12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hamish Ballantyne

Hamish Ballantyne is a poet and translator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He works in the Downtown Eastside and as a commercial mushroom picker. He has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab (Knife/Fork/Book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Auric Press, 2022) and published his first full-length Tomorrow is a Holiday (New Star) in 2024.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The first chapbook came out in early 2020 and flew under the radar. My most recent work is more deliberate, for better or for worse.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to fiction and non-fiction before poetry—I wrote a lot of stories growing up. I also wrote non-fiction after a fashion—I used to write small books about animals, the weather, natural history that were 100% made-up. I only came to poetry in my teens, through my friends.
 
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?
It takes a long time to get going, a lot of attempts circling around the same idea, sound, word. Once I crack something, develop an unexpected phrase, then I can get to cruising where a lot of writing happens very quickly. Then the editing again is a slow process, trimming things and developing threads between different poems.

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?
I think more and more I find myself working on a book from the very beginning. I have a lot of ideas for books, execution is harder.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No I'm not, but it's getting easier. I do spend a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds out loud, it's just that I don't think I'm the best reader. I'm working on that too.

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?
Yeah I think I do but I don't know if I can phrase them adequately outside of my writing. For one thing, I'm invested in the unscalability of poetry—the impossibility of extracting meanings from the full density of the text as it's written or read aloud. Poetry has an inbuilt resistance to the frictionless translatability demanded by late capital, and as such has huge potential to safeguard threatened histories, lifeways, idioms, sounds.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There's clearly a lot of anxiety in Western liberal democracies right now about the role of the writer in culture, and I think it has a lot to do with the hunch that no one reads anymore, with a liberal insistence that the crises of late capitalism are actually a result of people failing to communicate properly and we need to bridge dialogue in our polarized societies etc. I've seen a few too many thinkpieces about empathy—I'm suspicious of those.  

I don't see any sort of privileged role for writers in the larger culture, but I think literary writing is important. Documenting histories, imagining futures and alternative presents, transgressing the boundaries of language etc. I am less concerned about the role of the writer and more about the role of writing in the culture—because as worried as people are about the crumbling institutions of literature, about changing modes of reception, about shrinking readership, writing—the inscription of language—remains dynamic and participatory.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like it! I haven't been to a writing workshop or class since high school, so working with Rob Manery on my most recent book was a nice/new experience.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One time we were driving down a logging road and a big rig came flying around the corner and my friend went halfway off a cliff trying to avoid getting hit. His van was kind of teetering there for a minute but the trucker hopped out, got some chains, and dragged it back on the road. The trucker (Walter) thought the whole thing was pretty funny and just said "keep 'er between the ditches" before he blasted off again. Good advice. But maybe the chestnut there is that if you almost kill someone you should at least drag them out of the ditch with chains.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
The two have a very close relationship for me. Translation is generative, it allows me to play and experiment more freely, because there's material there to work with, there are some parameters. The nothing of the white page can be pretty restrictive, I get stuck with what's easy for me. So in times where I'm not writing much or I don't have much going on in my head I'll turn to translation for a while to get the wheels turning.

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 try to read before work every day, to make sure that I do something on a workday that isn't just work. Then I try to carry my notebook with me everywhere I go so I can write on the bus or when I'm walking around. Essentially I try to absorb as much as I can, from as many sources as possible—and eventually something in the confluence of film-music-poetry-natural history-history-philosophy-novels-newspapers will congeal into a thought, and once I have about four or five thoughts that have been sitting in my notebook for a while the writing will start to take shape in my head as I walk around.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Writing that's familiar, people like Peter Culley, Philip Whalen, Hoa Nguyen, Roberto Bolaño. But also I turn to a less exacting form of reading, skimming big books I have lying around. And music, and movies: Pedro Almodovar, Lucrecia Martel, Mike Leigh. Recently I had a long day of no writing and watched a ten-minute documentary about a family in Louisiana that poaches rabbits as they get flushed out of the corn by the big agribusiness threshers. That opened the floodgates.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Creosote! Docks! Low tide!

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?
I think David W. McFadden is drawing a distinction between literature and life which we must strive to destroy at every instant!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writing of Michael Cavuto, Fan Wu, Tessa Bolsover, Tara Bigdeli, Cecily Nicholson, Dale Smith, Aime Cesaire, Cesar Vallejo, Fred Wah. Michael Taussig, Clarice Lispector, Gogol, Sergio Pitol.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Go to the Brooks Peninsula.

