Originally from Winnipeg, Solomon Nagler currently lives in Halifax where he is a professor of film production at NSCAD University. His filmography and other information can be found online at www.cinemaofruins.com.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
I see a general lack of artists discussing the ethical implications of their renderings of Cinema. In this way, there seems to be a delineation between artists who are interested in refracting the light of cinema through an authentic sense of self, and those whose interests lie in a self-indulgent bronzing. I see it as all coming back to Tarkovsky’s ethical idioms regarding the necessity of sacrifice (the solitude inherent in an uncompromising practice) and the moral qualities inherent in time itself (the supernatural possibilities of mise-en-scène).
I would also appreciate more discussion regarding breakfast rituals. I’m fascinated by unintended gestures. We live in a false mirrored wonderland with looking glasses designed to give the impression of self assessment, when in reality we really spend more time looking at others through ourselves, the holiness of the gesture-without-thought is often ignored. The morning is the only time in the day when an authentic sense of solipsism can come into being; genuinely alone, communicating in grunts and pheromones, one foot in dream/spirit logic, the other stumbling in hazy halitosis.
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your filmmaking seriously?
To not worry, they’re wrong.
3. What is wrong with the film industry, and what are they getting right?
There is no such thing as a film industry, there are only those who live their images and those who drink them. Other people’s cavities are not my problem.
4. How will technology change filmmaking?
People change filmmaking, technology changes people. Our eyes are becoming more accustomed to brighter images. We long for clarity, this is greatly effecting directors who show naked asses for an extended period of time. With this said, I’ve never been one to sell memberships to the celluloid cathedral. I only implore that we take our eyes seriously, something that the phenomenology of instant images can make us take for granted. Beauty can never be solely adhered to the vulgarity of a specific material.
5. What is your process for a typical project, from idea to exhibition? (Give a specific example.)
The political elements of my process are a smoke-screened Maoist romanticism. Form and content must be elegantly mutated in a mysterious organism, something that can perhaps leave a tickling aftertaste for a couple post-viewing hours. My scripts are mere sketches that I use for funding purposes. After funding is confirmed, I immediately burn all story outlines, script drafts and treatments. After a prolonged period of reflection, I re-sketch the film based on the resonating impressions that have survived my repetitious purging of fantastical poisons.
The result is a radical, abstract narrative that refutes explication and depends much more on visceral description. I try to provide an enriched, organic, free-range mise-en-scène, that is braised with a palatable sense of duration so that the lines between what has happened, what will happen and what is going to happen all synthesize into minimal absolute scenes.
6. What are your daily habits as a filmmaker, and as a viewer?
Nothing is accomplished on warm sunny days. I work well in cities where there is a clear delineation between outside and inside space. Fleeting summer days are spent reading through a selection of books and feeding an unhealthy tea addiction. Eventually I glean the sweaty remains of the day and work throughout the night, gracefully panicking, murmuring to myself as I simultaneously chastise and congratulate myself on ridiculous midnight thoughts. All of this has been created out of necessity. Budgetary constraints and my dependence on working with technicians who have real day jobs have resulted in the majority of my films being shot between the hours of 20:00 – 5:00.
This being said, there is no equal to the spiritual/emotional deluge that occurs the instant one leaves a cavernous matinee black box, and enters into the luminous embrace of an exhausted summer day.
7. What is your ambition as a filmmaker—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
I aspire to continue tricking myself into thinking that this poisonous emptiness is not fuelled by ambition, but rather a search for purity and goodness.
8. Why don’t you quit?
A friend of mine who grew-up in Lunenburg County Nova Scotia had a stinking pet turtle. She tied the poor amphibian to the fishing docks by her house because her parents refused to let her bring the rancid beast into her bedroom. Me, I’m chafed to the bone, my rope is frayed and knotted, with this I work and keep working.
8-Ball: Brenda Schmidt
July 27, 2009
Brenda Schmidt’s third collection, Cantos from Wolverine Creek, was published in 2008. Her main blog is Alone on a Boreal Stage.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
The older I get the less and less I know what it is I want to talk about. Conversations have become more and more like bowls of chowder. They’re all creamy on top. Dip in a spoon and you get a carrot. Some corn. A potato. Maybe a bit of bacon. A clam. Who knows. Sometimes it’s thin. Sometimes it’s cream right to the bottom.
