2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry/2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Canisia Lubrin

The Dyzgraphxst, Canisia Lubrin
McClelland and Stewart, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist ; 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 23, 2021.

Canisia Lubrin [photo credit: Samuel Engelking] is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lubrin’s most recent poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst, was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, named a finalist for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and twice longlisted for the Journey Prize. In 2019, she was Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, and was named a Writers’ Trust 2020 Rising Star. In 2021, Lubrin was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction debut, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.

As the copy for the collection offers, The Dyzgraphxst is deeply engaged with issues of “intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster [.]” Given this, what do you think poetry can accomplish?

Given the snowflake, or the river, or the Candian woods, or the geese flying over head? I’m not sure I understand the dissection between the “this” of this question and poetry. Poetry is a wide-open space, where anything the poet is interested in can land. I don’t know if poetry is cabable of anything today that it hasn’t always been capable of. I am a poet who follows her interests into poetry. That’s all there is. I can’t tell anybody else what to do with poetry. As Dionne Brand says, poetry interrogates the reader. The nature of that interrogation depends on all kinds of things. All I know is where I am willing to go, and that I am willing to be lead, as Walcott says, into the home of the imagination.

There is such a wonderful polyvocal structure that holds the collection together. How were you able to keep all of the threads organized? Had you any models for this kind of work?

Both of my books arrive in the experimental tradition of Black diasporic art, and in the mode of Caribbean creolization. Polyvocality is very much deply embeded in Caribbean culture. Of course, if a reader is not familiar with the Caribbean as a space, as a grouping of ideas, as geography and poeple, etc., these modes would simply be missed entirely (as happens often). But I am concious about the writing being capacious enough that even if some crucial things are missed, in some places of the world, the poetry must still sing. I suppose I always want to write a book in which the reader must be involved actively in their own way through it. So, if 25 people read the book, they’ll come away each with their own signification of the work. And that is especially true for The Dyzhraphxst. In that way, The Dyzgraphxst does not hide its design, which is complicated, elaborate, even. So, if you’re looking for how the thing is working (which, of course, is part of the way it asks to be read), and you think you don’t quite get it (or whatever “it” is there suggesting itself), you must still be able to go along with the music, the rhythmic, the sonic. The pleasures of language. It is designed to be read both structurally and for something you might call epiphany. Complicated design but easy music, obvious emotional range. Like a completed house whose scaffolding you can see... a glass house whose interior is full of surprises, like one of those mirror playhouses, say. But the design isn't intended to keep the reader at bay. It is intended to let the reader become it, in this case. And that is hard, humbling, frustrating, work.

How was it working with Dionne Brand as editor? Were there elements of working with her that intimidated?

No. There’s no intimidation to report. Brand is an editor of immense sensitivity and nuance and skill. We were not strangers coming to this work, either. For a person like me who doesn’t need much push, a single gesture of hers would set me off in large ways. Simply brilliant working with Brand.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since The Dyzgraphxst was completed? What have you been working on since?

Always writing poetry. The next book is coming soon and it is a collection of short stories. That’s what holds my attention today, among many other things.

The Dyzgraphxst is constructed much more as a singular project than your debut. How did this project first reveal itself to you, and how different was it working on this collection?

Perhaps Voodoo Hypothesis prepared you for The Dyzgraphxst more than you might realize. The two books are quite different because they are different projects, but they are close siblings. I have answered this question about how the book “revealed itself” so many times that I fear I will become weary of repeating myself too often. The Dyzgraphxst has its roots in Voodoo Hypothesis. But, The Dyzgraphxst is my attempt to work through my distrust of the lyric I, especially in relation to the egologic individualism that has come to mark so much poetry, so much of the modern world. I wanted to put pressure on my own stakes in this work as a lyric poet with little confessional interest. I am interested in a thing. A question arrives. I follow its curiosities. That’s the movement. This process wasn’t different in terms of how I write.

There is such a joyous and playful sense of sound and rhythm in both of your collections. How important are sound and rhythm to you as you work?

Sound and rhythm are inseparable from poetry in my estimation. I have said this so many times already, but it might need to be repeated more than I’d like to admit: music is the anatomy of poetry. Which is to say my door into poetry is always aesthetic. No matter what the themes and all the serious business depict, sound is what I follow. I think sound carries its own kind of sense and challenges us who read and listen to make more of meaning than the predictable thing that syntax offers. Sound opens up something that puts us closer to the pre-verbal and then the oral roots of language. The page is an attempt to hold all that dynamism. And that dynamism is the sensorium of language that is given the pressurized space of the page in which to move us. I don’t let up until I feel moved in that sense.