Talking Poetics #43 : Bronwen Tate

 

Spending Time with Words as Words

During my MFA back in 2004, I tried to explain to my sister what writing poetry felt like: “It’s like spending time with words as words.” I meant that writing poems involved engaging with words not just as vehicles to represent thoughts, feelings, and ideas, but as objects in their own right in all of their particularity: sounds, patterns, connotations, associations, etymological roots, and so on. The phrase words as words still flits into my mind sometimes when I’m sitting down to work on poems.

Writing, especially writing poems, requires a different relationship to time and efficiency than most other things in my life. With my responsibilities as a teacher and a member of a family, things have clear deadlines: dinner must be ready for the children to eat or the assignment sheet needs to be posted to Canvas by 9 am on Monday. I can also expect a more direct correlation between time and results: an hour spent commenting on student work will yield a certain number completed, the zucchini butter spaghetti will take about half an hour to cook. In contrast, no one is urgently requesting poems. I am accountable to no one for them. And I have much less clarity about what an hour or five hours spent writing them might yield. Maybe something? Maybe something I’ll discard 80% of in a few weeks? To write poems, I need to find ways to enter that uncertain time, that inefficient time.

Now Entering Inefficient Time

Often, the container of a set amount of minutes is enough. For thirty or sixty or ninety minutes, I am in it, and I can set everything else aside. I used to tell myself mean stories about this: that real writers feel the poem rise up in them and overflow and don’t need dedicated time, that sort of thing. But now I’m more ok with the idea that there are many different kinds of writers, and I can just be the kind that I am. And the kind I am often needs the parameter of dedicated time for being intentionally unintentional.

How do we know when the poem is done? If it’s a sonnet, we can at least say when we’ve achieved the form, even if we may still be left with big questions about which word belongs in which place and continue to revise forever. But when we’re not writing into an established form, so much, everything, is up for grabs. Having a time parameter can let me stay with a poem and its uncertainties—and return to—it without constantly asking if it (or I) am done.

Pre-Deciding

Another thing that helps is pre-deciding. I often engage in some kind of daily practice. Having decided ahead of time that I will spend thirty minutes with my first coffee, writing by hand and just tracing sound patterns, or that I’ll send my friend a new sonnet before I go to bed, lets me shift the focus to how I’ll do that thing rather than whether I’ll do it or what to do out of the many possible things that could be attempted.

Mornings are often a good time for me. I have lots of optimism and fortitude in the morning, but still a bit of fuzziness and lack of inhibition that can be good for drafting. And, especially when I manage to get up early and not check my email, the morning can feel like time outside of time, like it “doesn’t count yet,” which lets me slip more easily into inefficient time.

From Material to Poem: Gathering and Arranging

Sometimes when I write, I’m just putting out feelers—documenting what’s going on, looking for emergent patterns in the words. Occasionally something will stick this way, but mostly this kind of writing becomes material I draw on later.

Other times, I’m working in a mode. Most of these modes involve a two-step process: gathering and arranging. Once I’ve found a generative mode, I often try to stay with it for a while. I’ve talked a bit before about reading Proust in French and then starting poems from the words I was unsure about, my guesses, and their dictionary entries. In this case, the gathering principle was “read Proust, find opaque or semi-opaque words, make guesses about them based on context and similarity to other words, look them up in French-English dictionary (and often a French dictionary too).” And then the arranging principle was something like “use this material to write prose poems that speak to your life, however obliquely, or that intuitively give pleasure by their juxtapositions or patterns.” Then, of course, so many revisions!