As far as questions go, I wish interviewers would always ask writers to name the most mind-bending book they’ve read lately. Earlier this spring my answer would have been Sea Sick by Alanna Mitchell. But then I read Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics by Timothy Morton. Now I’m rethinking everything I’ve ever written. It’s as if I’m rebooting.
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your writing seriously?
I wish someone would have told me to join the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. I was serious about writing for a good ten years before I knew the SWG existed. Once I joined I became aware of all the opportunities. The possibilities.
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
For the most part, I don’t think there’s much wrong with the industry. It’s a business and consumers are increasingly difficult to read. However, I do pause every time I hear someone describe things as homogeneous and conservative and wonder how my own tastes have been shaped by the industry. While the industry might well be homogeneous and conservative, I trust that there are always artists tugging at the edges. I’d love to see A Little Distillery in Nowgong: a novel across media, for instance, which deals with the tyranny of the book. Just imagine the viewers of this work. Artists, writers, publishers. Imagine the questions. If you tug enough and tug with power, eventually the logs will move.
I think they’re getting lots right. I see a great variety of publishers and a great variety of voices in print. Thanks to the internet, the books are just a click away.
4. How will technology change writing?
Starting when? The rate of change from the invention of the printing press onward has been phenomenal. Digital technology has set a pace no one can keep up with. There are so many options now as far as process and product goes. Whatever you can imagine. To think I, in a mining town in northern Saskatchewan, can hit Send and you, in Calgary or maybe holidaying in France, can receive, copy and publish this interview all in under a minute is just boggling. And it will appear in feeds just as quickly. But how will any writing, be it this online interview or a novel of genius, be received in the current climate? How will the matter of dilution, social network fatigue and feed rage change writing? It’s anyone’s guess.
5. What is your process for a typical piece of writing, from idea to publication? (Give a specific example.)
Sometimes an idea will strike me as I’m going about my activities of daily living. Like when I’m pulling weeds or flossing. Sometimes an idea will strike when I’m reading. I tend to let ideas brew for a long time before they hit the page. I don’t force the writing. It happens when it happens. If it’s a poem I’ll pin it on my bulletin board. A million revisions and several years later, I’ll send it to a publisher.
6. What are your daily habits as a writer, and as a reader?
I start my day with coffee and poems. It’s been that way for many years. Then I read the news. Then I read something else. And so on. I end the day with a book of nonfiction or fiction.
7. What is your ambition as a writer—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
Ambition is an interesting thing. Ambitions change. These days I simply want each piece of writing to be stronger than the last. Or closer to whatever I’m reaching for. I want to spend my time reaching. I also want to be part of the conversation. Part of a community.
8. Why don’t you quit?
Why quit what you enjoy?
Trying to make money writing…
July 23, 2009
… is like trying to make a dog out of cheese.
8-Ball: Peter Norman
July 22, 2009
Peter Norman lives in Halifax. His first novel, Emberton, is forthcoming from Douglas & McIntyre. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including The Best of Canadian Poetry 2008 and Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
Q: What’s the secret of your godlike sex appeal? And how do you manage to temper it with such winsome modesty?
A: Funny, George Clooney asked me the same thing the other day. Honestly, I don’t know. Equally mysterious is my inexhaustible wealth.
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your writing seriously?
“You are not as good as you think you are. You don’t know much. You’ve read only a fraction of what you need to read. Work harder, write more, sweat, learn craft, revise like you’re possessed. Get cracking, son.”
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
The traditional infrastructure is geared to feed a demand that may no longer exist. Publishers sell something that consumers don’t value much, or think they can get for free.
A lot of smaller houses are doing a terrific job of sticking to their guns and publishing exciting work. So are some of the big players. Whether this makes money for anyone, I don’t know. I’m no finance whiz—just ask my student loan officers.
4. How will technology change writing?
I’m hoping it will allow me to write without contracting carpal tunnel syndrome.
5. What is your process for a typical project, from idea to publication? (Give a specific example.)
There is no typical project. Each one’s different.
I like projects that come out of the blue and blindside me, things I never would have imagined I’d be doing. One day, the poet Stephen Brockwell told me he didn’t think sonnets were relevant anymore. An ardent sonneteer, I disagreed. Stephen hatched a plan: he’d write a sonnet lambasting the form, and I could reply with a sonnet in the sonnet’s defence. We swapped our poems, then he wrote another, and I replied, and on we went, fourteen times. We published our battle as a chapbook, read it on CBC Radio and at the Ottawa Writers Festival. This totally unexpected and wonderful thing turned into the most successful publication that’s had my name on the cover. (Which is, admittedly, a bit like saying Ashley is the brainiest Olsen twin.)
