In this freewheeling conversation
between poets, Joelle Barron, author of Excerpts From a Burned Letter,
and Jes Battis, whose new poetry collection I Hate Parties was released
this fall, share a thought-provoking exchange of questions. They explore their
sources of inspiration, discuss the role of neurodiversity in their writing,
and delve into their unique approaches to the craft of poetry.
Jes: I'll start, I guess, by posing two questions, and you can answer one or both:
1. What ideas are you drawn to when writing poetry?
2.
What have been some unexpected aspects of the publication process for
your book?
I tend to like narrative poetry with a wry voice, so authors like Kayla Czaga, Anne Carson, and Medrie Purdham, and also poets like Tommy Pico, who let queer stories unfold in their work.
Something that surprised me during the publishing process was that I had the chance to revise poems that had previously been published—I thought those were set in stone, but suddenly, I could play with them again. I also wasn't expecting to be as personally invested in the edits—I can distance myself from fiction, but the poems felt more intimate.
Joelle:
I wanted to tell you that I bought I
Hate Parties while I was at the Kingston Writers Fest and read it at dinner
and on my long journey home. I adored it! It's my favourite collection that
I've read in a long time, and I've been recommending it to everyone. You write
in a way that's so direct—the poems are wry, funny, and tender, and you gave me
so many of those moments I long for with poetry where I had to sit back and be
in awe of a line or turn of phrase. What a book! Thank you for writing it.
To get to the questions:
1. I agree with you completely on
narrative poetry with a wry voice (funny! I describe your writing as wry and
hearing who your literary influences are; this makes sense). I think Kayla
Czaga's "For Your Safety Please Hold On" is a work of genius, and
Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" is my favourite poem. I definitely
crave storytelling and a certain amount of accessibility in my poetry. I also
really like sex in poetry! Anthony Oliveira's Dayspring has some
excellent queer sex scenes.
2. This was my second time publishing a poetry collection, so I'm not sure if anything about the process was too surprising. Which is a good thing! Nightwood doesn't do Oxford commas—a shock!
Jes: I'm so glad you connected with the
collection! I really loved Excerpts From a Burned Letter, as
well! I do hope we get the chance to read together at some
point. How was your event in Kingston?
It's neat to hear you talk about how you look for storytelling in poetry. I remember reading Anne Carson's Beauty of the Husband and thinking how wonderful it was to reconstruct the speaker's marriage in a series of "tangos." And Autobiography of Red is still one of the oddest and most wonderful novels I've ever read. It completely tore open my mind in grad school—that, and reading Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry for the first time.
Here's a question, which we'll call question three): How do you go about weaving narrative/storytelling into your poems? Do you find that the poetry and its formal/experimental elements act as a distancing force, allowing you to approach the material slantwise? Or does it somehow bring you deeper into the event? I'm thinking not only about the Benedetta Carlini poems but also those that are more directly personal. In my work, I sometimes find that the enigma of playing with form helps to approach an intimate topic. There's a poem in I Hate Parties that was originally a CV2 contest poem, and the weirdness of using obscure words helped to address what, at the time, was a really complicated relationship.
Joelle: The event in Kingston was wonderful in the sense that the festival staff was excellent, and my fellow panellist and the moderator were both excellent.
Yes, Anne Carson and her use of other art forms in poetry (there's probably a word for that that I don't know). Like her nudes in "The Glass Essay." Ugh. Have you read Adele Barclay's work? She has this poem called "Discovering Anne Carson Isn't Gay" (I'm butchering that, lol), and the first time I read it, I was floored that being disappointed by AC's sexuality was at least a somewhat universal experience.
I don't think I can write poems that aren't stories. It's not something I set out to do consciously - for me, the poem starts with a story. The thing I love about poetry (or one of many things, I guess) is that I get to figure out how to tell a story I want to tell in a weird and unexpected way. It definitely brings me deeper into the event. I've always used poetry as a tool for processing. I'm a super slow processor of emotions and information in general. I like to talk things out, and I also like to write things out. I guess the deeper sort of looking that poetry requires helps me unravel whatever is going on inside my head and heart.
