Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of Canada Post (Invisible), i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). His most recent chapbooks are: glass / language / untitled / exaltation (above/ground) which won the bpNichol Chapbook award and Heavy Metal Litany (Model press). He is looking for a home for a new manuscript of poetry he wrote with the unhelpful assistance of AI.
Jason Christie reads in Ottawa on Sunday, March 24, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.
rob mclennan: You’ve been mentioning in author biographies for a while now that you’re working on a manuscript of poetry, some of which appears in your bpNichol Chapbook Award-winning glass / language / untitled / exaltation (above/ground press, 2022), with “the help of several Python scripts.” What prompted this process?
Jason Christie: When we had our first child I started a practice of writing every day. I placed no parameters on that writing. It wasn’t exactly poetry, nor was it exclusively prose. I listed things, I rambled, I talked a lot about having a young child, struggles with depression and unemployment, and family life. I’ve always been attracted to writing that opens a window into the writer’s experience in an unvarnished, matter-of-fact kind of way. Thinking here of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, for example. That went on for a couple of years where I would drop things into the file semi-regularly and it grew to almost 100 pages. I had no plans at this point to ever do anything with it.
When we had our second child, even writing became difficult to do! In the fog of the sleep deprivation and decreased mental facility that accompanies life with young children, my short term memory was obliterated. I started adding things to the file again, and it occurred to me that the file was in essence an archive full of memories. I was learning Python at the time and started playing around with scripts to cut up the raw material, randomize it, and then feed me a line at a time from the output. As well as being a lot of fun, it was revelatory!
Whenever I wanted to make a poem I would run my scripts to generate some interesting output from the raw material, print out the result, and set to it with my pen. It was very difficult to be creative with two young children at home, but I could definitely whittle away at pages full of stuff while they napped or during some quiet time. I started to find my way to an idea about what I was creating. I called the whole neverending thing: glass language untitled exaltation. The resultant poems are some of the most emotional and raw writing I’ve ever done.
rm: How does this process, and this result, differ from the work you were doing prior to having children?
JC: Almost entirely time, I would say, is the biggest difference. If necessity is the mother of invention, then it became necessary for me to figure out a way to keep writing despite my short term memory and cognitive capabilities being degraded by sleep deprivation. Before having kids, I had the luxury of time. I could stare at a blank page, spend an afternoon writing away when I wanted, but that had to change when dirty diapers and the needs of parenthood appeared.
Another change might be that while I’ve always been drawn to the everyday, ordinary subject matter of life, it took on a vitality and urgency as I realized my children were growing up. It is a relief to leave behind the interrupted sleep and bleary-eyed, survival mode of the early years but at the same time it is heartbreaking to think you might not know the last time you lift your children up and hold them close. Capturing the experience of life as a new parent, of my kids when they were young, having those memories out of my head, provides some comfort.
In some ways the use of Python scripts and cut-up methods is not different from what I was doing prior to becoming a parent. I’ve always had an interest in process-based writing and conceptualism, but I don’t feel a strong need to rigidly adhere to a process or show my hand with a wink. In that regard, this process aligns with my general approach to writing and thinking. I’ve also relished the messiness of everything in the past with dirty concrete or unpolished sections of poems/books.
rm: Where and how did your interest in process-based writing and conceptualism develop? How do you see what you are doing relating to other works within such an expansive field?
JC: My openness to many forms of poetry began with the crowd of poets I met at York University. We were part of a loose collective called The Writers at York. Thanks to professors like Margo Swiss, Christopher Dewdney, Bruce Powe, Stephen Cain, and Steve McCaffery, I was very fortunate to discover the possibilities of all kinds of poetry. Steve McCaffery introduced an incredible range and depth of poetry in his workshops, during my independent study that I got to do with him, and in conversation outside of the classroom. He was a very kind and enthusiastic teacher when I studied with him at York.
I studied with Nicole Markotić, Fred Wah, and several other great teachers at the University of Calgary where I continued to learn more about various poetic forms and schools. Nicole Markotić was my thesis supervisor and her no bullshit approach, incredible insight, and deep knowledge about poetry keeps me honest to this day about what I’m doing. I hear her voice in the back of my head whenever I try to do anything too clever or that isn’t supported by the infrastructure of the poem. Fred Wah was a huge inspiration too with his thoughtful, challenging mindset to what a poem can be or do.
The group of writers I got to hang out with in Calgary really built upon the foundation I set in university. They challenged me to think beyond the page, to explore various ways to publish, to write, to read poetry. I’m grateful for the years I spent in Calgary and the people I got to spend those years with! I’d extend this to my time in Vancouver with the KSW and the people I got to know there. It was where I found a way to bring politics into my poetry. This is a long, long path to get to the point, but it was somewhere between my time in Toronto and my time in Calgary that I discovered my interest in process poetics and my time in Vancouver that connected the personal to the political.
