Q: I’m wishing to better understand how it is that you
write, and put manuscripts together. Both body works (University of
Calgary Press, 2023) and The Muse Sings (At Bay Press, 2020), for
example, incorporated poems originally published in your Sunfall: new and
selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) and Soul
Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), with further pieces
from this latest collection from Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada
and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996). What does this mean for
you in terms of composition? Are body works and The Muse Sings
manuscripts that you’ve been slowly picking at for some thirty to forty years,
or are they more recent, simply pulling threads from earlier collections?
A: Mostly, almost always, I construct books off
material I have been assembling for years. Sometimes that means salvaging something
that never got into earlier books. I’ve kept paused or undeveloped material
that was part of earlier mss. So, I’ll have swatches of residual work from most
of the titles, especially those from the last 20 years or so. They might involve
pieces that are nearly “done” when I remove and take them into a new ms. More
often, they will contain scatters of notes, strings of cognates, quotations,
references, research data, rhymes, phrasings, research informationreminders,
remainders, and even drafts of poems. I keep them in a few identified folders,
and will move them between folders, knowing I might use them somewhere or
other. The gathering helps me find something that I likely would forget, and
that I might one day run with. It’s banking. A lot of it is goofy and
outlandish, but mostley it amuses and impels me.
The two books you specifically ask about have drawn on
what I’d been pecking away at for years. Some of it developed in extensions on
earlier publications. body works continues a history that started at
least in 1987 with the publication of soul searching. The title led some
who had heard of the book but never read it mistakenly supposing I was a
believer in angels. The book pretty much sympathized with the body and lamented
the imperialism of angels and snobs. Years later I wrote departures
(2016), based on a few weeks with a ruptured appendix—more appreciation of the
body. body works became the latest incarnation of the concern. As I was
assembling it I wrote a lot of new pieces, but what I had learned and what I
had done in the earlier books didn’t disappear. I looked back through them,
found a few pieces that would fit, and brought them, revised, into it. I’ve
often reviewed related writing and revived it within a new field. Part of the
impulse is to “save” the pieces. Some of them come from out-of-print books, and
from books with limited exposure. A saving from being unknown; that's the hope,
at least. If I am justified in my belief that I have improved any of them, or
at least altered into new understandings, it can be a saving from being
unrealized too—in the original piece and in the accommodating text too. The
threads seldom consists of particular passages from earlier publications, but
the spirit of earlier books continues.
In the case of body works I had already
assembled a lot of material in notes and drafts. Once I had identified the
focus of a collection I worked quickly and put together a manuscript within a
year or two. The folder-keeping functions as a preparation, even when there is
no discernible subject in mind.
I also gather in a more focused way. For years I have
kept sites for particular projects that I’m keen on. The most dramatic version
of the practice must border on lunacy. As you know, I have been labouring on a
ms, love in a dry land, for a long time. I can’t say exactly when I
conceived of it as an actual project. But it did begin as an attraction for the
characters in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House. I am speaking here
of my interest as a poet, I had always found the novel powerful and moving—poetic,
I'd say. I am unsure about when I started writing, but it would have been 1989
at the very latest. I have worked on it ever since and it grew and grew. I
wrote and revised year after year. Two books, country music (2004) and the
bentleys (2006), and a chapbook, the bentleys (2006) have come out
of it. In addition to what mostly went into those mss., I have ended up with
far more than 700 pages of other poems, and hundreds of pages of notes. I have
just now, in the last week, finished two new manuscripts from that larger file
and submitted them to publishers. One of them, I am proposing, will be called love
in a dry land, the title that supervised the decades of work.
I have
simply shed hundreds of pieces but many of the deletions I have already begun
assembling as part of another, quite different ms.
And there's the Germany book that has had little if any
distribution. Almost
nobody in Canada has ever seen passwords.
Q: I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that you
compose manuscripts that large, excerpting, as you suggest, into manuscript
lengths more palatable in size for potential publishers. Is there a difficulty
in conception between the singular project and the excerpted-manuscript? How do
you pull such threads out of a tapestry to find self-contained book-length
works out of such largess?
A: Funny you should ask.
I invariably build up an enormous pile of material.
Some of it becomes well-developed and builds in pieces toward a book. A lot
sits in another location as patches or drafts that may or may not go further.