I agree that working with form can help—I often use a random word generator to get me started if I'm feeling blocked with writing and tell myself I absolutely have to use whatever words come up. It's amazing how sometimes random words can help unlock these more profound, intimate thoughts and feelings. Do you find that form comes naturally to you, or are you repeating it during editing? The last poem in your collection, "My Boyfriend Names Every Bond Movie Chronologically," is so well arranged. You have all of these seemingly disparate ideas that flow smoothly and perfectly from one to the other. How did that come together?
Jes: Our whole interview could just be us lamenting that Anne Carson isn't queer. A character from The L Word even uses her book as a seduction tool! But her work has always felt queer to me in the sense of its enigma, how she approaches things slantwise, and her way of approaching sexuality. I've talked to a lot of queer people who vibe pretty intensely with her work, so maybe it has a formal queerness to it. I love that Nox is difficult to open and spills into your hand or how Red Doc has these aggressive margins. There's something playfully wild about her work, and I remember when Autobiography came out, it was criticized within CanLit as being "un-poetic," because she was prosifying lines and letting a narrative unspool.
I'm always trying to experiment with form and playing with space on the page, but I think my poems tend to be what the comedian Maria Bamford calls "odd quiet joke stories." One of the reasons I enjoyed Dina Del Bucchia's last book, You're Gonna Love This, is because she mingles TV stories with memoir in lines that tend to overspill and defy expected breaks. I think I've been quite influenced by stand-up comedy, particularly queer and trans comics, and Dina's work has this critical silliness that flares into real, hard feelings. That's often what I'm chasing in poetry. Leah Horlick's work also approaches this, with turns between charm and fierce vulnerability. Tommy Pico's neverending lines in Nature Poem are always slipping between gay in-jokes and dazzling critiques of colonialism. I was recently asked about comedy in my work at an event, and I said something like: I'm not sure I mean to be funny. As an autistic person, I think I've always been confused and enchanted by the illogical systems of the social world and how nothing really makes sense. Irony and sarcasm can be a bit baffling, but reclaiming them in, I guess, a neuroqueer way can also be fun.
The Bond poem came about because my boyfriend, who loves the queerness of the James Bond franchise, kept insisting that I watch A View To A Kill because it incongruously features Christopher Walken and Grace Jones. It's a movie that works on paper, he said, but in practice, it's a mess. As we were flying to Vancouver for a writing festival, I asked him if he could name every Bond film, and he did, smoothly and without hesitation. So, I kept thinking of the Bond films while I flailed through this big conference. After I had a massive meltdown, I could feel that poem coming together—the pleasure of including each Bond film while also creating a sort of frame for the intolerable feelings that I was having: That I couldn't be social, couldn't hold on to people, couldn't exist as queer and trans in my own arch-conservative province. In some ways, it came together as a talisman or protective spell.
You mentioned that Excerpts is your second collection—were things different the second time around? Did the core ideas of the collection come to you all at once, or was it something to chip away at gradually? In "Jane to Helen," you talk about the changeling myth and its link to autistic kids, which I found fascinating. It was an autistic student who first introduced me to that connection around the same time I was going through the diagnostic process and figuring things out. This feels like a question that I might find annoying (sorry), but did you want to talk a little about the role of neurodiversity/neuroqueerness in these poems? I didn't set out to make a collection about being queer and autistic, but some of those poems were insistent and came about during moments of burnout when I just wanted to write down what I was feeling.
Joelle: Omg, thank you for reminding me about that scene from The L Word!! I looked it up on YouTube to refresh my memory—the clip has one comment that reads "Marina is hot."
