rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Alice Burdick

 

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author most recently of Ox Lost, Snow Deep (a feed dog book/Anvil Press), and of Deportment, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press, Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press, Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press, and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her practice often includes collaboration, and recently her poetry has been used in Woodlight, a series of three films created by Hear Here and Erin Donovan. Her poems have appeared in Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotian Writers (Boularderie Island Press, 2018), GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), as well as other anthologies. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She has authored three cookbooks for local publisher Formac Publishing. From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair, and has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  She is also a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.

Alice Burdick reads in Ottawa on Thursday, November 28, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest, and will be conducting a poetry workshop as part of same on Saturday, November 30 (pre-registration required).

rob mclennan: When did you first start writing?

Alice Burdick: I first started writing as a little kid, and did a lot of writing and drawing. The writing was sometimes plays, sometimes stories, and sometimes poems. As an older teenager I really got into it, though, mainly poems.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AB: When I drew, I would usually be telling a story out loud at the same time, and often it would be with friends, as well as by myself. There was a lot of art and music in my home, and fairy tales and folk tales of all sorts were inspirational. I remember we had a copy of Archy and Mehitabel in the home and that was a rich source; nonsense verse by Edith Sitwell and Edward Lear. It was an easy leap from description to far-out narratives that happened. As with any new poet, a lot of my earlier pieces were a bit overwrought. But once I accepted sound into the process, it opened up.

rm: What did that foray into sound look like? And how did you first start connecting to other writers?

AB: It was the moment when I understood the role of rhythm, internal rhyme, disjunction, the out loud quality of the words on the silent page. That the writing starts with joy and play in sound, and they can transmit a mood or meaning with more velocity. Once I got that, the writing started to come more easily, in general.

I was lucky enough to be in The Dream Class as a teenager, where I was exposed to many different contemporary poets in Toronto, as well as the Small Press Book Fair. After high school ended, it was mainly through my partner at the time, Victor Coleman, as well as the Small Press Book Fair, that I found out about and became friends with a lot of writers, especially poets, who were also usually active in small and micro press.

rm: What was The Dream Class?

AB: The Dream Class was an extra-curricular writing class through the Toronto School Board. As far as I know, only Victor Coleman was the primary instructor. It was held at Christie Pits High School on Bloor Street, so I would travel there one night a week via subway with a couple of friends who also took the class. It is where I first heard Stuart Ross and Paul Dutton read, and found out about Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, et al. It was a great class and really showed me that the world of poetry is as wide as the world of song.

rm: It sounds as though you were engaged with some of this stuff rather early. Were you submitting to journals once high school ended? Were you publishing, self-publishing or quietly working? Who else was around, and what did your activity look like?

AB: In the last year of high school in Toronto, a group of friends and I who also participated in the Dream Class put together a journal called 21 Down (referring to our ages) and it included poems, silly articles, stories, photography etc. It lasted a few publications. Then I moved with my mom and my younger brother to Espanola, as she'd gotten a job as a high school art teacher there. I'd failed my last year of high school as I mainly didn't show up at all and so I graduated in Espanola. I wrote a lot there, on my own. After that point, I moved to Toronto, and then joined in on The Eternal Network, a chapbook publisher with Victor Coleman, and it was through this press I published my first chapbook. I met so many stalwarts of the scene then: Stuart Ross, jwcurry, John Barlow, Jennifer Lovegrove, Nicky Drumbolis, Maggie Helwig, Beth and Joy Learn, Daniel F. Bradley, Clint Burnham, Katy Chan, etc etc. It really was a lively scene in Toronto then. I worked in a cheese store, wrote and drew, then hung out with folks and attended readings. I did a lot of reading of various texts as well, new and old.

rm: I know you had a few chapbooks published through that period. How did you get from (and through) there to the publication of your first full-length collection?

AB: yeah, quite a few were published, both via my press and others. That mainly happened in the earlier to mid 1990s, and then there was a lull. My mother and then my boyfriend passed way within 5 years of each other and I just spent time living, working, and grieving. I was writing too, but not publishing. Every now and then I’d send my manuscript (which was called Anthropomorphic Pride) out to publishers but finally it landed with Pedlar Press. Stuart Ross became the editor for it, and that has continued for other books since. He’s always been an advocate.

rm: Do you see a difference in the way you currently approach a poem, or a manuscript, compared to those early days?