I can trace recognizable bits from this act of gathering (above) in at least two different poems in my book The Silk the Moths Ignore. Here’s one of them:

This book—and these prose poems, in particular,—have had a long revision process with a multitude of changes along the way. I initially wrote them in prose blocks, and then at some point, I played with lines in some of them, but eventually, I settled on this “prose verset” form that doesn’t use line breaks but relies heavily on paragraph breaks for pacing. In “Creating What We Name,” I see words and phrases that came out of that initial gathering (zither, remove seeds from a melon), but then the whole second paragraph I can trace to more recent play with puns and sound (felt/felt, cut/cut, shear/sheer). There’s often a period in my revision process that involves writing intuitively into a gap. I picture this as reaching out slowly with my eyes closed, feeling for something I can’t yet see but know is there. Sometimes revisions require an opposite impulse: I also like breaking up continuities to allow a greater leap.

Notebooks of freewriting are often a source for a gathering step. Other gathering methods include generating anagrams of a significant word or sketching out a moment from the day and finding a pair of words connected to this moment that rhyme and might form a kernel to write around, as in these Lorine Niedecker-inspired short poems. Other arranging principles might involve shaping fragments into a set form like these ten-liners that shift between couplet and monostich or repeating the same word with shifting meanings along a chain of sentences. I’m working on some poems now that use notebook fragments and anagram word lists as gathering methods and rely on colors and fairytale tropes as arranging principles. 

Whatever mode I’m working in, I’m constantly looking for emergent sources of pattern and friction and trying to draw these out. In any poem, certain elements are marked or activated while others remain absent or in the background. Friction means change, movement, tension, something at stake. And patterns—especially where and how we break them—determine where attention gathers.

 

 

 

Bronwen Tate lives in Vancouver, where she is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She completed an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Before coming to UBC, she was the entire Creative Writing department at Marlboro College in the Vermont woods. Her poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore (Inlandia Institute, 2021) is available for preorder. Recent poems have appeared in Tinfish, The Rumpus, Typo, Carousel, and Court Green. Bronwen also has a few new essays: a brief one on participating in a collaborative homage to Bernadette Mayer (the project is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press) and a longer one in Contemporary Literature on how ambivalence, complicity, and feeling can coexist with critique in the work of Harryette Mullen. You can find her on Twitter or IG at @bronwentate or on her website at https://www.bronwentate.com/.

 

Serial Interview with Renée Sarojini Saklikar : THOT-J-BAP (The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns)

BIO:


Renée Sarojini Saklikar writes the life-long poem chronicle, thecanada?project and in it are many things, including books, chapbooks, poems published in journals and anthologies, and artistic and musical collaborations. Her books include the ground-breaking, children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections (Nightwood Editions, 2013) about the bombing of Air India Flight 182; and Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018), (with Dr Mark Winston), as well as the anthology, The Revolving City: 51 Poems and The Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press/ SFU, 2016) (with Wayde Compton). Her work has been adapted into opera (air india [redacted]) and into music (Bee Studies) both with Turning Point Ensemble. She is the curator of Lunch Poems at SFU and Vancouver’s first free Poetry Phone, 1-833-POEMS-4-U (@downtownvanbia).

THOT J BAP is an epic fantasy written in poetry, selections of which have appeared over the years in chapbooks published by Nous-Zot, above/ground, and Nomados presses. The first book in the series, Bramah and the Beggar Boy, is forthcoming later this spring with Nightwood Editions and is available direct from Harbour Publishing: https:// harbourpublishing.com/products/9780889714021 

The website for THOT J BAP is https://thotjbap.com/

©Renee Saklikar 2021

**

This serial interview will take place over several months, with postings that occur in instalments.

 
PART ONE:

CT: Before we formally jump into THOT J BAP (The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns), tell me a bit more about your blog, thecanada?project , which is described as a life-long chronicle and combines essays, interviews, and events/activities related to your own writing practices and that of others in the literary and arts communities. One could say that these forms are all part of one another, including the epic form of THOT J BAP….

