Words At Large

What is the importance of travel in your work? Of making or finding a home?
The pull between “home” and “away” is a subject I return to often, along with the question of just what “home” is. A great deal of tension—the satisfying kind—exists along that axis between those two concepts, and it gets most interesting for me when I stop seeing them as mutually exclusive and begin to find their shared qualities. “Away” presupposes “home.” But what about “away” as just a place I’ve never been, or don’t know well, or don’t spend much time? Then the notion starts to drift away from place and toward time, and this excites me. The sense of suspension I feel on a train or a ferry (never, alas, on a plane)—of existing somehow both in and outside of time—is not unlike feeling truly, fully at home for me. My sense of home is much less linked to specifics of place than to conditions of the psyche: can I flourish, am I able to be myself, to do what makes sense to me? Do I feel my “fit” in the cosmos? The “yes” answers to these questions provide the ground for home. So I see all these projects, travel, making a home, finding a home, as related and intermeshed.

It’s often said that home is where your people are, and there is certainly a sense in which this is true for me, too. It’s a dominant value, and in many ways my writing about home is an attempt to explore what it means to that other way of thinking about home as made, deliberate, a condition of being.

You've written about both rivers and architecture, subjects from the natural world and the technological, urban realm. How do these blend together?
The given and the made—sometimes knowing the difference is tricky. The river is not a still thing; it carves out its own shape continually, much as we shape the world with our actions and buildings. I don’t mean to suggest they’re easy analogues, but each helps me to think about the other.

How much do questions of form affect your writing? Does working with formal constraints help focus your work? Do you like pushing against form?
Form is of huge interest to me. Form as the patterning of sound is fundamental, and for me it happens both intuitively and through conscious attention when I’m working on a piece. Form as the structuring of ideas, the way the poem is delivered, is equally fundamental. Sometimes a particular form calls a poem into being; sometimes the subject itself drives the form. Most of my poems are free verse poems in that the lines are structured by the cadences of speech rather than by fixed forms, yet I often find myself borrowing formal elements, like the four- or five-beat line. For me it’s important not to lapse into rhythmic patterns before the poem has its own impetus—doing this can actually diffuse the subject, rather than focus it, in the early stages. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true: a tightly-formed line or stanza pattern can sharpen the subject into something I can explore more carefully. I guess I’d say that whether the poem is structured by a fixed form or by the sound of speech, it’s always formed, and form is always present as an issue as I work.

What do you think are the most important elements of writing poetry?
This question is interesting, because it’s not the same as the “elements of poetry.” My sense of what’s important in the writing could be divided into a couple of things. One of these is language: attention to the resources and capacities of language is clearly crucial to the writing. For me this means I’m interested in how words sound, and in how sound works in the line and through the poem as a whole. The poem is, in part, a soundscape. I’m also interested in the baggage words carry—nuance, connotation and association, stories about their origins, related words, and so on. I remember being astonished and delighted early on to learn simple things like that “subterranean” has to do with being underground, as distinct from “submerged,” which involves water. I’m fascinated, too, by how language works (or rather, how we attempt to make it work) to convey what we want to say—and that our word “metaphor” seems to be connected to the Greek way of expressing conveyance.

The other big, general element I find important is attention. Depth and quality of observation, the willingness to go deep, to wait or explore or understand, or to uncover important questions, these things take great concentration and sometimes courage. I admire tremendously poets who write with unflinching attention to their subject, like Paul Celan, Louise Glück, countless others in our own times and earlier.

Describe how you became a poet.
I fell in love with poetry mainly through two impassioned teachers. First, it was my grade 10 English teacher, Tony Johnstone, who read aloud T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and The Wasteland, among other things, mostly from the early twentieth century, almost daily. I had no idea what those poems ‘meant’ and I didn’t care. Tony read like a storm; he made the poems elemental. He also made us read poems aloud, from memory, which further demonstrated to me the power of sound, and he made us write every day. I did, in a tiny little 5x3-inch ruled kitchen notepad, coil-bound along the top edge. It was Tony who suggested a bigger notebook might help me write bigger poems. I think this was really the beginning of my sense of self as poet. Soon I was inserting my own poems into my high-school essays—I always got rapped for this but never failed. I never asked beforehand if it was okay—I just went ahead and did it, since I had a hard time writing logical argument; poetry made more sense to me. Later, in grade 12, Barry Fox, who also ran the drama club, woke me up to Donne’s Holy Sonnets with his triple-force reading of “Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you.” The walls of the classroom nearly caved in, and for me there was no turning back. After that, it was practice, practice, practice, whatever the obstacles. And there were—always are—plenty of those, along with (thankfully!) support and encouragement, and the occasional joy of just doing it, which surpasses everything and is what keeps me going.

What are you reading now?
Several stacks of books: by the bed, by the desk, in the living room. I’ve finally gotten around to Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct; I’m also reading Robert Hass on Basho, other Japanese poets; A. L. Kennedy’s new novel Day is lurking, humming its way to the top; Amy Gerstler’s Medicine keeps surfacing, as do many of Louise Glück’s books.

Describe your writing process.
I work in a notebook, an unlined, hard-covered perfect-bound artist’s sketchbook. It’s not very portable—too heavy—so I also write in smaller notebooks which are scattered all over the place. I start in the morning, around 7.30 or 8, with a big bowl of milky coffee, and when I can, I work till whatever I’m working on reaches a point I feel can rest for a bit; it’s taken a more or less coherent shape. Then I’ll eat breakfast, maybe get dressed. It’s often mid-afternoon by then. Poems start for me out of sound, image, conundrum; the stimulus might be almost anything. And when a poem pecks or nudges at me to be written, it’s thrilling. But starts often elude me. Courting the poem is delicate. So I write in the notebook until something takes on a life of its own, and then, after I track it for a good long while I go to the computer and type it up. This begins the second stage, one that may go through many drafts, each printed and dated and numbered. On days when nothing new is coming I work on these drafts, and it usually shakes the poetry impulse back into me.

What advice would you give a poet just starting out?
Read widely, voraciously; let pleasure guide you but also explore the unexpected; be open to surprise. Read poems aloud. Write every day: work the language muscles. Work against your habits. And write about everything—be fully attentive to the world around and yourself in it.

Selected List of Books:

Volta
Signature Editions
2002

Swimming Among the Ruins
Signature Editions
2000