Lea Graham, This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch

On Crows

Last Thursday, the light at the ridge above that bend in the Hudson spread like Dreamsicles in July. Crows valentined dumpsters. Earth called cadence below. Lamps floated stem-less, sturgeon moons in a month of wolf whistles & Route 9’s chemical taste. Was it Williams who said “the hardest thing to do is see”? (Or was that just my gynecologist?) As a kid, my mother caged a crow believing one day it would sing “Hello, Dolly.” She faithfully fed it pork chops under a sycamore tree. Instead, it ate her spelling bee ring. She often said: Crows love the shiny things. Beware.

There aren’t that many poets from Arkansas composing poems influenced by Canadian prairie poet Robert Kroetsch, with the notable exception of Lea Graham (who, herself,was recently shortlisted for the 2016 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry), through her new chapbook This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Ottawa ON: Apt 9 Press, 2016). The author of the poetry collection Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011) [see my review of such here] and the collaborative chapbook Metric (above/ground press, 2011) and Calendar Girls (above/ground press, 2006), Graham writes in her acknowledgements that “These poems were written in dialogue with many of Robert Kroetsch’s texts,” including Excerpts from the Real World (Oolichan Books, 1986), The Completed Field Notes (The University of Alberta Press, 2000), The Crow Journals (NeWest Press, 1980), The Hornbooks of Rita K (The University of Alberta Press, 2001), The Lovely Treachery of Words (Oxford University Press, 1989), The Sad Phoenician (Coach House Press, 1979), Too Bad (The University of Alberta Press, 2006) and What the Crow Said (General Publishing Company, 1978), as well as Andrew Suknaski’s The Ghosts Call You Poor (Macmillan of Canada, 1978) and Ken Jennings’ Maphead: The Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (Scribner Books, 2011). In an interview forthcoming at Touch the Donkey, she discusses some of her connections to prairie poetry (and poets) in Canada:

I think that being from Arkansas, I have both a good sense of humour about place, but also a sense of the underdog in me. I think that maybe that’s a sense of the west, what you are up against, a sense of the isolated or rural. I grew up partially on my grandparents working farm in Greenland, Arkansas where I had an acute feeling of how isolated I was from the rest of the world (meaning: the world of books). But also, I had these young uncles and an aunt who worked in my grandfather’s dairy barn and chicken houses—and who were always playing jokes on me and my brothers and on each other. They used to leave messages to each other written in soap on the bathroom mirrors. There was a toolbox of arrowheads, fish hooks, grinding stones and Civil War cannon balls under the sink in the bathroom. I have written of that image over and over again. The sense of the humorous and fleeting, but of the tactile and enduring, too. When I read cooley and Kroetsch, it felt like I was reading at least a part of my own family, but in the most intellectual and tricky ways. And to be geographically connective about it, my maternal grandmother was from the Dakotas and later Montana. Her mother was from Norway and had been a homesteader.  She—Dagmar Zacharias—is the only one of my great-grandparents who was from the old country—everyone else was “American.” In any case, my maternal grandmother met my grandfather when he was an itinerant worker from Northwest Arkansas during the Depression and had worked his way up to Billings, Montana where he worked part of the week in a bakery and another part in a dairy. The bakery was in a basement, but had a window onto the street where you could only see people’s legs. He picked out her legs of all the young nurses on their way to school. This family story (or maybe the way I tell it), doesn’t seem far from the Canadian narratives I’ve read.

Robert Kroetsch infamously called literature a conversation, and the epistolary poems in Graham’s This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch do read as missives directed to the late Alberta poet, composed directly from where she is to wherever it is that he is, or was, and her ten poem collection opens with a quote from Kroetsch’s Excerpts from the Real World: “Perhaps if I call you forever you’ll hear me toward the end.” Kroetsch famously wrote poems that spoke of repeatedly returning to the beginning; through composing “the end,” is Graham attempting to circumvent Kroetsch’s continuous delay, or is she simply responding in kind, composing the yang to his ying? Is she, through her title, admitting that she can actually hear him, and could the entire time? In the poem “After Irene,” written after a hurricane, she writes: “You’ve written that our job is to uninvent the world. To unconceal. To make visible again.” Later on in the same piece, ending:

You’ve said it yourself: we can never leave home, never escape the skiffle bands & buttermilk, the avocado seed suspended on windowsills. You with your buffalo wallow & tipi ring. So long Binghamtop dreams! Me with my Civil War cannonballs, knucklebones under the sink. Our storm’s core cages us like a story. Like a thousand sea birds, bewildered, becalmed, trapped in eye’s past.

