conversations on the long poem
part one of this conversation can be found here
part three of this conversation is forthcoming
Bruce Whiteman: When you began writing Report,
did you have any sense of an overarching architecture for your long poem? Did
you even conceive of it as a continuing project?
Ken Norris: When I started, I was just writing a chapbook-length poem called Report on The Second Half Of the Twentieth Century. That’s how it first appeared: as a chapbook published by CrossCountry Press in 1977, written in 1976. I wasn’t thinking about a long poem AT ALL. It was only later, when I was writing the third book—Acts of the Imagination—that I thought, Hmm. Maybe Report and The Book of Fall and this poem that I am writing now have something to do with one another. By the time I’d finished writing the third book I thought I was possibly writing a long poem.
When I began to think of it as a long poem, I thought of publishing it as individual books all along the way. Antonio D’Alfonso thought that was one of the stupidest things he had ever heard, and encouraged me to “bundle” the first four books together in one book—Report On The Second Half Of the Twentieth Century: Books 1-4—which he published at Guernica Editions in 1986.
So no, there wasn’t any overarching architecture at the beginning. That came along later.
BW: A lot of Modernist poetry, especially “The Waste Land” and The Cantos, borrowed the strategy of collage from the painters. What became Book 1 seems to rely on collage as well:-newspaper articles, prose bits, and poetry. Were you conscious of using a classic Modernist formal procedure?
KN: Yes, in Book 1 I was very much aware of fragments/collage. I think I was operating more from “The Waste Land” than The Cantos. The “bits and pieces” of “The Waste Land” had a big effect on me. In Book 1 of Report I was ping ponging back and forth between newspaper stories and poems that were functioning as commentary.
BW: Book 1 really does set out in a Modernist way to engage with politics and history. But with Book 2 and after, your focus seems to shift to the lyric, or at least to your life more than to the life of the planet and human endeavour. Was this deliberate? Did you consciously decide that writing about private experience was the only way you could get at the life of your times?
KN: Two significant things happened around the time I was finishing Book 1: I started doing psychotherapy for five years and I started reading The Martyrology.
Neil Young has a song called “Frozen Man.” That song means a lot to me. I had a very damaging childhood. In 1976, when I was twenty-five, I was a frozen man, an emotional cripple. I couldn’t feel anything at all. Those five years of psychotherapy brought about a restoration of feeling.
In tandem with that, I was reading bp Nichol’s The Martyrology. The Martyrology is very language-playful, but it is also very psychological, and very rooted in human feeling. I could really relate to The Martyrology, and I see it as being the primary poetic influence on Report on The Second Half of the Twentieth Century. At McGill, I was working with Louis Dudek and getting to know him, and the assumption would be that Dudek and his long poems are the primary influence upon Norris and his long poem. But it’s really bp Nichol and The Martyrology.
The Book of Fall is about the death of Elvis and the restoration of feeling. Book 3, Acts of the Imagination, draws its inspiration from David McFadden and his long poems “I Don’t Know” and A New Romance. And Book 4, Clouds: A Sequence of Days, follows in the footsteps of a section in The Martyrology called “Clouds.”
Book 5, The Better Part of Heaven, gets edited by bpNichol and gets published by Coach House. bp also gave me feedback on Book 7, Islands. I often talk about Can Lit in familial terms, with Dudek being my spiritual father and Phyllis Webb being my spiritual mom. And then there are the older brothers and sisters: Leonard, George, Margaret, Lionel, Dave, Barrie, bill. That’s all very real to me. As I said earlier, I had a very damaging childhood, and I had to construct a family for myself. So I constructed a family of poets.
BW: So these life events took over the long poem, then? You were, as it were, made more at liberty to believe in your self-worth, and to explore your feelings, as against the state of the world?
KN: History with a capital H is fine and dandy. And I was driven back to it later on by Milan Kundera and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.
The Martyrology is very personal, as is psychotherapy. bp was showing me that “life writing” can be valid as small h history. And The Diary of Anne Frank made me realize that “life writing” is maybe a better way to understand an historical moment than some kind of objective record. Report has a very objective-sounding title. But the misery in “The Waste Land” is subjective and personal too, while reading out to the larger culture.
The Book of Fall is pretty personal and emotional. Acts of the Imagination is kind of steeped in spiritual idealism. And Clouds: A Sequence of Days more or less adopts the phenomenological approach of The Martyrology.