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?
I would love to work on an oyster farm.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always just liked the idea of stacking a bunch of papers I wrote on.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Secret Ladder by Wilson Harris. Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book of poems about the speed of sound and gambling.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Hamish Ballantyne, Tomorrow is a Holiday

 

practice instrument
practice    merest doing
the Holberg photograph is
as Julian never ceases saying a
return of the repressed as Julian
never ceases saying is an excess of
life the act preceded endless times
in a company town soon declared non-viable
awaiting showtime. AWAITING SHOWTIME
whether that’s annihilation of all practices
        or the moment to put your
into practice    until
performance at last denoted by
the um, tragic
then bacon it’ll
be as is our custom
for unexpected
  visitors (“Hansom”)

I’m intrigued by the quartet of sequences that make up Vancouver poet Hamish Ballantyne’s full-length poetry debut, Tomorrow is a Holiday (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2024), a title that follows his chapbooks Imitation Crab (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Durham NC: Auric Press, 2022). Composed across the sequences “Hansom,” “Luthier,” “A&Ws” and “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK,” Tomorrow is a Holiday is, as the back cover offers, “a witness at the margins,” all of which provides a curious and amorphous shape to that absent, outlined centre. “a letter from jimmy buffett to / benjamin treating the form,” he writes, as part of the third sequence, “of appearance of movement arrested / in the billboards advertising / billboard space: a whale encounters / an enormous incarcerated krill in a submarine [.]” There’s a lustre of the Kootenay School of Writing language-infused work poetry across Ballantyne’s lyrics, one that acknowledges labour, even across the patina of holiday, comparable to recent works by Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here], Vancouver poet Rob Manery [see my review of his latest here], Winnipeg poet Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here], Windsor-based poet Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], Roger Farr [see my review of one of his latest here] or Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk [see my review of her latest here]. He speaks to the things around those things that are also around those things, writing rings around rings around that absent presence of centre.

what’s attempting escape when shaking
surprised by your own response
seized by something in the air
and the airs of the body
my brain contains insane architectures that compare
to the formation, timeliness, and cultural import of flying
crows in this part of the city
we must ask what’s in the box
who put it there and the box
there
we must ask why there’s a skeleton on a throne
not what he’d look like with skin (“A&Ws”)

The evolution and trajectory of “work poetry,” a term coined from within a 1970s British Columbia terrain of poets including Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, was one that emerged out of a focus on and acknowledgement of labour and labour issues through a relatively straightforward lyric. Other poets, interestingly enough, that moved through this cluster of poets included Erín Moure and Phil Hall. There are some that might forget that Wayman, and this work poetry ethos, was a co-founder of The Kootenay School of Writing, although this focus on a more straightforward lyric was one eventually jettisoned by those members of KSW that followed. Curiously, the attentions to labour became fused with the language-informed poetic that KSW would be known for (anyone interested in further conversations around the history of The Kootenay School of Writing should pick up either Michael Barnholden’s anthology around such or Clint Burnham’s critical work on same [see my review of such here]. Think of writing by Michael Barnholden, Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Deanna Ferguson or Judy Radul. Through an attention to a particular flavour of language and labout, Ballantyne’s Tomorrow is a Holiday, then, becomes not only one of the inheritors of this particular sequence of traditions, but an impressive feat in how one moves forward.

If some poems, some collections, give the appearance of including everything, then that is the space around which Ballantyne’s poems exist: focusing instead upon everything else, attending the minutae of side moments, sidebars and margins across a wide distance. As the sequence “A&Ws” continues: “As property grew they moved / forever to outside edge of the fence / even after they were out of sight / of bend in the river they / liked so much [.]” I’m fascinated by the poems in the final section, “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK,” subtitled “Three Translations of San Juan de la Cruz.” Also known as Sant John of the Cross, the Spanish Priest and Mystic was born in Castile in 1542 and died in 1591, being one of the major figures in the Catholic Church for his writing, three sequences of which sit at the end of Ballantyne’s collection. Through Ballantyne’s translation, these meditatative sequences offer further ripples across his own “restless curiosity,” continuing an abstract conversation around a kind of moral authority on attention, being and being in and of the very moment, as the seventh of ten poems that make up the third and final sequence, “DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL,” reads:

porch light
night crouched low in the truck bed
church light
wife light
dream light (kid is or hitting
piano  swimming
pool
skinny horse
loved loved loved loved loved
(there are other
lights too)
via some grammatical weft suddenly
hear own pavement footsteps
I am in the dark
passing the store
passing the pet store