Her poems are prose-thick with information and references, collaged narratives composed in furious, passionate bursts, each in their own way searching for ways in which to make sense of the chaos, all of which is directed beyond the immediate chaos and back into “Bob” (all of which makes me hope she comes to Ottawa next spring for the rumoured Robert Kroetsch conference, so she can speak to him further). “You sing on the other side of the Wailing Wall,” she writes, to end her poem “Excerpts from This End of the World”: “words I wish I could take back / from the Coro desert or the post-industrial town / I am doomed to & that promise / of milk, honey.” Her poems evoke much of Kroetsch’s work for their shared questioning, their passions, from friends, food, travel and lovers, and the occasional drunken revelry and crude passing remark. Throughout these poems there is a searching, a seeking, as she looks to the work of Robert Kroetsch for advice, and direction, almost as though the lyrics of Lea Graham are repeatedly asking Robert Kroetsch: Why does the heart want what it wants? As she opens the poem “On the Mystery of the Vanishing Phoenician from 110 Mill Street”: “Bob, / I am writing this from the old millstream where your Sad Phoenician vanishes. I bring it with me to sit on the ledge when I need the rush, an eyeful of swoosh. Just when I’m fixed on a bright flip-flop or stroller wheel, I realize it’s skedaddled.” Later on in the same piece, writing:

Last month it disappeared to a dance in Smuts. All the way to Wood Mountain, can you believe it? That bit from cooley, who said it had been seen with Suknaski’s ghosts. They snuck into an old Métis church with their beer breath & dialect, telling stories of Duck Lake, sex in mangers. It drug in a few days later, stone-roasted, announcing its retirement to Assiniboia. Boy oh boy, Bob, did you raise it to act like this? Even crazy mclennan swears it Skypes him late every fourth Tuesday, repeating pornographers & poets enjoy large views nine times before clicking end. He & his lady shake & drink & claim they’ll start banning its mention from the Mercury Lounge. It late-nights, inventing toponomies for Medicine Hat. Can’t shut up about the onomastics of ex-lovers (the woman from Nanaimo, et al). How do I exist with a book that goes on like this?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Lacey

Claire Lacey currently lives in the UK. She holds an MA in English from the University of Calgary and a BA from York University. Her first book, Twin Tongues, won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her work has also appeared in Dandelion, The Windsor Review, and Filling Station.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
As my first book was a seven year project that I started as an undergraduate student. It was my way of discoursing with ideas and texts that I came into contact with during that time - from online forums discussing racism and sexism to poetry to academic texts on second language pedagogy and sociology. I felt that in many ways these texts that were occupying separate spheres were asking to be in direct conversation with one another, and poetry was my way of seeing those conversations unfold. While my first book is a way of understanding my own role and implication in colonialism, my more recent work deals with my own experience of a concussion - a traumatic brain injury that has caused me to change the way I interact and relate with and to the world. I still am exploring questions of identity and trauma, but now I am performing the work of my own healing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I recently moved, and I came across a notebook from when I was 10 or so. I found protest poems about saving the environment. I have always been drawn to language, seen it as a set of Lego to play with. I think poetry lets me play more with language and sound, and lets me dig into the gaps between genres (like digging ants out from the cracks in the sidewalk). I also write fiction, and science writing was how I earned my living for quite some time.

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?
The very unsatisfying answer is: it depends. Some of my writing happens very quickly, and sometimes it's a laborious process to get it where I want. Sometimes a first draft is pretty close to the finished product, and other times it is hardly recognizable between draft one and draft twenty-five. I don't have a reliable process of writing because I need lots of time to think and process precisely what it is I am trying to say. I do take lots of notes, particularly when I am in the midst of a project, and I return to my notes often. My notes tend to meander between what I am currently reading, watching, interesting conversations I overhear, and what I am writing. Usually, the most productive moments come from the junctions between subjects, between seemingly disparate materials.