6. What are your daily habits as a writer, and as a reader?
I wish I had daily habits as a writer and as a reader. My unpredictable freelance work life makes “habits” a longshot. (Good habits, that is.).
Here are the things that I do every single day, without fail:
1) Wake up
7. What is your ambition as a writer—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
There are ten books I hope to write and publish. It will please me very much if I finish all ten, and if each of them finds its right readers. In other words, I don’t really care how well they sell (though my student loan officers might); I merely hope that, in the vast Lavalife of the literary marketplace, they hook up and click with the readers likeliest to appreciate them.
For me, goals, aspirations, ambition etc. have to do with books, not self. I’m ambitious for specific poems and stories and novels I may write; I want them to excel. But I’m not interested in walking into a room and having people gasp and say, “Holy shit, it’s an author!”
Admittedly, though, it would be nice to become a surname:
—Say, Bill, what do you read when you’re not too busy waterskiing and practising dentistry?”
—Well, Stan, I’ve been trying to get into Proust, but who has time for that? So it’s been back to the regular diet… you know, Le Carré, Murakami, Norman.”
That would be cool. Especially if it meant I could score some free dental work.
Outrageous daydreams, aside, though, there’s really only one reason I became a writer: when I was a tot, stories held me in absolute thrall. They were the dearest things. The relationship I had with a story (especially a long story, a novel) was a grand adventure, epic yet intimate. All I ever wanted to do was create that same experience for others.
8. Why don’t you quit?
Don’t have the balls.
Sad and Sadly Funny
July 22, 2009
Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, copyedited by Vanity Fair.
8-Ball: Garry Thomas Morse
July 21, 2009
Garry Thomas Morse is a Vancouver writer with two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007) and a collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009), published by Talonbooks. Two additional books of his poetry will be available from Talonbooks in 2010, a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer and a poetic/familial exploration of Kwakwaka’wakw myth and the local history of the potlatch ban.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
Jonathan, why didn’t you ask me how it’s going with The Chaos Quincunx, my series of five serial surrealist speculative novellas? First it was a trilogy and then a friend suggested a tetralogy (think of Sigrid Unset!) and then when I realized there was an opportunity to go around saying “quincunx” all the time, I set to work on a fifth part at once.
Why, it’s going great! Thanks for asking! I have completed three of the novellas and am close to completing the other two. I am still in tentative talks about how this might possibly go to print. Recently, I came up with this theory about this work being the reverse-engineering of a graphic novel, but how does one even put that into words? Notwithstanding, it is lovely to wake up in the morning with the lingering taste of quincunx all over my lips…
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your writing seriously?
For some reason, this question reminded me of a direct quote from South Park:
BUDDHA: It’s alright. Everything is as it should be.
JESUS: Oh, shut up, Buddha!
I think the only hint of advice I can remember when I first started to really really really take my writing seriously was looking to George Bowering petulantly and expectantly for a response to a pile of poetry I’d given him and he said something like “there are some good poems and some bad poems.” I suspect from that point onward, I had interpreted this to mean there is no advice one writer can give another. Oh sure, you can advise someone not to invest in a pyramid scheme, but I tend to perceive the act of writing as an ultimately solitary activity. If we dare to call it Art with a capital A, then it stands to reason that our mistakes have their own value without our seeking to interfere with them. Marcel Proust suggested a link between neuroses and self-examination and writing, and in my case my various flaws and failings are part of my literary capital. I hardly wish to be advised out of making these mistakes. Perhaps all excellent writing is a series of magnificent mistakes, eh? I say to myself, it’s alright, everything is as it should be.
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
This question reminded me of the scene in Balzac’s “Les Illusions Perdues” where the impoverished Lucien de Rubempré takes his sonnets to the printer/publisher, only to be informed they are currently looking for historical novels in the style of Sir Walter Scott. I am of the opinion it takes a small-to-medium-sized press to get some interesting writing to print. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are the profit margins and irresponsible torchings of too many copies of a given title and marketing so much discount tripe to death. So far, I have had two great experiences, first with LINEbooks and more recently with Talonbooks. In my own experience, I feel very fortunate to have hooked up with a press like Talonbooks, since there is a certain amount of trust placed not only in the creative expression of my text(s) but in my ability to perform my works and hence, move some books. It was quite the honour and experience for a reclusive poet such as myself to tour Canadian cities with such intense performative poets Adeena Karasick and bill bissett. Although I was reading from my current collection of fiction Death in Vancouver, I think the audience recognized an aural synthesis between our respective texts and how there was a sensate resonance of sound lingering behind in the rooms where we read. This is a sign to me that Talonbooks is getting it right.
