AJ Dolman’s
(they/she) debut poetry book is Crazy / Mad (Gordon Hill Press, spring
2024). A professional editor, Dolman is also the author of Lost Enough: A
collection of short stories, and three poetry chapbooks, and co-edited Motherhood
in Precarious Times (Demeter Press, 2018). Their poetry, fiction and essays
have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, recently including Canthius,
Arc Poetry Magazine, QT Literary Magazine, and The Quarantine
Review. They are a bi/pan+ rights advocate living on unceded Anishinabe
Algonquin territory.
AJ Dolman reads in Ottawa on Sunday, March 24, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.
Amanda
Earl:
Crazy/Mad is full of puns, and language play: alliteration, assonance,
nouns turned into verbs, unique collectives such as “a sorrow of stones.” You
have a poem for John Lavery, who was an ingenious word worker. Can you talk
about your love of sound and word play? Was your first language Dutch? How does
the knowledge of other languages affect your English play with words and sound?
Would you like to say more about Lavery?
AJ
Dolman:
John Lavery was indeed a genius at language and I miss him, and the thrill of
reading new writing by him, terribly. We didn’t always agree, but we respected
each other, and he never let me off the hook, always prompting me with “So,
what are you working on now?” He was able to blend French and English
colloquial language into a joyous whirlwind of syllables that sounded perfectly
right in its wrongness, boldly direct in its meaningful meaninglessness. He was
one of those writers who could simultaneously do the thing (such as writing
what was ostensibly cop fiction) while utterly subverting the thing, playing
both ends to the middle, as it were. I learned a lot from him, but mostly that
we are all allowed to play with these toys of trope, language, genre, sound, meaning.
And
yes, my first language was Dutch, my parents and two sisters having immigrated
to Canada 14 years before I was born. I was a shy kid, and starting school in a
language I barely spoke didn't help that. But the Swiss immigrant kid in our
class (Fabienne, still one of my best friends) and I became friends, and she
and I muddled along in a sort of made-up Swiss-German/Dutch/English hybrid of
language and gestures until we could fully make sense of ourselves and others
fully in English.
My
Mam was my way into a passion for language, for how intensely its rhythms could
be played. There’s always been a sense in my family that my mother could have
been a great writer if her circumstances in life had been different. She told
the best (also worst) bedtime stories, because she would fully embody the
characters, so every witch or wolf scared the life out of me. She was also an
alcoholic, as was my Dad. Years later (she got sober when I was a teen, and
stayed that way the rest of her life), my mother easily admitted she’d been
terrible at parenting. But she certainly was a great language and drama teacher
to me.
AE: You dedicate the
book, not to one specific person but “to the worried, the lost, the uncertain
and the afraid.” Throughout the book, you address issues of social justice
through the lens of mental health issues. Those who deal with mental health
issues are more often than not erased, harmed by a system that wishes they
didn't exist and marginalized. You write about the issues of labour, poverty,
sexual orientation, gender, racism and colonialization. At some point in my inculcation
into the writing of literary work, I got the idea that one wasn't supposed to
write overtly about such issues. Did you
also have that impression and how did you override it in order to write and
share poems, such as "Delusions of grandeur?"
AJD: The Canadian
poetry (and fiction, for that matter) that I first encountered, and that was
esteemed by those guarding the CanLit towers when I arrived at its gardens
definitely had a silencing effect. It was those quiet examples of “this is what
we write about here,” which an emerging writer can easily interpret as “nothing
else will be accepted.”
There
were exceptions, of course (one of my favourite older books of Canadian poetry
is 1978's The Ghosts Call You Poor by Andrew Suknaski, a mad prairie
poet I didn't discover until my 30s). But most examples I saw came from the
States—Ginsberg, Clifton, poets who were queer and/or Black and/or stemming
from poverty, and who were angry out loud.
I
was taught to be quiet. Children were to be seen and not heard, and me having
first an accent, then secrets of gender and orientation, I doubled down on
being quiet. When I was ready to not be as quiet anymore, as an adult, a
student, a writer, I was told “We don’t publish political poetry” and “Your
message is too overt; stick to metaphor.” Don’t get me wrong, I love a juicy
metaphor. But if not right now, in every way we can, then when and how is the
best way to declare what we have seen, and to demand better for ourselves and
others?