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 usually begins aloud. I talk to myself, often as I am walking. If it sticks, I write it down. Sometimes these little bits coalesce into a piece. I tend to start with short bits that start circling around a theme then grow into a larger project; I was lucky in that this happened before I hit the grant-writing/university processes that want to fund projects.

With Twin Tongues I realized I was working on a book after about a year. Other times I have set out to write a book only to become entirely dissatisfied and throw out the manuscript. For me, I think when I am trying to produce a book I get too caught up with trying to write a book, while the real and interesting work is happening almost behind my own back.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I really enjoy doing readings and performances. It is another type of creative process for me, and often an opportunity for collaboration with other writers and performers. In fact, my current project is built out of an audio diary I kept during the early stages of recovery from a serious concussion. Readings can give a new texture to work, providing new layers to a written piece or giving voice to a provisional, site-specific experience. I think it is as important to produce temporary artwork as something published, which we tend to think of as more permanent. 

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?
Yes, Twin Tongues draws heavily from a number of different theoretical concerns around language, colonization, race, privilege, appropriation, and the politics of pedagogy. On a very fundamental level, it is looking at how history interacts with identity, and how good intentions can still result in harmful practices. The ethics of language, and even of being, are unresolved, and constantly in transition. How do I live and inhabit an identity that is inherently intertwined with a colonial culture? How do I find my language beautiful and simultaneously know that it is a tool for oppression? Twin Tongues was always doomed to failure, because it tries to answer questions about language and appropriation from a perspective that, even though I have done my best to resist, engages in appropriation and comes from a position of privilege. It is a book written about Papua New Guinea by a white, middle class Canadian woman. I struggled with the question of whether I should even finish the text at times, but to me, documenting this negotiation was more important than trying to create a book that contained 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?
Writers are always necessarily immersed in their own culture. I think the best writers reveal facets of culture that have not been thoroughly interrogated, and provoke questions about whether or not those facets are still relevant or worthwhile. In this way, writers, like other artists, can help us understand how we live, and question whether or not it is right to live that way. Writers don't have the answers more or less than anyone else does, but they are like the slow motion replay on a hockey game - it sure can help determine whether or not the puck has crossed the line.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have been very lucky in my editors. Twin Tongues was my Master's thesis, and so I had the benefit of defending it to a thesis committee, and receiving the feedback of two amazing writers and one visual artist before I even submitted for publication. My friend kevin mcpherson eckhoff also did a thorough and insightful edit for me, and then Jon Paul Fiorentino was a generous editor. An outside editor provides eyes that are fresh, that can determine whether or not the text is working the way it should...sometimes after being so involved in a poem for years it can be hard to see the big picture, or your mind remembers something that was removed a few drafts ago. So working with an outside editor, for me, is an essential and enjoyable part of the process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Think of the trees. It is a piece of advice that Robert Majzels gives his creative writing students. So now I think before I print: is this worth killing a tree for?

10 - 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 a routine. When I have a deadline, I tend to set dates with myself so I have 3-4 hour chunks of time to think and work, but that could be at home, at the library, at a cafe, wherever.

Right now my typical day begins slowly, because I have a number of mental focus and neck rehab exercises I do at the beginning of every day. I don't tend to really get going until 10am...which makes me feel really old sometimes as I go to bed around 10 each night as well.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I get stuck, I shower. It allows me to step away and get physically grounded. If that's not enough, a walk outside will do the trick. I find that returning to my own body tends to renew my mental energy, and pull me away from the glitches of abstraction that can stop the writing process.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lemon pledge.

13 - 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?
My work tends to reflect whatever influences are in my environment. When I worked for a neurosurgeon, my work was fed by the processes of science and medicine that surrounded me. When I worked in a gym, I started to pull from anatomical language. I draw a lot from the city and landscape that I inhabit as well.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
NourbeSe Philip and Dionne Brand both have huge influences on my work, and they are writers I often return to. Margaret Christakos and her Influency salon in many ways shaped the poet I am today. Then there are the poets that I play with: Kathleen Brown, Indra Singh, keven mcpherson eckhoff, jake kennedy, Stephanie Davis, and others...people who keep my thinking and writing fresh and vital and joyous.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a science fiction novel. Write dialogue for a video game. Write music.