In the process of writing Report, I’m kind of building a poet. I’m delving into the full range of what constitutes poetic sensibility. In my personal life, emotion is being restored to me. And “emotion” definitely constitutes an important part of the poetic sensibility. As does aspiration and spiritual idealism. The Martyrology taught me how to keep my eye on the ball of daily living. But it, too, is highly emotional and shot through with poetic aspiration and spiritual idealism.
The “documentary” approach to History can be extremely one-dimensional. I was trying to produce something that was multi-faceted. And, in a way, I was trying to build the complete human being, the complete poet.
BW: In my own long poem, as I’ve written it over the decades, I sometimes wished that I had chosen a different title. Did you feel that way too? Obviously, The Cantos as a title or The Maximus Poems doesn’t tie their poets down so much to something seemingly more explicit, as your title or mine does. Even “The Prelude” is pretty non-specific.
KN: No, I was always okay with the title. To me, “The Waste Land” was the report on the first half of the twentieth century, and what I was writing was the report on the second half of the twentieth century. It told a reader what to expect. It told me what the mission was.
BW: You’ve brought us to the first of the South Pacific books, The Better Part of Heaven. Obviously where you go, the long poem goes too. In the afterword to that book, you seem to want to refocus the nature of the long poem for you. It now becomes “a poetic diary.” A “report” sounds more objective, while a diary sounds much more intimate. Does that become a defining alteration for Report? I'm also interested in the influence Melville had on your thinking and writing.
KN: Okay, let’s remember who is editing The Better Part of Heaven: bpNichol. I go down to Toronto for a week, stay at bp and Ellie’s place, and Barrie and I edit the book. bp is very interested in the poetic diary. When I was writing it, was I thinking of The Better Part Of Heaven as a poetic diary? Probably not. But as I’m editing it with the author of The Martyrology, “poetic diary” is a big part of our conversation. And, as I remember it, it was Barrie who encouraged me to write the Afterword.
One of the things I learned from Barrie is to widen your horizons. We edited The Better Part Of Heaven as a free-standing book, that just happened to be Book 5 of Report. So we didn’t talk about the other books much—we just focused on getting the “Pacific writings” in order. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, during that week he taught me how to write.
I think the goal in Report was to write poetry in every way possible. That’s what I mean about Barrie teaching me to widen my horizons. Why write Report in one way, when I could write the twenty-two books of Report in twenty-two different ways? So, as we move from book to book in the early days, the books are all written differently. One of the things I recognized in Layton’s poetry was a stylistic consistency that really didn’t appeal to me.
So every time I sit down to write a book of Report I’m trying to do something different. With a poem/book like “Radar Interference” the fact that it is different is pretty obvious. With The Better Part of Heaven and Islands there may be more similarities than differences.
Herman Melville was a guy from New York. For all his time at sea, he was still a guy from New York. And I’m a guy from New York. So I feel a real connection with Melville. He is probably one of my big influences. Probably the most influential prose writer. Typee, Omoo, Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man loom large in my reading life.
BW: One other recognition that you mention in “Writing My Report,” i.e. the afterword to Heaven, is that a lot of the writing in that book is prose. This interests me, who gave up traditional lined poetry in my own long poem for various reasons. The voice that one hears in both the poetry and the prose in Heaven is recognizably the same voice. What differentiations would you point to that make something a poem and something a prose text?
KN: Poetry has an insistent rhythm. The rhythm in prose is often a lot more relaxed. That being said, the two things I seemed to be interested in while writing The Better Part Of Heaven were narrating the stories of the things that were happening to me and, somewhat in Romantic fashion, trying to capture the high poetic moments.
In brief, I threw pieces that narrated into prose and kept poetry for the poetic moments.
I agree that it’s all one voice, mostly. Often, in prose we’re hearing from the tourist, and in the poetry we are hearing from the poet. They are the same person, as I have often said. In some moments I’m the tourist, in others I’m the poet. That’s one of the things that bothers me about that book: we hear from the tourist too often. We get a lot more of the poet in Islands.
BW: One of the roles you assume as the poet is “the lover.” Though Book 7, Islands, comes between them, and takes us back to the south seas, and in fact reintroduces history to Report (the south Pacific as the site for atomic testing), Books 6 and 8 (The Book of False Return and The Book of Return) focus on love and read as pretty dejected poems. “Want” is a “vapour trail” in the first and in the second you confess to not knowing what you want and feeling that your life, lacking love, is “insignificant.” The Lovers is one of the major arcana in the Tarot, and we know that eventually the cards come to provide a parallel formal model for the books of Report. Is this where the lovers are being regretted or exert influence by their absence?
