Small
Press Intravues:
Occasional
Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem
Michael Sikkema: Your work is powerful, transformative, and sometimes kaleidoscopic. It can feel like magic. My question is: how do you think about poetry as word magic?
Gary Barwin: Firstly, thank you.
I wonder about word magic. I like the idea. The fact that there are silent letters. Now you see them, now you don’t (hear them.) Or that spellling werks the way it does. (How great is “knight” with all its bits of arcane letter armor into which its sounds are prised. Not to mention its meaning.) Or, really, that we even have words. It seems unlikely. Rocks don’t. And how did we get from molecules or a series of cheeps to Milton, or James Brown or Ceci n'est pas une pipe? Didn’t Joni say that “Words are stardust.” (and continued “Words are often bolded…”) But I have been thinking about transformation a lot lately.
How one thing can become another. Sure, exhaled breath and mouth position and a movement of the tongue against teeth becomes sound becomes word. Or a mix of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescents and other matter is dropped onto mulched tree matter becomes word also. Both with a history, texture, meaning, referent, rhythm, conceptual weight, context. Audience. And sure, how something that isn’t a poem ends up turning into a poem. Or something that isn’t seen as a poem, is seen as one. Frog+mwah=Princess (where frog=non-poem and princess=poem and the kiss is some kind of word magic.)
And the first part of a poem transforms into the next part in ways that may be mysterious or so obvious that they are mysterious also. And how do choices about the configuration and content of a poem someone chime with a content and configuration that we identify as our own? And what kind of magic are images. An anvil is falling from the sky but lands on the tip of a snowflake falling just slightly faster from the same winter sky. They descend together with a delicate grace. The snowflake which is really a word sets the anvil (which is really a word, too) down onto the sidewalk. In his bed, an old man decides to stop aging. He just stops. And so he lives forever. Also, all that phlegm inside him is a poem. A slurry of the glorious and patient, waiting for the perfect sneeze. Look! It’s coming now. Or at least within the next 100 years. Trust me! I’m a poem.
Secondly, really belonged at the beginning of the paragraph several paragraphs ago, way up there.
Sikkema: Who did you collaborate with to make your Selected Poems, For It Is A Pleasure And A Surprise To Breathe happen?
Barwin: The poet Paul Vermeersch is the senior editor at Noelle Allen’s Wolsak and Wynn Press in Hamilton. He suggested the selected. I invited the brilliant scholar and great supporter of my work, Alessandro Porco, to select the poems and write the introduction. Paul initially had asked me to consider selecting my own poems. The lid lifted off my head since my brain began doing handstands in there, the idea was so bewildering and overwhelming. What would I know about selecting them? I’m so entirely thrilled to have all these poems gathered together—from the facsimile reproduction of my very first chapbook to all those colour visual poems to some work that hadn’t ever appeared in a book. Without sounding too Pollyanna-ish, it really is true that writing comes into being and is published because of the inspiration, collaboration, context, mentorship, example and support of many. I have always considered all of my work as being part of larger community of voices and creators. Language itself would be very different without a language community. So, too, with poetry, made of language. Because of language. In language.
Sikkema: Your response to question #1 calls up the fact that you excel at creating spaces for, and charging spaces with performance. I'm impressed with the way that you turn a zoom talk, or what could be a simple stand-at-the-podium poetry reading into a full on performance. Does your love of performance tie directly back to your musical background? Or does it have other roots?
Barwin: Hey, wait a sec, what’s this? Oh man, what slither, such slip—are those gills pulsing? It’s so cold but oh I’m happy in a way I’ve never been but I’m waist deep in flow, this stream, trying to fish—it’ a metaphor, I’m a poet, see?— but gotta get this trout outta my pants. Floosh. There. down my left leg, trying to be free. It’s free. My leg is left in its contingent freedom, paired with my right. But the fish has found eddies and withering current and now I’m ready and really here. HERE. I’m thinking of that great line from Tom Waits, gravel king of the sorrowful metacabaret of the hopeful heart, “Songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air.” Thinking about his notion of songs filling the possibility of the air they’re made in. And so that’s how I tend to think about making or performing anything. What is the possibility of this air, what are the airfordances of this medium, this moment. Everything as both a constraint and a possibility. Every bug a feature, iridescent and leaving a remarkable trail. I have performed a lot of music but I think I have really seen the performative everywhere. Every time someone speaks. Listens. Preaches. Calls. Lectures. Instructs. Teaches. Or catches on fire. I’ve always been intrigued by the music of the body and its language in operation in the moment, as well as what might be conceivable also. Hey, what are those shadows doing in the cave? What’s the shadow for the word “shadow” look like. How can that shadow be red and how many limbs does that guy have anyway?
Sikkema: I see what you're saying, the shadow of word being a sword, which is of course an S word, and cutting the cave in half. Red? The ochre speaks for itself and others, and as far as limbs go, the six I count stay right near here. The caves are filled with so many paintings of animals and no plants, so few people and most of them are half bird. How many bird halfs are you?
Barwin: I aspire to multiple half-flights, to be one wing plus one wing plus one wing because one wing after the other is writing and also politics. And politics is a half bird, of course. The ochre of the sword, red with our limbs which are caves. When I cut a cave in half, I get a gulley, a gullet and the voices of animals and plants on the painted walls which speak. And which half of the bird? The outside? The inside? The part of the bird which is sky. Which is (s)word.