I
didn’t trust my own voice for a long time, and repeatedly being told by editors
turning down my work that my writing conveyed “a strong voice” felt like being
punched in the gut with a silk glove, a surface nicety that did nothing to mask
the jab. Yet, audiences and readers seemed to appreciate what I was doing. And
I saw more and more people, often from far harsher backgrounds and with more intersecting
identities than me, being brave. So, what right, then, do I have to not try to
be louder, to be braver, if I can? For myself, but also for others.
AE: While there are
glimpses of joy in parental-child relationships, such as in “Inversion,” where
you show a child’s humour and intelligence, your poems are unflinchingly candid
on the physical and emotional trauma of giving birth and of being a mother,
such as in “Perinatal panic disorder” where you write “children a choice you
can’t undo,/like suicide.” Or in “Female rage,” where you write about
Clytemnestra: “death in masses/of children,/stopping up/a rampant womb that’s yielded/crops
of babies.”
You
include a poem about Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children. What made you
want to openly depict the struggles of motherhood?
AJD: No one in my
poems rages against their children themselves. What they rage against is lack
of agency. And, I don't, in any way, mean to speak for any other parents or
their experiences.
I
adore my kid. He’s a teen now, and I have loved being part of his life and his learning
and growth. But, everything about pregnancy, birth, and especially the first
several years of his life, was immensely traumatic for me. Part of that, in
retrospect, had to do with gender dysphoria, though I didn’t realize what it
was at the time. Part of it was going into the decision to have a child while
mentally ill, which for me came with decisions about medication, with guilt in
advance about the poor parent I thought I might be, with concerns around
heredity, etc.
As
for Yates, I watched documentaries and read numerous articles about Andrea
Yates after the she was found to have killed her children, all of whom were
still little, one only six months. Yates was ultimately diagnosed afterwards
with severe postpartum depression, schizophrenia and postpartum psychosis. What
happened was horrific. Yet, what, in the aftermath, makes it still harder to
wrap our minds around is the questions around her intent, let alone her capacity
for rational thought. People in her life swear Yates never hated her kids. It
seems she loved them deeply, and what happened was a horrific confluence of
severe mental illness, her having been victimized her entire life, and her
religious beliefs leading her to decide she could protect her children from
some greater harm awaiting them in their futures by killing them and, thereby,
sending them safely to her god to lovingly care for instead.
I
used to think my fascination with the story was from seeing it as a worst case
scenario for mental illness and parenting. But I realized at some point that
what I was most consumed with was that, even in extreme madness, she behaved
like so many other people, by responding to her own lack of agency by taking
away agency from others. It's not what she consciously decided (she was found
insane on retrial, and thus not criminally responsible for her actions), but it
was the end result of what she did. And we see that same behaviour, in people
technically sane (technically, because, for example, I cannot imagine anyone
"sane" believing they can and should own another human being), time
and again throughout history.
AE: You deal with
mental health issues in this book in a way I rarely read in contemporary
poetry. Can you talk about how the collection came together and how you decided
to center it around this theme?
AJD: I write what I am
passionate about, and this is a thread that has run through my life, through
generations of my family, among friends and colleagues. And now, especially
since the start of the COVID pandemic and general acknowledgement of the
climate crisis, anxiety and depression, in particular, seem to be running
rampant. Of course they are. Look at what is happening. I am honestly amazed we
aren't all just breaking down in the streets daily. Yet, Madness was one of my
most fundamental fears for as long as I can remember. Not the being Mad itself,
but to be considered crazy, to be sent away, institutionalized, diagnosed.
Voicelessness, again.