KN: Messed up or thwarted sexuality is the engine that drives “The Waste Land.” That was certainly something that I noticed. And the Tarot pack gives us The Lovers as the sixth card of the Major Arcana. So Book Six, The Book of False Return, takes that up.
And, again, I found elements of that in The Martyrology. The kind of “life writing” that bp was doing really appealed to me.
When I first started writing poetry, I figured that it ALL was going to be love poetry. I was kind of surprised when I discovered other things to write about.
“Life writing” kind of exists as the opposite of History. Or “the other way” of telling the story. Instead of focusing on the machinations of the Nazis, let’s focus on the realities of the life of Anne Frank. Which tells us more about the times?
In The Martyrology, I found another way of doing things that really appealed to me.
BW: So is what you call “life writing” the way that the lyric impulse remains part of the long poem’s inclusiveness?
KN: The documentary Canadian long poem (Livesay, Geddes, Pratt) often strives to tell some kind of objective story. It seeks to adhere to “the facts.”
The Martyrology is shamelessly personal, and the saints of language are Nichol’s own personal mythology. In that regard, I think he's following a Blakean impulse, to find a way to explore the truths of the self. In exploring the self, Blake has one methodology and Wordsworth has another. But it’s all part of the same project.
Dudek's long poem is quite different from Nichol’s, in that he really doesn’t want to get into autobiography. He’s happy to explore his own psychology, but he really doesn’t want to talk about his personal life. bpNichol is happy to talk about ALL OF IT: what’s sacred to him, what’s happened in his life, what it’s like to lose a child you were expecting, the emotional fuck-ups that happened in his youth, the saints of language he believes in, all of it.
In writing my long poem, I think I chose to follow in the footsteps of Nichol. I’m willing to talk about all of it too. So the long poem will be inclusive of everything. Following Barrie, I even make up a couple of language saints: St As Is and St Art. I don’t delve into their stories, but I invoke them.
Following Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Nichol, how can you NOT talk about the realities of the self? So, starting with the Romantics, the lyric impulse is factored into the long poem. And it's there in Eliot and Pound, even if they're saying that it isn’t.
BW: Sure. The Pisan Cantos are nothing if not intensely personal.
The diaristic aspect of Report is most obvious in Book 9, which really is in diary form. Talk about that book. Was the first part actually kept as a kind of daybook?
KN: Book 9 is 1984: A Year in My Life. For 1984, Endre published a poetry agenda with The Muses’ Company. There were 52 poems, and weeks of days in which to write down your appointments and such. I couldn’t pass this up. So I wrote something in all of the day spaces. And then I wrote twelve monthly summaries. Which kind of talked about everything from an oblique angle.
The two “subtexts” were Orwell’s 1984 and Basho’s Long Journey to the Deep North.
Sometimes I’d write a little poem. Some days there was just one or two lines/statements. I remember one that just read “Ethiopia.” The reader was being encouraged to go back and study what happened in 1984. This was the life writing—what happened in History?
BW: With Book 10, The Wheel, it seems to me that you finally establish a voice or form that you will exploit throughout much of the remainder of Report. There will be exceptions, like Radar Interference and Island Stars and Tenor later, but the great bulk of what follows Book 10 embodies a common way of writing poetry. Does that seem true to you? Were you conscious of such an arrival, formally speaking?
KN: When I wrote The Wheel I was conscious of having written something pretty good. But the kind of “arrival” you’re speaking about: nope. I wasn’t looking for a stylistic consistency in which to write the poem. In fact, I was trying to avoid one. I just stumbled from book to book to book, creating forms.
The Wheel was the day, the twenty-four hours. I “borrowed” bp’s methodology from The Book of Hours, and wrote every section of The Wheel in an hour, carving up the day. I don’t think I wrote all twenty-four hours, but I wrote in all of the different parts of the day, for an hour. One day I’d write 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., and another day I’d write 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. I wrote all that stuff down, and then I erased it in putting the final poem together. I buried the methodology.
Does “a style” emerge in the second half of Report? I would tend to say no, because of all of the exceptions. Books 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19 and 22. Those books have nothing in common with The Wheel or with Notes for Reconstructing Babylon. I know what you’re talking about—there’s a kind of long poem form in The Wheel and Notes and Fragments from the Lost Book of Mu and Judgement, or The Wordsworth Project that looks quite similar. Also, those books might be a bit more coherent in driving their points home. Those are the books that are quite good at creating an overall impression. And I really have nothing to say about how a reader reads. As the poet who was writing the poem, every book seemed different to me. But I understand what you’re saying, and it’s the reader who interprets and comments and confers meaning, not the poet.
