Sarah Burgoyne : Brandon Wint in Conversation

 

 

 

 

I met poet Brandon Wint when he participated in a Poetry Studio I was facilitating, which is sort of an unconventional workshop that emphasizes collaboration and spontaneity. He had heard about it through Stuart Ross, my dear friend and the editor of my first book. In these workshops, we discuss a variety of poets and their poetics, then I present an “experiment” (based on that week’s reading) which everyone then goes off and attempts. This one meeting we’d be discussing Fred Moten, and the experiment I’d designed was one of the hardest ones yet: Write a poem whose meaning is a carpet unfurling in front of you, whose end you’ll never reach. The poem Brandon wrote to this prompt in the span of thirty minutes blew us all away. The word “masterpiece” was floated and echoed. His poem still resonates with me and I sometimes return to it (we save all our poems in a shared document). Needless to say, Brandon’s poetry accesses a level of contemplation, joy, grief, love, and sublimity that I haven’t seen in much contemporary poetry of late and I consider his work to be very important—but I wish I had a better word for this. What I mean is there are seldom moments in our lives where things get stripped away and we are suddenly faced with a searing moment of clarity in which what matters is suddenly brought into sharp relief. These moments are amazing, like touching the bottom of a lake when you thought you were in too deep, because often that clarity gets hidden beneath the debris of less essential matters until a new moment brings them back into focus. This is what Brandon’s poetry does for me: it articulates a loss which turns out to be the most valuable gain.

 

Sarah Burgoyne: Hi Brandon! I’m excited to talk to you about Divine Animal, your first book of poetry. The first question I have for you is a little strange, but I am curious: how are the birds in your neighbourhood, today?

Brandon Wint: That is actually a beautiful question. As you are probably alluding to, birds pop up so often in the book, and in my life. My general sense is that the birds in my neighbourhood are doing alright, at least in the sense that they seem committed to their lives, their rituals. We have a little bird feeder dangling from our front porch, so I get to see sparrows and finches pick and discard sunflower seeds, or find inventive ways of splitting the tough, dark shells.

I am in Vancouver, and really, the crows dominate the city. They are fierce, unafraid, assertive, vigilant, covetous, and loud, so everyday has their character. These quiet pandemic days are mostly animated, for  me, by the movements and noises of birds. They are the most constant, dynamic force I bear daily witness to.

SB: I also love the crows of Vancouver--they remain such a distinct voice in my upbringing. I just came back from a few days by a lake during which I was reading your book among many birds, and your line from “Nightmares” really struck me: “Urban birds / are manic with insomnia” (42). It made me pay attention to the very distinct hour that birds go to sleep and when they awake. The forest becomes so so quiet. And I started to wonder about city birds, and the disruption of this ritual, which is another important element in your book. In “Flame” you speak of “gather[ing] / all the day’s hours / like pine needles / and burn[ing] them / in a crucible of intimacies” (55). I am wondering if you could talk more about the “crucible of intimacies” or how ritual became an important part, which I assume it is, of your life and writing practice?

BW: I think about ritual a lot, even when I am not enacting them as consciously as I'd like to. I think, in a lot of ways, our lives are defined by our rituals and the ways our rituals either feed or deplete us, nourish us or harm us. So, in that sense, I suppose my notions about ritual carry an intimacy and an intensity. I think it's also why I pay attention to the crows, for instance. They seem very aware of rituals, and will fight to protect them.

As it relates to the kind of loving, relational intimacies described in a poem like "Flame": I think love and understanding are often sustained through healthy rituals-- that which you can return to over and over as a way of deepening the nuances of your rapport with other people. I think I crave that in my friendships and romances. Writing, for me, is probably the life-affirming ritual that I trust best. It is the thing I can return to in order to deepen my relationship with the world, and with myself. I think the sort of openness and rigorous attention that writing requires is a sort of crucible of intimacies. Writing teaches me something about the struggle, attention, tenderness and faith required to love.

SB: So would you say that writing is a ritual you protect with the sheen of a crow-like ferocity?

BW: Thank you for framing it that way. I am enjoying the process of thinking through these nuances. I would say that writing protects me more than I protect it. I turn to the writing to give myself a sense of what it means to be human beyond the ways I am distracted by capitalism. It's not so much that I feel the need to protect the ritual of writing--- I think my disposition to life is poetic enough that it expresses itself even when I am not putting pen to paper. But, I will say that writing is a ritual that protects me. Sometimes if I am unwilling to write, it means that I am unwilling to confront, or care for, or tend to myself. It's that the act of writing exposes the intersection of my subconscious desires and my conscious self. I am more vulnerable in the act of trying to write a poem than I am in the vast majority of my life's other tasks. That ritual vulnerability is my strength, it's an exercise that helps me be more resolutely human in the world.