16 - 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'd really like to try voice acting. I think it would be really interesting to be the voice of an animated character. I also think I would be pretty good at reading audio books.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have done a lot of other things. I had a career as a strength and conditioning coach, I was a roller derby athlete. No matter what else I do, I also write. It suits my tendencies to overthink everything and allows me to exercise my staircase wit.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I am reading a lot of science fiction and horror right now, and I've been into Octavia Butler and Philip K Dick. I also recently finished Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, which is striking and heartbreaking and politically relevant.

Before I left Canada (and gave away all my books) I reread Shannon Maguire's fur(l) parachute, which I think is a stunning book, the kind of book I almost wish I had written first, except then I wouldn't have had the pleasure of reading it.

I tend to run behind the times on films, but I saw Luc Besson's Angel-A a few weeks ago, and I appreciated it for its meditation on self-worth and self-respect, even as I question whether or not I agree with its take on love and sacrifice...

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am accumulating material and thought around my concussion and healing. Right now I am deciding whether it wants to be poetry or fiction or non-fiction or an entirely performative text. It hasn't entirely settled into a shape that feels right, because I have not yet settled into a shape that feels like myself.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Melissa Bull, Rue

Neva

The boat moves through bloated canals in perpetual twilight. He’s got a girl stuck like a burr to his shirt. We talk a little. His petulant intelligence reminds me of someone else. We clink bottles. A drawbridge strung up with lights breaks apart. We motor over wakes of jostling riverboats. A spray of white fireworks erupts from the embankment. I laugh, giddy from the extravagance of such staged beauty. We glide under a footbridge. I reach to slide my hand along a steel beam at its convex.

Montreal poet and translator Melissa Bull’s first trade poetry collection is Rue (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2015). Previously shortlisted (in manuscript) for the Robert Kroetsch Award, the back cover informs that “In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street—Rue’s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author’s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North American, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father’s struggles with terminal brain cancer.” The poems in Rue are physical, rough and personal, and tied directly to her Montreal, a city, at least through her poems, not always capable of either forgiveness or escape. Most of the language in Bull’s poems is relatively straightforward, focusing on short scenes and plot-driven narratives, writing out tales of travel with her mother, prostitutes in Montreal and other short missives designed nearly as love letters/postcards to and from a city she can’t help but love, can’t help but admit is so deep beneath her skin that one could simply not be separated from the other. So often her missives are presented uncritically, simply describing a scene and allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions:

Plaza Saint-Hubert Reconciliation Number Double-Digit

Headless mannequins pivot from their heels and bump into each other in clumsy slowmotion. Pigeonshit crusts the sidewalks. The odd passerbyer surprised to scope our makeout spot. We’re on a park bench between a discount houseware shop and a store full of 1950s child mannequins gussied up in satin first communion wear.

One of the baby mannequins is black, the others are oh-so-precious white in white.

Where the poems really shine is when Bull allows the language, as opposed to the narrative, to propel, which make me wonder why she chooses to write so much of these as poems instead of short (ie: “postcard”) stories. There are some intriguing movements and moments of prose in this collection, occasionally shaped to look like poems, but crafted and considered closer to a collection of short stories. Does shape or form really matter? Throughout Rue, there are pieces that are quite remarkable exist alongside poems less so; more often than not, the weaker poems are the ones in which she engages more with line breaks, somehow looser than their prose-poem/story counterparts. And yet: I want to see what Bull is really capable of. This collection merely hints at a far more fearsome power. I would like to see how that develops. I want more.

Two Pears

The first poem I sent him about himself.

It was a postcard. From Vancouver.

Probably bought at the art gallery.

Two pears, with crumbling cheese.

The sounds of the CBC

Peach tea

I don’t remember the rest. I was thinking of a day after high school. In January or February. His girlfriend was gone maybe singing a dirge. We could be freer without her monitoring the exchange of our love. (You’re fucking each other, she said. You have to understand how sick she is, he said.) I sat on the counter I’d have to Javex-clean that night. Peter Gzowski on the radio. A pre-night-shift 4 PM ease. Fragrant peach tea. A block of very old cheddar. He ate his raisins on the side, cupped them into his dirty hands, grabbed them out of their plastic bag with his dirty fingernails and tossed them back into his mouthful of yellow teeth ungraciously and glad.

