Suzannah Showler, Thing Is

Scenario: the couch is a room, and I walk

into it. Everyone knows cows have seven

stomachs, but no one cares what this means

for the grass. I’m going down again and again,

feeling the system in parts. If I could only

have one life, I’d swallow it. And keep coming

back to the same words. I’ve got you in mind. (“Conditions”)

The follow-up to Suzannah Showler’s debut poetry collection, Failure to Thrive (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], is Thing Is (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2017). Thing Is continues Showler’s exploration into the lyric, composing poems of uncertainty that explore the very nature of being and consciousness, while attempting to come to terms with just how it is the world exists, and we, individually, upon it. The book is structured in four sections, as she names her table of contents “Personae”: “Concerned with consciousness, enclosed spaces, negation,” “Concerned with beauty, sadness, sleep,” “Concerned with haunting, the afterlife, being a ghost” and “Concerned with interpersonal communication, empty spaces, the future.”

Showler composes her poems as lyric essays, each poem working towards a single, book-length goal. Despite, or even because of, the author/narrator’s inherent skepticism, the short poems of Thing Is seek answers to impossible questions, as Showler patiently and meticulously disassembles the world through language in an attempt to understand how the mechanism works. To open the poem “Not Not,” she writes: “When it comes to classification, / the thing you aren’t after isn’t // the worst place to start.” The idea of naming is one that comes up a couple of times throughout the collection, such as in the poem “False Negatives,” where she writes: “Naming a substance is an act of feeling / for principles of unity.” To name something is to make it tangible, and this collection is ambitious, seeking out what might be impossible to find, and yet, fascinating to engage. This is a sharp collection of poems, comparable to similar works by Adam Dickinson, Stephen Brockwell and others for their ongoing investigations into phenomenological studies. Elsewhere in the collection, to open the poem “Too Negative,” she adds:

I was a kid other kids’

parents gossiped about.

They told their children

what I was: too negative.

I get it. Fair to fear

contagion of bad attitudes,

to think naming a thing

can be an inoculation.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part two,

[the room, preparing: including Karl Jirgens, Denis De Klerk and Noelle Allen] See the first part here.

Toronto ON: If you aren’t already aware, Catriona Wright (poet and former Ottawa resident) has co-founded a new publishing venture, Desert Pets Press, with Emma Dolan, and some of their first publications include the anthology 300 Hours A Minute (2015) and E. Martin Nolan’s Poems From Still (2015). As their website informs: “Desert Pets Press was founded in 2015 by illustrator Emma Dolan and author Catriona Wright. Based out of Toronto, Ontario, the press publishes limited edition poetry and prose chapbooks and strives to combine exciting contemporary writing with innovative design.” Subtitled “Poems About YouTube Videos,” the chapbook anthology 300 Hours A Minute includes a series of playful poems (being exactly what the chapbook title suggests) composed by a variety of predominantly-emerging Toronto poets and fiction writers including Michelle Brown, Kathryn Mockler, Vincent Colistro (he has a first poetry collection due in spring with Signal Editions), Andy Verboom, Daniel Scott Tysdal [see my review of his most recent poetry collection here], Laura Clarke, Jess Taylor, Suzannah Showler [see my review of her first poetry collection here], Matthew R. Loney and Spencer Gordon.

Ted Talks

then TED foams at the mouth

forgetting to stop. TED co-opts cud as a fertilizer

two point oh. Won’t hold a microphone so one

is fastened to TED’s head. TED says hands are keyboards,

keyboards are dead phonemes. TED walks

atop a ramp atop the universities, whose popinjays cock

their heads up and balk. Cued to a power point,

TED points to its hegemony, Gemini, Jesus, Fancy Pants,

the real regressives. TED shocks she who opens

herself to touching it. Insteads are part of the prix fixe

of TED, such is its kindness, to offer hope. TED knocks

on my wall, in the voice of a friend, who shared this article,

who shared this article, who aired this sharticle,

who dares this icicle of shart? TED talks

and before long we’ll all be forced

to listen. Full stop. (Vincent Colistro)