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrik Sampler

Patrik Sampler is author of the novels Naked Defiance and The Ocean Container.  His short-form writing has appeared in a variety of publications including The Guardian, The Millions, and The Scofield.  Sampler devoted the better part of a postgraduate degree to the late-career work of Abe Kobo, and was a contributing editor for early editions of the surrealist journal Peculiar Mormyrid.  www.patriksampler.com

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

Getting my first book published gave me more self-assurance, and made me think some things about publishing.

My most recent novel, Naked Defiance, is less fragmentary than my previous (and first) novel, The Ocean Container, although both novels are digressive.  I think Naked Defiance is more metafictional, maybe less lyrical, more about extremists and “idealists who seek a richer engagement with life, but are repressed by the intrusion of internecine politics,” more about leftists turning into rightists and not knowing the difference… I’d like to think it’s funnier. 

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I think I came to poetry first, then perhaps felt a loss of the kind of innocence that can make poetry vibrant, and also thought that people like Christopher Dewdney and William Wordsworth had already done a good enough job and I had nothing to add.  Fiction became a better vehicle for my ideas and I started with short fiction, thinking it would be both easier to write and more marketable, but I was wrong and probably should have started writing novels sooner.

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?

If it’s a novel, it takes a year or two, anyway.  I take notes as I come across useable material, then the notion of a plot occurs and I see how it can be used to hang that material together…

4 - Where does a work of prose 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?

Based on whichever notes I gather, I like to get to a general framework pretty soon, then I add to it whatever else I can uncover…

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

If people would invite me to public readings more often, I might have a chance to find out if they’re a part of my creative process.  I’ve enjoyed some readings… basically it’s nice to chat with people about writing.

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?

Theoretical concerns… I think theoretical concerns behind my writing include notions of ‘reality.’  Out there, in a number of places, is an assumption that with greater detail something becomes more ‘real’ — but I think Jorge Luis Borges got it right when he said that not knowing the second fact about the first fact is in fact closer to reality.

‘Identity’ is another concern.  There’s a popular notion that a label can point to one’s deeper self, even though that’s clearly not how words work.  An ‘identity’ can’t be our essence, and we shouldn’t want it to be.  There’s a story by Abe Kobo called “The Crime of S. Karma.”  In it, a man’s business card — his identity — supplants the man himself and pushes him out of relationships.  We should read this as horror.

I’m reacting against certain kinds of received wisdom and if I’m asking any questions, they are rhetorical questions, and I should probably ask some more sincere questions…. Then again, I think the job of the novel is to provide no answers… so maybe — if it’s doing its job — the novel is part of an ever-expanding question.

Concretely, The Ocean Container concerns a political fugitive in partial solitary confinement, and questions the degree to which his perceptions are connected to observations of the external world.  Naked Defiance has something of a farcical mismatch between labels and the things to which they supposedly point, and then it’s also — superficially — a crime story in which the facts are never revealed… which reminds me that Chekhov’s gun is another thing that interests me greatly — namely, ensuring that the gun doesn’t shoot.  For example, a character in Naked Defiance mentions that she’s pregnant early in the story, but we never hear about it again.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

As I understand it, the role of the writer is to commodify oneself, reify fashionable notions (then evaporate when those notions become unfashionable), and sit for pretentiously composed photo portraits.  As for what the role should be… the writer — through their writing — should delight and entertain, invoke strange feelings of our oceanic bond with the mysteries of existence, and touch the sublime.  It’s really that simple.

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

I like working with an outside editor.  I’ve had lots of excellent advice.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m writing by committee…

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

That I should go to a certain place where a certain famous writer is doing a residency and giving feedback to manuscripts submitted by the public… I don’t want to drop names, because it’s in bad taste to do so.  What I will say is that she gave my writing a positive review, and that really did encourage me to write more.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I think it hasn’t been too hard.  One thing I like to do in fiction is mix hardly believable scenarios with familiar details of the so-called ‘real’ world.  In non-fiction, I do the same, but in different proportions.  What I find hard is coming up with the right ‘gimmick’ for a non-fiction piece, so I don’t write them nearly as often.  And then the world is quite cluttered with non-fiction of the opinion variety… Well, I guess you could say it’s equally cluttered with fiction, too.  As for the appeal… I think the appeal is to have some fun.