4. How will technology change writing?
So far, technology appears to be shortening sentences and attention spans. I’ve been a computer programmer musing about various forms of language and grammar for at least sixteen years, and probably for this reason, it seems to me everything has been moving in slow motion with regard to the relationship between writing and technology. At present on a societal level, I feel there is a primitive surface fetishization of infotainment-driven gadgetalia, although I have my doubts how informed it is. If I look at the work of Gertrude Stein or Charles Bernstein, I feel they are still way ahead of us in terms of addressing the relationship between semantic structures and the relationship (or lack of it) between them, which is really the nuts and bolts of writing the simplest of software programs or online applications. Of course, there are delicious bits of satire about technology gone wild in my rather delectable quincunx…
5. What is your process for a typical piece of writing, from idea to publication? (Give a specific example.)
I don’t have a specific answer for this question, since I don’t have typical pieces or processes of writing. I know that I wrote Death in Vancouver while working for my own educational software business, and that afforded me the luxury of setting my own hours outside of ongoing projects and writing it all out in notebooks. I have noticed that I get about the same amount of work done while working at a 9-5 job as I have the past three years, but the writing process feels more fragmentary to me, and since it is written on a computer directly, the style feels quite different. In two books of The Chaos Quincunx, I use what William S. Burroughs called the “fold-in” method, which feels rather like battering some batter in a bowl. This process is exciting, because of its sense of immediacy. I’m never sure what the characters are going to do next. However, I am looking forward to a time soon when I may be able to garner the fleeing luxury of a different state of awareness and concentration, perhaps for a short novel project. This process would again be different, and rely upon a continuation of certain fluctuations of consciousness from day to day, likely within the parameters of a few given routines. Already, I’m wondering if I will become mildly infamous for writing innumerable voluminous attempts, none of which I can accept as a “novel”, per se…
Regarding publication, I have to decide which works are worthy of sending off and putting into print. I have enough of a backlog of poetry I wouldn’t mind going to print that I have concerns about übersaturating the market with it, although instinctively I also want to shift the stuff in the back first, like milk.
6. What are your daily habits as a writer, and as a reader?
Sorry, my daily habits as a writer are classified. Oh, if you knew!
As a reader, I really enjoy reading novels at night. Otherwise, I tend to read poetry when I am composing poetry. I have always read novels for pleasure, but more and more, I am noticing a certain analytical part of myself emerging and taking notes, which interferes somewhat with my usual hedonistic reactions. That said, I read for pleasure and write for pleasure, hoping my own readers will share some of this pleasure. It is rather charming to me to consider the notion of a stranger picking up my book and taking pleasure in it. I am also of the opinion my personality could only be an unpleasant interjection to this experience, just as I find the authors of texts I enjoy have the capacity to suck the mystery out of my reading experience with their excessive self-revelations. More mystery, please.
7. What is your ambition as a writer—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
As for personal ambition, it’s something of a race against ghosts for me. I guess it will end when I am a ghost myself. Am I a ghost yet? On a good day, it feels neck and neck and by a nose. I think that I am living up to my ambition, creating decadent things like The Chaos Quincunx which I feel is unique, at least in terms of Canadian Literature. I still think producing a novel I can accept as a thing of quality is a worthy goal, although at times it feels like a tantalizing abstraction. Or maybe the best goals to have are abstract ones?
8. Why don’t you quit?
Writing, I wish I knew how to quit you! Umm…no I don’t. Well, I wanted to be a writer, at least since adolescence. Then at some point, I realized there’s a ****load of work involved in becoming a writer. Then I realized the ****load of work IS being a writer, and everything else is pretty much incidental. I find that the imaginative conceits of the writing life imbue life itself with an inherent richness that might not otherwise be perceived. The act of writing provides a way to illuminate diurnal/nocturnal beauty in a way that might otherwise be missed. I find myself in a constant state of excitation in which I suffer no boredom.
