Steve Venright : part one

Steve Venright is a Canadian visual artist and poet whose books include Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000), Floors of Enduring Beauty (Mansfield Press, 2007), and The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings (Feed Dog/Anvil Press, 2017). Through his Torpor Vigil Records label, he has released several albums of somniloquies, soundscapes, and songs, including Dreaming Like Mad with Dion McGregor: Yet More Outrageous Recordings of the World’s Most Renowned Sleeptalker and Samuel Andreyev’s The Tubular West. As a purveyor of neurotechnology in the 1990s, he exploited the psychedelic potential of pulsed light with his Hallucintatorium—a sort of retinal-circus sideshow that earned him the designation of “Toronto’s prime purveyor of non-chemically altered states” (Eye Weekly). Steve’s digital abstract images and patterns—“variegraphs” and “tryptiles”—are available online from the Torpor Vigil Art store, which peddles everything from credenzas to beach towels.

How does a poem begin?

A poem tends to begin with a neural or maybe extra-neural impulse, tickle, or flash. Sometimes the first line is already in my head; other times—if I arrive before it—I have to wait around a little for it to show up. Every poem I’ve ever written, so far as I can recall, has begun with a single phrase or line without my having any notion whether it will be as short as that or run on for, say, dozens of pages. The disparate but resonating one-liners end up assembling themselves into aggregates when enough of them emerge. Other one-liners suggest a theme and form that I end up riffing on till there’s a bunch of them and they form a modular piece, sometimes even a (dreaded) list poem. I often reflect on Henri Michaux’s observation that the mere desire to create a poem is enough to kill it. I also find Max Ernst’s maxim (Max-ism?) of keeping one eye on the outside world and one on the inner to be a useful position from which to start.