Q: What was the original impulse for this?
A: I’ve been working and thinking a lot on
theories of the sublime in relation to contemporary poetry. Specifically, I’ve
spent a lot of time over the last few years working through Jean-François
Lyotard’s theorizations of the immanent sublime. Basically, the sublime is
something we can encounter or think of, but we can’t present an example of it
to our minds—“the present moment” is one that Lyotard thinks about a lot. this is an attempt to work through “this-ness”
in the sense of an immanent sublime; something we know exists, but something we
can never really understand. So, I was trying to think about this-ness, not in
the sense of “this present” or “this idea,” but “this this,” whatever that might be, and how that idea could be
represented and worked through in language.
Q: Your work has been increasingly geared
toward an exploration towards language itself. Why do you think this is, and
whom have your models been? I know you’ve spoken of earlier influences such as
Mina Loy and Robert Duncan, for example.
A: Yes, there’s definitely been a growing focus
toward investigating language as language in my work. I don’t know that there's
a simple answer for why. My scholarly work has moved more in that direction,
and there always seems to be a direct link between my creative and scholarly
interests. I guess it’s just what has captured my attention. Certainly, a lot
of the people I’ve been reading over the last ten years or so have elements of
investigating or highlighting language as language. Robert Duncan is a good example
of that, though he’s also very careful not to go down the rabbit hole, so to
speak. All of the Black Mountain writers walk that line, and they all work as
influences in different ways, especially Duncan and Creeley. John Cage is also central.
Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah are both important to me, because they receive but
also work to modify that Black Mountain influence. Erín Mouré’s work,
especially how she manages to reinvent herself as a writer, is always in my
mind. And I tend to spend a lot of time reading work by Harryette Mullen,
Juliana Spahr, Lisa Robertson, Susan Howe, and Robert Kroetsch. I’m probably
forgetting a lot of names. I’ve been reading a lot of H. D. and Charles
Reznikoff over the last year or two, though I don’t know that they will
directly influence my writing. I’ve read a fair amount of Language Poetry in
the past, and they were really important to me when I was writing were the bees and gangson, but they weren’t direct influences on this. Adam Dickinson is a close friend and essential sounding board
for me, and I love reading his work. That’s a wide-ranging list, but I think
they all share an interest in the workings of language itself, though not
always to the same degree or in the same ways.
Q: Your list includes a number of poets who
utilize and engage with theory throughout their poetry, from the more overt
poem-essay by Spahr, Moure and Robertson, to far more subtle explorations.
Separate to your specifically scholarly works, where do you feel your writing
fits along the nebulous spectrum of the poem-essay, and what do you feel your
work can bring to larger conversations on form?
A: I don’t think of my work as very essayistic,
but I do think my work is very idea driven—I guess it shares that with a lot of
poem-essays. I’ve been reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which is absolutely astonishing. That book maneuvers the
divide between poem and essay in a way I can’t. Phil Hall’s Killdeer exists at that divide, too,
though in a very different way. I think a poem-essay tends to work through
ideas in the body of the poem, in a meditative way—it documents the process of
working through an idea. My work tends, I think, to enact a thought, but with
little meditation in the poem itself. The work of meditating on an idea is
something that happens outside the poem for me, and the poem works as a process
of enacting a thought, rather than meditating on a thought.
As for the conversation on form, I don’t know
that I have anything very new to offer. Robert Duncan always referred to
himself as a derivative poet, by which he meant that he was an amalgamation of
the poets who influenced him; Duncan is very much the central influence on my
writing and thinking, but—as he did—I try to adapt and string together
different, sometimes seemingly incompatible influences. So, I try to write in a
way that acknowledges the work of those writers who have influenced me: Black
Mountain, TISH, Language, while being
open to outliers (A. R. Ammons, for instance, or H.D., Charles Reznikoff, Mouré,
or even someone very stylistically different, like Alden Nowlan). I like to
think that my form is an amalgamation of those different elements, along with whatever
idiosyncratic aspects I might bring to the mixture.
I think one of the things that often frustrate
me about more conventionally lyric poems is that they’re written as though they
don’t have a form, or as though form is a natural, secondary concern to the
content. I tend to like poetry that is consciously very aware that writing a
poem is a very formal activity, one based in artifice. In my mind, there’s
nothing natural about writing a poem.
Q: I’ve always been curious about your
attachment to Robert Duncan. What is it about his “writing and thinking” that
has so deeply influenced your own?
A: I have a lot of favourite poets, but Duncan
really does stand above the rest for me, and he has since I first encountered
his work in the late 1990s. I think he had one of the great ears of the century—his
work is beautifully crafted at the level of sound and rhythm. But there are a
lot of poets with great ears out there, and lots that write interesting stuff.
I think I always return to Duncan because his politics and his aesthetics are
so rich, and they generally agree with mine. I feel that I write as a
derivative poet in the same sense that Duncan always stated he was a derivative
poet—meaning that he wrote by reading, he wrote by engaging with other texts. I
love how he views the world as an organically interrelated whole, and how his
notion of rime plays with that. Politically, I love his anarchism and his
arguments against hierarchies. I love how he argues that syncretism, the
gathering together of disparate ideas, beliefs, and elements, is the basis for
writing and a basis for ethics. I love that Duncan always viewed aesthetics as
political. So, his writing gives permission to engage with the world on
physical, textual, ethical, etc., levels in a way I find extremely productive.
Having said all of that, Duncan had a strong
mythical/spiritual side that doesn’t really agree with my worldview. I sometime
get a bit lost or uninterested by his writing when he moves firmly into those
elements. But I generally try to remain engaged with his writing even then and
work to struggle through to see what engaged him about those elements. I think
that challenge is a big part of why I love Duncan: for all of the things I love
about his work, there are still elements that I really don’t agree with, and that
mixture always intrigues me.
Q: The work I’ve seen of yours since the
appearance of Gangson (2011),
including this and Concatenations (above/ground press,
2014), have engaged more obviously with sound, meaning and visual play,
resulting in pieces that look far less like traditional “poems” than the work
in your first two books. What might have prompted this shift in structure, or
was it always on the horizon?
A: One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot
about since Gangson is the role of
artifice in poetry. Some writers want to downplay it in favour of a more “natural”
expression, but throughout this I
wanted to emphasize artifice in many ways, and sound and visual play was a
major part of that. Emphasizing artifice was important to the work because the
book focuses on such an abstract construct: this-ness. The work is an attempt
to imagine this-ness, which for me is tied up intricately with the presentation
of presentation itself. In order to try to imagine this-ness, it’s important to
defamiliarize it as much as possible. We live inside the “this” and so we can
never really conceptualize it; all we can offer ourselves are examples of what
different this-nesses (different present moments) were once those this-nesses
have past. We can’t truly understand an experience or moment while we’re inside
it, so this-ness is always something we’re retroactively working to
understand—but we can’t experience a moment from the outside, so crucial
information of each moment is impossible to regain when we’re trying to
understand it. The information we have of past moments is all artificial (it’s
memory of information, or it’s imposed information based on other experiences,
etc., but it’s not the information itself), and so artifice is necessary in the
work in order to emphasize that all attempts to present this-ness are
necessarily artificial. For example, “Concatenations” (one section of this) is a series of 26 poems, each made
up of 26 alphabetical words, each poem starting with a different letter. The
challenge is to say something while dealing with the artifice of language—but that
artifice is always there; there’s nothing natural about language, and the poems
are just more obviously artificial. The spacing on the page, where words are
placed according to visual rules (certain letters on certain lines order the
writing by lining up vertically), is just another example of artifice
structuring our thought and expression.