RSJ: Regarding thecanada?project…over the last two years I wrote an essay fragment about something momentous in the process of this life-long poem chronicle, of which all my creative work including THOT J BAP is a part...I’ve replicated the text here:

About thecanada?project

thecanadaproject is a life-long poem chronicle about place, identity, language. In it are many things, including published material and works in progress such as a prose poem novel, a series of essays about life from India to Canada, coast to coast as well as many sequences of poems, inpart, about the places I’ve lived: Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Northern Ontario, Northern Quebec, Montreal, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. The project will end when I end. It is a series of fragments always asking, when does the poem begin?

thecanadaproject interviews series

To interview another is to engage in process: discovery, interrogation. The question as astrolabe can also be weapon. How to leave space for the subject – that’s what I think about when approaching writers and artists…this section is also about gratitude, for those who do the work. Always there is the challenge: how to stay open—what did Martha Graham exhort?— keep the channel open. Is poetry a project? Dorothea Lasky, whose work I love, thinks not. And yet…

Essay fragments

“This is a site of fragments. This is part of a long poem. This is not enough time. This is time, and its dimensions.”

Rethinking Canada this new decade

One of my preoccupations as a creative worker: what does it mean to be Canadian? What layers of being make identity complex: citizen-settler-immigrant—Canada was/is a promised land, a paradise, but it is jagged.

For some time now, as I read and listen to Indigenous writers such as Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Billy Ray Belcourt (A Country is How Men Hunt), Therese Mailhout (Heartberries) and many more; as I observe the pain and discomfort this word and concept, “Canada” carries for many—as I read and reread documents about Indian Residential Schools, I’m becoming more and more uneasy with my own implication in structures, and systems.

And this comes to me: Language is a structural system. So, this new decade: thecanadaproject, my lifelong poem chronicle, will now be thecanada?project.

**

CT: THOT J BAP is considered a long poem, but it's also described as an epic, as well as a multi-part series emerging in instalments. [Bramah and the Beggar Boy to be published by Nightwood Editions and distributed/marketed by Harbour Publishing in April 2021].

What attracts you to the epic, the chronology, the instalment, the life-long, and the blog --all of which have resonance with a notion of a 'public' -- in terms of THOT J BAP, and in terms of your own engagement with forms of cultural expression and how these forms are enacted?

RJS: So, about THOT J BAP. Yep. It’s an epic. Epic in that it is long; so long, that it will emerge in a series of books...and epic in scope, in that it encompasses lots of different elements. And it is epic in that it is written within that tradition and playful, too, with the tradition of sagas, story cycles, and mythic texts.

And about thecanada?project (my blog/website)….Indeed, that is my life-long poem chronicle. It will end, alas when I do. Although, hopefully, there will be readers and friends who will, by the act of reading the work, keep it alive.

An example of the playfulness [of the epic form], edging around perhaps more complex imaginings, is the title, The Heart Of This Journey Bears All Patterns. Since the start of the poems appearing in journals and chapbooks, that title is represented as THOT J BAP. I love the mouth feel of that! THOT J BAP. To my ear, the sounds are somehow a kind of “Eastern/Asian” influence, with a nod, to my mother’s mother tongue, Gujarati.

THOT J BAP started out in 2008 as a long poem but not an epic. The poem was written in the aftermath of my father’s untimely death in 2002. I’d wake, mornings, and after intense morning anxiety, which I still suffer from, I’d sit at a table with a cup of tea and read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The poem began in response to verses and lines in the Four Quartets. Early on in the writing process, I realized, with a shock, oh, this is going to be way longer. I recall the moment. I was working on a draft of the manuscript of what would become my first book, children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections (Nightwood Editions, 2013). It was August, and I was at my friend Jackie’s place. We were taking a break from a summer work session, she with teacher prep, me with my long poems, and I remember just standing stock still, looking out at a pond in the park we were in, and saying, “oh I can’t do them both at the same time! I’m going to have to choose...and I thought, well, I’ll get through this first book, and then, I’ll get into THOT J BAP. Little did I know how long and intense and all consuming that first book experience would be...and through it, from publication to the intensity of its reception, I kept working away at this epic, much more slowly that I’d intended, and so the months, became years, and the poem lead me deeper and deeper into, well, a kind of altered state, of another time and place...and then,wham, the pandemic happened, and I went deeper even still…