An awful lots gathers in notes that i constantly transpose from hand-written
scribbles into a cache kept on the computer. Sometimes i simply addend stuff at
the end of the digital file, or drop it into particular spots. The ms that I
have identified as the project proceeds through addition and deletion and
emendation and repositioning. The related cache develops along a crude parallel
and includes stuff that has struck me as possible or promising. The files grow
at the same time, never equally.
I seem unable to call it quits on either front. I will
also be developing in other files stashes I may take up for other projects.
There are these heaps, and what to do with them? Where
to take them? And when? So long as the impulse to write persists I keep
writing. The winnowing is exhausting—because there is so much to process and
because I persist in changing texts, inserting others, writing more. I plunge
on, often with no end in sight. The poems evade me.
The extracting is exhausting because I always feel
there is more to do, you can never be done. I always quote the line from
Mallarmé (or Auden as I first encountered it): A poem is never finished, it is
abandoned. But it’s hard to let it go. I find it painful to pull out what I
find attractive, and I discard it, or set is aside, with reluctance. I keep a
lot of the excisions for other possible use, and will sometimes open a new leaD
using what I have withdrawn, though the impetus will spill out and mutate into
its own direction. (seeing red derived from work I had been doing for goldfinger.)
I try to choose what I think are the most interesting
pieces and the most accomplished ones. I want language that is alive and am
quick to drop what seems to me ordinary and flat and uninspired. I am also
looking for pieces that “fit,” whatever that might mean. I’ve a pretty liberal
sense of coherence, and cogency, but I do remove what I feel does not belong,
even if I like it. What I end up with undoubtedly will be marked by features
that a reader would identify as mine, but
I also look for variety and range in the selections. Though it is
probably true that for at least chunks of writers’ lives they go on writing the
poem that is their poem, I don’t want to write one in small variations on it.
Not much of an explanation, really. It’s a long and
exhausting job. The two newest mss that I have sent out only a week ago came
out of months and months of shaping what must have mounted to a thousand pages.
As I focused on the new collections I assembled preliminary piles, then worked
toward a difficult disposing and including that constantly moved.
Q: So then: when a published collection emerges out of
a mound of such largess, how do you consider it? Do you see that as the
finished work, or as a thread of a larger project that might never see the
competed light of day? Or of multiple collections out of a single work? Do they
exist as titles-in-sequence or pulled threads? I suppose my real question,
here: is the project the process or the completed, published book or books?
A: I don’t know how to answer. What I am inclined to
say would not be very satisfying. I don’t make a distinction among the options
you raise. I guess I’m unsure what you might mean by “pulled threads.” For
starters I’d say that the published collection is never a finished work. It
exists in its own right, but what’s there is never settled in what I have done
or might do. If I understand your terms, I’d say that the work is always
product and always process, and I would think of it as as lurching back and forth.
The work generally would might remain in process for any number of reasons,
most of them predictable. There's a sense that the ms is unrealized or
inadequately realized; a failure of energy or attention; a sense of nerve or
failure; a redirection in priorities; simple distraction; the want of a
magazine or publisher; a desire or need to continue on a project. I always
revise and redirect, even with published stuff.
I welcome the opportunity, as in, say, bringing into body works
the residues you have found; or more dramatically in developing what is almost
a second edition of Bloody Jack. Things could be made better, or
different, or newly functional. The texts don’t close for me.
Again, my response may not answer the question.
Q: Well, I describe as “pulled threads” because I don’t
know how else to describe a manuscript of one hundred or so pages that would
emerge out of a larger manuscript nearing a thousand pages. How else would one
describe the process of pulling out poems to shape something smaller in scale?
And I’m curious as well about the process of you returning to and adding pages
to Bloody Jack: were these pages that were originally composed during
the period you were putting the first edition together, or were they
newly-written pieces?
A: The work is getting a fair way off by now. I do
remember that I wrote a new conclusion the second time around, “at the bridge,
Penny.” I also added some “cinematic” pieces that I had already written but not
in time to include in the first Bloody Jack. I removed at least one part
from the original. I am attaching a graphic of the file listing “new poems,
added.” I’m not sure how complete that is, but it would give you some idea.