Sikkema: Can you say more about your "work being part of a larger community of voices and creators?" You do a lot of poetry collaborations, and collaborating is pretty natural for musicians. I'd love to hear you talk more about that and what it means for your work.
Barwin: For me, collaboration actualizes the inherent dialogue between reader and writer, or between writer and their own ideas of writing, the inherent discussion, the generative pushmi-pullyu that writing always is. Or that self or identity is. Or everything, really. We’re always already in discussion with our senses, our sense of self, our unconscious and our society. So collaborating feels like an extension of that. It opens the discussion to someone else, opening the gates of the gated community that is the self and one’s own writing practice.
And, in that interacting with others, engaging with their consciousnesses, their proclivities and energies and curiosities is fun and/or satisfying, collaborating is that, too. It’s fun to build a shed, a boat, a bread, or create a literary event with someone, to brainstorm (or brainshower? a clodburst?), to conceive of an idea, to work together to realize it as it changes in the realization. And so writing with others is like that. We’re a kind of scurvy crew yanking the halyards and mizzening the obscurely named scuppers-and-jag-like features of the word as we slosh our bowsprits through the sawing drink of it all. Ahoy! Purple prose and ridiculous extended metaphor!
To speak to the first half of your question, I am aware of my work being part of the larger dialogue—other voices and creators. A word wouldn’t mean anything without other words or the context within which the word could be used. Likewise, writing. Or, for that matter, a writer. We’re embedded in literature, and, hopefully, the broader discourse of our community and society. Exactly what we do with it depends on lots of things. One’s rating on the curmudgeon scale. How much chocolate is proximate to the day bed. But as writers, we are connected with history and across the present with the larger discourse. What has been said. What hasn’t. What is being said now and what isn’t. What is being said and how. To return to my terrible nautical metaphor, I feel like I’m a barrel bobbing in the brine, a single soggy writer in a large ocean of currents, possibilities and shocking fish. One of which may get stuck in my pants. If I’m lucky.
Sikkema: How did you go about selecting poems from the decades worth that you had to choose from? Will there be another collection of unselected poems?
Barwin: Initially, I was invited by the publisher to choose the selection. To me that was like looking into Douglas Adam’s Infinite Perspective Vortex and I balked. I balked I tell you! So I asked my friend, the brilliant scholar Alessandro Porco to be the editor and to shape the book, to choose the poems. He had written a couple of really insightful reviews and essays about my work and had edited the selected poems of Alice Burdick and Steve Venright, both of which collections were fantastic. He really understood and had thought deeply about we poets who emerged from Toronto in the 80s and I trusted his take. He didn’t always pick the poems that I thought I would have, the ones that I expected would be in a selected, but he—as I expected—was incredibly thoughtful and thorough and wrote an astounding introductory essay about my work. It was exciting, inspiring and touching. He so deeply engaged with my work and created a story about the work that was his own take and that was intelligent and took the long view. I don’t think I could have done that. I know I couldn’t have.
You ask about an unselected. It makes me think about a poet whose selected I edited. When we did the launch, he read only poems that I didn’t select. Hilarious. But what does it mean to “select”? Which poems should be selected? Which should be left out? What is the story? Whose story? And what happens to those other poems? Do they find another life, far from the book, eking out a simple, unselected life of their own, a more pure and individual life free from an overarching narrative, uniquely themselves, living in their own perfect moment, the perfect moment of their own creation? I hope that my work is part of a larger biosphere, part of an ecosystem of writing, speaking and interacting, part of the larger thriving world of writing. I hope that my work has a million points of contact with this world, a million points of contacts with readers. With the language. With that luminous energy which is making. And, of yes, with the sword of the half bird.
Sikkema: To close this interview, I'd like to ask just one last question. What advice would you give to unpoetry to ease the inevitable passage into poetry? I've been thinking a lot lately about the extremely difficult position that unpoetry is in, starting out as poetry, ending up as poetry, but being in the awkward middle phase. What advice do you have for unpoetry?
Barwin: It’s difficult not being poetry because poetry is ravenous. It’s hungry for more, like the sky. Like an ocean that bursts and consumes the land. Something tries not to be poetry and then insatiable poetry absorbs it with greed. The way we consume babies and they end up as adults, losing their delicate head-smell and the infinite abandon of their open-throated cry. Instead they become coif-pated coloraturas with their measly constrained song and narrow voices. And so too unpoetry wants to be the stranger in the undefinable land, an edgeless and indefinite wraith through which language passes unaware, on its way to its galas and conventions. But poetry is always on the move with its wolfish moonlit-eating grin, eating unpoetry like some unStrand coming up from the basement, its lips strained by ink. And so unpoetry is unable to elude the predation of its other. Poetry invades and subsumes, its vast appetite incorporating everything into its omnivorous and bloating corpus. Nothing that isn’t poetry can survive but becomes poetry. Unpoetry is born believing it is its own poetry but by and by becomes but a part of poetry writ large. Imagine a bird on the wing, glorious in flight, careless of the ground. Then it dies and rockets to earth. Unpoetry’s middle phase is that time it falls, a creature neither of the air or ground. If I could choose, I would wish to write unpoetry, unfettered, beyond shape and taxonomy. Too often I write that rocket-fall, that collapse from the air. Or perhaps, the bird-shaped crater that has opened far below. What is poetry’s mythic weakness. That it becomes everything. What is its mythic strength? That everything becomes poetry.
