U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Karen Solie (2004-5)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.

Karen Solie’s most recent collection of poems, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, was published last year by House of Anansi in Canada, and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A volume of selected and new poems, The Living Option, was published in the U.K. in 2013.

She was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2004-5 academic year.

Q: When you began your residency, you were about to publish your second poetry collection. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?

A: Because the publication of my first book came as a surprise, the experience of the second was different. I imagine it is for most writers. Modern and Normal was written with an element of nervousness – hope/doubt/curiosity/determination/fear – over whether I could write not just something else, but something better. Though I’m working on my 5th manuscript now, and the experience is the same. In terms of how it feels, where I am in my writing now is more or less where I was then. In some ways I’m more sure of myself; in others, less.

U of A gave me my first writer-in-residence job, in fact my first job as a writer, and I was in equal parts grateful, exhilarated, and intimidated. I learned a great deal about mentoring at a very important time to learn it, and a number of fascinating people came through my office. I know I learned more from the job, from the writers I worked with, than they did from me. It was a weird time, too. I lived in an apartment hotel on the edge of downtown that was its own strange planet. Modern and Normal was edited there, and I also drafted work that ended up in Pigeon.

Q: What do you feel your time as writer-in-residence at University of Alberta allowed you to explore in your work? Were you working on anything specific while there, or was it more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?

A: I haven’t until my current manuscript-in-progress embarked on the writing of a book or series of poems guided by a particular theme or subject. The handful of found poems in Modern and Normal came about not from a desire to write a series of found poems, but from a realization at some point that I’d accumulated a fair number of them. The task then was to reduce that number by half – two-thirds, probably – which was part of the editing I undertook in Edmonton. I was interested while working on that book to think through scenarios, references, details not as derived from personal anecdote. To supplement my store of figurative language, but also to refine, complicate, and vary how metaphor might operate. This risk in these statements is always that people will read the work with them in mind and think, “hmm, really”? Anyway, I read more and researched more. Tonal and rhetorical registers became a concern – their use and overuse. But all this developed pretty naturally. None of it was outlined as a plan to pursue.

The U of A position was a new experience, and as such made its way into what I was writing the way any new experience does. But it also afforded reading time, note-taking and thinking time, which is invaluable in its generally rarity. As mentioned, I did some new writing toward Pigeon while in Edmonton. The long(ish) prose piece “Archive” was drafted there, for one, inspired by my terror at walking across the High Level Bridge. I drafted many other poems that went nowhere, too. Got a few of those out of the way, which is part of it.

Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?

A: Though not from Alberta, I am from southwest Saskatchewan, so know the prairies. I very much liked that I could drive home to the farm every other week or so throughout my tenure. It’s a six-hour drive, depending on weather, so in Canadian terms not bad. I appreciated being in the north-central part of the province for its differences in climate, wildlife, landscape, and for the proximity to the North Saskatchewan River. I love rivers, their disparate characters, and spent a lot of time in the river valley. I also visited Elk Island Park and was intimidated by some bison. The High Level Bridge ended up influencing me a great deal, if being influenced can mean being terrified by. I lived on the downtown side of the river and walked the bridge a few times a week to get to the university, sometimes in pretty bad weather. My parents’ ‘92 Crown Victoria would be frozen solid in my apartment building’s parking lot, and by the time I’d stepped out onto the trestle I’d gone too far to hike back downtown to the subway. It would have seemed – not like defeat, I’m okay with defeat – kind of crazy. The bridge became a sort of icon for me during my time there.

I met wonderful writers, participated in and attended some great events, but don’t think I can really characterize the literary community then. Eight months isn’t enough time to get a good handle on anything. And it was 12 years ago. One thing I remember very clearly is reading C.D. Wright for the first time in Audrey’s Books on Jasper Avenue. You never know when or where you’ll encounter the work that will change you.

Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency? Were there any encounters that stood out?

A: I remember I was chuffed to have an office with my name on the door, where people could come to see me. I probably met with more writers from the larger community than I did with students. A guy called from jail to talk about his poetry. And there was an older fellow, around 80, who wanted to write stories about his life to give to his children and grandchildren. Okay, I thought. But then his stories were fantastic, a blend of fact and fiction. He wrote about owning a racehorse, about learning to hunt. They were vivid and funny and frank, literary in the best way. I encouraged him to try publishing them, but I don’t think he was really interested in that. He was fun to talk to, too. It was a great lesson toward going into relationships with writers and their work with an open mind, and to respect what they want from the encounter. Which in no way means just patting them on the back. It was -- and still is; the lesson is ongoing -- about seeing beyond my own inclinations.