SB: Thank you for these generous answers. There is so much I want to ask you in regard to each rung of your responses--and this time I got caught on this word “tend” you just used, which also resonates with your collection. To tend takes its root from Latin tendere "to stretch, extend, make tense; aim, direct; direct oneself, hold a course," and I feel that what it means to be “human” in Divine Animal has so much to do with inter-being or stretching toward the other: in your poem “Conflation,” there’s a fluidity between elements and beings: the human face becomes a planet; the “dark eyes” of a whale become the speaker’s own; an old man “from Flint, Michigan, / Black and too poor to leave” [...] “becomes the whale”; British Columbia “an orange rash of flame” (47) and this happens so much elsewhere in the book: thirst is “a country without a name” (25), a grandfather’s “husky timbre” gathers “the spill of years” (26), there’s a Eucharist in the speaker’s adoption of the “grandmother’s rituals” and the “grandfather’s quiet hands” (30) “in a kitchen in central Alberta / rolling yellow bulbs of coriander in my palm / As I crush their shells between my fingers” and I wonder the significance to you of this type of “aliveness” that asks one to “tend” or to stretch beyond oneself: the importance to you of the recognition of this togetherness in “the bewildering fold of creation” (80)?

BW: Thank you so much for making this connection, and for noting it so specifically. I think the quality you are speaking to is actually the crux of the book itself, and perhaps what draws me to poetry in the first place.

Not to get preachy about it, but I think this sort of aliveness, this recognition of the relationship between the human world and non-human world, and the sort of inherent permeability of the border between human concerns and non-human ones, is what sustains life on this planet. I think I am always looking to note those moments of intersection or conflation, when a river could just as well stand in for me, or I could become a river. For me, it is part of a desire to pursue and understand the Divine within the human condition. How do I become more human, more natural, more spiritually humble if I collapse the space between what one crow might say to another, and what I might say to my mother? How does my relationship to the planet, or to water shift if I recognize the pain and mortality in the eyes of a whale? These are the things I am driving at in the poems. The collection is called Divine Animal for just that reason. If I am able to hold, at the same time, an awareness of my divine nature and my animal nature, I think it helps me tend to myself, my mortality, and the earth in a more honest way. It connects me to everything, as I think we all are. It is this connectedness that I mean to hone in on, because it is exhaustless, and because I think it is where the essence of our lives resides. It's where the poetry of life expresses itself.

SB: In your poem “Theory,” you write “if metaphors could sound alarms, / ring—hourly as church bells— / a doomsday clock, // I would raise them on flagpoles / outside government buildings, / leave them tucked between stones like moss” (43), and in “Antidote”—a poem I’d like to talk more about in another question—you write, “A scientist curses, burns a globe on TV, / and the metaphor scorches my heels” (45). As a poet, would you say that metaphors, which to me, to borrow Fred Moten’s idea about emulsification as the sublime, also can work to take two unlike things and “emulsify” them via comparison or connection, act as exhaustless connectors in the poetry of life?

BW: Yes, exactly. For most of my life as a writer, I wasn't really aware that my faith in, or reliance upon metaphor was anything distinct. For me, something essential about what poetry is or should pursue (personally speaking) is bound in the power and range of metaphor specifically. I think it is exactly as you (and Fred Moten) have said. There's something in that act of emulsification that reveals the nature of life, or the relationship between things, on a level that is essential and elemental enough to render it sublime. I think that has always been an implicit goal of my work: to find a comparison or description that is so apt and so alive that it reveals a natural, sublime network between the speaker of the poem and whatever is being described.

SB: One way in which I see your poems sublimely networking is through touch, or a preoccupation with touch. As you know, I am interested in writers’ poetics, which, like your poem “Theory” suggests, I believe, is distinct from a philosophy in that a poetics seems more active and involved in the process of making (not just thinking), which leads me to your line from that poem “The planet’s decay, already so personal: / an archipelago of welts between shoulder and wrist. // How might our hands animate to solve it?” (43). This idea of animation, and in particular hands’ animation, sounds a bell through the entire collection, to the point where I started to see your poetics as a haptic poetics. The antidote to “despair, self-pity” in the face of ecological disaster brought on by capitalism and greed, is to sink “hands in lavender / stretch my naked limbs before a mirror, / let sunlight kiss my eyelids” (45), or in other words to have a luminous haptic relationship to the planet, an ornate ritual of touch, or an attention to what touches and what does not. In “Nightmares,” “the mythology of progress / hovers over concrete” (42), the rural night is “untouched dark” (42), there is a haptic desire for the “claws of sparrows” to “grasp a noose of light,” reconciliations can be touched but not held (18), the speaker is “everywhere the water has been” in the face of “belonging / only vaguely now / to any known history of land” (19), the great-grandmother’s pulse is dreamed of as returning in “the prosody of a wave.” A tangle is a type of touch, even. I felt like I read a poetic statement in the stanza, “The Universe: a river / beaded with amber light / where my prayers are my swollen hands / dipped into the cosmic stream” (70). So, my question is, in your view, is the Divine haptic? Must it be?