The argument of the collection, “poems about YouTube videos,” is reminiscent of the anthology Dinosaur Porn [see my review of such here], with the argument/prompt that sparked the project seemingly as random, but for the fact that the Ferno House anthology had submissions that were much further “out there” than the poems collected here. Wright, an emerging poet herself, appears to favour a particular flavour of the short, observational lyric, one that would fit very much in that space where the editorial visions of publishing houses Vehicule Press, Nightwood Editions, ECW Press and Wolsak and Wynn might meet. Along those same lines is E. Martin Nolan’s Poems From Still, a collection of short, meditative lyrics that weave through a gentle pacing. His poems reference hurricanes, including Katrina, and the resulting damage left behind. Nolan’s poems are thoughtful and empathetic, and centred very solidly in concrete facts and situations.

KATRINA FAR AWAY

I

In Detroit, on TV, they show the storm after.

It goes on, moves north, still the shape it was.

In Ohio they read of it,

how it’s coming there,

feeding that recently droughted land.

In Katrina’s rain the small hard flowers

of Ohio’s weeds rejoice.

II         IN OHIO

The man turns from the window, the same

rain hard on the window he’s stopped at

to see the storm die over land.

The woman on the stairs stops.

She holds folded clothes.

III

A: To get the real Taino god

of the storm take the wooden face

carved into mid-scream, face the storm

and forget any carved wood.

What appeals about this press, apart from the strong work and the graceful design, is in seeing how they work to engage with their immediate, local community, and producing work by numerous poets, many of whom haven’t yet made a name for themselves. There is much here worth paying attention to.

Suzannah Showler, Failure to Thrive

NOTES ON INTEGRITY

What if we stopped predicting the weather

and agreed to run it ragged?

To demonstrate: a dramatization

of a pigeon being hit by a car, except in this

instance, the pigeon wins. Once a month

it’s moving day. Walking home, you’ll notice

everyone is having a night in their lives.

Most people are now experts on design.

I’m pretty sure this guy I know is faking

imposter syndrome. But don’t we all

just want to stand, mostly upright,

in a stick figure forest of contemporaries?

At the very least, I’d like to make a name

for myself in the lost art of skywriting.

I was going to say something crucial.

But I forget what.

Toronto poet Suzannah Showler’s [see my recent Open Book: Ontario profile on her here] highly-anticipated first trade poetry collection is Failure to Thrive (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2014), a collection of taut, polished and punchy lyrics. A finalist for the 2013 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada, Showler was included in The Walrus’ list of “the six best writers you’ve never heard of,” and, last spring, she released her first chapbook Sucks To Be You and other true taunts with Bardia Sinaee’s Odourless Press. Structured in five sections—Sensory Anchors, Museum Mouth, What You See Is What You Get, Some Crucial Element and Keen Frequencies—there is a precision to the poems in Failure to Thrive that one doesn’t often see in a first trade collection, and even her more conversational pieces are composed of cut and carved lines so tight that one could bounce a quarter off them. “Lowest was Jean’s preternatural warble, / spate of notes carrying a regatta of old-world curses / that strained, wood-stained, to reach us.” she writes, to open “THE WINDSOR ASYLUM” Her poems are culturally astute, highly aware of the margins and capable of intriguing cognitive twists, and establishing connections that didn’t previously exist. “The Great Wall of China / isn’t visible / from space.” she writes, in the poem “A SHORT HISTORY OF THE VISIBLE,” later writing:

Body scanners once used only in airports

become popular in bars.

This is what you see:

clothes haunting skin haunting

muscle haunting bone.

What you see is what you get.