BW: Well, I would not entirely agree with that. Surely the poet deals with meaning too, although of course the reader finds things that the poet was unconscious of, both at the level of statement and at the level of form. I tend to think that the poet is mostly unconscious of the music of the language, and, if the poet is good, the poem works wonderfully at a musical level. But as for meaning, surely in choosing the things you write about in Report, making connections, exploring subjects, you as the poet are making meaning. A reader may say that “Sailing to Byzantium” is about Irish politics, but that doesn’t make that statement correct. Misunderstanding means being off the mark in a reading. No?
KN: I once had a student who said that Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was about the Statue of Liberty. They could see the statue out there in the harbour in the poem. So yes, there is inventive misunderstanding. And, of course, non-inventive misunderstanding.
Yes, of course the poet constructs meaning. We’re on the cusp of talking about Radar Interference, which has the poet actively constructing non-meaning. That’s always a possibility too.
BW: Since you've brought it up, let’s talk about Radar Interference, which constitutes Book 11 of Report. That book is made up of six-line stanzas in which, to quote you, “words are liberated from meaning,” or apparently so, and you evoke a “poetry of words under erasure.” Some of your usual concerns can be spotted in the poem—you refer to Jack Kerouac’s epitaph, for example, which is “The Road is Life,” which strikes me as Norrisian. But on the whole, Radar Interference seems like a very unusual essay for you. What were you up to there?
KN: I was at a Chris Dewdney reading where he read Spring Trances in The Control Emerald Night. Before he read the poem he said something like, Don’t worry about what it means. Just let it wash over you. I did as I was told, and it was quite a pleasing experience.
Don’t worry about what it means, was an interesting prompt to write something in a different way. So that's what I set out to do. Radar Interference is kind of my “I Am the Walrus.” I set out to write a poem that didn’t mean anything, that would frustrate a reader’s desire for meaning. The line was the unit of composition, and I organized the poem into six-line stanzas. I did my best to make sure that the lines had nothing to do with one another. If anything makes sense, it is purely accidental. I was trying to write a poem in fragments that makes no sense at all.
At the same time, I tried to write interesting lines. I wanted the lines to be compelling. I was sort of using the techniques of “The Waste Land” to stop making sense. Why not? Why not have one book in Report that was doing something completely different.
One should never read Beautiful Losers as a self-help book. A student of mine did that once, and it took me six weeks to rein him back in to realms of sanity. But I was probably taking F.’s advice to “Connect nothing.” Finally, there was an opportunity in which I could do that.
I pretty much saw all of the books of Report as experiments. Radar Interference was an interesting experiment.
BW: Well, F was giving the opposite advice of E.M. Forster’s “Only connect,” I’d wager--the postmodern push-back against an earlier generation. I gather that Dudek had difficulties dealing with Radar Interference?
KN: I don’t think Louis ever said anything to me about Radar Interference. He never said very much to me about my work, and I never said very much to him about his work. We tended to talk about everything else. Maybe once a year for twenty seconds we’d commend one another for something one of us had written. I’m sure if I was hanging out as much with Irving it would have been a very different kind of conversation. We would have spent 80% of the time talking about Irving’s poetry. Louis was a bonafide intellectual who liked having intellectual discussions.
BW: One of my favourite books of Report is The Concertos, Book 15. You will think, well, that’s just Bruce liking poems that have a classical music story to them. And you’d be right! But only partly. I know that you wrote these poems while listening to concertos by Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and others, a repertoire that is not your usual turf, I think. But I like the poems formally too, and “vocally,” i.e. because of the line and voice you use. “The pained cry of the angels,” as you put it in the first “Concerto,” seems to me to represent something of the tone and concerns of these poems. That and “the sweet sad music of humanity.”
KN: I don’t know a lot about classical music, but I like Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, and Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos. To those I added concertos by Bach and Beethoven, maybe a few others. I wrote all of that stuff down in my notebooks and removed the citations as I was working on the manuscript. I figured the reader could figure out which was which. Which is, of course, nuts.
The methodology of The Concertos was to write the poems while the concertos were playing. When the movement stopped, the stanza stopped. If there were three movements there were three stanzas.
The “voice” of the poem was trying to follow the featured instrument. I think I wrote twenty of them and kept the best ten.
BW: We’re entering the final group of books now, the seven that appeared in 2005 as Books 16-22. In the first two, history seems to come rushing back in, with first Babylon and then the so-called lost continent of Mu. Yet this last volume begins with Adorno’s famous saying, “no poetry after Auschwitz.” Can you talk about the impulses behind those two books and how they fit into the overall architecture of Report?
