Klara du Plessis is a poet, artist-scholar, and literary curator. Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and her critical writing received Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award. She is known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics, and writes in and between English and Afrikaans. Welcoming collaborative formations, her narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, was adapted and produced as a mono-opera film with composer Jimmie LeBlanc, premiered at the International Festival of Films on Art in 2023. Klara develops an ongoing series of experimental and dialogic literary events called Deep Curation, an approach which posits the poetry reading as artform. Her fourth poetry collection Post-Mortem of the Event is forthcoming, Fall 2024.
rob mclennan: Moving through your essay collection, I’mpossible collab (Gaspereau Press, 2023), I admire the way your essays begin with the question of how to think and write about anything, well before conversations around the essay, critical approaches to poetry, poetry and collaboration. How does an essay begin for you? How did this collection begin?
Klara du Plessis: An essay begins with enthusiasm, with a surge of desire to write about something I encountered—at the time of I’mpossible collab, that “something” is always a poetry collection, but in more recent work it can also be a concept, an exhibition, a movie. This enthusiasm then directs the entirety of the imagined essay, a thread of what this essay could be. Due to the short scope of these particular essays, I usually write it in one or two sittings. It feels important to do so quickly in league with the strong inclination to get something out of me. Once this energy subsides, writing becomes much more arduous. I'mpossible collab began with Unfurl, a chapbook of four literary essays also published by Gaspereau Press in 2019. Since then, I collected a larger span of pieces on contemporary, Canadian poetry. I noticed how much of myself I was bringing to the writing, considerations present in my own poetry suddenly seen in the work of others. It’s a network. There’s influence. But there’s also the critic’s collaborative projection of self onto the subject.
rm: When sketching out an essay, what are your goals for the piece? What are you aiming towards?
KdP: Well, that would vary from essay to essay. I do approach prose writing in a very similar way as poetry, in the sense that the argument needs to subside in order to signal completion, but also that the work needs to sound its own finale. I always read and edit work out loud, which means that the cadence of the work is almost as important as the content itself.
In terms of I’mpossible collab, there is both a reaching towards and a subversion of scholarly discourse. In my academic research, I often feel throttled by the scope of expected research, that I am not allowed to have thoughts that aren’t substantiated by other critics, that the I is subsidiary, not to a collective and supportive we, but to an antagonistic citational practice. The essays in my book have more lateral moves than institutional research. That said, they also form part of the larger intellectual conversation on contemporary Canadian poetry.
rm: I would suspect that you didn’t necessarily begin writing these pieces with a collection in mind. At what point did you see this as a book-length project? What do you consider the through-line across these pieces?
KdP: Initially, I envisioned a second chapbook like Unfurl, including the essays on Jordan Abel/Dionne Brand, Oana Avasilichioaei, Kaie Kellough, and M. NourbeSe Philip. When I proposed it to Gaspereau Press, Andrew Steeves suggested that I lengthen the chapbook manuscript into a book-length work instead. The essays surrounding those four core pieces grew out of his invitation, specifically “Collab Room” on Erín Moure’s Theophylline and “No Collab” on Lisa Robertson’s Boat. I’ve been thinking about criticism as a form of collaboration for a long time and this is the scaffolding that frames the collection. While the notion of working with and alongside authors’ work is implicit in most of the collection, I foreground the subjective range of my analyses. Some sections read like poetry rather than scholarship. Sometimes I acknowledge that I am bringing a perspective that is based on personal association and not textual evidence.
rm: What I find intriguing about your work, from your own poetry to your translingual work to your essays, is how every corner of it exists in “conversation” with other writers and their works. The best reaction to a poem is another poem, it’s been said, but how do you decide on responding through the essay over the poem, or vice versa?
KdP: You’re the second person in a week to mention the dialogic element of my writing and the funny thing is that I’ve never thought of my work that way before. Yes, I’ve done a lot of collaborative work—writing G with Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, working with Kadie Salmon on a sculptural artist’s book, and so on—and yes, I think about the relational nature of criticism in I’mpossible collab, and yes, we all write and reflect within the past and present community of writers, but I’ve never seen my poetry as a form of response. My debut collection is literally called Ekke (meaning I) and even I’mpossible collab plays with implications of the first person speaker. If my work is provoked into reaction, then perhaps it’s because I’m striving to find my voice and perspective in the mix.
rm: How do you see your critical work in conversation with your poems? How do you see each one, if at all, impacting upon the other?
KdP: Reading and writing are always in dialogue. Reading a book that really resonates often urges me to write, an essay yes, but also poetry. To frame it in relation to my book, there’s a collaboration at stake, one which inspires me to create new work, but one which also allows me to find traces of my own writerly preoccupations in what I’m reading. It’s important to be broken out of this cycle too.
