2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Tolu Oloruntoba

The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba
Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Tolu Oloruntoba [photo credit: Franctal Studios] is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium. His poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Entropy, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for health authorities in British Columbia. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver Area, where he lives with his family.

There aren’t too many poets who already have a new title published by the time they’ve a book shortlisted for such a prestigious prize. Given your second collection, Each One a Furnace (McClelland and Stewart, 2022), appeared this past spring, what do you see as the relationship between the two collections?

Thanks, rob. Because I had been emerging for some time (about 20 years) before my first collection was published, I had accumulated some manuscripts’ worth of poems. So, although the poems in my first two collections were mostly written between 2017 and 2021, the momentum of my former work carried me through. The two books are part of a continuum in my mind, a trilogy centering existential inquiry. My vehicles / motifs in this inquiry continue to be mental health / illness; dysfunctional family dynamics / the legacy of trauma; migrancy / instability; and urban ennui / disillusionment with a broken society within a setting of climate collapse. I stopped trying to veer away from my key meditations, and in each of the successive books, I have been able to refine the questions I am asking. The scope of my inquiry has remained the same, however.

What, for you, is the process of putting together a manuscript? At what point in the process of writing the poems that became The Junta of Happenstance, or even Each One a Furnace, did the shapes of the larger manuscripts begin to reveal themselves?

For most months of the year, I do not write many poems. I simply read, work, and wait. I realize now that this is my subconscious incubating and associating a lot of material. However, for two to three glorious months a year, my built-up psychic energy releases itself in dozens of poems. They invariably carry the heft of my recent meditations. The last manuscript I completed, in 2021, was apocalyptic. Which makes sense when you consider covid and the recent state of the world. I begin to sense the shape of a manuscript when the initial sheaf of poems, usually about ten or so, begin to coalesce around a theme that reveals the slope of my subconscious. For The Junta of Happenstance, the poems I began with arrived while I still lived in Pittsburgh, PA, about a year before I began a cross-continental drive to Surrey in BC. I had also recently begun to seek help for my mental health. That reckoning with my personal fragility and the precarity of my existence on this continent, animated the early poems. Some of the poems, like the ones in the final section of the book, were incantatory poems that helped me survive the worst of my dysphoria and panic. A poem like “Settlers’ Effects,” for instance was written in fragments while we left our former home behind, heavy with disillusionment. Sometimes, while driving, I would ask my partner to text a certain phrase to me before I forgot. Or I’d hold it in my head till we got to a rest stop. A poem like “Emerging” was written when we arrived in BC and began to look for a place to rent. The bee sting I referred to literally happened as we left one of the places we had been viewing. So, the book is a non-chronological account of my journey from Pittsburgh to Surrey, all the while searching for mental health and confronting the bloody realities and histories of the three countries I have lived in. On the other hand, I began to write Each One a Furnace when, nine months into my time in this country I lost my job. In the distressing six months that followed, I was able to channel a lot of my confusion, rage, fear, and sense of instability into the manuscript. In this way, if each of my books represents an era of my life, my eventual bibliography may be viewed as a somewhat autobiographical account of my life. I maintain complete deniability of course and will invoke my application of poetic license in any required parts of it, as all poets must. J

Your work as a physician connects you to a wide swath of poet-doctors over the years, from John Keats and William Carlos Williams to Shane Neilson and Conor Mc Donnell. Is this something you are conscious of as you are writing? How do you see these two elements of your life connecting, or even impacting each other?

I consider myself a poet that happens to have medical training and experience. It is not a central part of my identity. I simply use the resources my medical career left me with. Write what you know, eh? Or at least use it to frame what you don’t know and need to know. I view my project management and health technology work in corporate North America in the same way. It all goes in the sausage (if you pardon the gross analogy). I will admit, though, that my time in medical towers has improved my facility with Latinate and Greek etymologies, which then help me wend my way around the English language. Because I was a sensitive young person, my time in medicine also affected me deeply, and perhaps increased my capacity to imbibe and integrate information. I was a trivia club captain in my final year of medical school, for instance, which was a natural outlet for all the information I used to stash (and continue to collect). The impressions of medical practice, of course, sometimes find expression in poetry, but never because I am deliberately invoking them.

Given your self-described twenty years of “emerging,” what shifts, if at all, are you noticing now that you’ve begun to publish books? Has your relationship to writing changed through the process?

Because I have achieved the literary goal I held so close for two decades (getting ONE book published), I find myself in need of a new mission. This feeling of deflation and alienation after one's debut has been well described by several authors, most recently (for me) Alexander Chee in this short Twitter thread.

So what does a dog that has been chasing a car do when it finally catches it? I guess we're about to find out. The primary thought I have now, though, is that I have written everything I want to say in poetry for now (between the two books and three unpublished manuscripts). Time to try some other genres. Perhaps that long-abandoned novel of mine, or a screenplay. This might just be the massive burnout speaking, but it is how I feel at this time.

I’m curious about your relationship to form. Have you a potential shape in mind when you begin to compose? Are there particular structures in the back of your head, or is the process more intuitive, formed through the process of composition?

Occasionally, I give myself a literary challenge: to create a cento, or write a sestina or villanelle. More often, though, the form comes to me when I am writing the poem. I am in the “write first, edit later” camp, so I try to intuit where the poem needs to breathe, after (most of) it is written. I put my stanza breaks there. If the poem is more breathless, my lines will tend to be longer and stanza breaks fewer, or absent. As I arrange the poem around breath and format the poem for the page, I sometimes follow the interesting possibilities that occur to me based on what I know about form.