Margo LaPierre: I notice wonderful sonic synchrony in your poems. Do you approach a poem first for sound and wing it on a first draft? Or do you have a narrative in mind, or a memory? Or some other way to enter the poem? Or are sound and semantics entwined from the get-go?
Cora Siré: These are such great questions! I think of the sounds and words as being intertwined, much like thunder and lightning. The storm is the entry point. My impulse to write a poem arises from the emotional — outrage, say, or passion, wonderment, even gleeful turbulence.
The thunder of a poem, like a musical score, emerges from the words, the rhythms, and the spaces or pauses between the words. I have to work my way into the storm and rarely get the thunderbolt in the first draft. I’m winging it, dredging memory, as you suggest, until I find the right word or phrase, that flash of illumination to light the way forward. It’s the storm that interests me most, the tensions that arise from the collision and compression of the aural and visual.
MP: Tell us a bit about the roles of mustard, cobalt, and the various shades of red in the collection. Does each colour symbolize anything in particular for you? For example, in my own writing I find orange is always the colour of alarm/warning. Do you have these internal colour codes too?
CS: My newest poetry collection, Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light (Guernica Editions, 2021) has its foundations in my attempt to connect various colours, hues, and shadings with the emotional. I draw on the visual arts as well as Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), a humanistic exploration of the emotional reactions to viewing specific colours. He got some of the science wrong, but the essence resonated with me. Our feelings can be represented as a tableau of intense colours.
In my case, internal colour codes aren’t fixed. I love red, for example, but sometimes it signifies the beautiful and desire, other times, danger and fear, or some combination of all of these. In one poem, ruby red collides with scarlet, a kind of existential battle royale or “fierce internal argument.”
My book builds on these conflicts and concludes with a prose poem that reaches for redemption as a form of acceptance: “The fluidity of identities, a meld of hues and primaries, of places, lands and waters crossed, capsized emotions. Light and its absence, the greatest sorrows, fragmented and unpredictable.”
MP: In “Origins of the Blast,” the speaker tells us: “Delusions parade as illusions.” Can you delve further into this idea in the context of that poem?
The line you mention is from one of the most political poems in the collection. It begins in Argentina with my beloved’s experiences preceding the military coup in 1976 and then riffs into my childhood experiences in Montréal witnessing the War Measures Act (1970). What connects these two events, despite their vastly different outcomes, is the imposition of martial law that facilitated the detention of anyone for any reason and led to the arrest of many innocent people.
So the line “Delusions parade as illusions” refers to the dangers of assuming we are safe. I’m reminding myself (and readers) that it might be deluded to cling to that illusion. The verb “parade” is meant to evoke the might of the military that can be leveraged, with a simple act of legislation, to turn against citizens.
The poem exposes how fear has affected me and my beloved, how it’s shaded our perceptions. “The Origins of the Blast” relates to what we witnessed and experienced in our lifetimes as well as the legacy of horror our parents lived through during the Second World War in Europe. These are the “demons charged by power / who keep coming back.” They infiltrate our nightmares, colour our relationship and require us to work on our healing.
MP: I read place and geography as paramount in your poetry, in addition to colour, but the title line is taken from a poem called “Note to a Mapless Self.” Tell us about this tension and your choice of title.
CS: It’s true that most of my work draws on my family’s history of displacement and how it’s affected me, particularly around the question, Where do I belong? I never have an easy answer.
In the poem you mention, I’m trying to guide myself out of despair. One path to resilience is poetry — the act of creating, depicted as acrobatic exhilaration, and the inspiration I draw from other poets. The poem’s final line, and the title of the book, is lifted from a poem by the Russian poet Pushkin about transcending the conflict between the earthly dark (evil) and the celestial light (good).
MP: What are you currently working on?
CS: I’ve just finished reviewing the final proofs for Fear the Mirror, a collection of stories to be published this fall by Véhicule Press. This book is a blend of fiction, memoir and essay, and digs deep into my background with its European-Canadian-Latin American influences. It is also grounded in Montréal where I live.
In this forthcoming book, there are moments when, inevitably, poetry creeps into my prose. My previous novels featured poets in various disguises, and this new book is no exception. I reference the late Canadian poets Dorothy Livesay and Jane Jordan, Pushkin (again!), Rilke, and especially the Chilean poet, Roberto Bolaño. He was famous for his novels, but in his last interview before he died (young at 50), Bolaño declared that he was most proud of his poetry. In Fear the Mirror, I pay homage to his affirmation of the resilience of poetry which he described as “braver than anyone” in the poem “Resurrection.”
