What
follows is an interview with the poet Mikko Harvey which took place over
email during the first two months of quarantine. I would send out a question
and Mikko’s responses would return every so often as welcome missives from the
world beyond the walls of my house. We cover lots of ground here: violence,
anxiety, fairytales and nations – topics which are probably of relevance in
every age, but felt particularly so at this time. Hopefully, you will find
something useful here.
- Ben Robinson
05/31/2020
BR: Thanks for agreeing to do this, Mikko. I
really enjoyed Unstable
Neighbourhood Rabbit my first time through and so when rob asked
if I might be interested in interviewing someone for the new blog I went back
through the books I’ve read in the past year and this one immediately jumped to
mind as one I’d love to have a conversation about.
My
first question is about the book as a whole. The brevity of the book felt quite
striking to me, but even in its smallness it feels fully formed like you made
an intentional choice for smallness. I read in your [neonpajamas] interview that you had many more poems that
didn’t make it into the collection and that your selection process for the
poems that did make it in was quite rigorous – you really made each poem
justify its place in the book. I’m always interested in people making a
conscious decision to subvert the trappings of a genre or medium and here it
seems like you made a decision to work outside of the traditional 70-100 page
range that is typical of most poetry collections. Was the length of the
collection something you thought about? Or was it less intentional than that?
Do you think there’s a legitimate aesthetic reason for having poetry
collections be 70+ pages? Clearly, you’ve proven it can be done in less here.
MH: First of all, thank you for your kind
words and thoughtful question. I did feel a bit conflicted about the length of
the collection, mostly just from a social/practical perspective. If somebody is
going to buy my book, I want to give that person as full of an experience as
possible. On the other hand, when I think about the poetry collections I love,
one feature I tend to love about them is their re-readability. I come back to
certain books over and over, over the course of years, and in that sense they
are infinitely long. Whether or not I achieved that re-readability in Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit, I don’t
know, but thinking in those terms at least reframes the issue.
Part
of the book’s brevity was a simple matter of quality control. UNR was my first
book and I was writing it in my twenties. I remember a poetry teacher once talking
about how grateful he was that he didn’t publish a book in his twenties—because
if he had, he said, he would have ended up looking back at the book and
regretting its immaturity. So I was aware of certain risks. For example, as a
younger writer I think it’s easy to confuse the power of your poems with the
power of the creative process. Writing poems is intoxicating but that doesn’t
mean your poems are intoxicating. Being extra strict with myself about which
poems were allowed in the manuscript—in terms of both quality and fit—was a
kind of concession to my rookie status.
Also,
I think that the poems themselves have some say in how long a book of them
becomes. In this case, at a certain point, my creative interests changed. I
started writing poems that didn’t really belong in UNR. Forcing those poems
into UNR would have been harmful to the particular texture I was trying to
build in the book, and forcing myself to write more poems that belonged in the
book would have resulted in stale poems. When your poems decide they are moving
on, I think your job is to meet them where they want to be. Being a poet is
already such a fucking absurd choice—once you’ve come this far, you may as well
follow your instincts and write the poems you truly want to be writing, rather
than the poems it would be sensible to write. At least that’s a little talk I
sometimes give myself. I just feel lucky that the energy of UNR sustained
itself for as long as it did—long enough to grow into a book.
All
that said, if you can maintain a level of freshness and cohesion for 70 –100
pages or more, I think that’s wonderful. By all means, take up the space. A Sand Book by Ariana Reines
really owns its size in a delightful way, as one recent/extreme example, at
300+ pages.
BR: Interesting what you say about knowing
the difference between “the power of
your poems” and “the power of the creative process.” Do you feel like you can
discern this a little better now that you’ve written UNR? That you can maybe
trust your impulses a little more as you mature as a writer? I know in that
same interview that I mentioned above you referenced a document called “lessons
learned from publishing UNR”. Can you talk a little bit more about that
document? What some of the lessons were? How they might affect what comes next?
