Jean Marc Ah-Sen : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

What’s funny is that despite my profound respect for it, I don’t really read new poetry anymore. I will take a look at buzz books year round, or the work of my friends, but I still find it pretty daunting. It’s a very intellectually taxing pastime, and the daily grind of life overtook my love of nourishment from abstraction I suppose. Basically, I don’t think I’m smart enough to keep up with it. The poets I tend to return to for whatever reason are the ones who had a very large impact on me growing up, or those who are able to speak to some sort of emotional reality I can share in, but carried to some limit-breaking intellectual frontier. I think that’s why I like Baudelaire and Belli. And I still think Lynn Crosbie’s Liar is just about the greatest thing ever. 

Jean Marc Ah-Sen : part four

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

I quite like the built-in expectation that poetry has to be arcane and obscure to succeed; that it’s seemingly telegraphed from Mars. I realize that this understanding has been challenged by poets before, but I think the reputation as an outlier form—something only the cognoscenti are disposed to understand—prevails for better or for worse. Richard Hell said, and here I’m paraphrasing, that “poetry is as rarefied and specialized as polo or astronomy.” This may be couched in the idea that poetry is about maximizing redundancy in language, whereas day-to-day discourse seeks to reduce it. I like that conceit a lot, and have attempted to incorporate it in my writing—it’s a challenge to render superfluity, or maybe it’d be better to say garrulousness in my case, as a virtue. When you have a lot of people down on a form, or at minimum unversed in its workings, it can be a really fertile ground for experimentation and exciting innovations in the arts. Poetry in my lifetime has certainly never been viewed as a populist medium of expression, and I don’t see that changing, even with the voguish explosion of Instagram poetry. This indifference outside of the academy can be a prison, and it can breed pomposity and hostility in its practitioners, but I’m more optimistic in thinking that it is one of poetry’s strongest qualities—this ability to endure against all odds and maintain its fortitude in the face of aesthetic pursuits that are culturally dominant. 

Jean Marc Ah-Sen : part three

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

I form very strong attachments to books I admire, or writers to be more specific. Usually it’s a relationship of unwavering constancy on my part. It can be towards elements of books, but more often than not it’s in relation to a work taken in total that I view to be exemplary in some regard. My last flirtation was with Stephen Potter, the English satirist, whose influence bled over into three of my books. I ask myself if I can justify adulterating these texts by bringing an ersatz version into the world, and one that is, to add insult to injury, gussied up with my pet obsessions and fears. My reservations about writing in such close proximity with another text usually gives way to my compulsion to just write the damned thing. I work in isolation, but often ask my friends for advice, especially if I am facing a barrage of rejections. 

Jean Marc Ah-Sen : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I went to visit my family in Africa and found all of my cousins’ dog-eared school books from the seventies and eighties. I have thirteen aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, so there was quite a collection of these imposing, dusty hardbacks. The education system there was structured differently, and had a European flavour to it. I found the material to be quite challenging. I took some poetry books back with me and read them on the plane ride home. I started with a compendium of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems. It was the perfect introduction for someone of my sensibilities. 

Jean Marc Ah-Sen : part one

Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and a participant in the collaborative omnibus novel Disintegration in Four Parts. His writing has appeared in Hazlitt, The Literary Review of Canada, and The Puritan. The National Post has hailed his work as “an inventive escape from the conventional.” He lives in Toronto with his wife and sons.

What are you working on?

My main focus right now is getting two books off the ground and making sure they see the light of day. One is very airy and superficial. It’s about being in your twenties, dead from the neck down, revelling in a kind of youthful crudity and loucheness. The other book is more typical of the work I’ve done. Maybe it’d be best described as a “Gothic pulp.” The whole book is a dramatic monologue, taking its cues from Camus’ The Fall and Beckett’s Not I. It’s my take on the Faustian devil story. Temptations, broken covenants, eternally willed evils, that sort of thing.