Kevin Spenst : coda

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Of late, I’ve been immersed in the work of BC poets. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work of Roy Miki in a huge collection of his work entitled Flow, which brings together his six books of poetry. There’s an intensity of thought that goes into the placement of each word in lines that flip through multiple meanings. Right now, the book is open to this line: “the rain renews all hollow/ pain that can’t be renewed/ by a drive down the street.” Lovely. Also, I’m slowly reading the poetry of Joy Kogawa “A Garden of Anchors” and I’m rereading Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Other books I’ve loved of late: Curtis LeBlanc’s Little Wild, Malory Tater’s This Will Be Good, Katherin Edwards’ A Thin Band, Russell Thornton’s The Broken Face, Onjana Yawnghwe’s The Small Way and Eve Joseph’s Quarrels. Yes, I’ve been on a reading bender this year.

Kevin Spenst : part five

Why is poetry important?

What is language? Is it biological? Is it technological? Is it private or public? How is a word in your head changed when it comes out of your mouth? There’s nothing as strangely unique and accessible as language. Poetry seems to me to be the best place to tease out its meanings in an engaging way. Poetry combines the uptick of philosophical thinking with pratfalls of slapstick.

It’s also remarkable how there can be a social dimension in something so solitary. Working with words, you are handling these nests, stones and joy-buzzers of meaning that have been thought, spoken and written by so many others who came before us. These words will also be passed down to future generations. When editing work, you also have to shift into an Ear of Another. I know what this means to me, but does it really work that way? Poetry feels like a central place in the transit of meaning-making. 

Poetry has been part of many other progressive causes. (Horn-tooting: On a very small-scale, personal note, I once helped organize an afternoon poetry reading for a group of Vancouver teachers on strike. Rita Wong, Jeff Steudel, and Danielle LaFrance were some of the poets that came out.)

Also, thinking about our current moment, we see how essential eco-poetics and the poetry of protest are. In British Columbia, we are dealing with threats to our natural environment from industry and government and it’s heartening to see poets like Rita Wong so devoted to writing and resistance. Last year she wrote a gorgeous book with Fred Wah called Beholden: a poem as long as a river.  Currently, she’s in court for being part of a blockade of Trans Mountain workers. Steven Collis is another BC poet who’s gone to court for environmental activism. These poets are doing important work.

What else can do all this but poetry?

Kevin Spenst : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

A poet whose work I return to time and again is Don Domanski. I love the fable-like quality to his poems that incorporate so many different traditions from science and geology to various world religions. There’s a buzz to most every phrase in his work. Last year, I spent two concentrated months reading and writing and I’m pleased with the poetry that came out of that period. Upend (Jackpine Press) was the resulting chapbook. I was more aware of the layering of lines and metaphors while writing that than ever before thanks to the work of Domanski.

In terms of straight up poetics, Jane Hirshfield is someone else who I’ve reread. I like her clarity of vision and how she sees poetry as a spiritual pursuit. To be perfectly frank, I may write something that neither goes anywhere nor means anything to anyone, and if all I have is that hope in a final product, then I’ve failed. If I take up the task of writing as something inherently valuable (a period of reflection on meaning, language, etc), then I’m bound to benefit from this time whether or not my poetry makes it off my laptop.

Oh, and Mary Ruefle rocks. She’s someone I need to read more. Someone whose work always delights in its sharp cognition and radical flights. 

Kevin Spenst : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

My conception of poetry has opened up tremendously. Currently, on my desk, there’s a chapbook of concrete poetry made with a typewriter. As a teen, I did not dig bpnichol or concrete poetry at all, but seeing the work of Judith Copithorne here in Vancouver, Gustave Morin in Windsor, Ontario (his Clean Sails really blew me away) and Renee Gladman, whose Prose Architectures is sublime, I have a growing appreciation for vispo. Also, sound poetry fascinates me whereas when I was a teen it would have just made me giggle. (Google: steve mccaffery carnival). I was delighted last year to hear Donato Mancini give a reading in Victoria at Open Space of new work that took on a uniquely aural dimension.