I love Maria Bamford! I've never heard "odd quiet joke stories" but that makes perfect sense in terms of your poetry. There's that scene in her Netflix special, Old Baby (I'm sure you've seen it), where she is pretending to be a bridezilla, and she's just doing this low, feral grunting and muttering, "I wanna wear a pretty dress." The only person watching is her husband (and her dogs, maybe), and the husband is losing it. I would love to write a poem that somehow captures everything that joke captures for me. My secret and most dearly-held desire is to be funny—I don't think that comes across a ton in my poetry, and honestly, I fear to try because failing would feel so catastrophic. As you say, as an autistic person, I've often been perceived as funny when I wasn't trying to be, and I don't mind that, but there's something about that dynamic that feels so untenable. Like, if I start trying, I just won't be funny at all. The humour in your work is so subtle, and I would recognize it as neurodiverse without knowing anything about you. It certainly resonates with me on that level.
I actually returned to James Bond over the past few years after discovering the podcast Kill James Bond, in which trans/queer people dissect the films. I had seen most of them as a kid but hadn't thought much about them since then. They are so queer! It's incredible. The way you describe writing the Bond poem reads so much to me like my own process, and I think it's also similar to how neurodivergent people speak to each other in general. That spiral of communication where things are connected somehow, and it just makes sense, maybe in a way you can explain and maybe in a way you can't. My friend Ellie Sawatzky, an incredible poet, and I often talk about those moments in life that you know are so meaningful that they have to be poems, but you have to figure out a way to explain to the reader why they should care. What you're describing feels to me like that experience of solving the puzzle of how to present a very personal, singular experience as something so universal.
The second book came about in a much different fashion than the first one, which was written over the course of six-ish years, a lot of it while I was in grad school. A theme emerged, but I didn't set out with any idea of what I was doing. With Excerpts, I wrote the bulk of it in a few weeks, and the idea for it really did come to me all at once. I read The Secret Garden to my daughter, a book I loved as a child (she hated it). Through my adult eyes, the book was just so queer and seemed such an obvious allegory for queerness. Surely, I was not the first person to have thought this, so I did a little research, and of course, I wasn't. But I started thinking about all of those times when you read something that isn't "supposed" to be queer, but you just know it is. The same thing happens with things that aren't "supposed" to be autistic. And then, of course, sometimes the queer and the autistic converge. I liked the idea of looking at historical and literary figures, removing the speculation, and just deciding they could definitively be as I perceive them. I feel like poetry is the perfect medium for that kind of exploration.
I'll be annoying and answer your
question with another question: But do you think you can write poems that
aren't queer/neurodiverse/both? I guess their role is a sort of scaffolding for
me. Like, I am not the poem's speaker, but I am the scaffolding of it. For me,
craft is an important sort of bonus when it comes to writing, but on a personal
level, I would never write at all if I didn't need to get some feelings out,
exactly as you say. So, I guess their role is to ensure that the poems
exist!
Jes: Maria Bamford is so poetic as a comedian. I feel like I understand all of her anxiety implicitly. I love those shows that she performs only for her parents or only for her husband and dogs. She's challenging the whole idea of what it means to perform (and isn't our family our first audience?)
I do find a lot of subtle queer humour in your work. The poem titles, especially, make me laugh, like "I'm Not a Human, I'm Three Poems in a Trenchcoat," and "Your Wife is a Cryptid." The "Trenchcoat" poem made me laugh out loud when I first read it because I absolutely get the idea of "trying to write a poem / about a radish. It wasn't going well." Is that poem set at the International Village in Vancouver? I thought I recognized the reference to the crystal dragon store. That mall is a poem in itself. I love how it persists stubbornly in that neighbourhood--how it was fancy when it was Tinseltown, and now it has the air of a celebrity going to seed.
I also admire how some of your lines turn upon an edge of humour and rumination, like: "Was that sonnet form? / No, it was a poem about how a boy called me / ugly pussy behind the French portable in grade seven." The idea of being able to shoot lasers. There's something joyful about that poem, even as it gets at the difficulty of processing weird cruelties and big trash feelings through poetry.