When Showler opens the first poem in the sequence “SUCKS TO BE YOU AND OTHER TRUE TAUNTS” with “I have to say, strangers form great / cognitive maps.” it also opens a description of her writing as a whole, attempting to compose maps across a great range of source information to answer questions about how and why people act the way they do, and how and why the world, precisely, exists and acts the way it does. These are poems of experience and attention, as well as short essays on comprehension. And Showler is capable of deep attention, even within poems that might distract with her dark and quirky observations and humour. Her playful explorations are immediately clear simply through a list of poem titles, whether “PORTRAITS OF SEVERAL LAMPS BROKEN WHILE HOUSE-SITTING,” “CONFESSIONS FROM THE DRIVER OF THE GOOGLE STREET VIEW CAR,” “SOME FINAL EXPLANATORY THOUGHTS” and “A SHORT AND USEFUL GUIDE TO LIVING IN THE WORLD,” that ends with: “The trick is to try to live in Earth time / and keep the vigil of an orbit around anything. // Employ these and other strategies that prove useful. // Please write to me of your success.” These are poems far more interested in exploring the correct questions to ask, but ask they do, and demand at least some kind of response. One can’t help but respond.

THIRTEEN SUBCATEGORIES

found poem

Accidental deaths by location

Victims of aviation accidents or incidents

Accidental deaths from falls

Filmed accidental deaths

Firearm accident victims

Deaths by horse-riding accident

Hunting accident deaths

Industrial accident deaths

People who died in ATV accidents

Railroad accident victims

Space program fatalities

Deaths in sport

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Suzannah Showler

Suzannah Showler's writing has appeared places, including The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, and Joyland. She was a finalist for the 2013 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and winner of the 2012 Matrix LitPOP Award for poetry. Her first book, Failure to Thrive, is forthcoming from ECW Press April 2014.

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?

I don’t know yet how or if my book will change anything, but I’m very glad it’s coming out. I’m only just-just starting to write new work again, so I don’t know what it will be or if it will be different. I hope it’s better.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry first when I was in kindergarten. I wrote a poem in the voice of Harriet Tubman that took the idea of being a “runaway” slave very literally and put her in an actual foot race. (I have been an earnest dork since infancy.) I remember feeling sure that it was a poem, even though it didn’t rhyme. But I don’t know why I did that instead of something else.

I would love to write fiction and non-fiction, and I do try, but I’m like a wannabe triple-threat flailing spiritedly and arrhythmically through the dancing portion and too scared to sing past the first three notes of any song.

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 kind of feel like describing writing process is like describing your dreams: you can never quite get at what you’re trying to convey, plus it’s super boring for anyone who it didn’t happen to. But yeah, I’m really slow, and my drafts come out as both copious notes and something close to a final draft all in one drawn out stew-mess of a document. It’s chaos. In an ugly way.

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 am definitely not working on a book from any kind of beginning. Just cobbling a lot of small things, and slowly.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings are not really part of my process. By the time I read a poem aloud, I’m not working on it anymore. But I’ve learned to like readings, in my way. There’s a healthy dose of dread, and then once I’m up there I get a charge out of it. Especially if I end up making people laugh, and that’s often really easy do to because people are very desperate to laugh at poetry readings.

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?

I am extremely theoretically concerned when writing, but I’m not trying to answer any questions. I write so I can hang out with questions I find impossible to answer. I don’t think I can make claims about what’s current; I only know what I’m haunted by.

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 think the role of writers should be to do things with words in such a way so as to attempt to convey something (“something” can be interpreted loosely). I don’t know what this means for culture.

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

Essential.

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

About writing, the best advice I’ve ever gotten was “be fearless.” I’m pretty sure I’ve never lived up to it, but it’s something to try for.

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

This is my terrible confession: for the most part, I really only like reading poetry insofar as it fuels my poetry-writing habit. My taste keens towards poems I wish I had written, or ones that make me want to write better. This is a disgusting way to read and appreciate other people’s work, and I am a horrible monster.