Q: Looking back on the experience now, how do you think it impacted upon your work?

A: My work, as I think of it, is teaching, mentoring, and editing as well as writing, and I learned a great deal about all of it during my tenure. I made mistakes in my interactions with writers then, and regret that they had to suffer my inexperience. Not that I don’t make mistakes still, I do all the time. But my first writer-in-residence position afforded me a practical knowledge of ways I needed to, and need to, improve. The job came at a crucial time financially, put the money panic on the back burner so I could attend to the writing panic of finishing edits on the second book, and it also afforded the luxury to start on the third. In that luxury, I felt a little more free to experiment, to take time to read. The curiosities I developed then persist to this day.

Karen Solie, The Living Option: Selected Poems

Ode

Blue jay vocalizes a clash on the colour

wheel, tulip heads removed one by one

with a sand wedge. Something

in the frequency. Expectations are high

There’s a reason it’s called the nervous

system. Someone in bed at 11 a.m.

impersonates an empty house. The sharpener’s

dragged his cart from the shed, his bell

rings out from the 12^th century

to a neighbourhood traumatizing

food with dull knives. A hammer claws

to the edge of a reno and peers over. Inching

up its pole, a tentative flag. And the source?

Oh spring, my heart is in my mouth.

A selected poems by Toronto poet Karen Solie would be news enough, but the UK-published The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) includes not only healthy selections from her three trade poetry collections—Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005) and the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Pigeon (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2010)—but forty pages of previously uncollected work under the section title “The Living Option: New Poems,” allowing a generous one hundred and sixty page volume of her work. Given the length of time between her trade collections to date, it makes one wonder if this “previously uncollected” section might end up being the bulk of a future collection to appear in Canada, as opposed to being work that appears only in trade form in the current selected. The latter has certainly been known to happen, such as in the bulk of the “new” from Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s Sunfall: New and Selected Poems: 1980-1996 (Anansi, 1996), but I would suspect the former is a more likely outcome, given the fact that Bloodaxe titles don’t necessarily make their way into the Canadian market (unless, of course, Anansi decides to produce a Canadian edition of the book). Either way, there aren’t too many Canadian poets managing to get selected poems produced by British publishers: Gary Geddes had a selected poems co-published between Bloodaxe Books and Goose Lane Editions in 1996, his Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970-1995, and Toronto poet Priscila Uppal’s Successful Tragedies: Selected Poems 1998-2010 appeared with Bloodaxe in 2010. Other contemporary Canadian poets with British titles are few and far between, but also include Edmonton poet, editor and critic Douglas Barbour’s Fragmenting Body etc. produced by both NeWest Press and Salt Publishing in 2000, or even my own name    , an errant (Stride, 2006).

Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours

Gratitude toward the houseplants, shame

for what they must endure. Of particular concern,

the azalea, flowering like the gestures and cries

of someone off the trail who sees a helicopter.

A long cold night is coming on.4

Is it dying or being killed?
When I’m 100 percent on what’s happening,

there’s still that niggling five. Too much

water, neglect, information. Decisions

made at the executive level.

Science tells us plants emit signatures and responses

on yet another frequency we cannot hear.

That’s all we need. When little,

we were told our heads were in the clouds.

Now we suspect the opposite.

This is an impressive and impressively large collection of her work, and would provide not only an incredible introduction to her work as a whole, but an enticement of the new poems for anyone already familiar with her first three trade collections. Solie’s poems have long existed as even uncomfortably-sharp meditations on violence, bad luck, back and lost roads, love, desire and mistakes of perception, all presented with a remarkable clarity, even from the perspective of voices trapped in the midst of any or all of the above. What I’ve always appreciated is how precisely she locates her poems, providing a wealth of incredible detail in very few words, writing on Lake Erie, Lethbridge, the Kananaskis Valley, rural Saskatchewan, Victoria’s English Bay, suburban Toronto, highway travel on the 400-series out of Mississauga, Greyhound buses (“Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way”), and more than once on driving and car rental (even in the space of this collection). Any regular reader might notice that John Deere tractors, also, are discussed regularly in Karen Solie poems. Whenever she does place a poem so specifically, she does so with insight and the attention of a local, articulating not a postcard poem about any arbitrary geography, but composing a piece with a suggestion of intimate knowledge, especially of the darker elements of what it means to exist in that place. In the poem “Rental Car,” she writes: “Eastbound, westbound, exodus via / the 400-series highways. Personal reasons / I will not get into. The 427 Interchange / is a long note in space, a flightpath of materials / the grace of which is a reason to live.” Her poems attest to and articulate a restlessness and an ability, one might suspect, to remain still or static, or in the same place for too long, and often end up being short narrative pieces on experience, attention and consequence. “Anything / going has far to go.” she writes, near the end of the poem “Lift Up Your Eyes.” Or the poem “Sault Ste. Marie,” that includes: “Each day a new threshold / to break upon. The fires mean for now there’s work. The drugstore // clerk plans to stop in to the casino / for a couple of hours after shift and what so-and-so // goddamn doesn’t know won’t hurt him. She’s not talking to me / so I’m inclined to believe her. How difficult could it be // to stay here?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Don Share