(Remember: a bowl of walnuts on Hampton Street, the mystery of a nutcracker not in the shape of ballerina boy in Christmas garb.)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Broadbent

Laura Broadbent was born in Stratford Ontario and has lived in Montreal for the past seven years. She won the most recent Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and her poetry collection OH THERE YOU ARE, I CAN'T SEE YOU, IS IT RAINING? is out momentarily from Snare Books.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book is forthcoming with Snare Books in the Fall of 2012.  The story is this: I had just completed my [creative writing] master’s thesis and knew about the Kroetsch Award, so I thought: Why Not. I’ve been notoriously reticent about showing my work until I believe I have written something approaching my impossible standards. The manuscript I sent for the Kroetsch award was the first poetry I have ever sent out in the world. By some miracle the world took care of it. Being shortlisted alone was enough. It meant, simply and profoundly: Laura you have permission to write. Or, in less sentimental terms, it meant: It Isn’t Total Shit. Which was the best gift possible. The resulting kindness, congratulations and encouragement from my peers is overwhelming. Further permission. I realize pretty much everyone believed in me except me. That’s the story.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry last. In fact I hated poetry for a long time – I thought I didn’t understand it. I thought it was phony, pretentious, and intentionally obfuscatory.  Like becoming best friends with someone you initially thought was an impossible jerk. I was taking fiction classes, and the comments were always the same: the language is rich, the images are precise, the ideas are good, but there is no narrative. I don’t believe that fiction needs narrative, but whatever. That’s when I realized I was a poet. I wrote my first poem in 2008. My first poetry professor was the Canadian Poet Laureate at the time, John Steffler. All at once it dawned on me that not only was I a poet, but I have always been a poet. I’m pretty sure one is born that way. I think and observe and live like a poet. I’ve always had an immense staring problem.

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 make a mess and then see what I can do with it. Same goes for ‘life in general.’ Ideas for any of my better poems always come as a direct flash of inspiration. Some call it the voice of the Muse. Sometimes, very rarely, they come out fully formed and all I have to do is make minor adjustments. But usually I psychically projectile-vomit way too much onto the page, and then strategically take away, lug away, take away. I suffer from excess in general. Too intense. Too passionate. Enormous emotions. I’m always too much, and my initial writing is no different. So, with this excess, after I’ve taken most of it out, I then take a break from the page, clear my mind. Then I take out my editorial surgical instruments and refine it to the most crystalline form I can. I have to be ruthless and trust the intelligence of my readers. I haven’t mastered this whatsoever. It’s arduous and I love it. It hurts so good. I wish I could refine my person the way I do my writing. However, and this is important, I craft the fuck out of my poems but I don’t want them to seem too cool and ‘crafted,’ I still want them to contain human mess, monstrosity, and warmth. A fine line.

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 don’t begin with images, I begin with abstract ideas or theoretical concepts. The image is created to flesh the central conceit. Sometimes there are no images. Sometimes someone just says something outrageous and that’s it. Thinking of a book is far too overwhelming. I work in suites and series, and usually there is a conceptual or narrative thread that makes these individual suites work together, and they create a dialogue. This aleatory coherence makes the world feel magic.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I hate readings. I attend for moral support for friends or colleagues, but I hate to read my work. I never wanted a public persona, I’m exceedingly private, I always wanted my work to stand on its own. A tall order. I am this utterly confusing and confused mix of extrovert and introvert. When I speak to people I think it seems effortless, at least confident, yet I hate being looked at and I crave long stretches of deep solitude. I need to drink a lot around crowds. My nervous system is shot. I can’t lie very well and performance is basically the joy of lying, and I don’t mean that in the pejorative whatsoever. It is acting. In my classes I was always the only one who was against reading, so I’m led to believe there is something wrong with me about this. I just have such a romance with the idea of the intimacy of reading in solitude, how my words can change every time, with every reader. I’m an awkward lonely person and I write, in a way, for awkward lonely people. I don’t want the fact that I am a reasonable looking young woman be why anybody would be  interested in my poetry. Or me for that matter.

