Geoffrey D. Morrison : part five

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I almost misinterpreted this question to mean, “how do you know when you have reached the final lines of a poem?” Because it’s not always the same, is it? Sometimes you find the end before you find the middle. 

I will say that the poems I’ve had the most fun writing were often very voice-driven, if in my case usually a weird voice, so that the end ideally comes quite naturally as the end of a conversation or a monologue would, and the middle ideally leads to the end without the need for much fixing, and the beginning to the middle…I wish it was always like that!  

Some poems, the ones I’ve had the least fun writing, are kind of like scabs you pick at when you really shouldn’t. There are so many moving parts at play, and changing one thing has major implications somewhere else, but, ah, you need to change it, and so, but, what if…In that case you can never tell when you’re done. The poem has become like a cursed object and you must put it away and do something else for awhile, give it time to cool down and work out its problems on its own. 

Geoffrey D. Morrison : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

There are two Japanese poets from the seventeenth century I hugely learned from - Nishiyama Soin, and Ihara Saikaku. It’s the free associative leaps of logic, the almost joyous way they place images side by side, sometimes in ways that are really funny.  

There’s a beautiful book called Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster that translates poets of Abbasid-period Iraq. Everyone in there is amazing but especially Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri, a pessimist freethinker and early vegan, almost existentialist in his outlook. He’s a poet of the mind moving, and so I think of him alongside the contemporary poets I probably learned from most, W.S. Merwin and Dionne Brand. 

I value the alliterative and punning lessons imparted by the typically anonymous poets of Old English verse, especially for me the riddles, but also the exilic laments – “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” “Wulf and Eadwacer.” I value the Pearl Poet for the same reason. 

Of the Metaphysical poets, Herbert more than anybody else, and especially “Prayer I.” I urge everyone to stop reading this interview and Google it now. Now that’s what I call parataxis. 

I cherish Gerard Manley Hopkins hugely, both for the obvious sonic reasons and for his integrity and care. Emily Dickinson for her brilliance and her lineation and her always-perfect choice of words.   

Dylan Thomas, H.D., Pablo Neruda, and Nicanor Parra round out the crew. 

Geoffrey D. Morrison : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I think poetry is on a spectrum with other forms rather than completely separate from them. I think certain forms “aspire to the condition of poetry,” to crib from Walter Pater, and that some do so more ardently than others. And I don’t always think poetry’s near cousins are the ones we would necessarily assume. So for instance I think one such near cousin is the visual aspect of film – much more so than the dialogue in film, even if the script is self-consciously “poetic.” I especially mean the rhythm of cuts and the selection of shots; they have a scansion as poems do, they imply the movement and the juxtaposition of emotions and ideas in a special way.    

So by this reasoning Orson Welles’ hallucinogenic film-essay F for Fake is more like a poem to me than his Chimes at Midnight, even though the latter is an adaptation of Shakespeare and so by default features poetry. I don’t totally know if I believe this. I’m trying it out. 

I think Dziga Vertov’s early Soviet film experiments are poetry. I think anything paratactical is in the extended poetry family. This means nearly all lyric-forward music, collage, found footage, assemblage in sculpture, and all old folk tales and myths and stories with weird logics and sudden transformations.

Parataxis, defined broadly to include montage and so on, seems really crucial to what poetry is to me – the ability to jump from idea to idea, image to image, feeling to feeling, without necessarily requiring some sort of overbearing connective tissue. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Verlaine didn’t want to write about the count walking into the room! It’s a transition from one scene to the next, a connector. He would rather show the count swimming, the count watching lightning strike a church, the count drinking vodka with his grandmother, and leave aside how he got from one to the other. 

Geoffrey D. Morrison : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

It must have been early. My mother read to me from books of nursery rhymes, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, that kind of thing. As a family we kind of put a premium on memorizing snatches of poetry, old sayings, rhymes. My mother grew up in Aberdeen in Scotland, where the Doric dialect of Scots is spoken. There are a number of poems and ballads in Doric, jokes, funny sayings. The agricultural historian Ian Carter correctly points out that the dialect is “particularly rich in vituperation.”  

When my grandparents came to visit us, my grandfather would just start declaiming poetry out of nowhere. It was strange and wonderful. I particularly remember these lines from “The Battle of Otterburn,” a ballad chronicling a medieval battle on the English-Scottish border:

But I have dreamed a dreary dream,
Beyond the Isle of Skye;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.

This was a man who was born on a farm, for most of his life drove a lorry, and ended up as a porter in the University of Aberdeen medical library. I believe he had been given poems to memorize at school. Years after he died, my mother showed me a sheet of paper in his handwriting. It was a poem in Doric about a boy who made a whistle out of a twig. It was so good. I thought he wrote it! It turned out it was by a poet from the early 1900s. I don’t know if he wrote it out completely from memory or copied it from a book but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the former.

Anyway, all this to say that I felt a connection with poetry really early on – and not only a connection. A reverence. But I didn’t dare write it for my own enjoyment until I was a teenager.

Geoffrey D. Morrison : part one

Geoffrey D. Morrison is a fiction writer, poet, and critic. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson, of the experimental short fiction collection Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). His work has appeared in Grain, PRISM, The Malahat Review, The Temz Review, Shrapnel, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in both the poetry and fiction categories of the 2020 Malahat Review Open Season Awards and a nominee for the 2020 Journey Prize. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory.

What are you working on?

Right now the main focus of my attention has been on revising and expanding a novel. That said, my approach to the novel as a form has been shaped pretty fundamentally by my earlier experiences writing and reading poetry. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. 

There’s a remark attributed, perhaps in error, to Paul Verlaine – he apparently said he could never write a novel because then he’d have to write sentences like, “the count walked into the room.” I suppose he meant that being a poet entails the use of language at its greatest intensity and with an allergy to the commonplace ways of saying things – what’s a “count,” anyway? what’s a “room?” what does it mean to “walk into” one? On a deeper level he might be saying that a poet questions the basic narrative choreography of going from point A to point B. 

At any rate that’s how I interpret his remark – if he did in fact say it – because that’s how I feel, too. I couldn’t write sentences like that without feeling immense pain, and my first efforts to write a novel were badly compromised by my feeling I was supposed to do it in a way that pained me. But on the other hand I was attracted to the challenge of the novel and to what it would allow me to do and say. So I began again, resolving that I would not write sentences about counts walking into rooms (so to speak). I would design my novel such that utterances of that sort would be impossible.   

As I did so, I found models. I noticed that many of them – and in particular Thomas Bernhard, Gerald Murnane, Roberto Bolaño, and Samuel Beckett – had also begun to some degree or another as poets. 

I think poetry gave them all something really important and I don’t think it’s the obvious thing. They don’t necessarily “write poetically”; that is, they aren’t necessarily using language at the level of its greatest intensity all the time. But they proceed with an attitude to narrative and to meaning that is closer to a poet’s. A poet is often building meaning with the reader, or giving the reader the tools to build the meaning, and these novelists do too.