A good friend of mine has said that without literature and his kids, he’d do himself in. Since I tend to see my abundant voluminous texts as my brilliant gifted adorable progeny, I would readily concur with this statement. Oh sure, I’ll quit tomorrow…
Below are a couple of pirated clips from Carbon Harbour, book five of The Chaos Quincunx, in which the future is frighteningly green. Let’s watch.
NOTHING BLITS THE SPOT LIKE READY-MEDI MEALIES
Werner Gig removed each fingerless and blew upon his much benumbed hands. He had been tending Wind Pharm 207818-072008A for most of his life and it showed in his cracked and scarred digits. He chewed some dried fava beans thoughtfully, spitting out an excess of Genethax. As a young man, the surrounding fields had been rife with beans and sprouts and corn, before the Infestation of Fiver-Niner. He had filed the application himself to order a shipment of terminator seeds. After that, the cockadas scarcely bothered to come round, although there was nothing to eat either. He had long ago given up on breeding phishes. Werner had discovered it was necessary to order Ready-Medi Meal Packets, and like the other pharmers, he was soon hooked. Because nothing blits the spot like Ready-Medi… Thanks to these compressed mealies, he expected to live up to the duration of his contract without putting up much of a fuss when his own termination date arrived. He watched the turbines turn in the stellar wind and creakingly crank out a meager supply of nutrient paste, wondering for a moment whether his own stool could nudge along the growth process. But due to the amount of Genethax in his system, he expected not.
FRIENDINATING OFF
Sky Sapphire was minding her own highs and lows when abruptly out of nowhere she was poked right off her feet.
“For quality control, this interaction will be recorded and oddcasted.”
“Drück!”
“For quality control, all expletives will be censored.”
Sky looked up fretfully at the looming figure of Amicus Object. She tried to recall when their flirtation had begun. But she had learned (the hard way) he was only hard for pure product and as many of them he could transfer in a single meeting.
“Sky Sapphire, long time no touch. Are you rebuffing me?”
“Amicus, I did like you. But you never said you were with Friendination.”
“Let’s discuss it over Brillo.”
“No. Stop trying to sell me stuff.”
“Feeling tense? I know where we could go for a discount nethersage…”
“For how many carbon credits, Amicus? For just how many?”
“You are killing the environs with your frigid avarice. For less than a credit per tick, each fetus…”
Sky flew into a bilious rage, due primarily to her last helping of Halibutella. She knew from his profile settings that Amicus was a Foreign Object about to be replaced in the final stages of the merger with Bildung Endustries.
“Why don’t you just friendinate off, Amicus? I know you’re about to be reclassified as an utter Abject.”
Amicus Object snarled and bared titanium teeth. He seized her shoulders with the previous version of pincers.
“Now you don’t want to get friendinated.”
“Sorry! I know I still owe you a splenetic fortune.”
“Let’s discuss it over a savoury cup of Reconstitute. You can buy more Friendination paraphernalia to remember the occasion you will never forget.”
Sky wept, knowing the drill. She turned to the media outlet and smiled through her tears.
“Friendination. How else would I have gotten hooked up to someone like Amicus?”
The Weirdest Thing Yet…
July 20, 2009
…and maybe the best.
8-Ball: Diane Guichon
July 20, 2009
Diane Guichon is a M.A. graduate (’06) from the University of Calgary’s Creative Writing Program. Her poetry manuscript, Vignettes, was adapted and performed on stage by the University of Calgary’s Nickle and Dime Production Company (February 2006). Her first book of poetry Birch Split Bark (Nightwood Editions, 2007) was awarded the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell 2007 Book Prize. Guichon teaches English Literature and Academic Writing for the University of Lethbridge (SAIT campus) and presently serves as the first writer in a pilot project: University of Calgary’s Writer-in-the-School Program at Queen Elizabeth High School in Calgary, Alberta. Currently Guichon is working on a new poetry manuscript, Grass Clippings, which explores the cohabitation of nature and the human in suburban spaces.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
Interviewers tend to ask questions about authors’ writing practices or where authors get their ideas for certain works. I’d much rather they ask questions about what it is that is important about poetry and literature—both the reading and the writing of them. This summer I picked up The New Press’s Nobel Lectures from the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006. I am finding it fascinating to read what these Nobel prize-winning writers have to say about the importance of their art. They all seem to have slightly different perspectives depending on their own personal histories or nationalities. For instance, Gao Xingjian (China—exile, Nobel prize in 2000) defines literature in terms of the voice of the individual. “…Literature is inherently man’s affirmation of the value of his own self and that this is validated during the writing—literature is born primarily of the writer’s need for self-fulfillment.” A free society then is one in which an individual is free to pursue reading and writing in all its various forms. It is also a society that values the individual. We only have to look around the globe these days to see societies that do not value individuals and individual freedoms. Where is literature in these societies?
