Not that long ago I picked up my copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 and realized just how much I owed him. Early on I was very much taken with form, and reading him and Kerouac’s prose taught me a lot about flow. Much of my writing until recently was an attempt to develop a practice that includes form and flow; reading it now feels like watching myself as a teenager move in a body that’s not fully inhabited, or that’s too fully inhabited. Being aware of this conflict is helping me find solutions to this problem of form and flow.
Later on, a few years apart, I read Yves Bonnefoy and P.K. Page. And here it’s their attention to the moment that struck me. They give you a sense of a whole room, of a whole event, of the depth and breadth of an emotion, without entering the realms of description or analysis.
And a couple years ago now I did a reading alongside Daniel Leblanc-Poirier. I didn’t know him, hadn’t read his work. Us talking after the reading, walking from St. Boniface to Winnipeg, and the way he read his prose at the reading, opened something up for me. Not that we talked that much about poetry or writing; maybe it’s just getting to know someone a bit, how that leads to look at what matters to them, at what they do, differently. He’s part of something of a movement in Québec that can be trashy, that can seem to look for shock for aesthetic reasons. Until then I saw this kind of writing as facile, and retrospectively that was immensely unfair and close-minded. And contradicts my admiration for Ginsberg. I don’t see myself as a part of that movement or aesthetic, but for the collection I just finished I did explore a change of tone, subjects that are tied to discomfort, that might create discomfort, and vocabulary that I might not have considered poetic before this meeting. And it’s a collection about the French language and its politics, so somehow that shift is fitting.
Beyond these few moments, since rob mclennan started Periodicities I’ve been reviewing poetry. That’s new to me. I try to do one a month, it gives me a break from all my other writing. It’s allowed me to really focus on a book, to keep it with me, because I tend to move on very quickly and not return to books after I’ve read them. To discard them unto my bookshelves. Some books give and give, they’re immense like that; and there are others that have quieter voices, that you have to take more time and adjust to. Writing about them has helped me develop an actual discourse on poetry, or poetries, perhaps, as opposed to only focusing on my own practice.
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