[Re: “what attracts you to the epic, the chronology, the instalment, the life-long”…] If I knew the answer I’m not sure I’d still be obsessed with these things! Since I started developing a consciousness of myself as a writer, which happened somewhat later in my life... For example, as a child and young adult I was always scribbling...always trying to understand the world and my place or lack of place, in it, through writing. But only much later, probably when I joined SFU’s The Writer’s Studio, did I permit myself to put the cloak of “writer” around my shoulders. And once that happened, I, too, noticed, this compulsion: to chronicle; to envision the poem both as fragment, incomplete and also, as part of a historical/social context; also just sound, waves of sound; or one image, reoccurring.

Always, the first thing is sound. Then image...I don’t really think too much about meaning. And perhaps the long poem, the epic, the chronicle, is a way to hold fragments of sound and image inside a kind of a vessel? That’s where poetry, all aspects of poetry and dance and movement also come in...and somehow the epic holds a key to how to be in the moment, still and sweet and slow and also right inside the now, the urgency of now, all the things buffeting at once... And the poem, or the act of making poems, sound to sound, with image, in fragments, and then held and documented in the epic, the long form, is about this tension between lack and abundance, belonging, not belonging, which is how I experience, this, my mother – tongue, English.

**

[You can hear Renée read from a section of THOT J BAP on Soundcloud. children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections with music by John Oliver and poetry by Renée Saklikar can also be heard on Soundcloud. Her chapbooks can be ordered from above/ground and Nomados Press.]

 ***

PART TWO:

CT: As the person writing THOT J BAP, how are you finding the process of keeping track of the multiple narratives and their fragments?

RSS: Keeping track of the THOT J BAP creative process demands mindfulness and a kind of rigour that also sometimes anxiety: over ten years, I’ve accumulated documents and files and paraphernalia and printed articles and notes. These are in boxes, files, charts, notebooks: the THOT J BAP archive has taken over a lot of our small apartment. And because I’ve been working on it for so long, I’ve carted these boxes and files around with me. I’ve had to teach myself how to keep track and have learned the hard way, the folly of not doing so: when I’m on the trail of a story, the “scent” of a poem it can be cumbersome to have to go searching…

CT: And, in terms of working with the sonic, do you find sonic elements, expressions, changing between chapbooks/books, or within the books themselves?

RSS: The question of sonics really interests me. So much of my creative process and the way that poems arise for me is about sound, and I am but a kind of scribe taking dictation for the sounds that are tapping out their message and rhythms, waiting for me to stop whatever else I’m doing, and just be still enough to try and capture what I’m hearing. So, there is this sensation of a continuing sonic boom, echo, chant, thread, pulling me along. I’ve had to learn to listen carefully and slowly. That’s part of what’s taken me so long. Sometimes I’ve not quite known what I am hearing, and I’ve had to walk and reflect and hold the sounds within me.

CT: When you return to drafts, as you compose, how is your 'ear' responding to your work (especially if you haven't looked at a chapbook or draft for awhile)?

RSS: My body seems to demand, first, a set of rituals. These have varied over the years and include the following:

-A lot of brewing of tea: rooibos in a mug.
-The rubbing and holding of stones/rocks picked up on my walks.
-Listening to all kinds of songs, on a loop on my devices and just letting them play.
-Then, reading my notes.
-Or, often, dusting the THOT J BAP archive.

I kid you not: I spend a lot of time dusting, re-arranging, searching for documents, notebooks, looking up things on the internet, re-reading books that are my companions for the journey. Sometimes, after all that, composition is simply sitting in silence and one word, one word! Emerges. So, I’ve been reckoning with time and its dimensions. Humbling, to say the least.