Joseph Brodsky (Russia—exile, Nobel prize in 1987) speaks in terms of language. If language is “what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom…then literature—and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution—is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.” I find this definition rather humorous in a way. I value writing and poetry especially, but am I engaged in the ultimate activity of human beings???
My work with students, even those in junior high, has shown me how we grow in our own thinking through the written articulation of thought and experience. Whether this articulation takes the form of an analytical essay or a poem, we are forced to spend time with ourselves and look inward while addressing some condition in the outer world. Not only do we learn about ourselves, through reading and writing, and our connection with the world, but we learn to empathize with the condition under which other individuals live. We see our humanity. This is all very idealistic, and perhaps interviewers just take it for granted that everyone who is engaged in the art of producing “literature” hold the same beliefs. I enjoy reading about other authors’ writing practices and where they get their ideas, but I would also like to hear their whys… why do they write? I’d like to hear their answers to your question no. 8.
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your writing seriously?
I first started to take my writing seriously in poetry and fiction writing classes. I wanted my professors to tell me how I should be writing as a contemporary poet in Canadian society. If I wanted to be a published poet, then what kind of poetry should I be producing? Should I be writing as a language poet and engage in word play or aleatory writing? Should I be writing lyric poetry and base my writing on experience and emotion? I received such conflicting information based on the writing practices of each individual professor. Our critique sessions always focused on what was clichéd in our writing or how the form reflected or failed to reflect the subject. We seemed to focus on individual poems and lines rather than on the bigger picture of contemporary poetry in Canada, how it was being written, and if there was a single answer to how it should be written. I suppose that is why I started to interview such individual poets as Tom Wayman, Carmine Starnino and derek beaulieu. I wanted answers to the big questions and these were poets willing to talk about poetry within a larger context.
Of course, I realize there isn’t any one way to write poetry. Every poet, every subject will call for very different treatments in language depending on all kinds of factors and individual aesthetic considerations. Perhaps we still teach poetry based on a rhetoric originating from New Critics. I found that these classes failed to address the bigger picture. Now, I try to gather this information on my own by reading about individual poets and how they view their art (hence the Nobel lecture book).
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
I only have one published book so far, so I don’t have a great deal of experience with the publishing industry. However, I have received numerous rejections from a variety of publishing houses across Canada, so perhaps that has boosted my limited experience a bit. Canada appears to be a very small marketplace for book distribution and sales. Publishing houses seem to rely on just a small stable of “bankable” authors and so engage in building and reinforcing their star authors rather than taking the risk of publishing other voices whose work may show equal merit. If you add in regional interests and regional authors to this, then it is easy to see how difficult it is to get published as a new author. The publishing houses and the editors who run them are then in control of what work receives recognition.
As for what the publishing industry is getting right, I’m not really sure. I think once they have a book in print, they do a relatively good job of marketing it. They submit it for relevant prizes and try to keep it in front of potential buyers and readers. They seem to do what they can with the scant resources available to them.
4. How will technology change writing?
I love the physical aspects of buying and reading and collecting books. I collect books like others collect figurines or stamps or hockey cards. The book to me is a physical artefact that links me to a time and place and a particular experience. It doesn’t have to be a glossy, leather-bound nineteenth century edition – even a slim paperback will do. I’m afraid that with Google and with books on the internet, the book as physical artefact, similar to some archaeological find, will no longer exist. Future book collectors will only find traces of word dust in deleted computer links.
5. What is your process for a typical piece of writing, from idea to publication? (Give a specific example.)
I think in terms of writing projects that relate to a particular concept or idea that I feel compelled to examine from a new angle. Birch Split Bark came about because I was interested in exploring how the canoe had been written by Canadian poets since before Confederation, and how I could bring that representation into question. My last poetry manuscript (I call it Grass Cuttings—or sometimes Grass Clippings) is a fall-out from my connection with ecocriticism, and ALECC—the Association for the Study of Literature, the Environment and Culture in Canada. Ecocritics often study what I think of as “exotic” nature—bears, wolves, whales, etc., and our relationship with nature and the “wild.” I wanted to bring an ecocritical treatment to the suburban backyard. For many the only “nature” we are exposed to is that found in urban or suburban settings.
