Peter Norman : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I usually have several on the go, and I dip in and out of a given collection (unless it’s a sequential narrative or for some other reason demands a cover-to-cover read). On my shelf right now: new books from Dani Couture, Phoebe Wang, and Jeff Latosik; an earlier one by Micheline Maylor; a Selected from Charles Simic and a Collected from Rita Dove.

Peter Norman : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I had formative, paradigm-nudging encounters with the work of Sylvia Plath in the eighties, Margaret Avison in the nineties, Stuart Ross in the noughts, to name a few.

In middle age, I think the likelihood diminishes that an aesthetic experience will take your brain completely apart and put it back together again. In Zona, a book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, Geoff Dyer proposes that this is much less likely to happen to us after the age of thirty, which has generally held true for me (I’m forty-four). For one thing, there are so many more books/movies/albums/etc. already swimming around in memory that it becomes harder for a newcomer to plunge into the pool and dominate. I read a lot of poetry that I love and admire the hell out of, but I’m too old for it to establish itself as a soul-reconfiguring aesthetic touchstone. No skin off its back, of course — plenty of other readers will have that experience with it.

That said, in recent years I have come across some work so striking and distinctive that it has renovated aesthetic regions of my brain. Recent books come to mind by Sina Queyras, Linda Besner, Mikko Harvey, Susan Holbrook, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; I’m sure there have been others.

Peter Norman : part three

How does a poem begin?

This has changed over the years. Originally, I would set out to write a poem about a specific thing — a personal experience or observation; a particular topic or theme. Then, as I learned more about prosody, I’d try out various forms for the challenge of it. Later, poems tended to arise from a phrase that came to mind and stuck there because it had a pleasing and/or exciting sound; I’d build out from that original bundle of words, whatever form or subject might happen to transpire.

In recent years, I’ve found these sound-nuggets less forthcoming, or at least less intriguing. So I play around with challenges and restrictions — for example, my next book (coming out this fall) consists of poems that use the line-ending words of other people’s poems. Inspired by cooking shows like MasterChef, I sometimes set myself “pressure tests”: I spin a Wheel of Fortune–style virtual wheel (wheeldecide.com) that I’ve loaded up with various challenges (compose a poem that does x or adheres to form y). Then I have half an hour to do the best I can with whatever the wheel assigns. I pretend that Gordon Ramsay and his ilk are waiting to deliver withering assessments of my effort.

Peter Norman : part two

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

In my teens and twenties, I’d share stuff with friends, family, and teachers, and occasionally I slammed, which is one way to get an instant reaction (via score cards held aloft by randomly selected audience members). In the early 2000s, my wife and I spent four years in Ottawa, which proved to be a vital period for my poetry’s development; most of the material that made up my first three books was written there. We regularly attended the Tree Reading Series, hosted at the time by the novelist James Moran, and I would try out new poems at the open mic. That’s a decent initial editing technique: if the passage you’re reading is flat, you can feel the energy drain from the room; if a line is unwieldy, you’ll struggle to deliver it. These days, though, I don’t generally release a new poem into the world until it’s published. I figure if an editor wants it in a book or journal on their watch, it must be working somehow; if it finds no love there, I’ll retire it or haul back to the drawing board.

Peter Norman : part one

Born in Vancouver, Peter Norman has since lived in Victoria, Ottawa, Calgary, rural PEI, Halifax, Toronto, Windsor (Ontario), Montreal, and Edmonton. He has published a novel and three poetry collections. A fourth, Some of Us and Most of You Are Dead, is forthcoming in fall 2018 from Buckrider Books. For more info, visit peternorman.ca.

Photo Credit: Melanie Little

How do you know when a poem is finished?

No idea! I don’t trust any of my assessments of a poem (is it worth keeping? is it worth revising? is it actually — gasp! — done?) until at least a good several weeks have gone by. After that, the self-congratulatory flush of creation will have faded, and I can take a colder, harder look at the thing. Even then, though, my judgment is always suspect.

I’m reminded of something that happened during the editing of my last book. It included a sonnet about a funeral home. The poem was ten years old and had been published in a journal; I figured it was more or less okay as it was. However, my editor, David Seymour, felt that the closing couplet needed work. Looking at the piece again, I agreed with him, but my proposed solution (as it often is) was that we simply delete the whole damn poem. David pressed; he believed the piece had something to offer, and a stronger ending could salvage it.

I reassessed. Maybe the problem was that the couplet was straining prematurely to wrap things up. So I shoved the couplet aside, got rid of the sonnet scheme altogether, and just started adding quatrains. I ended up with seven new stanzas and a forty-line poem that worked a lot better. All along, the issue hadn’t been the last two lines; the issue was an incomplete poem. For a whole decade I’d thought it was finished, when in fact it was barely begun.

I’m not sure there’s a point to that story, except to reiterate that I never really know when I’m done. And good editors are awesome.