CT: We’ve talked a bit about THOT J BAP transitioning from, structurally, a long poem to an epic, and incorporating components of epics that may be familiar: chronology, tellings of critical figures and events, forms of continuity -- sounds, repetitions within language and the line. Eliot’s Four Quartets sparked a ‘start’ into form, but are there particular epic works that offer direction, resistance, patterns as THOT J BAP evolves?

RSS: In addition to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, there is also Eliot’s The Wasteland. As I’ve maybe mentioned, THOT J BAP started out in 2008 as a series of written responses, which were themselves acts of self-care, to help me deal with grief and anxiety. I used prompt-based writing as I read and re-read both The Four Quartets and The Wasteland, as a means to both deal with morning anxiety and also to explore the long poem form.

And although I didn’t understand it at the time I was writing, I see now that I was also resisting Eliot .  I love his poems/find him distasteful. Nothing about his life, his mores, his politics is about me at all. Still love his poems, though. So that’s interesting! 

I then put much of my THOT J BAP work aside as I went deeper into the work needed to complete my first book, children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections.  About ten years ago, I began re-visiting my notebooks and re-connected with the work.  Looking over my response here, I’m struck by that prefix, “re”: to return, to go back. Revisit, re-connect, return. That’s an impulse throughout THOT J BAP and I’m only now beginning to see the connection of the prefix to the idea of time, forward and back. 

Photo credit: ©Renee Saklikar 2021

Other epic works that offer “direction, resistance, patterns”: Robin Blaser’s collected works, The Holy Forest. I credit Meredith Quartermain for first introducing me to…I can remember discussing Blaser with Meredith and then one day, I ordered my own copy of his collected works, The Holy Forest, and have dipped in and out of it many times. I love his idea of Great Companions: just now, in writing this, I got up, went to my bookshelf, and pulled down my beloved copy of The Holy Forest. Do other folks read it as a one long poem? I’ve always done so but now, re-looking at the pages, I wonder? In the section on Dante as a great companion, which I’ve tabbed and earmarked and underlined, I found myself thinking about tradition and the long poem and how much of the field of long poem writing sometimes seems as if it were overtaken by the perception that only men write epics. As if Sappho didn’t exist.

I’m looking right now at one of the bookmarks I’ve kept in Blaser’s book: purchased in Dublin a few years ago. Laminated. The faces of 12 Irish Writers: Beckett, JB Shaw, James Joyce, Oscar White, J M Synge, Sean O Casey, Flann’O Brien, Oliver Goldsmith, Brendan Behan, W. B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, Patrick Kavanagh. 

 

Photo credit: ©Renee Saklikar 2021

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve read and studied most of them. Imagine, though, you and I, as women poets, staring back at their sepia-toned faces. Perhaps, as I do, loving their work. And yet, not seeing anything of ourselves in that gallery of writers!

That absence, that not seeing oneself in The Line Up, that’s a fierce resistance in me. All those voices. Maybe there are now poets who don’t hear the dry papery whispers: What, you? You, writing a long poem? How dare you!
From such readings, and re-readings, and texts, and enquiries, comes direction -- there’s lots to learn from The Greats, and then, that impulse, to resist. And for me, as found in THOT J BAP, resistance takes the form of imaginative dissonance, the creation of worlds. 

And here are a few more epic works; or, works that I read as part of an epic/long poem structure, for example, by Bertolt Brecht. Have you ever read any of Brecht’s love poems? I find them queasy making in their sexist violent attitude and don’t much care for them at all; on the other hand, his plays, I love; and his Three Penny Opera is an influence. In the years I’ve been writing THOT J BAP, I keep coming back to Brecht. 

 

I’ve just now pulled out a dusty orange notebook that I keep handy. Compiled between July 2010-Dec 2012. I’m re-reading notes I wrote on Dec.17, Vancouver Public Library, 5th Floor, inter-posed with my notes on Brecht, this,

 

[regarding Ntozake Shange: “‘being alive, being a woman and being coloured is a metaphysical dilemma, I haven’t yet solved.”

