Steve Venright : part five

What are you working on?

Poetry in a broad sense—I suppose this is obvious—can be found in any medium. I move from one to another, depending on what feels fun and otherwise compelling at the time: writing, visual art, audio recording, and sub-media within those fields. As for literary projects, I’m completing work—after a lengthy hiatus—on a book about the dream world of legendary sleeptalker Dion McGregor, to feature dozens of original transcriptions of his somniloquies, which were recorded in the ’60s by his roommate/songwriting partner Michel Barr and are now in the archives of my little Torpor Vigil label. Its title is The Somnolent Adventures of Dion McGregor, and I confidently anticipate that it will be the fastest-selling book of its kind in more than half a century. (There was one other book of its kind that came out in 1964.)

I’m also assembling a compilation of poems that were not part of my 2017 selected. It will likely be called The Golden Age of Noxious Drivel. Though not by me, of course!

Steve Venright : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

What I find most difficult about writing poetry is resisting the temptation to be meaningful. That’s not to say I avoid meaning (whatever that means) in a poem, only that I try not to arrive at meaning through intention. I suspect there are instances that prove that statement false; e.g., a limerick about the third World Trade Center building to collapse on September 11, 2001 wouldn’t have gotten very far along without some awareness that I’m methodically imparting what, for simplistic convenience, can be called a political view (though I’d prefer something like “empirical curiosity”). But, generally, I prefer if a poem develops or asserts its own meaning without my conscious intervention. Also, the words are very hard.

Steve Venright : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I haven’t been reading much poetry of late, though a couple of fairly recent favourites would be Stuart Ross’s poetic novel Pockets (ECW), and the selected writings of Paul Dutton (Sonosyntactics) and Alice Burdick (Deportment), both from WLU Press. I have, however, been reading lots of books about poetry and poets. I’ve now read almost everything by Richard Holmes, including his massive and exceptional bios of Shelley and Coleridge, and his trilogy of “reflections of a Romantic biographer” which include, as in the most recent instalment This Long Pursuit, revelatory mini-bios of poets who are often better known their other vocations, such as Margaret Cavendish and Zélide (Isabelle de Charriere). Another superb poet-bio I read recently is the one on Keats by Robert Gittings. Oh, and I did just read most of John Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont—picked it up in Cambridge at Grolier Books which, like the poet, was born in 1927. Not bad, that guy.

Steve Venright : part two

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

One of the books I return to when needing to get my bearings is Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. My poems were almost all in prose even before I first encountered it, but my love of that collection—and formally related works such as Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror—secured my inclination. Beyond any technical allure, of course, is the haunting and transporting charge of being addressed by the mind of Baudelaire travelling without decay or distortion through time and space. Literature is indeed, to paraphrase Nicky Drumbolis, a wonderful form of time travel! (When I’ve got a craving for rhyme, humour, and absurd mythic adventure, I can be found within the pages of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.)

Steve Venright : part one

Steve Venright is a Canadian visual artist and poet whose books include Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000), Floors of Enduring Beauty (Mansfield Press, 2007), and The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings (Feed Dog/Anvil Press, 2017). Through his Torpor Vigil Records label, he has released several albums of somniloquies, soundscapes, and songs, including Dreaming Like Mad with Dion McGregor: Yet More Outrageous Recordings of the World’s Most Renowned Sleeptalker and Samuel Andreyev’s The Tubular West. As a purveyor of neurotechnology in the 1990s, he exploited the psychedelic potential of pulsed light with his Hallucintatorium—a sort of retinal-circus sideshow that earned him the designation of “Toronto’s prime purveyor of non-chemically altered states” (Eye Weekly). Steve’s digital abstract images and patterns—“variegraphs” and “tryptiles”—are available online from the Torpor Vigil Art store, which peddles everything from credenzas to beach towels.

How does a poem begin?

A poem tends to begin with a neural or maybe extra-neural impulse, tickle, or flash. Sometimes the first line is already in my head; other times—if I arrive before it—I have to wait around a little for it to show up. Every poem I’ve ever written, so far as I can recall, has begun with a single phrase or line without my having any notion whether it will be as short as that or run on for, say, dozens of pages. The disparate but resonating one-liners end up assembling themselves into aggregates when enough of them emerge. Other one-liners suggest a theme and form that I end up riffing on till there’s a bunch of them and they form a modular piece, sometimes even a (dreaded) list poem. I often reflect on Henri Michaux’s observation that the mere desire to create a poem is enough to kill it. I also find Max Ernst’s maxim (Max-ism?) of keeping one eye on the outside world and one on the inner to be a useful position from which to start.