The Secret Garden was always one of my favourite books, and I love how you point out the delightfully excessive use of "queer" in the book. I always connected with Mary before she got civilized, when she was still feral and mean and lashing out at the world. That's kind of what autistic childhood felt like for me. Knowing I had to be polite, make eye contact, have give-and-take conversations, and speak when I was spoken to, I was wandering through this wild garden where nothing made sense, and nobody was saying anything about it. Does anyone see the size of these pumpkins? Is that a lizard? I love how The Secret Garden, at least for the first part, feels like a developing friendship between an asocial girl and a hyper-anxious kid who never gets out of bed. That does sound like a neurodiverse relationship in the making. My students didn't connect with the book, though. As with Little Women, they'd become annoyed when it felt like the characters were being civilized and streamlined into Victorian marriages, even though there's so much wild in the middle of those books.
I like your ideas of neurodiverse experience as a kind of scaffolding for poetry. I've often worried that my poems are a bit too self-centred because I tend to filter experiences through a kind of anxious, inward perspective. In my poetry group, people are often writing this brilliant poetry about ecological disaster, or a still life scene, or the complexities of raising kids, and I'm like: Here's a poem about me shitting myself; here's a poem about the guy I slept with who said "no kissing and don't touch my feet." I do like writing about animals and objects, as well, but I'm not sure I can write a poem that doesn't ultimately come back to my experience of living in this weird queer raccoon body. I envy Anne Carson for her ability to kind of ghost through her poems in this clean way, where we never learn too much about her. But one of the things I only love about your poem, "I Am Once Again Asking If I Am Too Much," is how it explores that idea of being rebuked for being "too" something when you're ultimately just trying to make it through one social encounter after the next. The idea of the person moving on "from something that never existed," when you still feel stuck in the groove of that uncreated thing, just spinning there. My therapist tells me that perseverating on the past is a form of control, but I'm like: What else am I supposed to think about? Who doesn't watch things recede through the rearview mirror and wonder about them? Isn't that how we write?
Joelle: Yessss, it is absolutely about International Village, lol. I used to love to go there by myself on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to look through the Japanese dollar store and go to the movies. I still love to go back whenever I visit Vancouver, but you're certainly right that it's not what it once was. I sometimes wonder what will become of it in the long term. I know I'll never get that very specific feeling from any other place.
I feel like I have always done this thing where I just kind of disregard the endings of certain books because I just know the author would have written a different ending if they could have. Jane Eyre is like that for me. Or maybe the ending makes perfect sense, but it's saved by the ability to see the subtext that exists beyond it. I think there's something to be said about the fact that people growing up now have more explicit queer representation readily available to them than we had. That's, of course, a wonderful thing, and I get why they maybe don't need something like Jane Eyre in the way I needed it. It's bittersweet.
I feel very seen by what you're saying about envying people who can write beyond themselves in this very effective way. I went to school with a couple of people who could write the most incredible poems about historical figures and incidents with no self-insert whatsoever. I have never been able to do that successfully. I think there's a place for both. I also think that I write what I want to read, and I am typically much more drawn to deeply singular and personal work. I find it endlessly amazing how such intensely personal experiences can be universal. I also think that needing to think about the past depends on the speed at which we can process incidents. Autistic people absorb so much information about the world around them all the time. It takes a while to sort through that. I feel like I've gotten to know myself by thinking about the past. I think it's also why things like meditation don't work for me; existing in the present moment doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to others. But that's a whole other conversation!
Thank you for your kind words and for seeing the humour in my work. It truly is the biggest compliment a person can give me. I have enjoyed this exchange so much.
Jes: I’ve really enjoyed talking as well!
Joelle Barron is an award-winning poet and writer living and relying on the Traditional Territories of the Anishinabewaki of Treaty 3 and the Métis people. Their first poetry collection, Ritual Lights (icehouse poetry, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2019, they were a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ2S+ Writers. Barron’s poetry has appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine, CV2, EVENT Magazine, The New Quarterly, and many other Canadian literary publications. They live with their daughter in Fort Frances, Ontario.