A different way to answer this question is that I always aim to write criticism with a poetic approach. Similarly, my poetry is somewhat essayistic, perhaps due to its long-form preference.
rm: You mention the collaborative G, a book composed with Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, which recently appeared with Palimpsest Press. How did this collaboration come about?
KdP: I love that collection! Kess got in touch with me early pandemic and with the curious fact that both Persian and Afrikaans share a guttural g sound or [x] in the phonetic alphabet. Kess also compiled a list of homophones in Persian, Afrikaans, and English that served as the initial trilingual and translingual inspiration. What started as an undefined project became a book-length manuscript in the span of a few months. Collaborative writing has a lot of momentum because you’re not just writing in relation to yourself, but receiving constant signals from another mind.
rm: I’m curious about what insights into your own work such a project might have prompted. Do you see your work any differently now after working on this collaboration? What did such a project provide or allow that might not have been possible otherwise?
KdP: I felt more permissive to myself, working with Kess. Because the work wasn’t mine but ours, there was more scope to roam and play. It’s a bit of a contradiction really, being more yourself when not yourself. I wrote some silly poems, not all that made their way into G, in a tone that felt more like me goofing around at home than being a poet. That said, this is a serious book. It foregrounds connection across languages and geographies. It offers hospitality, while disorienting and rebuilding language. The method of composition was joyful, but the tenor of the poems themselves resonate with important political implications.
G is very much also a continuation of the translingual work that I had started in Ekke and I’m happy to have spent time expanding the practice. There is always more to say about language.
rm: Do you see the two of you extending those conversations, or does this exist as a singular-project? Might there be further work between you two down the road?
KdP: Kess and I aren’t done with events for G yet. This past week we participated in an online conference on translingualism through the University of South Africa. We’re reading at VerseFest on 24 March, of course, and we’re organizing a full read-through of the collection at Montreal’s Articule Gallery on 18 May. As for writing new work together in the future, who knows? It could happen. Working across languages is an important and current thread to follow. We also gained a friendship from this collaboration which will last a long time.
rm: What do you feel the events add to the conversations you two have been having, or to your thinking, or even understanding, around them?
KdP: G is very sonic. The translingual elements come to life when read out loud, for sure, but parts of the work were also composed to be performed. The entire “Speech” section, for example, was spoken before transcribed and so it’s a vibrant work to bring to the stage. Each time that Kess and I perform it, it feels different though. The tenor of a day, what’s happening in our lives, really affects the poems. They have felt virtuosic and they have felt slow-paced and intimate. I think because this book is written collaboratively, being together to present it to audiences feels especially relevant. There’s sociability written into the pages.
rm: Given your work through the essay and collaborating with Kess since the publication of your full-length debut, where does your forthcoming second poetry collection Post-Mortem of the Event fit in this particular trajectory?
KdP: In some ways, Post-Mortem of the Event returns to Ekke’s preoccupation with the essay-poem or transposes the essay from I’mpossible collab back into verse. It’s structured as a series of longer works that relate to events and archives of poetry in performance. It’s also cyclical in nature, in the sense of looking back to a set of book launches of Hell Light Flesh, using digital tools to transcribe, distort, and manipulate discussions of my work. This book is discursive and exploratory in method, but also really lyrical and formal. It opens with a crown of sonnets! Then develops into sonic visual poems. This collection isn’t translingual in the same way as G, but it is interdisciplinary and very sonic, a progression that I see quite clearly from the “Speech” section of G. That said, Post-Mortem of the Event was written not quite in parallel with G, but definitely on an overlapping timeline. It follows different intellectual preoccupations, but it’s composed by the same mind in a roughly similar temporal frame.
rm: How did you first land at the essay-poem? What is it about the form that resonates?
KdP: The essay-poem is a form that I intuitively articulated for myself. This is roughly around 2012-2015, when I was drafting the poems that later appeared in Ekke. I was finding that my poems needed more space than the ¾ page lyrical poem and that my style was pointed, sometimes syntactical and discursive, without ever leaning into the paragraph or argument. This is something that I expanded upon with the more narrative framing and book-length arc of Hell Light Flesh, and am returning to with Post-Mortem of the Event, work adjacent to my scholarly concerns. I like how this conversation has come full circle, moving from my essay-writing, through poetry, to essayistic poetry. It’s all the same thing really.
rm: What have you been working on since the poems in Post-Mortem of the Event, and the essays in I’mpossible collab?
KdP: I’ve been writing poetry in Afrikaans lately and re-curating sections of my work published in Canada for a South African audience. Writing in Afrikaans isn’t new for me, but it is a process of figuring out a different medium. It’s not at all a one-to-one transfiguration of how I work in English or translingually. Each language configuration is a different artform. I’m also starting to articulate a new essay project, but it’s too early to really talk about it yet.
My practice is moving increasingly into interdisciplinary terrain. I exhibited a sound installation called Scree/n at Centre Clark last year and am excited to continue developing in the direction of performance and recording.
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.