Ken Babstock is the author of three books of poetry. His first, Mean, won the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award. His second, Days into Flatspin, won a K.M. Hunter Award. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, been anthologized in Canada and the United States, and translated into several languages. His most recent collection, Airstream Land Yacht, was a finalist for both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, and won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
In your latest collection Airstream Land Yacht you have different voices narrate your poems. How did this shifting point of view affect the content or tone of the poems?
This collection, in some important ways, is actually about "shifting points of view" so I felt obliged to carry on not being myself, which turned out to sound much like myself, only more so. Meaning I consciously wanted the poems to try everything from song, to murmur, to whimper, to wander, to arguments and evasions. They gained a playful raggedness and tone of self-invention that wasn't there in the earlier books. I call it a 'gain'. Others have disagreed.
In your early work you were associated with a tough, hard-edged approach to experience. How has your work evolved, from your perspective, and where do you see it going in the future?
I'm still not sure if I approached experience that way or if experience approached me that way. I can say that the poems in the first collection were written in my twenties. I may well have been guilty of 'Young Man-ishness' then. Whatever the case, any writer who intends to continue writing will learn to modulate, interrogate, and expand the field of their own inquiry. Fancy way of saying I'm a little older now than I was then.
Do you see poetry as a tool or weapon of any kind and if so, how so?
Think of a compac case or powder kit for the mind. Small enough to carry around and helps deal with blemishes, imperfections, swellings that mar our pictures of ourselves and the world. Only it's not always about improvements to the reflected image.
Or it's a vocal prosthesis for those of us who can't sing.
Or it's language's Supreme Court, where all the most fundamental decisions get handed down, usually as compromises.
Or it's a memento from a quick trip to the Other Side.
How does human energy get stored in language, and how is it possible to tap into that energy in language and release it?
I'll say rhythm is the storage unit. Metaphor is the tap or release valve. But I could be wrong.
Your work seems to cross genres as well, attracting musicians and filmmakers. The Rheostatics' album “2067” sets one of your poems to music. Deadly Snakes Max McCabe uses lines from another in “200 Nautical Miles”. And there are others. Do you have any idea what it is about your poetry that connects with that audience?
It's not just me. Gord Downie (the Tragically Hip) used lines by David O'Meara in a song. I know John K. Samson (The Weakerthans) is a big fan of Karen Solie's poems. There must be many others. I'm guessing it's the confluence of similar but varied disciplines or kinds of writing. We take from them what we need and they use us in kind. It's good. It's cross-fertilization and should happen more often.
Why did you decide to become a poet?
Why? Where's Liebniz?
What books or writers have most influenced your life?
As a human in the world, I'll say Plato, Freud, Marx, Darwin, the canonical religious texts, etc, you get the idea. As a singular, private reader it's more difficult. I've always thought Samuel Beckett had a huge influence, but maybe I just have a crush on his face…J.M.Coetzee hit me hard early on but not so much now. Same with Seamus Heaney. Eugenio Montale. Paul Muldoon. Dante's Inferno creeps into my poems and I don't know why. 'Influence' is a knotted problem; it changes monthly. Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher damaged my head for a time but I think I'm healthier now. Currently Slavoj Zizsek has the run of the house. I'm easily swayed…
In what way have your roots in Newfoundland influenced you as a writer?
Well, having no identifying maritime accent left in my speaking voice has sometimes caused a kind of music- or texture-envy, but on a more straightforward level, we all come from our childhoods (someone famous said that) so Newfoundland's influence, if in fact it's there, was really inevitable.
Is it true that you have a special interest in contemporary Irish poetry? If so, why?
Um, no. No more so than, say, contemporary American poetry. I will say that for a nation (or two) with a relatively small population they do seem to grow them big over there.
Have you written prose fiction? Will you?
I'm guessing that'll hinge on how far I can develop my sorry-ass sense of discipline. It's a lot of hard work, y'know, writing prose fiction! Or so I've heard.
What are you reading now?
A few things: Tony Judt's Postwar: History of Europe Since 1945, Jesse Ball's Samedi The Deafness, Christian Hawkey's Citizen of, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives.
What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of writing poetry?
A very difficult question. Can I skirt it by saying none of the elements are more important than the finished thing itself?
Describe your writing process.
I start with a few words that make a particular noise, then I go in search of others. As I'm searching for the others, I try to be simultaneously allowing the new ones and those initial ones to inform me of some kind of appropriate patterning device or guiding principle so that they don't simply dissolve into a meaningless verbal porridge like this sentence…
What advice would you give a poet just starting out?
Read. Then when you've read a lot, start reading again. Read some more.
Once you've worked up the nerve to finish a poem or ten, read those poems out loud to yourself in your basement or attic or garden shed or burrow. Can you hear it? Be honest.
Selected List of Books:
Airstream Land Yacht
House of Anansi
2006
Days Into Flatspin
House of Anansi
2001
Mean
House of Anansi
1999
Judges and reviewers call his work wide-ranging , fresh and honest. Not only his subject matter but his style shifts with each exploration finding equal footing with the concrete and the conceptual. A poet of exciting and challenging scope , vivid imagery and playful humour.
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