Cam Scott : part five

How did you first engage with poetry?

My mother was a professional storyteller in libraries and schools, so I grew up within earshot of a fairly ageless poetry. There were lots of other familial inputs as well, from my aunt in particular, but my first personal engagement was with a little anthology of William Blake. The Songs were familiar but the heretical, metaphysical stuff appealed to my sense of religious seriousness and perversity at once. I remember carrying that book around as if I could grasp it by gradual absorption—so my first self-directed engagement with poetry was more or less talismanic. I eventually learned how to read poetry by staring at it for many years without a clue. Probably the lyric sheets of favourite records were another point of entry—there seemed to be such a wide gulf between the weight of the words transcribed and their life in song, sometimes I would just stare at the lyrics and try to guess the delivery. 

Cam Scott : part four

How does a poem begin?

So far, my project has compelled me to view every poem as an eddy mid-stream of an enormous social current, so I have a difficult time demarcating them, even by author. Of course they exist apart from me and separately, but I preserve them as odd, indelible phrases that swim together, whatever their attribution. Where my own writing is concerned, poems always begin musically, with a particular sonic effect of language that exceeds or precedes or even strengthens meaningful communication.

Cam Scott : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

There are several writers or historical moments that completely altered my ideas about poetry. John Ashbery weaned me from some fairly staid, morally upright modernist fare and felt immensely permissive. bpNichol always brings me back to basics, to the level of the letter. I think that he taught me how to really look at poems, rather than greedily reading as if to paraphrase. Elizabeth Smart more so than any polemicist affirmed for me that the writer must be fanatical in some respect, and when I encountered New Narrative I felt a similar affinity. The Kootenay School of Writing really lit a fire under my ass—it had that para-academic precocity that one associates with Language poetry but felt unaffiliated, rough-shod, DIY, more rebellious than scholastic. I related it immediately to punk, which was something I knew how to do. 

Cam Scott : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

For years before I wrote poetry as such I sang—shouting, truthfully—in punk bands, and my first lyric attempts were wholly musical, insofar as the words were secondary signification; I was far more interested in affective extremes of the human voice, however unintelligible as speech. Unsurprisingly, the words were often maudlin and ridiculous beneath the level of yowling rage. For more than a decade since, I’ve worked closely alongside and with an ear to improvised music, composing extemporaneously for principally sonorous effect. A lot of writing simply thematizes music and suggests a complementary playlist, but I’ve always tried to think of my writing in sonic terms first and foremost.

Cam Scott : part one

Cam Scott is a poet, critic, and non-musician from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 territory. He is the author of the poem ROMANS/SNOWMARE. A book of essays, THE VANISHING SIGNS, is forthcoming from ARP Books in 2022.

Photo credit: Robert Szkolnicki

What are you working on?

My project consists for the most part in a single poem, entitled ROMANS/SNOWMARE. This poem is a lengthy agglomeration of sentences without an obvious beginning or end, rebuffing closure and sequentiality, to which I add something every day. I started organizing my writing under this heading in order to address a restless feeling, that I was constantly writing and annotating but not producing anything; and this kind of slowly aggregative collage work more or less solves the problem of content and inspiration, because the poem is always growing even when it doesn’t feel as though I’m writing anything at all.