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine.  His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), and most recently a new book of poems, Wishbone (Black Sparrow), and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions), which explores the British poet Basil Bunting’s time in the Middle East; Share has also edited a critical edition of Bunting’s work for Faber and Faber. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books) were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize, and will appear in a revised edition from New York Review of Books Classics.  He has been Poetry Editor of Harvard Review and Partisan Review, Editor of Literary Imagination, and curator of poetry at Harvard University.  With Christian Wiman, he co-hosts the monthly Poetry magazine podcast and has co-edited The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

That first book changed my life by, well, by failing to change my life.  I thought it would be momentous, and momentously gratifying, but though it was given a good write-up in Publishers Weekly, the press died suddenly and ignominiously, and so then did the book.  It was devastating and humbling, so maybe the change consisted of teaching me not to be excessively proud of myself. 

In my earlier work I was very careful with each poem in a technical sense.  I’m older now, and as I go to pot, so does my prosody: I’ve let myself go to seed, and take that metaphor rather literally – it has been, shall we say, productive.  Then again my early poems were written pre 9/11, and my language, like everyone else’s in our culture, has come to incorporate a version of (for lack of a worse word) instress.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first.  When I was done with college, I was out of work for a while and sat down to write a novel: six hours a day, nothing but writing and some coffee.  The result was abject and appalling junk.  I’d always loved poetry, but thought it was too good for me.  But the humiliation of writing prose ended up teaching me the writerly humility required to take up poetry in, as they say, earnest.  As for non-fiction, well, I simply haven’t got the requisite diligence or patience.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I don’t have writing projects.  I realize that they’re very trendy, but I disbelieve in them.  Anyway, writing for me is a slow process because I’m in no hurry, and can’t think that writing is like running, that the more you do it the better you are.  If that were true the most prolific among us would be the best, and it’s just not so (and how would we account for Larkin, Empson, among others?).

Because I have a job that requires my attention at just about all times, I have to write whenever life lets me do so, which is to say when I’m on the train to work, or pushing myself to stay up late into the night with a notebook in my lap.  This induces a kind of pertinent reverie, so I don’t mind at all. 

When I started out, I revised poems for years.  I don’t know how many years I have left, so now I revise them for months.  My drafts do resemble final versions; the relationship is genetic, but a poem can seem to grow up before your eyes almost the way a child goes.  Then you let it leave home.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem begins for me as a mystery.  That’s all I can say about it.  Short pieces for me used to get woven into larger work, but now I let them stand alone and fend for themselves.  If they’re too weak to stand, I just kill them off.  I do somehow seem to know when things are part of what might become a “book.”  It’s a question of knowing when and where to begin – and when to leave off.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
The best critique of a poem, in my experience, comes from having to read it in front of other people.  If something sucks and you’re not being dense or perverse, an audience will let you know that… vividly.  It’s not right to use people in this way, but we all do it, yes?  That said, I enjoy doing readings, and try to do them well, because I know how difficult it is to sit through them.