So,
that thread ran through many of my poems, too. And I’ve talked before about the
impact Jon Crispin’s photographs of the confiscated luggage of patients of the
Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Upstate New York had on my view of
madness as a viable subject. Being invited by guest editor (and absolutely
brilliant poet) Roxanna Bennett to contribute fiction to a Matrix issue
on Madness also helped me feel this was a topic I could make work for an entire
book. As for the actual structuring, some great fellow poets and editors,
including Deanna Young and Stuart Ross, looked at previous versions of the
collection, and provided great guidance that helped me make both the poems and
the book's structure more cohesive. But, it wasn’t until Shane Nielson at
Gordon Hill Press pushed me to make the book more what it already almost was by
then that I fully embraced it. I am delighted by the end result in a way I ‘think
I could have anticipated.
AE: Your portraits of
the prairies and the suburbs is full of Gothic landscapes and scenes of
horror. Can you talk about influences?
Where does your sense of the Gothic and of horror come from?
AJD: Between the ages
of two and 15, I grew up on a hog farm in Alice Munro country, Wingham, a
foundry town in Huron county, southwestern Ontario. In the early 80s, the
bottom dropped out of the hog market and desperation ran through the
communities like a rush of Crown Royal. It suddenly cost more to raise a hog
than you would ever make on it per pound. But who would buy your farm? Eventually,
the banks refused to even foreclose on any more properties. They were holding
too many absolutely unsellable farms already. So you couldn’t even claim
bankruptcy. You could just go deeper and deeper into debt, with no hope for you
or your family or the dreams you brought with you. Or you could go to jail for
insurance fraud after burning your buildings down. Or you could hang yourself
from the rafters and make it all someone else’s problem.
Our
own, brick farmhouse, its yellow paint repeatedly peeling in the summer
humidity, was from the 1800s. Hanging in our bykeuken (uninsulated, room that acts as both a
mudroom, often a laundry room, and the informal kitchen where the working wood
stove is, where meats are hung and dried, and where the farmhands eat their
lunch) was a damp-eaten, ornately wood-framed, black and white photo, maybe
even a lithograph, come to think of it, of the stern looking couple who had
founded our farm. They would stare down at the farmhands or family as we ate
lunch.
My
first real job was picking rocks in the neighbour's fields so their dairy cows
wouldn't break their legs. In our own fields, my dad had me stoppering up
groundhog holes with more rocks, as part of his plan to protect the cattle we
grazed temporarily pre-slaughter from the same. My dad would then run water
into the remaining open holes to try to drown all the groundhogs and their
babies. I doubt it worked, since I doubt I found every exit. But you get the
vibe here. Two alcoholic immigrant parents in a rural gothic dystopia.
Then,
later, I married a horror writer.
AE: Your poems often
end with endings cut off, which feels like a disruption of status quo poems
where there's an epiphany or full circle ending. Can you talk more about ending poems with
conjunctions and other unusual endings? Any pushback from editor?
AJD: The majority of
pushback I’ve received from editors over the years has been when I try to wrap
my poems up with an inauthentic, pretty bow, to round them out and make them
neat and tidy and "finished". But that is not the nature of my
content, or my writing style, or my mind. How can I end an exploration of the
mess (glorious at times, but absolutely a mess) that we humans are, by coming
to a single, poignant, epiphanic conclusion? And, what thought is truly
complete? What is the end of a journey? At best, we are forever in some sort of
motion, learning along the way, changing always. I have made my peace, and so
seemingly have my favourite editors, with the fact that I am not, nor will I
ever be “a sensitive man.” I don’t have it in me to “write poems about flowers.”
But I’ll stay at the bar with you for the telling of stories that blend into
both each other and the night, until
;)
AE:
Joy is fleeting in the book, and when it appears, it is often associated with
the speaker's memories of queer experiences, such as “Obsessive traits.” There
is also joy in the play of language and the metaphors you use, the incantatory
lists. What, if anything, brought you joy when you were writing these poems?
How do you reconcile joy with the bleakness inherent in the collection? I loved
the bleak imagery here. I felt it painted a reality that I understand, that you
have not glossed over the direness of the 21st century. Do you think this is a pessimistic
book? Where do you see hope if you do?
AJD: I see a lot of
joy in these poems, but it is often the joy of expressing myself, and of
standing up, for myself and others. Tears are important. Tears can help you
process, can get you ready. But, to stand up and speak is to be filled with the
joy that you can, that you are, that you know you have to. That you have been
given the opportunity, and you are ready to give it to others. I am not joyful
that we continue to shut people down. But I feel the enormous joy of gratitude
that I can say “Look. We are continuing to shut people down. And it is time to
listen to them instead.”