 

The Arabian Nights. As I write these notes, I have beside me a small paperback, Arabian Nights, Volume 1, of the much-critiqued translation of Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of those not very nicely bound Signet Classics, water stained, curling at the edges, a true “one for the road” long poem writer’s companion. I must add though, the following:

I grew up with a kind of Reader’s Digest version that my father bought me, with these gorgeous colour plate illustrations and a faux mahogany binding. Only later, did I come to understand how much colonialism and the ethnocentric blindness of “the West” created misrepresentations of these Arabic tales. As well, I don’t read Arabic, so the only way I have to enter into the world of the Tales is through these various English translations.This process of reading (and loving) what I think of as “problematic versions” of epic texts informs some the ways I’ve approached my own epic.

 

My lifelong companions:

 

At the end of Bramah and The Beggar Boy, which is Book One of THOT J BAP, my publisher and editor at Nightwood, encouraged me to include notes: at first, I resisted. Then, I came to really like the idea and here’s a snippet relevant to our conversation:

“Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, plus translations of Homer’s Odyssey, Wikipedia forays into Vedic scriptures, family gossip about Hindu gods, as well as re-readings of Christina Rossetti, Octavia Butler and an old red hymnal.”

CT: Are there works that you think also pare back the essences of an epic form, that fragment it? 

 

RSS: Certainly. For instance, I think in my writing process, that paring back can be traced to Marlene Nourbese Philip’s work. I had the great privilege of meeting her in Vancouver many years ago and it was transformative. She was in town to do a reading from Zong! and everything about her reading and then the conversation we had after, continues to resonate. Her work still teaches me to develop a means to interrogate my “slipped tongue” and the pain-complexity of working in the only language I know, this conquistador, English. I grew up in a family where my parents spoke a mixture of English, Gujarati and Marathi. And English, although my mother tongue (such a haunting complex phrase) is also an uneasy fit. I wonder if growing up in an “English speaking” household that includes other spoken languages, might produce in any poet this love for the fragment, the un/spoken, those strange elliptical silences in “mixed tongue” parental conversations…

 

As I write these notes, here’s a vivid memory of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts: Summer, a few years back. Betsy Warland takes me to hear Rachel Blau Du Plessis and then I hear her again at a little reading at The People’s Co-op Bookstore. Maybe you were there too! I’ve been reading “Pitch”, the poem sequences 77-95 in her life-long open poem, Drafts, for several years. I go back to it again and again.

CT: I would have liked to have been there! There is a sense of ritual in the various chapbooks, a building sense of pattern and repetition, bolstered by various figures moving geospatially ‘in time’ (present) and in a ‘space-time’ (both place and future), and by certain structural forms, like the sonnet or repeated images and line fragments. What are the realities of memory and searching/exploration in THOT J BAP? How important is account and recounting from figures who  often leave parts of their stories hanging — ?

RSS: I think the best way I can approach an engagement with these fascinating questions is to reference Roberto Bolaño. I haven’t actively thought of his work in a few years but certainly at  earlier stages of the writing of THOT J BAP, I devoured his disturbing magnum opus, 2666. My husband read the book over the duration of his Christmas break several years ago.  I was so intrigued by the boxed set of this over 900-page novel, with its five “parts” (printed as books), that I started to read it and then sort of fell into it, feverish and frightened and compelled. Later, we purchased a book of interviews Bolaño gave before he died of liver failure in 2003. From these readings, I started to experience memory and the idea of the quest, as part of the fundamental structure of the poem. These ideas then led me to fantasy!  

In THOT J BAP we encounter memory (the past) and memories (nostalgia for the past), and quests (which of their nature, are about forward movement) and searches (which are, often, quixotically, about the past and the future), which culminate in a kind of propulsion which the author Maria Reva says, wonderfully, about THOT J BAP that is both “ancient and futuristic.” Each character has a voice, each voice is rendered in verse, each verse takes a form, each form is often but a fragment, or, a re-telling, or an un/reliable re-counting. Re: to return, to go back. Je me souviens. That sort of thing.