There’s a story that comes to mind.  I was in, shall we say, a bad way when trying to write the poems that went into Squandermania.  At a reading for Amherst Books, I read aloud the angriest poems I thought I’d ever written.  And people started laughing – a lot.  At first, I was pretty confused and upset; I figured that I’d misjudged things so badly that I felt I’d better give up writing altogether.  But then I realized how right my listeners were: the pathos of personal anger really is comedic.  That insight put me on what felt like the right track, after all.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Lord no, no theoretical concerns.  I’d have to be a philosopher or scientist or rabbi to address those adequately.  It’ll sound portentous (part of the comedy, really), but it feels as if my poems are asking questions.  Asking me questions.  Like what the fuck do you think you’re doing?  I’ve yet to come up with any answers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I’m sure that the writer has a role in larger culture, alongside all the other kinds of roles that makers and doers have.  But I can’t really say what that role consists of, exactly.  I suppose the role of a writer is to write, and take his lumps, and then lie down, as Machado says, under the ground.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve never had an outside editor, as such, for poetry.  Well, once, the poetry editor of a pretty well-known magazine said he would publish a poem of mine if he could rewrite it.  I was so charmed and fascinated that I let him do it.  He did a worse job than I did.  I wouldn’t let it happen again.  Poets are pretty much left to their own devices.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

There’s an Allan Sherman song, “Good Advice,” which nicely points out that good advice is just the same as bad advice. “Good advice costs nothing, and it's worth the price.”  (Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MInOApCkA98)  That’s about it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Critical prose is very hard to do.  I adore reading it, and am relieved not to have to write it.  Most of what gets called poetry criticism now is really just book reviewing mislabeled, or writing for the entirely understandable purpose of academic credentialing.  Mostly, I’m lucky enough to get away with blogging, or writing pieces of what used to be called “appreciation.” 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have any kind of routine.  I do carry all the implements with me, in case there’s a chance to work on something.  Otherwise, I’m just living what passes for my life.  And so a typical day begins for me with my eyes opening and becoming adjusted somehow to the light… after which I let the coffee and anxiety kick in.  The rest, as they say, is hysteria.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When my writing gets stalled, I figure it’s my writing’s way of telling me to shut the hell up.  So I stop.  And then, unaccountably, it starts up again, particularly thanks to reading a lot (and not just reading poetry).  At some point, one will have worked on his very last poem, but they don’t tell you when that moment comes.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Great question!  Memphis BBQ.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of the above.  But beyond influence, one needs stimulation.  The crap that happens every day is the stimulus (I spend a lot of time on public transportation in a vast city, which is quite nicely stimulating).  Books come, in other words, from life.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The list changes daily, sometimes even hourly.  Louise Gluck says that we feed on other writers and move on.  That’s pretty accurate (and vivid).  We’re cannibals, aren’t we, when we read and write?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Once when I was young, one of my mentors, Derek Walcott (the other was George Starbuck) shoved a sheaf of okay-ish drafts back at me and said, “This is fine, but it’s not a life’s work.”  He was right about that.  So what I would like to have accomplished, and have not yet, is something resembling a life’s work.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, I’ve had all kinds of odd jobs in my life already.  I’m quite happy doing the work I do now, thank you very much.  If I hadn’t been a writer, well, Patrick Kavanagh has the best response.  [You won’t be able to use the whole quote, but here it is! - ]

“I am always shy of calling myself a poet and I wonder much at those young men and sometimes those old men who boldly declare their poeticality. If you ask them what they are, they say: Poet.

There is, of course, a poetic movement which sees poetry materialistically. The writers of this school see no transcendent nature in the poet; they are practical chaps, excellent technicians. But somehow or other I have a belief in poetry as a mystical thing, and a dangerous thing.

A man (I am thinking of myself) innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds that it is his life. Versing activity leads him away from the paths of conventional unhappiness. For reasons that I have never been able to explain, the making of verses has changed the course of one man’s destiny. I could have been as happily unhappy as the ordinary countryman in Ireland. I might have stayed at the same moral age all my life. Instead of that, poetry made me a sort of outcast. And I was abnormally normal…

I suppose when I come to think of it, if I had a stronger character, I might have done well enough for myself. But there was some kink in me, put there by Verse…

But I lost my messianic compulsion. I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose.”

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

See above.  I really have no idea.  And yet… my fifth grade teacher - to punish me for doodling rather than taking notes on his lecture about volcanoes - smacked me on the crown of the head with the stone in his bulky class ring, exclaiming "One day, Don is going to be a GREAT WRITER." The gauntlet... almost literally... was laid down. Pete Townshend had his nose for motivation; I had Mr. Kramer.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Volume 4 of W. H. Auden’s collected prose.  It was a better education for me than college!  Last great film?  2001: A Space Odyssey, which I saw in Cinerama in 1968.  I do think Spielberg’s Duel is a minor classic.  I don’t get out much, as you can see.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book of poems that are one sentence long each – not to be confused with tweets, by the way.  In looking over a pile of recent drafts, I realized that almost every poem has maybe one good line in it; why not, I thought, just cut to the chase and keep that one line?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;