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 like to write early in the morning, partly because there’s no other time in the day, partly because I like it.  I start by eating breakfast (the same one I have every day), stretching, listening to some classical music… Then I sit at the computer and drink a mug of undiluted espresso, and after about an hour I’m quite warmed up, mentally, and then I can go for maybe another hour, maybe two, and that’s about all I can handle.  That’s how I like to write, but I can’t do it too often, due to everything else…

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

If my writing gets stalled, I don’t get too worried because most of my ideas happen accidentally.  I think just being out in the world… Well, cycling is my usual mode of transportation, sometimes I get ideas when I’m on my bicycle.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Baked mackerel.

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?

Nature is a big influence.  Music is another big influence.  Those two things appear quite a bit in my writing.  The geometric abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky and his Concerning the Spiritual in Art have influenced me greatly, as have the films of Andrei Tarkovsky – Stalker and Mirror, in particular.  It was a kind of ecstasy reading his Sculpting in Time.

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

Years ago, discovering Abe Kobo was a big impetus.  There’s never been a novel quite like Secret Rendezvous.  It starts with a man — a kind of running shoe salesman — and the arrival of an ambulance at his home.  The paramedics are there to take his wife to the hospital.  She’s not feeling unwell, nor has she called for an ambulance, but they both figure she should go, anyway.  After all, if an ambulance shows up, there must be a good reason… And that’s the most ‘normal’ part of the book.  I don’t think we’re allowed in Canada to mention what else happens in that novel.  Suffice it to say, it showed me the novel didn’t have to be just the same old, same old.  As for other novels, Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island is similarly uninhibited, but far more commercial. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn made a big impression on me, as did Renee Gladman’s Event Factory.  I read Anna Kavan’s Ice not too long ago, and it’s been on my mind ever since.  I like Italo Calvino quite a bit.

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

Earn some decent money.

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?

I think of the writing process as being a lot like carving.  I could see myself working with wood, maybe as a carpenter.  I like plants, so farming might also be nice, except I like to go to the seaside in the summer… Maybe I could work in a haberdasher, or maybe like a... a chapeau shop, or something...

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

I didn’t make it anywhere near getting onto a professional team for the Tour de France, so I gave up attempting that, started playing bass guitar, joined a few bands.  I had aspirations to make some of those weird, athletic basslines like the ones Derek Forbes of Simple Minds made a few years on either side of 1982.  Any bands I was in didn’t quite get off the ground, though, so I turned to writing.  Well, I had been writing all along, just not too seriously.

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

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is certainly a great book, and I’ve just finished reading it again for about the fifth time.  It’s often credited as the ‘inspiration’ for George Orwell’s 1984, but the truth is that he just brazenly ripped it off — which isn’t to diminish the value of 1984, because it does a few important things differently.  Mostly, however, it’s directly analogous to We, except that We is a lot funnier.  No one is being tortured into believing that two plus two equals five.  Rather, toward the end of the novel the government sends people door-to-door, basically, encouraging everyone to get a lobotomy.

As for the most recent great film I’ve seen, it’s Kawa no Nagare wa Baiorin no Oto, directed by Sasaki Shoichiro.  It’s a studied exercise in disobeying the Chekov’s gun principle, and a very understatedly weird film because it was made for TV and looks like it might be a kind of documentary — except that it’s not.  Every few years I watch this film to refresh my memory… I find it mesmerizing.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m tidying up the first part of a two-part novel, about a man with no personality who is on a journey to the edge of the Earth.  Along the way he stops at various decadent cities overtaken by primordialist cults.  At each hotel he receives an overwrought letter, in a poor imitation of the style of Anaïs Nin, by an estranged lover he might not in fact know.  The second part of the novel, which I’m just getting started on, is a family memoir.