AB: Not really. To me, writing poems seems like one long project. So it is always the same and always different. I have taken different approaches over the years, and have found different incentives/prompts, such as listening to music or watching films at the same time. Maybe the biggest difference is that I accept that poems and manuscripts don't always need to be published, and it just comes down to the writing. 

rm: How does a poem begin? Even if you think in terms of your work being a kind of single, ongoing project, when you are writing, do you think in terms of one poem at a time, clusters of poems or manuscripts?

ab: Usually I just think – I am going to write! And then I write, and it is usually just a focus on the writing, not knowing if it will be a single long poem, or if it will become a longer series of poems, linked or not linked. If I am writing in response to a specific thing initially, then sometimes there's an initial containment because of that constraint, but then it usually widens a bit. I don't usually think of something becoming a book when I'm writing the poem(s) but that seems to be something granting bodies like.

rm: Did having a selected poems, Deportment (WLU Press, 2018), that Alessandro Porco put together, shift your perspective or provide any unexpected insight into your ongoing work? What was the process of putting that collection together? Were you involved at all?

AB: yes, Alessandro communicated with me a fair amount – he checked in with me when he had the list of poems under consideration, and we talked about the process together. I also wrote an afterword for the selected, where I talked about how my writing life developed. I have to say that it was illuminating (and surprising) to read what Alex wrote about my writing. I am a reader but I also didn’t go to university, so my understanding of terminology and theory is a bit limited. It was interesting to see what he sees in my writing, as generally I feel like I’m receiving transmissions and then transcribing them as poetry, and mainly don’t plan on a particular effect. It was fascinating to read his take on my poetry.

rm: Has your approach or consideration of your own work shifted since that process?

AB: yes, I think I accept my weirdness more. In the past I sometimes was concerned about “wrapping” up the endings of poems, and now I accept an energetic continuity!

rm: You suggest that your work is a kind of single, ongoing project. How do you see your new collection as part of that trajectory?

AB: I think as I get older, the continuum becomes more apparent. Like, poems are a living practice. Ox Lost, Snow Deep is essentially a chapter in the big book of life. I’m more comfortable with longer poems, and these are occasionally multi-page poems. Also there is more interplay (I think) between the surreal and personal aspects of the poems. 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

 

Kathleen McClung : Process Note #48 : Questions of Buoyancy

The 'process note' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note by Kathleen McClung is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

I need quiet to write a poem. Deep quiet. Right now, though, as I write these sentences in the thick of election season, there is extraordinarily little quiet. So much campaigning! So much commentary! And so many of us are working terribly hard to Get Out the Vote by phone calling,  texting, door knocking, and—my preferred method—handwriting letters urging people to engage in the democratic process and cast their ballots. I’ve written over three hundred letters and postcards this season, but not much poetry.

I wrote nearly all the poems in Questions of Buoyancy between 2016-2020, when Donald Trump was in the White House, a dark time in our history. For the first few months of his term, the poetic form that provided most solace for me as a writer was the cento. I found comfort and courage crafting new poems by weaving together lines by poets I admire and love, including Dawn McGuire, Danusha Laméris, Robert Eastwood, Robert Aquinas McNally, and others. I also wrote “Glosa for Those Who Pretend” building from four lines by my friend Grace Marie Grafton in her poem, “Detour.” I wrapped myself in a shawl of words from others. That shawl helped keep me warm and keep me connected.

During that dark time, I also turned to historical figures, mainly women, for sustenance and inspiration. Two linked sestinas open my book. They’re based on an 1883 tragedy near Año Nuevo Island in northern California. Two lighthouse keepers drowned when their small boat capsized, leaving their wives stranded on the small island. As I read about the widows, I became fascinated by their resilience and resourcefulness and how they survived. Writing these two persona poems strengthened my resolve to not simply endure Trump but to protest and resist. “The Comrade,” a pantoum that follows “Whistle Keepers, 1883” and “Ida’s Song, 1945,” is another persona poem, written in the voice of Annie Sullivan, who was Helen Keller’s teacher and friend, and perhaps the person most responsible for raising Keller’s political consciousness and spurring her activism.

