James Dunnigan : part five

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Really great poems no one finishes. Not the poet, not the reader.

James Dunnigan : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I have to admit, few poets have. There are many novelists: Balzac, Faulkner, Sebald, Tolstoy. I think a poet is better served reading other kinds of writing, novels, nonfiction, encyclopedia etc, and viewing other media, painting, film, sculpture, installations, so on so forth. This is finding what poetry can do by understanding first what other art forms can do; finding your way to the edges of poetry from the outside rather than the opposite. This I think is what Anne Carson does and what makes her work so boundlessly appealing to so many people. From Eros the Bittersweet onward, she often sources the form and tone of her work outside of what is generally thought to be ‘poetic’, even when she draws it from philology which while it studies ancient poetry is hardly a ‘poetic’ business. In a world where many people think of a poem as a kind of little clockwork machine, the pleasure of which is in figuring out the mechanism, formal, ideological or otherwise, she has not only electrified and digitized the machine, but, in fact, seems to be getting rid of the machine altogether in favour of the raw current or electrical signal.

Otherwise as was the case with Dr. Carson I think the most important poetic encounter of my life so far has been with the ancients: in my case not with the Greeks but with one particular Roman poet, Virgil, whose Aeneid single-handedly convinced me to start studying Latin, woefully belatedly, in my undergrad years. Virgil’s epic is an electrifying treatise on the concept of ideology in the Althusserian sense, operatic, tragic, brutal as iron and told in lines as heavy and ductile as gold. It also saved my life.

James Dunnigan : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I mentioned George Slobodzian and Bryan Sentes: Bryan taught me literary criticism at Dawson College. George teaches at Dawson, too, but I only got to know him outside of school—in fact, mostly as the result of a visit to his cottage in Slovakia. As a poet, Bryan taught me how to read things. George, on the other hand, taught me how to write things. In their presence I am always the pupil first, and that will not change as long as they live.

I also make a point of regularly attending poetry readings in Montreal, open mics and such, in order to test the waters for certain poems, gauge my ability to perform them, and also, of course, in order to see what other people are doing in the city. I have been a regular attendant at the Accent Reading Series, a bilingual (now unofficially multilingual and definitely multivocal and otherwise polymorphous) event curated by Devon Gallant and Luc-Antoine Chiasson. There is always something interesting going on at Accent events. So far, it has evolved into a kind of meeting ground for poets and other writers from diverse horizons: sexagenarians and millennials, Concordians and McGillians, MAs and MFAs, Anglos, Quebecois and Acadians—it is always ready to accept more and different people, and is steadily growing for this reason.

James Dunnigan : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Scope and vastness (not necessarily length) being two things I am inordinately fascinated by, I only got turned on to poetry when I got the sense that it could do things on as large and deep a scale as a great novel, great film or scripture (most of which is poetry, but I didn’t know this at the time). The closest I ever got to enjoying poetry in my adolescent years was when I found a copy of the Qur’an in Arabic and French at Dawson College’s library and began to, with the help of other translations and often transliterations (Arabless as I was and still am), piece the text together aurally as well as narratively. Surahs Ar-Rahman, Ash-Shams, An-Nur and Al-Balad contain tremendous poetry which I know I will never experience the way many Muslims or native Arabic speakers do. I still have a verse from Ar-Rahman pinned to my kitchen wall now which says something along the lines of “all that is on earth will [one day] disappear”: consolation at least in the instances where things on earth are bothering you, and a healthy reminder of where all of us must one day go: away. In English, it was my introduction to things like Paradise Lost and Othello, which caused my break into poetry, that and especially the poets of the early XXth century: Pound, Eliot, Williams—H.D. only much later, as is often tragically the case. It was all downhill (uphill?) from there.

James Dunnigan : part one

James Dunnigan is a poet, scholar and fishmonger from Montreal. His first book of poems, The Stained Glass Sequence, won the Frog Hollow Chapbook Competition in 2018. A second chapbook, Wine and Fire, is forthcoming with Cactus Press.

Photo credit: Luc Robitaille @ Robitaille Photo

How does a poem begin?

With words. I’m really being serious. The best way to find if not an opening line then an opening into a potential poem, I find, is a method I call the prise au vif, or ‘catching raw’. It’s not my method exactly but one I’ve learned to practice over years of discussion with poets Bryan Sentes and George Slobodzian. One vivid example of this method in practice, to my memory, was an afternoon when I was sitting with George on his balcony one summer, the both of us sunburnt, drinking beer. George spots an unsettlingly large wasp in the pine tree in front of us. He points this out to me saying something like “man, look at those wasps”. Then he sort of smiles and starts to reword it out loud, slowly: “wasps among the pine cones (…) wasps/ among the pine/cones (…) wasps among/dry pine cones (…) under afternoon airplanes” sort of playing with it, and if it’s good enough he’ll put it down on paper. The observation or thing observed doesn’t even have to be “poetic” in itself. You don’t need to be in a heightened state to get there, though we both certainly had something of a glow on that afternoon. It’s just a technique you learn, like embroidery or filleting a fish or mindfulness or jumping turnstiles. It’s the articulation of it, the deployment of it in language, via the notational system of the line, that makes it poetry.