The range of poetry that is more open or experimental is incredibly broad. In terms of process-related poetry, I love Ted Berrigan’s poems. I was introduced to Ted Berrigan by Christopher Dewdney while studying at York. I love how Berrigan folds the act of writing into the poem, the details of the moment of composition, even bodily processes get mentioned. Then there are Berrigan’s Sonnets which to me represent a very playful kind of process writing. His work with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard comes to mind too. Highly experimental without being rigorous. That’s my jam.
rm: With those influences you cite as examples, what did those first experiments with your own forays into writing look like? How were you looking at your own way through such a heft of influence?
JC: Heft is right! It took me a long time to find myself in the mix of my influences. I found protection and solace in such strong role models and in the communities in which I found myself. A curious thing happened though, perhaps because I moved around a bunch, but over time I began to filter out the bits from each inspiration source to apply to my own voice – for example politics from Fred Wah and my time in Vancouver, formal innovation from being in Calgary, the quotidian from Berrigan and Mayer, serious playfulness from Markotić and McCaffery.
Nowadays I am a lot less anxious about where I fit or where my writing fits. Once I was beyond the comfort and security of the communities that sheltered and nurtured me, including the academy, I felt free to express myself as I wished. I am grateful for the guidance and education I received from my peers and mentors, but it took no small amount of courage to step away into the unknown.
rm: Because you’ve published a number of chapbooks now, I’m wondering: how do you see the process of chapbook-making? Are your chapbook manuscripts built as in-progress longer manuscripts, appearing as stops along the way towards something larger, or do you see them as self-contained projects that evolve into something larger?
JC: I think all of the above! I love the chapbook format a lot. I’m looking at Anne Carson’s Float on my shelf right now and the many chapbooks from friends and writers I admire.
For me, there are chapbooks which I built to be self-contained, which is not to say that they will never appear as a part of something larger, but I love the constraint of the format because I tend to overwrite. With the ongoing, ever-expanding glass language untitled exaltation poem, in the way it always exists as the potential output of several scripts, I used chapbooks as a way to excerpt from that bounty of material. Perhaps one day I'll have a site or app or something where poems from the raw material can appear automatically or that anyone could use to generate their own bespoke poem.
Creating limited expressions in chapbooks also allowed me to zoom in on particular aspects of it. With random_lines = random.choice, which you published in 2017, I was mainly interested in the strangeness and familiarity of the output. I was trying to sift through what I was doing to figure out what the bits of poetry might look like from the process of accreting and editing the raw material generated by the process. The following year (2018) you published glass language (excerpt), in which I started to see more clearly what I wanted to express through the project. In 2022, we worked on glass / language / untitled / exaltation (an excerpt), which was the most realized expression of how I think about the whole thing. And it won the bpNichol Chapbook award in 2023 for us!
That was pretty surreal. I don’t know if I adequately thanked the Meet the Presses crew at the time because I was super emotional, nervous, and overwhelmed, but they are incredible to a person and they do such vital, important work spreading the love of chapbooks and small presses. For that matter, I don't know that I thanked you nearly enough for your support over the years! Thank you rob, and thank you to the Meet the Presses team.
Um, I got distracted by my children and tendency to ramble, but to return to the point here, I love chapbooks. I think they take a lot of the pressure and preciousness out of trade published books. You can put yourself out there with a chapbook in a way that often gets sanitized by book publishing. Chapbooks are a fantastic place to try something raw, new, exposed, and to fail so you can figure out what you are trying to do and do it better.
rm: Do you see the chapbook as a place to see how work fits and feels, and potential responses to such? And if so, how does this compare to potentially sending work out to literary journals? How do these experiences help shape, if at all, the way you think through a project?
JC: Sometimes a chapbook is a place to try things and sometimes it is a perfectly encapsulated thing into itself. The chapbook feels like a wide open format to do things that might not work in a trade book or journal. Chapbooks help me sort through ideas, but sometimes they arrive fully formed.
Like with Heavy Metal Litany which ryan fitzpatrick graciously published through MODEL PRESS, I had a lot of fun trying to understand the lyrics to some of my favourite songs. I was doing that anyway, and then it occurred to me to turn it into a poem. I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere, or if that long poem is exactly what it needs to be. Similarly, with Bridge & Burn that you published through above/ground, I was sitting at a Stumptown coffee shop in Portland looking at a clothing store with the same name and figured that’d be a great title for something. I was obsessively thinking about the tree in our yard that was going to be cut down and it all just came together.
In terms of journals, I haven’t sent anything in for years. I find the whole process of organizing submissions exhausting. That said, there are some journals, like filling Station and Arc, that make me wish I could get my shit together to submit something. Maybe I will!
The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include 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). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. He is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s annual international poetry festival.