CT: THOT J BAP describes torture, imprisonment, displacement and migration, detention and surveillance, raw personal and societal loss and persecution, as well as resistance and revolution. Names, titles, and references cross ethnicities and cultures and are intensely relevant: Before-Time, Rentalsman, Revival-Network, Outsider, Abigail, Bartholomew, Investigator, The Tale of the Rani of Jhansi, etc. Individuals are within multi-dimensional, pan geographic realities — what is resistance in The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns?

RSS: I think it was Peter Quartermain who once said (it could have been at that November reading we did, Chris, at People’s Coop), that he saw THOT J BAP as a map history of the world. It is both unsettling and reassuring to read your list of all these societal, political, geo-political, historical, geographical and demographical processes and traumas and inequities that indeed are layered into the dystopian wonder that is the world of THOT J BAP. I suppose all my poetry and my poetics is predicated on my experience of our historical, cultural, economic, and ecological moment. How can it be otherwise? If THOT J BAP comes to be read into the body of work that is, for instance, “CanLit,” then perhaps it will be read as poetry that contains and arises from history. 

 

When world building the epic fantasy, with its myth and magic, I also was called to the readings of scientific reports on climate change and government malfeasance (CIA torture report) and many more documents, including the history of locksmithing, manuals on craft-making, old instruction books on inventions, out-of-date primers on astronomy, and even recordings of the late Robert Fisk as he spoke of world events in front of hundreds in a cathedral in downtown Vancouver. In fact, Chris, layer into all of this, that long conversation you and I had, in your truck, one rainy November night, after we’d dropped off Renee Rodin, after you and I did a reading at People’s! We spoke of many things, including the role of the state in surveillance and the state of the world regarding climate change.

CT: At the reading in November (2020), I was able to hear you read again, which is always helpful as a way to take in your work, and "A map history" is an apt comment. To follow these thoughts THOT J BAP....how weighted is your title - The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns?

RSS: I love this question. Here are a few thoughts culled from those end notes to Book One, Bramah and The Beggar Boy: 

 

The title speaks to…

…my obsession with formal poetry and with what I call docu-poetics, the breaking apart of text to create new forms, often in combination with visuals, such as symbols and signs. This obsession finds its creative tension in the investigation of the fragment fused into forms of poetry such as blank verse, the sonnet, the madrigal, the ballad, not to mention, spells, codes and riddles. You’ll find all these in THOT J BAP, plus new forms I’ve created and haven’t yet named! So there I was, working away with all this, and then our pandemic happened. And this story grabbed my fingers and off we went deeper into that ultimate portal, myth and magic. The question is, will I ever return to Before? ♛

 

PART THREE:

 
CT: What happens to languages across portals or through time, and then to the storytellers across those domains?

RSS: THOT J BAP employs different forms of language and different kinds of texts, as we see in book one of the series, Bramah and The Beggar Boy: In this way, language proves to be the ultimate shapeshifter!

On one level, we find verse forms often used in epic poetry. Fused with those forms are many other kinds of text and levels of language, with puns and rhyme. Early on into the writing process, I realized that the story demanded attention to a fine level of detail, and I gave myself the time needed to seed each page, with poetry that coheres with layers of things: characters, time, location. Now that the first book exists in print, when I look at the sequences of published poems, I see that language is itself a character. It changes depending on each of these domains:

     -location

     -time
     -characters

All these elements seemed to choose me as an instrument: that I would be the poet to arrange the pattern.
 

I love the way the published version of Book One [Bramah and the Beggar Boy] of THOT J BAP materializes language as its own ecosphere: each poem builds into a sequence and each sequence is linked to the whole narrative.

CT: Maps. Is “map” the right word for how one might try to describe the movements — of people, of terrain and plants, of time and of language (and oh, there are other things to list here!)? Is a map a kind of constraint of record, archive, reference? A swinging door...?