In terms of the lyric, my interests over the years have centered around metaphor. It feels foundational to how language is embodied and experienced. I gravitate towards work that is wildly metaphorical and playful and I love the idea of opening up metaphor to erasure, found poetry, and the plundering of other texts. (Thank you, Silliman and Bernstein!) Surrealism is another place that I like to play. James Tate takes the cake and pushes it through the colander and it’s squeezed out into sweet squiggles that exude meanings both sad and hilarious. Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing the Vancouver poet Laura Farina on a radio program I cohost (plug: Wax Poetic on Coop Radio; pats on the back: RC Weslowski and Lucia Misch). Laura’s work was a burst of lovely surrealisms: horizontal landscape hanging in the window, the city crossed the street pretending not to know me… That’s the kind of stuff I strive to write.

Kevin Spenst : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

It was the spontaneous overflow of powerful teenage feelings recollected in suburbia. In high school, I remember being very keen to read the Romantics. I had no idea what to expect, but I loved the name and these poets turned out to be as exciting as I expected with their critiques of consumerism (Wordsworth’s “The World is too much with us, getting and spending we lay waste our power”), philosophy (light) in Keats’ “Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard sweeter,” straight up ecstasy in most of Shelley, the renewing power of nature, and a host of other themes. If we compare the music videos from the Romantics (that 80s band), I would say that poetry from two hundred years ago stands up better than music from thirty some odd years ago. I mean that’s the beauty of poetry and working with language, it’s not as subject to the vicissitudes of fashion as other art forms. (Apologies for the strawman argument.)

The teen-angst poems that I wrote were love poems that were basic sentences with some missing articles and prepositions. After I read ee cummings through the summer between Grade 11 and 12, I played with spacing on the page. In Grade 12, I took a Creative Writing class from an wonderfully supportive teacher, Mr. Chudnovsky. (factoid: Chudnovsky’s son grew up with Seth Rogen who named the villain in the latest remake of Green Hornet... Chudnovsky!) I wrote fiction and poetry in his class, but after sending a story to Event Magazine and getting a rejection, I folded. I’m still working on developing a thicker skin for rejections and criticism.

Kevin Spenst : part one

Kevin Spenst, a Pushcart Poetry nominee, is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong (both with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press), Ward Notes (the serif of nottingham), Flip Flop Faces and Unexpurgated Lives (JackPine Press), and most recently Upend (Frog Hollow Press). His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including Event, the Malahat Review, subTerrain magazine, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, BafterC, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2014. He is a cohost at Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio and part of the organizing team at the Dead Poets Reading Series. He lives on unceded Coast Salish territory with his sweetheart Shauna Kaendo.

Photo credit: Shauna Kaendo

What are you working on?

I’m currently working on a chapbook of new poetry riffing on faith, spirituality, mushrooms (no… not those kinds (well… not, exclusively)), and idioms from other languages for rain. I wrote a prose-poem this morning that runs riots through the Book of Revelations, the movie “God’s Not Dead” (file under: cringingly over-the-top evangelical propaganda), and cute dogs in a voice that appears to be raving mad, but in fact, at the end of the piece, it’s an emblem of sanity. I’m having fun letting my manic energy out and then reeling it in for quieter poems that are a bit more sobering and dark. Yes, I’m drawn to extremes. 

Also, I’m working on a series of experimental prose pieces that make use of the Mennonite refugee experience in Vancouver, Canada in the 20s and 30s. That’s my family’s background and I’m digging into as much history as I can to build up settings for surreal tales that flit between fiction and nonfiction. I love the definition of Kelly Link’s short fiction as being slipstream, which is a style blending different genres and modes. That’s a place where my imagination feels most at home. Hopefully, all of this will culminate in my first trade publication of prose somewhere down the road.

What’s amazing is that I’m able to do all this from my own writing room at the Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, BC where I’m the current writer-in-residence. Yes, I’m living on gratitude.