John Luna : part five

5. How does a poem begin?

Well, it’s funny that, looking at the above answer, I would say that poetry is a constant but that the instance of a poem is not. As such, beginning a poem is a problem. It used to be that I would have to try and then perform moderately well or badly or procrastinate and engage in some of those moods and behaviours (esp. walking or travelling) in order to find the poem in media res and then conjure the myth of its beginning. Now I mostly have to just open a file with a title and one overheard phrase or another that has been distorted a little, and that is sort of like walking into an installation space and laying out materials for an exhibition. Then more elements are brought in and unloaded and aligned and the idea of building this temporary shelter for the poem presents its straightforward problems of connection and load bearing and the transfer of prospective weight. And this is the result of a constant situation of pressure; but that’s not really a poetry problem. At some point, the gestures enact a series of consequences and there is an ordeal, and that gives us the poem, which really doesn’t start beginning until that point; the rest is training and suspense.

John Luna : part four

4. Why is poetry important?

I am a visual artist as well as a writer, and for years when engaged with one practice would become convinced that there were no other practices or preoccupations worth having, but it was actually the space held in reserve between this illusion of having two choices that was vital. I suppose I would say because it is already happening at all times, that every concern we have with poetry about sound or meaning or voice or form are already problems of a social culture and that we see them in the young, for instance, and see them in our symptoms and interfaces and politics. So (admitting it’s bad to start a sentence with ‘so’) you might as well ask, ‘why is will important?’ Or, ‘what is will and why is it important to ask?’

John Luna : part three

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

There are books I would never willingly part with, and people I do reread for pleasure, but I’m insecure enough to have some anxiety about influence. When I was younger I would have to be reminded that there was such a thing as a poem, and so direct myself to a poem by Adrienne Rich or T.S. Eliot or Paul Celan. Now, I generally am trying not to think of a poem as something that exists in any comparative way. I reread things of my own in a certain way (rhythmically and meanderingly) if I want to remember my own humour and tactile reasoning and that can help, especially, with the process of editing.

John Luna : part two

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

Part of my interest in relating to poetry pertains to my own problems as a reader, and how a person should go about accessing ideas in writing. Poetry has often just seemed like the most efficient way to communicate a material sensibility in writing urgently, with a figural relationship to the structure of the writing (its syntax, its appearance on the page) that is direct and also directly reflexive. The problem of introducing characters is avoided, as is the problem of framing arguments, yet characters and arguments occur. We get close to the visual, to conventions of speech and even body language, as to conventions of rhetorical oratory like truism, epigram, etc., always with the ability to slip back into thought and the process of language’s just achieving coherence. Even the lyrical or the musical can fall back into silence or forward into traffic.

John Luna : part one

John Luna is a Canadian/Mexican-American artist, whose practice as a visual artist and writer includes painting, sculpture and installation, critical writing and poetry, and teaching in the areas of studio art, art history and theory. Publication of his written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, Train and Matrix, among others. Luna’s first collection of poems, Listing, was released through Decoupage Publishing in 2015. His second book-length manuscript was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2017. He the recipient of a 2017 BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant for an ongoing project involving text and visual art.

1. What are you working on?

Currently I am working to arrive at something cohesive as a book for publication, the character of which will make it a thing with its own concerns rather than what would feel like a collection. These pieces are dense prose poems (each between one and three pages with not a lot of spacing) using references to commercial fragrances as the premise for reverie and meditation. At some point I became very interested in olfactory sensation as a point of departure for ekphrastic writing, as well as the subcultures that have formed around that; there are all kinds of ironies in that material. These poems are very worked over and developed over many sessions. By way of contrast, I’m also working on a series of rather raw and subjective-sounding sonnets based around the activity of reading, although it might be more accurate if we imagine ‘reading’ here as split up into separate (not always relatable) acts like ‘scanning’, ‘hearing’, ‘inferring’, ‘projecting’, etc.