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?
Yes absolutely. Poetry is thinking made visible. Not only thinking made visible, but organizing and presenting thought in such a way that the reader takes on the flavour and momentum of thought and wants to go off and write for his or herself because of it. The intersection between poetry and philosophy is not talked about enough. Jan Zwicky does a good job of it. Anne Carson too. Majorly so. I’m constantly taking on philosophical ideas and thinking them through lyrically, conceptually, or straight-up solipsistically. I love to think excessively and heavily and poetry allows me to think through things in my own weird way. And nerdy too, since I derive such pleasure out of it. The current questions are far too heavy and too many to write here. You’ll have to read my subsequent books. The world breaks my heart in the best and worst ways. I’m worried.

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?
This sounds dramatic, yet it is a fact: the writing of others has saved my life. On a less dramatic level, the writing of others enriches my life every single day. Writing has frightening exciting power. Basically you either are a writer or you aren’t, and you either do something about it, or you don’t. Writers certainly aren’t respected like they used to be. The currency of the soul used to be far more important. But I like that writers, poets in particular, aren’t obliged to be writing about the soul all the time either. This business about the soul is still a general misconception about poetry though [like my father thinks all poets are prophets]. Not everyone is Rumi or Mary Oliver. The creative possibilities available to a poet are truly exciting. You can be a prophet, a mystic, a humorist, a [post]modernist, a romantic, a dada-ist, an intellectual, a conceptualist, a minimalist, a sentimentalist [but please don’t be], [etc], or a combination of all of them. Yet the lack of a coherent poetic ‘norm,’ or big ‘movement,’ also means a diffused audience. I’m more or less happy for that. Unfortunately, in larger culture, ‘being a writer’ means being a journalist, a script writer, or one of the 0.001 percent of novelists and 0.000000000001 percent of poets who can live off their work. However I’m glad to see how much great poetry is constantly being made – when you’re a poet you simply can’t help it. Because we’re a minority, we support each other. I bet 96% of poetry books bought are bought by poets. I really want our culture to care more about poetry. It’s why I want to teach. Yet. And yet. Really good journalism is poetry to me. A well written script is poetry. A masterful sandwich is pure poetry. The poets are at work, just with different job titles, really. My dad’s a poet/prophet disguised as a postman.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. Writers write in the dark. I have very low self confidence and I simply need someone I respect to tell me what I’ve done. I fear the day, actually, when I just assume what I’ve done is good. I become blind to my work, I’m not sure what it is, I just know I did it. A good editor’s suggestions are always pretty simple but seem revolutionary, because they solve this problem you’ve been obsessed with and unable to solve, with a single stroke. It’s one of my favourite things, like, ‘Laura cut this last line,’ and I’m staggered by the genius of the suggestion. ‘Kill your babies’ is an old writing maxim, and it is true. Kill your babies, otherwise your editor will. When somebody offers you good editing feedback, you want to kiss their feet. So if there are any foot fetishist editors out there...

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
‘Chill Out, Broadbent’ – Everyone

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?
There is an enormous appeal for me. Genres are borders meant to be moved, as far as I am concerned. I am interested in illustration and design, and I want to oversee the creation of my future books so that the form is absolutely part of the content. My aesthetic sensibilities are somewhat appeased by poetry as I have to pay attention to the actual physicality and space of the page more, that is, the space is part of the poem, or the form the words take on the page can perform themselves, like Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. I am crazy about Kenneth Patchen’s painting poems. Derek Beaulieu is a different story altogether. Robert Bringhurst is nuts about typography and layout. William Blake. Illuminated manuscripts. It’s been going on since forever and current artists/writers are doing really neat stuff constantly. These intermedial artists have been deemed the ‘blur generation.’ Gets me really excited. Beautiful books, or deconstructed books, or book boxes, odd or well-crafted signs, or paintings with text, such things make me drool. I should care more about the internet, and the great/terrible things it has provided for writers. But I'm old school and I love the tactility of objects, the smell of paper. The smell of paper for me is like the smell of women's panties for a dirty old man.

