Chris Turnbull is the author of cipher forthcoming from Beautiful Outlaw Press in spring 2024, [ untitled ] in o w n (CUE Books 2014), and Continua (Chaudiere Books 2015). Her poetry chapbooks, collaborations, and installation pieces are in print, online, and within landscapes. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poetry can be found on trails (www.etuor.wordpress.com).
Chris Turnbull reads in Ottawa on Saturday, March 23,2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.
Conyer Clayton: You have a new book coming out, cipher (Beautiful Outlaw Press) — very exciting! Can you tell readers a bit about it?
Chris Turnbull: cipher considers landscape refashioned by disaster and cyber, including the adoption of words used to refer to tangible/physical experiences and realities. Several figures — The Curator, the kids, “we” — flicker in and out. Duration is difficult to pinpoint.
I’ve been working slowly on this manuscript for several years — and over this period considering seeming societal withdrawals ‘from’ the outdoors. I wonder how other generations might mediate their experiences of, or limit fears of, various elements of our physical worlds. I think this conundrum is important — there is no conclusion, but cipher presents possibilities. How do these generations relate to or make world(s)? Land does not take precedence, screens, networks, are central and unbound: the marsh is ripped at corner.
CC: I’ve been following along your project rout/e for a while now, where you place poems along trails. On the website, you say, “Language is visual, sonic, and kinetic. When I return to the poems in rout/e, they’ve usually changed in some way — a crease in the paper shifts a line’s interpretation; condensation may obscure the clarity of how a word is visualized; the branches from a fallen tree might cause difficulty in reading the poem or navigating a trail, or someone may have taken the entire poem away.” In your new forthcoming book cipher, you say, “the kids refuse the forest.” Is there a connection in the poetics of rout/e and cipher?
CT: No, not really. rout/e was initially a small press publication that I had started in Vancouver and, eventually, didn’t want to continue publishing it in paper format. I am outdoors a fair amount — rout/e started as a result of my experiences outdoors and some thinking about how poetry (language) can be experienced. I started placing/planting poems on trails with an idea that discovering a poem on a trail might enable access, in a way, to poetry outside of a school or scholastic setting. It was a way to get poems off the shelf and out of archive — to try to enable a different form of encounter. Outdoors, a poem might (like the landscape folks walk through/with) not be in a form that’s expected. rout/e and cipher aren’t that much alike in form or impetus.
CC: Can you speak to what change or loss is being mediated throughout your book? What surrounding is cipher attempting to navigate through language?
CT: Our surroundings and relationships are mediated through language and through our senses. Language itself is a surrounding — how a sentence is ordered, or what is left out of a line — organizing syntax to make “sense” or present perspective. Change and loss are different things. cipher presents possibilities of both, experienced through forms of absence and forms of focus. In cipher, continuities are disrupted by eco-disasters; the figures in cipher are intermittent and from different periods of time. How do they describe their experiences, what they feel, what is remembered? Maybe none of cipher is grounded in ways we understand, maybe experience is best explained by wearables and augmentation — if so, can language adequately describe our sensory and cognitive experiences, such as love? When I started writing cipher, what I wanted was a different lexicon for a changing, curious, time…and as I thought about it, I saw that the language (in English) that we use to describe our environments and the interactions within those environments, have become transposed.
CC: I am really intrigued, as someone who has worked so deeply with the natural world as a collaborator in your poetics, with this movement into deep consideration of cyber realities and virtual environments in your new work. Can you talk a bit about this shift?
CT: We live in a very wired environment; it’s just not obvious, or perhpas is understated. I think humans are very adroit at inventing and creating environments for short term benefit, although the long term effects can have multiples of negatives and positives. I think we’re also very adroit, and invested, in creating stories about our realities and our experiences of our surroundings. I see an enormous investment of time for many of us in online, cyber mediated, realities and wonder about how we might be evolving, or how online environments affect our abilities to inter-relate or understand the varieties of interactions that occur invisibly, minutely, or obviously in a “real” world. I have been involved with a lot of kids in outdoor environments and noted symptoms of agitation and mood changes when away from their devices for a few days; I have noted the same with adults, although adults can mask a bit better. I’ve noted that the “sense” of time — typically aided by getting things done, moving around, interacting — is disrupted too. Things that should be firmanent, in cipher, aren’t. What is being navigated?
CC: Why a long, sequential poem?
CT: It just worked out that way, probably because it’s an exploratory piece. I don’t often write single poems — partially because I prefer not to title pieces and like the open nature of a sequential poem. The other component of writing a longer sequence is that pacing can be modified in ways that, in a shorter poem, is limited. cipher can be very slow in its pacing — this is deliberate — some lines clusters can be, if read out loud, related to the pace of particular movements (e.g. walking).
CC: Your work is often very visual, with ample white space. What is your method for translating your work to performance?
CT: Well, I come to write/perform from off the page — and continua and [untitled] in o w n — are spatially oriented in ways that cipher is not. White space is an invention for paper. It’s not just visual, or seen by its contrast with the shape of letters or images: it can be represented in performance by breath, time, physical action/gesture. It contributes to the “platform” that is the page. continua, particularly, for example, is a poetry-play — a multi-voice/polyphonic poem. The white spaces are as much prop as the language or the photographs. The page is a dynamic: you can’t avoid white space — so what does that mean for the placement of words on a page, and the movement of the eye “across” or “within” the page?—the focus of one’s eyes…we’re not just reading letters into words. [untitled] is more tightly constrained, in terms of its white space, and acts as a conversation/meditation on environmental policy, degradation, and beauty, among other things. In the past, a few friends have assisted me to read continua, and we marked passages and practiced the pacing, interjection, pauses, and harmonies. The same could be done for [untitled].
Another way to perform them is via videopoem — which is a form I really enjoy developing. continua, [untitled[ in o w n, and cipher are all on vimeo in whole or part form. cipher is here: https://vimeo.com/923378242
Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer and editor from Kentucky now living in Ottawa, whose multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, addiction, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. Their latest book is But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, Anvil Press). They are a Senior Editor at Augur, Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, and guest edited issues of CV2 and Room Magazine. You can find their nonfiction and poetry in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, This Magazine, Room Magazine, filling Station, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others.