Ken Norris : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’m standing in the doorway of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca. Peter Gizzi just brought out a new edition of it with NYRB. To me, it’s the most important book of the twentieth century. It has taught me more than anything else. So now I propose to reread it for the first time in twenty years. Will it blow my mind again? Quite possibly. Here’s hoping.

Ken Norris : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I like this question a lot. First of all, because it recognizes that writers require renewal. That is absolutely true—that is absolutely the case. Sometimes you’re just completely tapped out, and writing is just over. So . . . how do you recharge your batteries?

The two books I always go back to are Neruda’s Residence On Earth and Creeley’s For Love. And, often, I will take just a peek at HD’s Trilogy.

Ken Norris : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Oh, the way I think about writing gets changed all the time. It’s just a question of what have I fallen in love with lately. I loved Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry when I was thirteen. I loved Leonard Cohen’s poetry when I was seventeen. I loved Robert Creeley’s and Pablo Neruda’s poetry when I was eighteen. The list goes on and on, and now I’m seventy. Lorca was important. Artie Gold was important. Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer. bpNichol as an editor was extremely important.

If I stay open as a reader, then everything I read changes me as a writer.

Ken Norris : part two

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

Mouse Eggs. When I was a young poet, hanging around with the other Vehicule Poets, we put our poems in a mimeographed magazine called Mouse Eggs. About six months ago, Endre Farkas revived it as an e-magazine. So I started putting the new poems from Hawaiian Sunrise in Mouse Eggs. So it’s an interesting time to be answering this question. In 1975, my freshest poems were in Mouse Eggs. And in 2021, my freshest poems are in Mouse Eggs. Poetically, I’m once again hanging around with the friends of my youth.

Ken Norris : part one

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. His most recent book is South China Sea (Guernica Editions). He currently resides in Toronto.

What are you working on?

I just finished working on a chapbook called Hawaiian Sunrise. It is coming out with above/ground press. It is my “work of the pandemic.” I wrote it in Hawaii in December and January. It’s pretty much all I have to say about the Covid-19 experience-- that is the atmosphere in which the poems take place. Covid-19 + Hawaii. Negative tests and surfing. It was the worst of times and the best of times. 

It is probably the most off-balance thing I have ever written.