MH: I think that directive to “trust your
impulses” is important, because even if you manage to sidestep one
trap—mistaking the power of your poem for the power of the creative process, for
example—there’s always going to be a new one there to greet you. Maybe you grow
too attached to a certain poetic identity you’ve carved out for yourself, and
it grows stale. Maybe you start to fetishize one aspect of your poems—your
imagination or your vulnerability or just a certain form you like to work
in—and end up going so far down one path that you lose sight of the others,
causing your poems to become one-dimensional. There are so many ways to
accidentally squash or stifle or scare away the vitality in a poem. New ways
are being discovered every day, by myself and other intrepid researchers! Poems
are shy animals and what I increasingly feel is that trusting your impulses and
sensitivities is the only sustainable way forward—because in that case, even if
you fail, as you inevitably will, at least the failure is your own.
I’m
probably getting too theoretical, so here’s an example. After the 2016 US
presidential election, I began writing these poems that I thought of as
“bureaucratic grotesque.” Basically, they were dystopias. I soon had a sizable
group of them, but they never felt quite right. I didn’t enjoy spending time
with them. I think the problem was that they didn’t reflect what was actually
most relevant in my mind, day by day. They were attempts by my conscious mind
to push my unconscious mind into a shape that it didn’t want to take. In the
end, I felt I had to throw those poems away. This process repeats itself all
the time, in big and small ways—my scheming mind always has some new idea about
a project or series that will be so clever, so awesome—and I have to rely on
the quiet voice in the back of my head to usually say no to those schemes, to
shut down those machinations and instead return to the simpler place of sitting
in front of an empty page and discovering, one line at a time, what each poem
actually wants to be.
As
for the document you mention, it contains a lot of minor points about the
publication process that are not worth delving into, but, looking back at it
now, one “lesson” does jump out at me, which is that I want my next book to be
less dark. I realized this immediately after publishing UNR. Holding the book
in my hands, seeing people I love holding the book, seeing strangers holding
the book—I was struck by a feeling of responsibility for the book’s contents.
Which sounds obvious, like, duh, you are the one responsible for what’s in your
book. But I didn’t anticipate how different the book would feel once it was
real and printed and a place that other people’s minds could visit. UNR is a
fairly dark place. I had grown accustomed to that darkness during the writing
process, but felt it newly upon publication. I do not regret the darkness, by
any means, yet observing its intensity in this way provided a lesson that is
pushing my newer poems in a different direction.
BR: I think you’re right that it’s a dark
book, although not needlessly or gratuitously so. It feels purposeful in its
darkness. In “Ode to Flesh-Eating Bacteria” the speaker says, “Is it not a
little bit / religious when / a healthy cell / is overtaken / and gives itself
/ to a wholly new / and overwhelming / force?” There seems to be a wonder or
even a perverse beauty in some of this darkness. Can you say a little bit about
what you maybe found useful about death and violence with regard to the poems
in UNR? Perhaps what their presence revealed or achieved or allowed you to
address?
MH: As an anxious person, an important
realization for me was that anxiety is an act of imagination, a negative act—a
fixation on negative possible outcomes—but an imaginative one nonetheless.
Anxiety has a curious way of transforming the story you tell yourself about the
world and your place within it. I think the violence in UNR is probably a
reflection of my own anxiety. A good deal of my poetry is surreal, but the
emotional cores of the poems tend to be drawn from life, so I see UNR as a kind
of autobiography. I think UNR served as a space where anxiety could be explored
and given substance, for aesthetic as well as therapeutic (or am I not supposed
to say that?) purposes. Speaking of lessons, I don’t think I was fully aware of
the role anxiety was playing in the poems until the book was published and I
was able to look back at it with more detachment. Who knows, perhaps that is
the only way to get the work done: to not fully understand it while you’re
making it.