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 need to write daily. I don’t. It is my biggest frustration. I can’t figure out how to do it, this thing they call ‘discipline.’ Morning writing is productive, night writing is slowly poured. I can’t even choose a time of day. Honestly, if I spent the time writing that I do dying over my love life, I’d have 40 books of poetry written by now.  I also work three jobs.  People advise me to marry rich because then I could sit around, look pretty, and write all I want. Or write on our yacht. No idea disgusts me more, unfortunately.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Anne Carson is my version of an anti-anxiety pill. She orders things for me. She makes my brain burn to write. I return to her most frequently. Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ is something I’ve read forty times at least. People call her the philosopher of heartbreak. Fernando Pessoa and Clarice Lispector are close seconds. I like to read haiku or Vera Pavlova for example to remember economy. Lydia Davis always inspires and cheers me up – obviously, she’s good for  economy too. I like to read a lot of mystical stuff too – along the lines of Taoism and Buddhism and Jewish Mysticism, and then follow them with these great Western Canon Curmudgeons like Schopenhauer or Seneca. Theorists like Deleuze, Bataille, Bergson, Cixous, really get me going. Simon Weil ignites me and makes me feel guilt for not being hardcore enough. There’s a too-wide spectrum.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Garlic bread. We were poor and ate spaghetti maybe four days a week. Or maybe Christmas trees.

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?
That’s nuts. I know what he’s saying, but it just obviously sounds insane. Everything influences my work. And everyone. You have to watch life, indeed, stare at it, have a really big staring problem, to write. You’ve got to dive in, which is why I make a bad Buddhist – suffering is really good for writing. I willingly take on pain, I'm not that scared of it, I find it interesting and rewarding. Destruction and rebirth. I’m way too curious. It’s impossible to figure people out, and so fun. It’s hard to figure a bird out, and so fun. It’s hard to figure a memory out, and so fun. What is wine all about? A whole lot.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ll spare you. I am a true book-slut, I work in a bookstore, and my list is unreasonably long. Reading is my life. My apartment is stuffed with books.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Have enough cash to buy my beautiful mother a house [my ability to hope borders on insanity]. Also, I’d like to calm down and be nicer to myself. I haven’t done that yet. Maybe I'd like to be a mother be the state of the world terrifies me.

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?
A drummer. [Obviously not concerned with being rich.] I would also like to be a dolphin or a sloth. I’d like to be a body of water, like Lake Huron.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I started dictating stories to my mother before I could write. So I began around 2-3 years old. Or I would draw a picture, and tell her the story of it. I just couldn’t not. I still can’t not. I was homeschooled for a bit, but when I started ‘real school’ I was socially inept but made my way by being the default ‘class artist’ or ‘class writer.’ Like, ‘ask Laura to write/draw that for you.’

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Ariana Reines has been blowing my mind. She is this power-mix of magic [something poetry doesn’t have enough of these days] and intellect [something poetry has too much of these days], grit and grace, craft and mess, courage and vulnerability….read her. She’s got compelling audacity and really big brains.

The Turin Horse is the last movie that really did a number on me for weeks. It was so unbearable, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how great it was after. The understanding came after. Absolutely haunting. Barely any words in it. Less than ten words, I bet. A film that felt like 40 hours. Don’t know how long it was in actuality. Brutal art.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Three things four the next four months: 1. Finish my degree. 2. I’m having an art show in the fall so I need to get painting. 3. Begin writing my next collection of poems [also: 4. Read voraciously. 5. Better myself. 6. Be more social. Oh and 7. Make money.]



March 2012

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Eleni Zisimatos

Eleni Zisimatos writes and edits in her hometown of Montreal, QC. She was short-listed for the National Magazine Awards, The Robert Kroetsch Award, The Santa Fe Writer's Project and the Irving Layton Awards for poetry and fiction. She is Co-editor-in-Chief of the poetry magazine, Vallum: New International Poetics. www.vallummag.com.

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

I published my first chapbook when I was doing my MA in poetry at Concordia. It was an exciting time and my will to write was strong. It was a good chapbook, a long narrative poem, "Artemis and Return." I read it now and wonder where some of the energy it holds has gone. My writing now is not as intense. I seem to have a more Zen-like, relaxed approach now.

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

I have always been torn between poetry and fiction. I write both but I think I am a better poet. I'm not that good at long, descriptive passages. I was mostly sucked into poetry whilst doing a Modern poetry course at St. Francis Xavier University, with Doug Smith. I went to an amazing reading there by David Donnell and was hooked for life. But I also went to a reading by Timothy Findley around the same time, and languished over great fiction-writing abilities. I still have a signed copy of The Wars, by Findley. So...

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 was never a journal-writing, note-taking kind of poet. My writing is all fuelled by past experiences locked in my mind/body that spill out quickly almost like an alchemical process. I won't say I go into a 'trance' or anything, but it is kind of different from day-to-day experience. I do revise but not extensively.

