Neil Surkan : coda

How important is music to your poetry?

If I accidentally overhear even a sliver of a tune in the morning, I often lose those dream shreds that are vital, at least for me, to writing poems. So in some ways music is fatal to my poetry. 

But sometimes someone in one of my poems is listening to a particular song in order to create an associative or suggestive effect. I love overhearing strangers’ song choices and thinking about whether they’re actually into what they’re listening to, or whether it’s happenstance. For example, a few years ago when I was buying a turntable off Kijiji the seller put on Bryan Adams to demonstrate the sound quality. Was that his favourite? Or did he take one look at me and think, “Cuts Like a Knife”?

There are certain albums that light my brain up and make me want to write poems the next day, though – Lyra Pramuk’s Fountain, Amen Dunes’s Cowboy Worship EP, Moss’s Sub Templum, anything by Arthur Russell, Florist, Francis Bebey, Floating Points, ANOHNI. Also, Phil Elverum’s old songs (and tweets) were very influential to my first book, On High.

Neil Surkan : part six

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

Tranströmer’s Baltics. For its meshwork of place and memory. The way a landscape/seascape might guide a form. I love comparing translations of it (I think the Samuel Charters is my favourite). It’s also the perfect length: you have to buckle in, but no stretch breaks are required. 

And it’s evocative af.

Neil Surkan : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’m always nosing around in multiple collections at a time. Here’re the ones slung over chair arms and tented on countertops right now:

Henri Cole’s Blizzard. WTF. What a breathtakingly unflinching collection. Wham. Can’t praise it enough. Euphoria. Terror. Grief. Sweetness.

Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. There’s something about this book. It’s always off my shelf. The opening call to “make room in the mouth / for grassesgrassesgrasses” truly, truly amazes me. 

Julie Joosten’s Light Light. I had never seen the word “Agnotology” before. Agnotology: the study of culturally produced ignorances. 

Bradley Willow Trumpfheller’s Reconstructions. This chapbook contains a snap bracelet image that I’ll never forget. 

Nick Laird’s Feel Free. The eponymous poem always gives me swoops of wonder. A great dad poem. 

Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible. I don’t know what makes a prose poem tick. But I really like these prose poems. Some feel like riddles that Strand himself never answered. 

Kirby’s forthcoming Poetry is Queer. There’s a wisdom in it that is rare and so, so vibrant (courage). 

Neil Surkan : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

The list will expand till I die. A taster: 

Michael Hofmann, for sourness. How sourness can be productive. The joy in sourness. 

Ange Mlinko, for jubilant complexity. How an image can emerge from the periphery. 

Franz Wright, for the nexus of despair and prayer. How praying can be ominous. 

Susan Mitchell, for savoury precision. How a familiar idea can be breathtakingly refreshed when said just-so.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, for those tangles of phrase, those double negatives, that make my head feel like there are ants in it. How such phrases must be earned. How such phrases can be earned.

Etc.

Neil Surkan : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Shelving a sense of purpose, a specific idea to say. If I go in wanting to do or say a particular thing, I’m doomed. What I find most difficult about writing poems is also what I find most difficult about living: the relinquishment of control over the outcome. 

For me, letting go is the discipline.

Neil Surkan : part two

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

My hunch is that poems are often suggestive (some poets would say “associative”) in a way that requests a unique form of attention from reader and writer alike. Some of the poems I find most exhilarating have such miniscule tensions and/or echoes running through them that they could seem – AHH – boring. I have many awkward memories of times I read a poem to someone I love and then looked up to realize that they were completely unmoved. Take Jamie McKendrick’s’ poem “Ill Wind,” which ends with the lines “And though the leaves were still I heard the wind / snicking the links with its casual shears”: I lose it over the word snicking. I think it’s gobsmackingly apt. But you can’t heave the poem “Ill Wind” at someone who is in the middle of texting their mom, or trying to center a photograph in its frame, or enjoying a memory of having sex outdoors. Maybe the “accomplishment” of poetry is also its fault: it waits so patiently to grab the attention, to suggest, that for some it never does.

Neil Surkan : part one

Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collections Unbecoming (forthcoming Fall 2021) and On High (2018), both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness (Knife-Fork-Book, 2020), and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). He lives in Calgary.

Photo credit: Luca Surkan

What are you working on?

Since my second collection, Unbecoming, comes out this fall, I’m still dwelling in that book (copy edits, etc). But I’m starting to feel a weird stomach-flutter again, which mostly comes from reading with an eye for craft/sequencing (for instance, John Elizabeth Stinzi’s chapbook Plough Forward the Higgs Field, one brilliant long poem, gave me such a rush. The way it accumulates contexts, spans theory and family, and churns through so many registers got me wondering what it would feel like to write a chapbook-length poem in a similar way. And that got me savouring the fact that I may never know how that feels.). 

I’m also currently mulling over the feeling of running on empty, how a poem might explore that feeling, whether poems always explore that feeling.