If
you’d asked me this same question a few years ago, I probably would have
answered that the violence in the poems was intended to jolt readers into a
state of heightened awareness, based on the premise that poetry—as opposed to
more visceral mediums like music or television—can be easy to gloss over. It’s
easy to read a poem without letting the poem get under your skin. Humans are
skilled at filtering language and keeping it at a distance, and we are getting
better at this every day thanks to the vast amounts of inane language we are
constantly absorbing. As a result, I think, even wonderful poems are likely to
be dismissed as boring by any given reader at any given moment. In fact, I do
this myself with probably 90% of the poems I read, despite my best
intentions—it’s just so easy to do. In UNR I was hoping to create an experience
that felt urgent and jarring enough—while also remaining playful and inviting
enough—that readers would stay engaged. John Baldessari comes to mind, writing “I will
not make any more boring art, I will not make any more boring art,” again and
again.
Perhaps
the true answer to your question is some combination of both of these possible
answers.
BR: I am interested in what you’re saying
about anxiety being an act of imagination and how the form of the
fairytale/fable/parable/folktale might fit into that. In the book, you seem to
be setting up these seemingly innocent or familiar narratives that quickly veer
off in extreme/absurd/surreal directions – almost worst-case scenarios or
intrusive thoughts. Where one might expect to end with a clear moral in a
fairytale you tend to leave things in uncertainty. Do you see a connection
there? You spoke to the poet Talvikki Ansel about Finnish
heritage. Does that factor in with the fairytales at all? Is Tove Jansson
present here?
MH: I love leaving things in uncertainty. I
love the way uncertainty feels and reverberates. I love the way the brain
expects closure and has to rearrange itself when closure is not provided. And I
think you’re right: when poems employ the language of fable or fairy tale—or
maybe any kind of narrative—that expectation gets even stronger, which makes
the anti-ending feel even stranger. That said, not every ending can work this
way, or else the expectation dissipates and you can no longer play around with
it (always a new trap).
I
think a lot of poets, myself included, sometimes worry about whether or not our
poem has been fully understood, so we get this urge to summarize/underscore the
takeaway message of the poem in its final lines—to wrap a bow around what we’ve
done, basically. I feel that this move, more often than not, weakens the poem
by creating distance between the poem and the reader. If the materials of the
poem are compelling enough, as a reader, I don’t want to be told what they
mean. If you do good work in a poem, you open up lines of implication. Opening
up those lines is more important than describing them, in my experience,
because when the lines are left open the reader is able to close them in a way
that is personal.
Tove
Jansson is present, for sure! Though I haven’t turned to her work much lately,
all I watched when I was growing up was Muumipeikko on VHS. It was probably the
single most formative ingredient in my early childhood imagination. More
recently I’ve become interested in the folklore of Finland and particularly the
pre-Christian animism of Sapmi, which is so wonderful in its bear-worshipping
sensitivity to the natural world. I haven’t done much writing about this
subject, I think because my life feels so distant from it and I do not want to
accidentally be reductive. I suspect the more right-feeling way for me to
engage with Finnishness is through translation. I love the idea of translating
Finnish poetry, but I’m still only at the beginning of the process. I need to
practice, I need to improve my language skills, and I need to find the Finnish
poets whose work speaks to me. I hope to take steps in that direction after I
finish my next collection of poems (and hopefully recording this hope in
writing, here, will encourage me to actually follow through).
BR: So it is written! Perhaps this is a good
place to speak about nationality. Despite whatever criticisms individual
writers may raise about the evils of nationalism, the presence of international
prizes and funding for works in translation, the machinery that surrounds
writing, including the publishing industry, still seems to be very
nation-focused, concerned with building a national literature.
Many
of the poems in UNR are explicitly set in the United States and you went to
American universities, however, you won the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and
have a Canadian publisher. Is nation/place/heritage something you are conscious
of when you write? What has been your experience moving between Canada and the
US? Do they feel like separate worlds with regard to writing/publishing? Where
do they overlap and where do they diverge?