So the appeal of writing prose for me is that as a reader, I love it in a less murky, self-involved way, and it would be nice to write the sort of thing that I might enjoy regardless of what I was doing with my life. Unfortunately, I’m a paralyzed and mediocre fiction writer. I find switching into non-fiction really fun and easy, actually, but I’m not sure how good I actually am at it (see: ‘Spirited, arrhythmic flailing,’ Question #2).

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 go to sleep at night thinking about breakfast. I love breakfast so much. And coffee.

So, here’s a problem I have: I like everything best in the morning. By later in the day, I’m bummed out. So I’d do well to develop a regular routine where I write every morning, but that would mean giving up running in the morning, and sitting around and looking at things in the morning, and reading in the morning, and consuming internet junk in the morning.

All this to say: only so much of the day is a morning, and then it’s just the rest of it. I try to write whenever I think I might be able to trick myself into doing it. 

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

My writing is always stalled. Stalled is just what writing is for me.

If time and money permits, a train trip alone is a good way to get me going. Or anything a bit disinhibiting. Like, two glasses of wine and half-hypnotizing myself by playing songs I’ve listened to so many times I can’t really hear them anymore.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I’m from Ottawa: a city renowned for its affectless air.

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’m influenced by anything I can manage to get my head around. I find most of it on Wikipedia.

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

Andrew Battershill is a writer with whom I share a pair of sweatpants. This arrangement has a profound impact on my daily life.

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

Take the train from Europe to Asia. Also go to Iceland. Also road trip in the American South. Also some writing things I can’t talk about here because I am too superstitious.

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?

This is my favourite question to ask people at parties! People have these whole other selves they keep in their back pockets (along with regret and nostalgia and lint).

My dream job: street photographer circa 1954-1976. In this century, too, I would have liked to have done some kind of visual art, if it hadn’t been writing. I draw at about the level of a half-talented sixteen year old (because that’s what I was, but then I got older and not any better.) I didn’t learn to print photos in the darkroom until I was in my 20s, but I love it more than just about anything else. (It is magical.)

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

To be real, I was never going to do anything else. I was an early and singularly hungry reader, and I started wanting to write books pretty much as soon as I started reading them.

The more interesting question, in my case, might be how this was actually allowed to happen. And the answer is: because my parents are crazy and permissive and the best. They never, ever told me to not do this, or even so much as hinted that it wasn’t a practical choice. And my parents aren’t artists; they’re professionals. Think about the crazy act of imagination it takes to be a tax prof and a refugee lawyer and to look at your kid and say: sure, poetry, that sounds great! I think that takes more imagination than actually being a poet.

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

I like drag a couple of years behind the rest of the world (keeps me young), so the last great book I read was Swamplandia!, and the last great film I saw was Catfish.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I can’t talk about it. (See: “too scared,” Question #2; “stalled,” Question #12; and  “superstitious,” Question #16.)

[Suzannah Showler launches Failure to Thrive in Ottawa at VERSeFest on Tuesday, March 25, 2014]
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

the VERSeFest 2014 schedule is now online,

The schedule for the fourth annual VERSeFest, Ottawa's annual poetry festival, is now on-line. Running from March 25 to 30, 2014, VERSeFest is comprised of various literary and spoken-word reading series (including The Factory Reading Series) collaborating to organize and host a wide-ranging poetry event, featuring readings and performances from Mary Ruefle, David W. McFadden, Brandon Wint, Marilyn Irwin, Margaret Christakos, Stephen Brockwell, Andrew Faulkner, Blaize Moritz, Billie Jane Kearns, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jenna Tenn-Yuk, Kathryn Mockler, Karen Connolly, Kaie Kellough, Mary Pinkoski, Nina Berkhout, Peter Richardson, Shane Rhodes, Flilosi-Fire, Sarah De Leeuw, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Stephen James Smith, Sue Goyette, Suzannah Showler and others, a screening of Robert McTavish's documentary on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, The Line has Shattered, as well as a post-screening panel discussion with McTavish and conference participants Roy MacSkimming, Robert Hogg and William Hawkins.

For a full schedule and list of readers, as well as information on tickets, check out their website.