Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Liz Howard
McClelland & Stewart, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.
Your debut collection managed a great deal of critical attention, including winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. Did you feel any kind of pressure when attempting to move beyond the poems in that collection to compose something new? Or were you already well on your way into the new book?
After my first book, the question of what I would do next was often posed to me, especially after all the aforementioned attention. The success of that book was exciting, affirming, and overwhelming but also invited criticism about my worth. After a time, I reconciled myself to the fact that whatever I did it would be held up against the unexpected success of the first and found lacking. This gave me some permission to “write whatever I wanted”. When I was a student in Dionne Brand’s poetry workshop she talked about bringing forward whatever she felt wasn’t adequately addressed in one book into the next. I had also received some criticism about the first book not being accessible. In the second book I wanted to work with direct address, to write about my lived experiences in a less coded way, and to curtail my habit of linguistic pyrotechnics (failed somewhat on that count).
I completely agree with Brand’s suggestion of continuing a conversation or thought: to write simply isn’t a matter of addressing the perceived failures of prior work, but a consideration of evolution, even as one might engage with certain themes or concerns in an ongoing way. Do you approach your work in terms of ongoingness, or a kind of progression or evolution? Or are you working from manuscript to manuscript, poem to poem, to get to that next point?
In my writing practice I’m mostly focused on trying to get something, anything down on the page. I do a lot of “free”, “automatic”, or “stream-of-consciousness” writing, filling up pages of my notebook. Over several weeks I will return to these passages and find phrases, lines, images and so on that I can use to build a poem. I have the disposition of a scavenger, making use of what is on hand, and what I am reading and my larger concerns and daily life also enter my writing. When I get to the stage where I am putting a manuscript together I do have a sense in mind of how it might be in conversation with my prior work. I also have an urgency to work against the limit of my abilities. When I’d go out exploring in the bush as a kid I’d often be looking as far ahead as I could, trying to see places where the outline of trees thinned against the sky. I knew this meant that there could be a lake or some sort of clearing there and I felt compelled to go and see if I was right. I have a similar sensation when I’m writing. Pushing further in an experimental sort of way (hypothesis: a lake is there) to see what is on the other side. Sometimes it’s a lake and sometimes it’s a void. I find both interesting.
Much of the collection explores your attempts to reconcile your relationship with your father, from his absence during your childhood, to your eventual reconnection mere days prior to his death. What was it that prompted you to work through this material through the form of the poem? What is it you think the form of the poem allowed that might not have been possible otherwise?
Unfortunately, my father died 20 minutes after I arrived at the hospital. I was hoping for at least a day but that was not in the cards. He had resurfaced in Halifax in poor health and had reached out to family for records in order to receive health care. One night I received a call from my aunt saying that he was in hospital and in a coma and that she was flying to be with him. I asked if it would be okay for me to fly out as well and booked a flight for that morning. When I landed and turned my cell signal back on I had texts from aunt saying to get there as soon as possible. I got a cab and the driver tried to engage me in friendly conversation about where I was flying in from and what had brought me to Halifax. I tried to be polite and kept my answers as general as possible but when he continued to press I had to explain what was happening and he got quiet after that. When I managed to find the ICU I saw my father for the first time. That moment defies description for me but in a way it was like seeing myself. I resemble my mother in many ways but everything I found strange (not necessarily in a bad way) about my face was there in my father’s. A few minutes after I arrived a nurse announced that he was “in the process of actively dying”. After he passed I decided to stay in Halifax to help my aunt with body and funeral arrangements. I was in Halifax for a week, staying by myself at a bed and breakfast across from the hospital. I had a lot of time to think and I started writing and the writing took the form of a letter to a friend. After I sent the letter (email) I found myself returning to it. It was only a couple of degrees removed from a raw accounting of that time and the larger context it unfolded within. When you, rob, asked me a few times via email for work for your online poetry journal DUSIE I tried to edit the letter into something resembling a poem. I didn’t know if it was a poem. I’d never written anything like it. Who was going to tell me it wasn’t a poem, though? After it was published a number of people reached out to me to say how much they loved it and were touched by it. When I was invited to give readings the audience would often connect deeply with that poem.
Why did I explore all of this in poetry? I think poetry allows for compression, uncertainty, and the unsaid to exist simultaneously which mirrors how I seem to experience the world. Poetry allows me to transmit some of that experience in the most authentic way possible, as a kind of offering, invitation, or inquiry.
How do I feel differently as poet in regards to this second book? I feel as though, through trial, error, and great effort, I have widened the scope of what is possible for me in terms of form and what I can be in conversation with. I’ve also come to a realization that my work has a life entirely outside of my own, and I’m grateful to those who have told me that my work impacted them in positive way, be that creatively or in being seen.
Was there anything that writing through grief revealed that you weren’t expecting? Are the poems in Letters in a Bruised Cosmos part of a longer, ongoing process?
I suppose that I was relieved (a kind of unexpected happiness—that’s not quite the word but it’ll do) that I was able to sublimate my pain, grief, into something that spoke to other people. I wasn’t sure if the book was too much or not enough. I often have dreams where the flesh of my arms falls away and the raw, exposed nerves are dangling out in front of me. Writing this book was like composing with those raw, dangling nerves. Would I be able to have the manual “control” to craft something that was more than a reinscription of my personal hardships? By the time the manuscript was finalized I felt that I had accomplished more than that through elevated language, historical consciousness, and scaling—from invoking the quantum, the biological, the personal, the sociohistorical and the cosmological.
I would say yes; the poems of Letters are part of an ongoing process.
Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Letters in a Bruised Cosmos was completed? What have you been working on since?
I have had new poems published in The Ampersand, Canadian Literature, Room Magazine and The Capilano Review.
I am currently
working on a hybrid prose-ish work titled The Confessions of Electra
Rousseau (it will likely contain some poetry, memoir, fiction, speculative
memoir, auto-theory, and true crime tropes and general weirdness) and a work of
prose poetry that will continue my ongoing re-writing/investigation into the
poem The Song of Hiawatha with a focus on the effects of colonization on
mental health, the representation of Indigenous women in literature, and the
resurgence of Indigenous voices, knowledges, and place names that the original
poem appropriated or erased.