MH: Canada and the US do feel like fairly
separate worlds to me, in terms of writing/publishing, more so than I expected.
That’s just my personal impression, given my own limited experience, and I can
only speculate about the possible reasons behind this impression, but speculate
I shall. On the US side, I think there are several factors at play, one being
that in this particular historical/political moment there are a number of
US-specific issues at the forefront of people’s minds in the US, so naturally
there is an emphasis on US poets writing about—describing, exploring,
transforming—their experiences from within the belly of this particular beast.
This is a good thing.
As
a less good thing, I think there is also an element of arrogance involved in
the sense of US poets undervaluing poets from other countries—not in a
conscious, intentional, or mean-spirited way, but in a
I’ve-been-swimming-in-this-pond-for-so-long-I-forget- about-other-ponds kind of
way. Based on my (again, limited) experience in US poetry programs and
communities, there is simply not a ton of contemporary English language poetry
from other countries being read here, whether that’s from New Zealand or the
Caribbean or England or Australia or Canada. There almost seems to be an
unspoken checklist, like, “okay, we will embrace two or three poets from each
of these countries, but no more.” By the way, I am totally guilty of some
version of this myself, and do not mean to suggest otherwise. And, in case the
gods of corporate technology are listening, I should say that social media is
probably playing its part in counteracting this effect. And, there is also
something to be said here about the fact that the Canadian government supports
its artists drastically more than the US government supports its artists, which
influences the attitudes and even the aesthetics of those artists, but I am not
the person best equipped to say it.
Regarding
my own experience, I’d say that having a foot in both US and Canadian poetry
has made the publishing experience—already strange—even stranger, in a good
way. The circle of mysteries is pleasantly enlarged. I’m seriously lucky that
House of Anansi published my book, for many reasons, one of which is that they
helped get the book into the hands of Canadian readers who likely would have
never come across my poems if the book had been published by a US press, and
that is the central joy of all this, the poems reaching human beings. As for
the writing process, during that I am only vaguely conscious of the US/Canada
separation and how my poems might land in one country vs. the other, probably
because I view the poems as existing in a different kind of space, an imaged
space that is more or less nowhere, even if specific place names are sometimes mentioned.
For me, nation/place/heritage comes up during the writing process most acutely
in the form of being a white man and trying not to be an oblivious, arrogant,
status quo-perpetuating asshole, and this is an ongoing learning process.
I
do also sometimes think about my individual ancestors and family members while
writing. For example, when I’m feeling slightly ridiculous about my creative
practice, ridiculous about the very idea of writing poems, embarrassed by my
poems about talking animals and raindrops falling in love with each other,
crushed by the capitalist machinery that seems to want to leak into every nook
of experience… in those moments I sometimes think about my
great-great-great-great grandfather, who was a shaman in Salla. He died in 1915
and I can only ever know about him in a limited way (shout out to my uncle
Jussi who has sifted through old Sami archives to learn this history) but I do
know that he believed in and practiced a kind of magic, one that had to do with
the earth and animals and unorthodox acts of attention, and I think that is
cool. At a time when modernity was closing in on him and disparaging what he
stood for, he kept doing what he did and believing in its power. I don’t know
how people will think about poetry in one hundred years, or if poetry will
still exist, or if we will still exist, or if we will have been replaced by
robots, or if those robots will write poetry—maybe poetry will feel as far away
to those future beings as Sami shamanism now feels to me, and they’ll say
“there were these people who arranged words on a piece of paper so that you
would feel something when you read them, something that had to do with the
sounds a mouth makes and something called the imagination, and mostly these
people were viewed as kind of silly, but they kept doing what they did anyway,
and I think that is cool.”
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian.
In 2020 he will publish two chapbooks: Keeps on Running (The Alfred
Gustav Press) and Dept. of Continuous Improvement (above/ground press).
He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of
the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. He is
@bengymen on Twitter.