I’ve also started outlining a novel about a disenchanted government worker who spends his meagre savings on a used Mazda Bongo camper van and goes on a road trip to sabotage symbols of consumerism during the day while writing reviews of fake novels at night.  These fake novel reviews foretell the story: he’s kidnapped by a militant transhumanist, a dialectic ensues, he manages to escape, then regresses to a childhood state of oceanic connection with the natural world… or a kind of pantheistic rapture.  There’s more to it than I’ve let on here, but all the pieces will fit together.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Barry McKinnon (1944 – October 30, 2023)

Rae Armantrout and Barry McKinnon at VERSeFest (Ottawa), March 2012

Sad to hear from Paul Nelson that Canadian poet, editor and publisher Barry McKinnon died 11:30am on Monday morning in Prince George. Nelson writes that “plans for a spring memorial service will be made soon.” I don’t precisely recall when I started interacting with McKinnon, but I know I was reading his work in the early 1990s, sitting in the Morriset Library at the University of Ottawa reading The the. (Coach House Press, 1980), i wanted to say something (Red Deer College Press, 1990) and Pulp/Log (Caitlin Press, 1991), all of which became important for me in terms of thinking of the cadence and breadth of the long poem. If you can, pick up a copy of The Centre: Poems 1970-2000 (Talonbooks, 2004), a collection that really displays the ‘poem as long as a life’ mantra that bpNichol articulated, something shared with Nichol’s own multiple books of The Martyrology (1972-1993), or Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (2002).

There was something jwcurry once said of McKinnon’s poems, his long poems, that I always thought was interesting, suggesting that the first half of any McKinnon long poem is working up to a single point, and the second half working away from that same point. My collection Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), was one of a number of works I produced over the years as a direct result of reading Barry McKinnon’s work. At McKinnon’s prompt, as well, I’m probably one of the few continuing the “Sex at 31” poems he and Brian Fawcett began, something I wrote about a few years back as part of Jacket2. It must have been in 2000 or so that I was up in Prince George, staying with McKinnon for the sake of a reading, and digging around his archives to see what there was. He handed me a “Sex at 31” poem by Artie Gold that he produced back in the late 1970s, which Artie allowed me to reprint as an above/ground press broadside, a poem that later fell into the second ‘best of’ above/ground press anthology. Thanks to Barry, I followed that particular thread (composing poems for every seven years, as was their original consideration: thirty-one, thirty-eight, forty-five and fifty-two, so far), and am still pulling away at it, in as much homage to McKinnon and Fawcett (and Gold) as anything else.

Barry McKinnon and Brian Fawcett post-Talon/ECW launch, Toronto, 2004

In McKinnon’s basement circa that 2000 visit, as he was complaining that a particular bill bissett title he produced in 1970 (Stamp collection) wasn’t seen or acknowledged by anyone, and he opened a cupboard to reveal a stack of a few hundred copies. Hard to get attention for something sitting in your basement storage, I suggested, so he gave me some fifty copies to distribute, which  I handed out at further stops on that same reading tour, including in Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto. We met prior to the reading over drinks, and he offered me a copy of The the., telling me it was one of only five copies he had left (extant copies had fallen prey to one of Coach House Press’ infamous “dumps,” which left unannounced copies out at the curb). After the reading, we went out for drinks, landing late in his living room. His wife Joy, unimpressed.

We launched together in 2004, having both books in the same season with Talonbooks, landing in Toronto as Brian Fawcett heckled us both from the crowd (David Phillips, on his part, heckled McKinnon through his Vancouver launch at the Kootenay School of Writing space). We even brought him to Ottawa for VERSeFest in 2012 [see my report on such here], where he participated in The Factory Lecture Series.

It always felt like Barry McKinnon was a poet who deserved far more attention than he received, and how moving north to Prince George to teach in 1969 put him on the outskirts of literature (this was certainly how he felt), despite the enormous amount of activity he encouraged, prompted and hosted during his time in the north. Who else would have brought Robert Creeley to Prince George? i wanted to say something, originally self-produced through his Gorse and reprinted years later by Caitlin, is an important early long poem from the Canadian prairies, one that was hugely influential to other writers, even if the larger public weren’t aware of it until long after those influenced by the poem had published their own variations. McKinnon became an important figure in Northern British Columbia, as publisher, poet, organizer, teacher and as an example of someone in that geographic space who was able to produce interesting work, and take seriously the conversation and thinking of literature. I know over the past twenty years or so he was getting frustrated with traditional publishing (he’d long been a chapbook publisher, so one foot was always on the outside), focusing more on putting work online than sending it out to anyone. I would recommend working through his website and seeing everything he’d putthere.