I typically develop a manuscript of poetry over time related to a particular concept. I edit the work for fresh language. I try to keep to the concrete in order to always reflect the physicality of the real world. When I think the manuscript is ready, I send it out to a publisher for feedback. I research publishers and try to match the subject material and my style of writing to what else the publisher has published. Sometimes this means sending my work across Canada. I have encountered what I think might be regional barriers to publication this way. But then, of course, you never know if a rejection is simply because an editor didn’t like the work, or didn’t think it was something the publishing house could easily promote. I’m not very good at pursuing publication options, as I’d much rather just move on to the next writing project.
6. What are your daily habits as a writer, and as a reader?
I don’t write every day, but I do read every day. I find lots of reasons for not writing each day—teaching class, researching how to teach, folding laundry, going to the gym, or training a new puppy not to pull on the leash. I research concepts until I can no longer deny the need to write, until I simply am compelled to sit down and start writing. Then I tend to write as often and as much as I can. Writing is never easy. It is hard work. As a writer you are constantly faced with the fact you will never be able to fully capture and communicate accurately the complexity of those images and thoughts in your head. You set yourself up for a very daunting task, and that’s why I find the most difficult task in writing is writing. It never seems to get any easier. The more you write, the more you realize you fail—the only thing that brings you back to it is knowing it must be attempted.
7. What is your ambition as a writer—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
Personally, I want to write something of true beauty. I want to write something—a piece of fiction, or a poem that could not be expressed any other way but how it was expressed. I want perfection in tone, in sound, in image. This is pure schmaltzy hokum and I know it, but when I read a text and recognize its perfection, I want to emulate that in my own writing. I would like to move people the way great writers have moved me. I want to write like Gerard Manley Hopkins; I want to write like Pablo Neruda or Philip Larkin; I want to write like Cormac McCarthy or Ian McEwan.
Professionally, I hope not to be a one book author. Publication does provide official confirmation that you can write. I have trouble when asked about what I do to respond, “I am a poet” or “I am a writer.” My response is typically, “I teach writing and literature.” I’d like to be able to state unequivocally that I am a poet, and one book just doesn’t seem to allow for that claim.
8. Why don’t you quit?
I’ve had some success with a book prize on my one and only published book. I suppose that spurs me on and challenges me to keep going. I also teach writing and that keeps me involved in both the creation and analysis of writing—it keeps me in the industry of writing and writers. It helps motivate me even in the presence of rejection. Writing now is simply a part of who I have become. Quitting is no longer an option.
Whipper Snipper
whipper snipper power extends
my arm across the Atlantic —–
the nylon cord ligament pulled
from my wrist whirring —–
disappears in a blurr of destruction
grass raggedy edges
cropped where they stand and struggle
against concrete, cedar or mountain gravel borders
where it is deemed unacceptable to take a stand
taller than the next individual
blades and boys have already succumbed
to the lure of the Cub Cadet lawnmower
Sandbox Death
sealed within a sandbox
mute
beneath plywood plank and
grains of sand
friends sifting through seasons
entering and exiting the body
at unpredictable times
the empty scoop shovel
the yellow dump truck idle
inarticulate no longer fueled
by childhood energy or emotion
to labour towards bridge creations
the biological eradication of a
neglected apple core decomposing
slowly in silence awaiting
next year’s summer and the
promise of air to give up life
complete and disappear
under sand unsealed
The South Wing
There is a hospital in my backyard where people go to die or get better. The automatic doors open and close all day long making it tough for me to mow the lawn. Ambulances careen through the dogwood, snap blossoms off branches on their way by. Doctors and administrators in white lab coats sit down to coffee under my patio umbrella and discuss the cost of tree stump removal or the dog’s pedicure. I hang green scrubs out on the clothesline to dry for the evening shift that starts at nine. Visiting hours last too long and I run out of egg salad sandwiches. The disinfectant applied to operating room surfaces kills my bedding-out plants. Parking is always a bitch but my son receives tips for providing emergency valet service. I have heard healthcare funding is a problem to be solved with every taxpayer’s cheque that I forget to remove from my pocket before I am discharged. I leave with a paper id bracelet still looped around my wrist after the demoral injection.
Debaser
July 19, 2009
To the best of my knowledge, the only song about Luis Buñuel — “Debaser” by Pixies, from the album Doolittle.