AE: The poems in
response to Jon Crispin’s photographs of the abandoned suitcases at Willard
Asylum for the Chronic Insane fit really well in this collection. Can you talk
about how you found out about Crispin’s series and why it resonated with you?
AJD: Jon is one of the
few artists whose work moved me to reach out directly to them. I forget how I
came across his online gallery, but I recall he had a fair number of suitcases
and other baggage shot already, though he has done hundreds more since, I
believe.
The
Willard Asylum, which is a real place in upstate New York, eventually became a
hospital before ultimately shutting down in the latter half of the 1900s. It’s
a terrifying place, visually, geographically, and conceptually. The luggage Jon
shoots was all found in a long-closed-off wing in the attic while developers
were considering options for the property. From a shoe shiner’s work kit, to
prosthetic limbs, embroidery tools, photos and love letters, pretty shoes and
ribbons, the bags contained all the objects that were taken from new residents
and never returned. Many of the patients, or inmates, lived out their lives,
short or long, at Willard and were buried in its cemetery.
These
were the days, from the turn of the to mid-20th century, when you dealt with
someone who was problematic (your queer cousin, the wife you wanted to leave
for another woman but couldn’t divorce for religious or other reasons, the son
who came back from the war “changed,” your husband who wouldn’t get out of bed
anymore, your sister who heard voices, your white neighbour who wanted to marry
a Black woman, your girlfriend who tried to kill herself, and anyone else who
was too much or too bothersome for you to handle) by sending them “away.” And
Willard was far away, indeed.
For
me, the place, and Jon’s striking photos of the last, lingering intimate
details and priorities of these people, many of whom were intended to be
forgotten, resonated deeply with me. Here was my worst case scenario, and also
the very case against it, made manifest. To be diminished, discounted,
discredited, deemed valueless and made into nothing but an absence, someone
else’s regret. What Jon shows is in his photos is proof of life, however. Proof
of value and individuality, of creativity and connection and everything that
makes us human. That makes us worthwhile for the sheer fact that each of us
exists. No matter our state or how we present to the world.
AE: Can we start a
playlist for Crazy/Mad? I'd like to open with Lorde’s “Writer in the
Dark.” What would you include?
AJD: Absolutely! I
love books that come with playlists. I first saw it in queer romance (I chaired
a Bi Book Awards Romance jury for a number of years), and am thrilled to see
the idea spreading. Art always influences art. And music has been very
important to me my whole life. I’ve put this one together. Honestly, I find
Lorde a bit dodgy, politically/ethically, though I have included “Writer in the
Dark” here, because it is, regardless, a good song: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0k8jRw6K9DapwhnJnbwQZO?si=48de2af31c3b4489
Most
are what you might expect, but “Het Kleine Café” (the little cafe) is a song my
dad would listen to over and over again when I was growing up. It’s mournful,
on the one hand, but is also a beautiful lovesong to a little, broken down pub,
and the sense of community you get from going somewhere where you feel everyone
is equal and content. Het Kleine Cafe is not fancy (“the only food you can get
there is a hard-boiled egg”), but, as the song says, “It is a very good Cafe.”
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a
queer writer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin
Anishinaabeg traditional territory, colonially known as Ottawa, Ontario. Earl
is managing editor of Bywords.ca, and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual
Poetry (Timglaset Editions, Sweden, 2021). Her books include Beast Body
Epic (AngelHousePress, 2023), Genesis, (Timglaset Editions, 2023), Trouble
(Hem Press, 2022), and Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014; Invisible
Publishing, 2019); A World of Yes (Devil House, 2014) and Coming
Together Presents Amanda Earl (Coming Together, 2014).
Her
latest chapbook is The Seasons, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper
Zygonia (Full House Literary, 2024). More information is available at
AmandaEarl.com and https://linktr.ee/amandaearl.
You can also subscribe to her newsletter, Amanda Thru the Looking Glass
for sporadic updates on publishing activities, chronic health issues and joy in
difficult times.
