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?
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.