BW: Wow. I have to sit with the implications of this question (and the revelations therein) for a while before I can answer this question in any final way. Thank you for the expanse of it. What I can say now is that I don't know that the Divine is haptic, but I do absolutely experience my poetics as a grasping and a gesturing toward the ideas, feelings and forces that seem to outrun my body, or cannot be comfortably contained within my human, corporeal sense of myself. So yes, very much, I am writing in order to bring myself into some understandable proximity to that which feels untouchable, or at least hard to hold. Maybe, aside from love itself, poetry feels like the best way I can experience and grow comfortable with the tension between control and the uncontrollable--that which can be vaguely touched but not grasped. Writing poetry feels this way, perhaps on some level what I am calling the Divine, or the sublime, feels this way. I wasn't aware of how often that tension was being rendered in metaphors of touch, but now that you point it out, it is apt. Too, I think I have some hard-to-describe faith in the body as a source of insight, a site of research. So all of my spiritual yearnings and preoccupations get rendered through the physical, because I believe the body holds earthly and spiritual memory. The body is the Divine gesture. So maybe that's why there is a conflation between touch and knowing.  

SB: The “unleashed,” “unspooled,” “unscorned,” “unmade,” “blooded,” “danced” “nectared,” “unghosted,” “conjured,” “mystiqued,” “unmythed,” “elasticked,” “lustred,” “incanted,” “mango-scented,” “lilaced,” “tender-skinned,” “essentialed,” “anthemed,” “voiced,” “intoned,” “sparked,” “untethered,” “unchained,” “released,” “blue-silked” (59) body?

BW: Ideally, yes. :)

SB: I have one more question for you, though I could keep talking about Divine Animal, in particular, the role of incantation, which is a type of singing and spellcasting, a prosody with a smack of magic to it, that your collection references and enacts, especially in the opening poem “Incantation: Memory of Water.” But I will leave the poem choice up to you. Is there a poem in this collection that you’d like to speak more about or one that has a special significance for you?

BW: I think "Incantation: Memory of Water" has an expansiveness to it that is unlike most other things I've written, and maybe sets a certain kind of tone in the sense that it evidences a preoccupation with history as a bodily and spiritual thing. I think that poem speaks to a historical and spiritual continuum that I am always trying to understand more about. I want to comprehend, in an embodied way, what it means to inherit the blood memory of enslaved Africans, enslaved Jamaicans, enslaved Barbadians, and also the blood memory of my people as free, powerful, magical and connected to the earth. I wrote parts of that poem as I was reading Dionne Brand's A Map To The Door of No Return. I was also reading The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay. Both of these books look at water, migration, violence, physical and spiritual memory, so that poem was my way of writing myself into a continuum with those poets, and more importantly, the familial continuum I owe my life to by virtue of my ancestors' survival and their brilliance.

SB: I also felt like the poems in “Incantation” resonate deeply with M. NourbeSe-Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” and her metaphor/dismantling of “language” as “l/anguish” when you write, “Entire bodies / whose names are drowned. Who groan / in the imperfect recall of textbooks / whose sunken lips tableau the lost languages / that make me say Barbados and Jamaica / in their absence” (15). This poem, in which “ocean” remains literal and also becomes a stand in for “memory,” “teeth and eyes,” “reams of paper,” to name a few, made me think of the incantation as the prosody of absence, which is never actually absent, but multiple (and multiplying).

BW: Yea, I think that notion of absence being replaced by the multiple, or the many-voiced, is a frequent theme of the book, and of my life. I am trying to write myself into conversation with the forces outside (and inside) my body. That is what poetry is about for me, spiritually and socially: broadening the conversation, making the continuum between my voice and other voices known. It is not that I mean to erase myself, but I want to acknowledge that I (and my poetry, obviously) belong to something much larger than myself. I suppose the poems are my nascent form of ontological experimentation and inquiry, where I am trying to make sense of the merits, origins and components of the continuum to which I belong. In the book, as in my life, I suppose sometimes that continuum is called "history", sometimes it is called "Blackness" or "nature" or "Divine". In any case, the essential pursuit is the same: to name this site of belonging, to note this life force, to reach for that which I can touch but cannot hold. :)

SB: Perhaps, “a moonlight, a devotion / tireless as winter” (58). Thank you so much for your luminous book, Brandon, and for your insightful and wise responses to these questions. :)

BW: Thank you for reading the book with such astounding sensitivity. This conversation has been an absolute honour and a source of revelation. Thank you.

SB: Likewise!

 

 

 

Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist and educator based in western Canada. His poetic, often multi-disciplinary work is full of tender attentiveness, and casts a gentle but precise eye upon the many iterations of suffering and beauty that make up the human condition, and the natural world. For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violence futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.

Photo credit (black & white): Abdul Malik.
Divine Animal promo image-- photo cred Liam Mackenzie. Design by Luca Herrera.

Sarah Burgoyne is an experimental poet. Her second collection, Because the Sun, which thinks with and against Camus’ extensive notebooks and the iconic outlaw film Thelma & Louise, was published with Coach House Books in April 2021 and was nominated for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry. Her first collection Saint Twin (Mansfield: 2016) was also a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry (2016), awarded a prize from l'Académie de la vie littéraire (2017) and shortlisted for a Canadian ReLit Award. Other works have appeared in journals across Canada and the U.S., have been featured in scores by American composer J.P. Merz and have appeared with or alongside the visual art of Susanna Barlow, Jamie Macaulay and Joani Tremblay. She currently lives and writes in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke.

Photo credit: Laurence Philomene