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 have honestly tried to have a beginning and an end in sight before I start on the first poem, but, alas, I can't ever see the end beforehand. Maybe this is another reason I am less good at fiction. I can't seem to be able to make an outline of a complete story. I just kind of write, with no set particular direction, and progress with short pieces towards a whole. Interestingly, I write about 5-6 poems in one sitting and, when I read them after, I find there is amazing unity and cohesion between the poems. Not only in style and tone, but also in imagery and thought. I haven't written too many books yet, but the one that was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Signs, was made up of a conglomeration of short pieces. They cohered nicely into a pretty good manuscript. I have tried writing single, 'independent' poems, to be collected eventually into a book, but I like this less than the more perpetual, organic flow of parts and sections, words and images.

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

I like readings, but I find I get nervous and don't have a great flair for chit-chat and anecdote while on stage. I get all serious and this is sometimes a downer for an audience. Although people like good poetry, and I think my poetry is good, they also like some levity and breaks between poems. But I still read at the Yellow Door and the Visual Arts Centre in Montreal and have read at Mother Tongue in Ottawa. It is fun. I plan to get out a lot more and loosen up a bit.

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?

It's funny because a lot of my education (after I switched out of Organic chemistry in my 3rd year of my BA) has been in Classical and Medieval poetry and writing. Although I love this kind of work, ironically my writing often tends to be more avant-garde, more in the style of Anne Carson and John Ashbery. But I am a lover of poetry and can appreciate most styles. I even still appreciate science, egads. I love philosophy too. The old questions about love, death, the meaning of life, etc..are still relevant today and I think people still want to delve into deeper things like that, even in an age of surfaces. I am trying to be less pessimistic and more mystical in my writing. I love Rumi, for instance, but can't seem to be able to get rid of the 'edge.'

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?

Writing is always political, so writers ought to reflect on such things. The personal, mystical experience is my main 'like', but in a way, I prefer the Modernists of the 20th C and their style of writing. Even if a poet is not being directly, openly political, political concerns can be embedded within the fabric of their writing. Even writing about mystical love infers the absence of love and charity in the world and its leaders. So the work becomes political anyway on a deeper level. Does this make sense? Hope so.

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

I haven't worked with a lot of editors, so I can't say. Some poems of mine that have been accepted by magazines, a few times were revised by editors. I didn't mind the edits. I am flexible about my writing. It can morph into different things, kind of like the passage of time and life. It's an organic process, not fixed by ego.

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

The best piece of advice I've heard is to read a lot, and I do. It's good to know about other people's work etc.. But also life experience is very important. It's not all about the mind, but the body too.

10 - 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 just write randomly at different times. Maybe I should be more structured. This is probably why I don't have a lot of books published yet!

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

When I get stalled, I just leave my writing for a while. Completely forget about it. Then after a while, I'm back! And it's usually better writing.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Well, do you mean my childhood home or my home now? My childhood home was 100% Greek, so I guess stuffed green peppers and tomatoes baking in the oven covers it. My current home, well, I guess Tibetan incense.

13 - 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?

Every little thing that one has experienced in their life is locked in the body and there is memory of it. Experiences you have forgotten inform your work. Experiences one is experiencing now are also useful, but I think that deeper influences from the past create works of art. Personally, I am not really influenced by specific things like music or nature. I don't like looking at an art object and writing a poem about it, for instance. But I do often use inter-textuality when I write, particularly with older poets like Dante etc..

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

As I mentioned before, classical, medieval, philosophical and religious writings are central to my work, even though the finished product of my work has no resemblance at all to these writers and writings.

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

I don't know.

16 - 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 guess I would be an artist. I love painting and drawing. I am pretty good at cartoon-like stuff. I would have liked to create animated children's films too.

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

That hidden 'manic' spirit! It chose me, not the other way around.

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

Scivias, by Hildegard of Bingen was very interesting. I've been on a movie strike for the past 5 years (not to worry, I'm coming out of it--) so I'm not up to date.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am 'planning' my next move. I will promise to complete a new manuscript this year if it kills me. So, right now, I'm just busy editing other people's work for Vallum Magazine, my other occupation, which I love.

Thanks for the interview rob; it was fun!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;