I interviewed him a few times, including in 2012 and more recently, for Touch the Donkey. I reviewed a number of his works, and even attempted a lengthy essay on his work circa 2006, which fell into my first essay collection with ECW Press. Paul Nelson also did an interview with him in 2015 that is worth paying attention to.

He was always kind to me, and deeply engaged at what was going on with writing. Those visits were always few and far between, and I shall miss him.

 

Annharte, Miskwagoode

 

Mothermiss

What is the difference between motherless and mother loss? Probably the time factor involved. Motherless might go on for a long time while mother loss is seemingly a one time event. Being motherless for me happened when I was about nine and my mother disappeared. She had been coming and going since I was seven but the last time I saw her I did not know I would never see her again. She had been to jail and served about a year’s sentence. Before that, she had been going on long drinking binges. I developed the feeling of shame about her absences. My father said nothing much at all to either comfort or give any information about her.

The result was a growing silence what went on for years starting in the fifties. I do remember him saying that she was last heard of as being in Ontario. He mentioned the police suggested he make a formal inquiry. I had been abandoned by her but did not know it exactly. I did not know the terminology that went with either the concept of motherless or mother loss. The motherless aspect took over though I think of it as a time when I did not think that much about my mother. I did miss her but had not cried about her leaving. It had been a shock that had numbed out most of my feelings. I did expect her to return at some time so I did not think of her as being dead or lost to me forever.

The fifth full-length poetry collection from Anishinaabe poet Annharte, a/k/a MarieBaker [see my piece on an earlier collection over at Jacket2], is Miskwagoode (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2022), a collection composed against a backdrop of loss: “Taken from the Anishinaabe for ‘woman wearing red,’ Miskwagoode is an unsettling portrayal of unreconciled Indigenous experience under colonialism, past and present.” The collection opens with an introduction by her son, Forrest Funmaker, and another by her granddaughter Soffia Funmaker. “When my coocoo was just nine years old,” Soffia Funmaker writes, “her mother went missing and was never found. She was one of thousands of Indigenous women who are either missing or murdered in what is now called Canada. My jaji (father) named me Soffia and when he told my coocoo the name he chose for me, he said, ‘I hope she can have a better life than her.’”

Across a layering of shifting form, Annharte’s Miskwagoode offers a collision and cadence of words that flow across possibilities, writing of violence, grief and addiction, and the loss of so many through the legacy of colonial trauma. “where goes this naked ndn // not born Indigenous without,” she writes, as part of “Jack Identity,” “blue mark on bum // fail to act indifferent // national inquiries hold on [.]” The poems explore form, identity, community and “a backdrop of unreconciled realities within Indigenous experience,” from prose bursts to poems set as layered accumulations of staccato phrases, all set as disjointed descriptives across a documentary poetics she’s been crafting for years. “explain what is possible,” she writes, to open the poem “Better Yet Explain,” “for right now create / street surveillance position / post qualifications / employ non-gloved hand / feel out resistance / anticipate interference / from driven class interests / encourage cultural revival / lessen neo-liberal outreach [.]” And, as much as she presents herself as the documentarian, she sits precisely within the scope of her poems; more than simply an observer, she offers commentary, advice and option, neither passive nor unbiased, but deeply invested what is happening, and what should be happening; the ways in which things need to improve, both from without and from within. One might claim this, in the end, a book of deep grief and honesty, and how healing (and reconciliation) can only emerge through a true acknowledgment of the devastation wrought through colonialism. Moving her lyric across a landscape of mourning, the tone of her poems shift slightly in the final section, “Wabang,” through a suite of poems composed as prose declarations, and even calls-to-action. The poems are hopeful, engaged with a playful wit and gymnastic cadence, composing a blend of sound and storytelling to provide something to hold and hold on to.

Down with Big Stink

Fight takes Giant Skunk down Wolverine held squirter but tail still up
Pressurized spray got right in his face dirty job somebody would do
Suspicious vibrations why Great Skunk followed animals escape after
They cross his path broke rule so they made a stand special bear song
Ask help to take out big bully after all Wolverine washed his face at
Hudson Bay explains why salty dirty water why Winnipeg so named