RSS: Yes, to maps! And yes, I think that the epic in particular lends itself to language and map-making, whether literally or imaginatively. Both frames of reference are found in THOT J BAP.
 

For instance, the idea of Perimeter: it’s both a place and it’s also a state of mind, and how one might qualitatively view Perimeter depends a great deal on “what side of the fence” one finds oneself: e.g., beggar boys (outcasts and orphans) v Consoritum (all powerful).
 

During the process of writing this long poem, I often felt as if I was taking dictation from some other world: voices, story bits, snippets of dialogue would arrive, often when out walking or pre-pandemic, riding public transit, especially when crossing the Fraser River, or taking the east bound SkyTrain downtown into the city.
 

As I delved deeper into the creation process, the layers of sound, the fragments of images, created a tapestry from which the characters and location emerged.
 

In the revision process, my editor asked if I wanted to sketch out a map. I gave this a lot of thought. For now, I chose to let the map be in the mind of the reader.
 

Book One, Bramah and The Beggar Boy, contains “map poems” and poems that reference maps, records, archives. The front and end material provided a glossary and summary of characters and locations.
 

I might draw a map of the “universe” of THOT J BAP once the series is ultimately completed. When I think of maps, I often think of texture: the way maps feel to the touch when you are holding a map in your hand. (as opposed to holding a phone in your hand).
 

Texture and gesture; rhymes and prose; light and shadow; good v. evil. These dualities all find themselves played with, in the lexicon of THOT J BAP. All these are explored and yes, embodied, in, for instance, the Parchment Scroll poem sequence in Book One, Bramah and The Beggar Boy.
 

I’m interested in your experience of repetition as a device: that is so much a part of how epics work, right? Harking back to the oldest epic tradition of the bard or seer, reciting the tale before an audience.
As I’ve mentioned, I gave myself the gift of time in creating this epic fantasy in verse. And part of that gift inspired me to share something that was finely wrought, meticulously crafted, for the joy and edification of the reader. THOT J BAP is baroque, it’s the opposite of minimalist.
 

I didn’t fully realize this when I started out on this journey: that by working on the epic, which of course, I’m still doing (!)—there would arrive in me the feeling we get when we step into the working studio of a master craftsperson: one of delight, awe, gratitude, excitement. I can only hope to offer such to the reader...I guess we’ll see...
 

With regards to a “mixed language household”: I grew up with English as my first language, my mother tongue, although my South Asian parents also spoke other languages (e.g., English inter-mixed with Gujarati, my mother’s mother tongue; little bits of Marathi, my father’s mother tongue).
 

Part of the impetus for this epic fantasy is to weave into the history of English epics, my own stance, to welcome myself into the space of The Great Man tradition.
 

To see “brown, brave, and beautiful,” a hero who looks at least a little like me.
 

So, the inclusion rather than the exclusion of other epic languages and traditions just felt natural. Normative in fact! 

"Language". Photo credit: ©Renee Saklikar 2021

"Inside Perimeter". Photo credit: ©Renee Saklikar 2021

 

"Summer Portal". Photo credit: ©Renee Saklikar 2021

"Outside Perimeter". Photo credit: ©Renee Saklikar 2021

 **

**A note from Renee to Readers of This Interview:

 

Over the years, after spending thought and labour both on my work and on how I choose to talk about my work, I’ve noticed that other readers and writers, will sometimes do the following, particularly after asking to be my “friend” on social media: they’ll take my words, and re-purpose them for their own needs. Sometimes this is subtle and just part of the process of creators riffing and building on other creators. Other times, the taking, increasingly, is more along these lines: “hey, here’s something I can use so I’ll just clip and grab it, ‘cause it’s on the internet, so who cares.” Not cool. 

 
So, I’m putting it right out here: Please don’t take our words, either from our creative works, and/or our words about our work without our permission.

I’m going to write an essay on this kind of taking, using Ursula K LeGuin’s essay "The Disappearing Grandmothers", as part of my research. Caveat Emptor!