Michael Lithgow : coda

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

How To Avoid Huge Ships, Julie Bruck

Hard Child, Natalie Shapiro 

What we Are When We Are, Cvetka Lipuč

Arias, Sharpon Olds 

Michael Lithgow : part five

What are you working on?

My second collection of poetry, Who We Thought We Were As We Fell, is coming out this spring (Cormorant Books, 2021), so that’s exciting. Most of my creative energy for the past little while – in addition to completing this collection – has gone into longform fiction, a novel; such a difficult process, but it does continue to grow and find itself. The story is about disparate, broken people trying to overcome limitations - being forced to, really, or invited to by the circumstances of their lives – individually at first, and then with the possibility of collectivity, and in the face of the kinds of indifference to suffering that algorithmic cultures seem to propagate. I have also started working with visual artists on different projects – on an illustrated version of one of my short stories, and on a kids alphabet book, which is fun and whimsical. It’s my first foray into the world of combining my writing with visual expression, both exciting and challenging. 

Michael Lithgow : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Finding/creating language that happens, that allows language to come alive in the body, that invites a reader into an embodied relationship with my words, and with them my own body, my own experiences, my own sense of mind and self. Finding the language that can hold that tension, that thrives in the space between certainty and obscurity, that invites a reader to share that tension of being alive. Making language that stays alive like that, even on a shelf for a very long time -  

Michael Lithgow : part three

Why is poetry important?

Is it? I suppose the question could better be asked: how is it important? On a societal scale, my sense is that poetry is not that relevant for most people, that like opera or perhaps live theatre, it exists as an anachronism of sorts, a form of human expression that once may have had an ascendant place in the public imagination (and even then it would likely have been for narrow privileged audiences), but now thrives in more marginal spaces. 

But importance on an individual level is different. Poems have been for me at times life rafts, whispered evidence of hope from lives lived intensely within the maelstroms and possibilities of imagination. The poems I like most transform the existential discomforts of being alive into events of beauty. And the magic of a poem is that it can happen in the poem -- that transformation from crisis to resilience. Just like that. Like the sudden snapping of a tattered prayer flag on an old string, being in the wind.  

Michael Lithgow : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

WC Williams taught me the simplicity of language, the power of the clear clean line, of how the clear clean line can offer such visceral pleasures. Williams was a family doctor in a poor community. He made poems from the mundane stuff all around him and with them crafted vessels to hold the profound feelings he experienced. I only understood later how antisemitic his work is – and so I’ve abandoned it. But the pleasure in a clean, unadorned line still remains, even if I don’t always strive for it.  

The confessional poets all taught me it was OK to confess, but more importantly, to do the intimate, complicated and fraught work of subject formation in a poem. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsburg, Robinson Jeffers, James Wright. My love of poetry was forged in the crucibles of these poets who shared their own excruciating and beautiful attempts at being human.

Sylvia Plath deserves special mention in this regard. Like so many others, I have been deeply affected by Sylvia Plath’s work. Plath taught me to listen to syllables, meter and rhyme in more complex ways. Plath also demonstrated that enduring feelings of hopelessness, loss, being lost, confusion, uncertainty and horror at the raw existential truth of being alive can be transformed into sudden, alert and surprising sensations of resilience and transformation. But it’s the complexity of her images as almost a language of their own than continues to beguile. I continue to learn about writing from Plath.

From Gerald Stern I learned to leap around more, to let the insane links between images and words and feelings and memories and thinking loose in a poem, that that looseness can fill a poem with terrific energy and surprising sense-making. Stern is a storyteller in a kind of homespun, mythic way. His poems create myths of his own life, and by doing so, allow us into a world where we can consider our own lives in mythic terms, by which I mean on terms more meaningful than, say, what the Dow Jones tells us about the worth of our days. 

A recent influence is Tongo Eisen-Martin. His poetry opened up for me an exploration of form and discovery of its epistemic consequences. It’s fair to say my approach to form has tended to be conservative, or perhaps conventional, and opening up form to something more organically or ecstatically formal allowed me into a poetic exploration of almost violent tensions trying to unhinge my own critical sense of self from their foundations in certain kinds of privilege. 

Cvetka Lipuš is also a recent influence. Only one of her books has been translated into English, so there is so much more to learn. Lipuš teaches me to leap further, letting scraps of the remarkable in day-to-day details bubble up into almost-dreamscapes. ‘Almost’ is where the magic lies for me, somehow tethering the power of dreaming – the power of how dreams make meaning - in the recognizable debris of a life. Lipuš’ first translated collection (Athabasca University Press, 2019) was the inspiration to complete the manuscript for my second collection of poems. 

Michael Lithgow : part one

Michael Lithgow’s poetry and essays have appeared in various journals including the Literary Review of Canada (LRC), The /Temz/ Review, Cultural Trends, Canadian Literature, Existere, Topia, Event, The Antigonish Review, Poemeloeon, The High Window, ARC, Contemporary Verse 2, TNQ and Fiddlehead. His first collection of poetry, Waking in the Tree House (Cormorant Books, 2012), was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Quebec Writers Federation First Book Award. Work from this collection was included in the 2012 Best of Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books). Michael’s second collection, Who We Thought We Were As We Fell (Cormorant Books, 2021), will be published in the spring. He currently lives in Edmonton, AB and teaches at Athabasca University.

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I was asked this question recently in connection with World Poetry Day – poetry shares the experience of being human with language. What I man by this is that poems are intimate events with language. A poem is language in which and through which something happens. I’m tempted to say something is discovered, but I’ve read too much Foucault to believe it entirely. And “fabrication” isn’t quite right either, which can also mire language in routine and cliche. Somewhere between creation and discovery is the urge to make sense and to find it —a sense of self, meaning, understanding— to eek out a defiant sensibility through curiosity. Because the best poems to my mind have no idea where they will end up until they do, and this is the sense of wonder they can share. I said “with language”, but maybe “in language” is a better way to put it — an event in language because that’s how human energy is traced in poetry —mind energy, body energy, spirit energy — through a collection of words tangled together with syntax, grammars and so on, whether or not these regulations are actually followed. Poems capture, and at their very best, make human experience in words. They reveal, create, and discover intimacies of subjectivity in all their complicated uncomfortable contradictions. The very best poems for me share the intimacies and vulnerabilities and outrages of learning to be human. Of course, all art forms are about this very thing! So I guess it’s the medium that sets it apart. Words tangled in rules, both tamed and set free through human desire in the face of all the forces that want to determine what can and cannot be spoken legitimately.