KN: Dudek’s big poem was Atlantis, and he pursued that lost continent. So I felt I had no choice but to pursue Mu, the lost continent of the Pacific.
And Joyce went after ancient Greece and The Odyssey. And we’ve gotten a lot more of the Greek classics with Anne Carson. So I decided that, for me, it would be Babylon and Gilgamesh.
And yes, at that point in time, I felt the necessity to reencounter History. Report had gone into a lot of subjective areas. I’d been reading Kundera, who is acutely aware of History in books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
I think Report has the architecture of a sprawling city. It wasn’t designed with neatness in mind. In fact, it probably wasn’t designed at all.
These books are certainly formidable. And at that time I was thinking a lot about Pound’s Drafts and Fragments. Which became Notes and Fragments. And notes was doubled. Musical notes and the notes you jot down. Somehow, out of notes, we’d reconstruct Babylon. Mu, in its lostness, yielded fragments. I was reading some wacky, esoteric book about Mu, which pulled a piece of evidence from here and another shard of evidence from there.
I don’t remember why I quoted Adorno. I was floored when the first Gulf War started. Contemporary atrocities started coming at the poem fast and hard.
BW: Yes. The ruins of Babylon are apparently right across from Saddam Hussein’s palace. So the contemporary world overlays the ancient world, or confronts it menacingly. And you essentially condemn the contemporary world when you state that “the true test is that we still find war acceptable” in Book 16, and later say that “History.../is the true hell.” Given that Mu is mythic and not historical, unlike Babylon, were you fleeing into the poetic, or into the mythical to escape the world before your eyes? Was the re-encounter with history, as you put it, simply too depressing? After “Mu,” you return to the intensely personal material for two further books, The Book of Broken Moonlight and Boulevard Saint Laurent.
KN: Well, Mu becomes another “act of the imagination.” The book I was reading about Mu was either “fanciful” or “bullshit” depending upon your persuasion. I kind of felt stuck with it, so I was just making up stuff as I went along, and sometimes just freely associating.
In Atlantis, Dudek goes back to Europe. I didn’t go back to the South Seas for Fragments From The Lost Book of Mu. I just kept making stuff up.
So yes, there was less responding to what was going on in the world with that book, and with the ones that followed. I came back out to the world to discuss “the Wordsworth project,” which is the long poem, and the century as it was ending. And my long poem, as it was ending.
BW: Right. Book 20, Judgment, or The Wordsworth Project, seems like a crucial achievement in Report. It includes a kind of brief survey of the history of the long poem, for one thing, starting in 1799 with the short text of Wordsworth’s The Prelude and ending with your own long poem, precisely two centuries later. Judgment as a term is multidimensional: you don't hesitate to evoke The Last Judgment on the one hand—it’s clearly the image on the relevant Tarot card—or to accuse yourself of “poor judgment” in a love affair on the other. And coming now close to the end of your long poem, you seem almost happy to admit that it doesn’t “cohere.”
KN: Well, none of the multi-book Modernist or Postmodernist long poems “cohere,” whether we are talking about Pound’s Cantos or Nichol’s The Martyrology. But they do something else. Poe would hate them because they don’t really have a “unity of effect.” But they have a “multiplicity of effect,” which is maybe what they were going for all along.
BW: What is the “purity that resides outside history” that you evoke on the final page of Report?
KN: “and now I am returned / to a purity that resides outside History.” Hmm. The way I read it now, the purity I’m being returned to is “lyric poetry.” The long poem is done, and I no longer have to contend with History if I don’t want to. I can go back to the pure lyric. The long poem, the “report,” involved me with History, and now I can leave it (and its muse) behind if I want to.
Whether that’s entirely true. . .
Once the poet gets “involved” with History, can they ever leave it? Probably not. Certainly not in a time of pandemic. I was probably just getting a little giddy about the long poem about to end, and not having to write it anymore. And lyric poetry sure was looking good to me!
BW: Well, let me quote John Berryman from The Dream Songs:
The only happy people in the world are those
who do not have to write long poems...
KN: That’s really something from the pre-pandemic world.
It's hard to imagine “happy people” in 2022.
I was happy to get out from under Report back in 2001. Writing anything for twenty-five years starts to feel like a job. The last couple of books were less fun than the earlier ones. Also, towards the end, you’re trying to solve the problem of how it ends. I ended it by having the Muse of History faint.
BW: That seems like a very cogent way to end.
KN: Sure, fainting muses. A multi-book long poem actually ending is certainly a shock.
