How important is music to your poetry?
Listening to music certainly enriches my life, and I listen to music almost every day, loud, often singing and dancing, often whilst editing (not usually whilst composing). Most of the music I listen to is instrumental, extremely beautiful, existential and blissful to my ears, which carries over into the mood of my writing. On the other hand, walking, looking at art and reading probably have more of a direct impact on the content and form of my writing.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Billy-Ray Belcourt for sure. When I read NDN Coping Mechanisms, I thought holy crap, you can do this with poetry?! Incredible. Belcourt’s work is so visceral and beautifully humble. It inspired me to get to the bottom of who I am (an ongoing process) and how I need to show up in my poetry and writing life for those around me. Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson are two other poets that continue to blow my mind. They edited an anthology called Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out and it was life-changing for me. That sounds very cliché, but it’s true. The book is packed with contributions from many creatives with mixed heritages, including pieces by the two editors. Reading Other Tongues was the first time I ever felt like a book was speaking directly to me and a lot of its power was in the multiplicity of voices sharing their stories. It was a whole community of people reaching out to me. I started having success publishing my work after I figured out that I didn’t need to write about the fancy trending things that I thought I needed to include or explore. My story was interesting, and before I could go outward with my writing, I needed to go inward and do some excavating. This was a fundamental shift in my understanding of how I should and should not occupy space with my work.
What are you working on?
I am currently working on a new collection of poems, Yellow, an ekphrastic collection which addresses Vincent Van Gogh's life and art produced during his time at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy, then in Auvers, where he committed suicide. During this time, he produced some of his most famous paintings—The Olive Trees (1889), Irises (1889), and The Starry Night (1889). I have held a flame for Van Gogh ever since I was a child, specifically his relationship with the aesthetics of color. Through the use of color, van Gogh often rendered the physical world around him into a living anthology of emotion, and as such, van Gogh’s relationship between art and mental illness is of great interest to me. While exploring Van Gogh’s work, I am concurrently exploring my mother’s relationship with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
I’m going to try to take this down a different road than just saying ‘writing is the most difficult part of writing’ because you can just scroll down your twitter timeline and see a million tweets a day affirming that. Instead, I’ll try to talk about what made it difficult for me. I used to be prolific in my youth. It’s a good thing I’m not anymore because I was also, generally, bad. But rattling off those easy things was probably good for me. Now, of course, the challenge is beginning: getting up the nerve to tackle the vision you have for what the idea should be and the prophetic certainty that your mortal coil will only be able to shuffle off a debased version of the ideal. See? The problem is that: nihilism precedes the opening, so the beginning never begins. If you have no hope that you can measure up to what Time demands, your despair will lead you to oblivion’s plate, and the insatiable emptiness will collect you as it does all. Then you counter yourself: if it collects all, better to be collected with a long trail behind you of artefacts rather than a deep inwardness of unsubstantiated ideas- and yet… Nothing reigns. This can become especially prominent once you shift from the private, youthful scribbles, or the private scribbles that predate the consciousness that you’re in the literary world into the conscious striving to set up a prominent place in the literary market- and you meet denial, rejection, muted or negative reactions when you only ever encountered praise in your little world. And digging out of the hole that is the comparing world of literature, submitting for publication, the measurements of publication, where the locations of the published pieces are ranked by prestige, all this then becomes part of your poetic psyche, and your writing is no longer about transcribing an ideal into a form but now about doing so in a way that pleases or defeats those who have hurt you, to join the crowd you’re outcast from. Maybe some people escape this or do better with it. But the real trial becomes: how are you able to get back to the place where writing poetry is about writing poetry and not about the game? The game presents a major obstacle, one which you, the writer, typically exaggerates to your own doom. Life builds walls enough: finding time to think and work in the midst of life. That’s the bulk of the difficulty there: the external hindrances that life thrusts upon us all- how do we overcome these sufficiently to work? Some can compartmentalize better than others: when they arrive home, they can cast aside the day’s drudgery; others take longer to decompress to get into the state they need to be in to let themselves feel what they need to feel to think. Finding your own groove is one of the difficulties. Sometimes your groove changes on you, and you need to reestablish how you overcome. Basically, life is determined to make writing poetry difficult. But sometimes it comes easy. Some poems flood out, and those are beautiful. Sometimes routine, by this I mean a work routine- maybe a job where the duties are fairly rote, or more physical and you feel you have your entire mental side to yourself- puts us in a position to work better. For me, it doesn’t. I’m a baby. I’m overwhelmed easily, and the slightest draught displaces me. I’ll cry that the world is set against me and wallow. Life is conspiring against my work. No one cares. Only me. In that reality, the only way out is through- a saying that may be cliché, but which helps me step on a plane and endure. Write or die. Obviously, I don’t want anyone to adopt that. I’ve adopted it because I hold myself to harsher and more merciless standards than I apply to others, but even hyperbolically, the point holds: work or don’t, but the suffering of not working will eventually outweigh the suffering of working.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
In a talk at the University of Saskatchewan, Tim Lilburn introduced me to the idea of “poetry systems” which unfold over a number of books and occupy decades of a writer’s life. Ongoing preoccupations. Life-long poems. Thinking about my writing like that helps me let go of one poem and move into the next, trusting that each effort connects to some larger network. I can allow each individual piece to say some of what I hoped to say without needing it to (impossibly) accomplish everything.
It also helps to put poems away, pull them out some time later, read them out loud, and listen for what sings. What can be pared back? How can I clarify an image or idea? At some point, the thing starts to sound more true, less terrible. At some point, I’m satisfied enough to feel that it’s done.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
It’s a cliché to quote Valery on this subject, but he’s right: A poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned. So then the question becomes: When is it time to abandon a poem?
And the answer, for me, is: When I’ve done all I can for the poem; when the poem’s needs have been fulfilled except for those needs that I am incapable of fulfilling. Because every poet is incapable of making the poem they set out to make; the poem that actually exists can only ever be an attempt at reaching some imagined poetic perfection. Ben Lerner puts it best in The Hatred of Poetry: “The poem is always a record of failure.” The trick is in recognizing when you’ve gotten the poem as close to the unattainable ideal as you can.
A metaphor to (hopefully) make it clearer. Say every poem starts as a tiny spirit in need of a body – some idea or experience or emotion that wants to exist in the world and needs to be rendered in language to have that existence. My job as the poet, then, is to make that body. The spirit/poem knows what kind of body it needs to live in the world. I’ve got to listen to it and shape a body that meets its specifications. But of course, I am not god. I can’t conjure a real, flesh-and-blood body ex nihilo. Best I can do is a sort of clay approximation. And when I’ve made the best damn clay body I can for my little spirit/poem, it can exist in the world as an independent entity. It no longer needs me (because I can’t give it what it really, truly, ultimately wants).
And so I send it on its way and hope that, with every reader it meets, it gets closer and closer to that ideal. Because the readers, too, are part of the process of authoring the poem. The interpretations they bring to it, the encounters they have with it: All of that is part of the poem, too. It accrues like a constellation around the poem; it expands and enlivens the poem’s clay body, makes that body more supple, more pliable, warmer, more massive. Every reader, in this way, brings the poem closer to that ideal and receding state it yearns for.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I have more than a few favourites. Without going to the bookshelf I will pick out three to limit this answer. Any of P. Inman’s books to cleanse the soul: for a gong bath, for a sit-down walk. Then Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Matt Welton’s We Needed Coffee… for bliss, deep imagery, and brainwork that’s intense but not taxing.