I structured my book by grouping poems into two sections, one more externally focused and the other more internally focused. Part I, “Weave them to a wider dream,” begins with these persona poems about historical women and then moves across time to incorporate a variety of other characters, including people I passed hurriedly on sidewalks in San Francisco during the 2020-21 Covid pandemic: a jazz combo setting up outside a café, a cluster of handsome young firemen, a teenager waiting to cross a street, a little boy chasing a pigeon. I added these pandemic poems in the course of revising, reorganizing, and re-titling my manuscript over a six-year period. I finished the first iteration in 2018 and ultimately signed a book contract with Longship Press in early 2024. In the meantime, I submitted to about thirty presses and contests, and honestly, there was a long period during the pandemic when I submitted nowhere. I had plenty of quiet for writing in 2020 and 2021. But publishing a book requires a complex blend of actions and attitudes far beyond quiet. Is it a stretch to suggest that trying to publish a poetry book is sort of like political campaigning for office? “PICK ME! PICK ME!” Clearly, the presidential election is weighing on me as I write this essay.

Part II of the book, “Mend quietly what’s torn,” turns inward and includes poems about my family, my health, and my partner’s health. The title poem of the collection, “Questions of Buoyancy,” meditates on a family legend about my father losing—and finding!—a contact lens on the bottom of a swimming pool. I struggled to come up with a title for this rare free verse poem—mostly I work in traditional forms such as sonnets and villanelles—so I’m grateful to my partner Tom McAninley for suggesting this apt title. Water shows up often in the book—oceans, lakes, pools, tears, rain (and drought). The challenge of staying afloat emotionally and spiritually also shows up in almost all the poems. I don’t use the word buoyancy very often in my day-to-day life, but I love it. And, damn, we need it.

Jim Daniels, Julie Kane, and Amy Miller, the brilliant and generous poets who wrote blurbs for the back cover, praise my use of form in Questions of Buoyancy. I am grateful for their kind words and want to say a bit here about why and how formal poems feel so good to write. Mainly, I find formal verse to be liberating and freeing, rather than stiff or confining. A form equips me to explore complicated emotional territory. I’ve said before that, for me, a sonnet is like a canoe. I get in and paddle. It takes me somewhere, helps me travel across sometimes-still, sometimes-choppy water. It’s not very big, but it feels sturdy. And I like how it curves at both ends.

The book ends with a sonnet that has lots and lots of water in fourteen lines. I wrote it on retreat during a huge rainstorm along the Sonoma County coast in California. I was staying by myself and, listening to the downpour, I started thinking about the forest inhabitants just beyond my sturdy cottage. To end this essay—and to keep moving through this strange election season—here’s one last question of buoyancy.

“Gualala Winter”

Keep dreaming of gray deer asleep in woods

as sheets of rain claim every living thing—

tailor bees, bracelet cones, chipmunks, hawk broods

high up in nests that sway but last. Each wing,

leaf, stem of fern—soaked through, wet to the core—

endures these January storms we track,

evade behind our screens, our twice-locked doors.

Nervous, we curse old roofs, new leaks. Come back.

Mend quietly what’s torn. Listen to wind.

Confuse it with Pacific surf close by,

cars crossing flooded roads. Gray deer may find

logs hollowed out, may curl inside, stay mostly dry

under mossed bark. Or not. Our sun will rise,

night storms will end. We animals open our eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kathleen McClung is the author of five poetry collections including her newest book, Questions of Buoyancy (Longship Press, 2024). Other titles include A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. Winner of the Morton Marr, Maria W. Faust, and Rita Dove national poetry prizes, her work appears widely in literary journals and anthologies. In 2024 she was a finalist for San Francisco poet laureate, and from 2021-23 she served as guest editor for The MacGuffin, a Michigan-based literary journal. Kathleen is a faculty member in the English department at Skyline College, where she directed the annual Women on Writing conference for ten years. She also teaches for San Francisco State’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and leads private master classes for Bay Area writers. www.kathleenmcclung.com

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com

brandy ryan : Three erasures

 

 

 

 

 

 

brandy ryan is a queer poet who likes to slip between genre and form. she has published four chapbooks – full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), After Pulse (with Kerry Manders, kfb, 2019),  once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014), in the third person reluctant (Gap Riot Press, 2024). other pieces appear in lockbox, long con magazine, CV2, Windsor Review, and MediaTropes, among others. brandy has become obsessed with collage over the last few years, leaving tiny bits of paper and sticky surfaces in her wake. two collage series appear in Contemporary Collage Magazine 31 and Beautiful Trash Vol. 3. in August 2024, her “strange creatures” collages were part of a group show alongside Gap Riot’s Kate Siklosi and poets Brian Dedora and Kate Sutherland.