Also: “jail break,” some “cunning” bits, a score for “by the red.” There are
probably others, and likely lots of little changes, but these I can’t remember.
There probably are traces of them in the material that remains from working
with U of Alberta.
Q: How easy or difficult was it for you to re-enter a
published work after that much time?
A: Easy for me. Easy, and enjoyable.
Maybe because the book in the first place was an
exercise. I had early on conceived of it as a loose drama, an assembling of
many different styles and voices (somebody else’s in a way), a compendium of
widely varied forms. It was a rough drama and a half-assed encyclopedia, I
thought. When Kroetsch showed up in the middle of the writing, he gave me a
copy of something by Bahktin, and I realized, that’s it, I’m writing a
Menippea.
The book was not particularly personal, so I hadn’t a
lot of emotion invested in it. I was able to come back to it not having much of
that attachment, and so felt free to change it as a lucky second chance. The
whole thing was a gift—all that wild material around the Krafchenko story, and
all of the formal possibilities.
Q: You mention that almost no-one saw passwords,
a collection of journal entries from your time teaching in Germany in 1980.
Wasn’t there another journal entry you published, I think part of Sunfall:
New and Selected Poems, that was composed from your hospital bed after your
appendix burst?
A: This stuff became a basis for departures,
the book that ambled around the ruptured appendix. As I remember, you found
that book strange and hard to centre. I thought that the material in sunfall
was a mix of prose and poetry. Maybe not. I say this without reviewing it, but
that’s what I had supposed. I always work with a loose sense of what counts as
poetry, and what I’m willing to call poetry. Often, I work with intergeneric
stuff. The journals exceed any ordinary definition of the form; they’re bulging
with crazy rhymes and the words of people I encountered and jokes and fantasies
and parodies and rapid shifts in voicing and ironies and eruptions of sounds
and rhythms, lyrical outbursts and elegiac moments, patches of nonsense —the sorts of stuff that
would violate the truth-telling function of the journal. I think of the journal
as a place where I can let go, and let in. I think I mentioned something about
wanting language that is demonstrably alive. I think of what I do in journals
in much the same way. I often play and invent and reach for something more than
sober recordings. Quite often they include passages marked with ragged right
margins and a lineation that in almost any other context would announce they
are poems; or think they are; or would like to be considered as poems.
Q: I’m wondering at your use of the prose journal over
the years. Given your suggestion that you publish far less than you produce, is
the journal form one you utilize often? What prompts you to compose a journal
over, say, working on a poem?
A: Almost entirely circumstantial, that and the
excitement of trips. Many of them included family and friends and colleagues. I
kept only one journal before the summer of 1990. And I have kept journals when
I was travelling for a long stretch and then usually under literary or academic
circumstances. They took a lot of time and energy, all the way into keyboarding
and editing. The first journal, which I have taken to calling “Travels with
Dave,” came from May, 1978, when he, Daniel Lenoski, and I were in Lahr,
Germany, were ending up our teaching for a first-year English course for the
Canadian armed forces and their spouses. And then a series of others in 1994,
1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002—all from visits to Europe. I kept notes by hand,
and increasingly by keyboarding over the years. After I got back to Winnipeg I
keyboarded everything, sometimes within months, sometimes over several years. I
always edited them, trying to make the writing more vivid and fresh, and more
detailed too (no way could I have entered many of the passages right there on
the spot amidst workshops and visits and talks and classes and presentations
and travel and you know what this is like). I invariably arrived home with
dozens of notes on scraps of paper and napkins and coasters, including names
and addresses that sometime bewildered me: who was this? Why did I write this
down? The keeping was a nuisance sometimes, and often inconvenient, but i
enjoyed it at every stage. There was always the old writer’s pleasure in
fitting a word.
The journals enabled me to remember. And to construct
a record of cultural events. They also helped me to pay attention. Without the
alertness that a journal requires, I would not have noticed all kinds of
things. And I would have lost a lot of memories that I have turned, and hope to
have turned, into poetry. When reading the 2001 journal, for example, as I am
doing now in response to your email, I feel a pleasure in what it has kept for
me.
Q: Have you considered attempting any further journals
into print?
A: I have, yes, but I’ve made no attempts so far.
Love to find a place for something.
- see rob mclennan's reviews of Dennis Cooley's three 2021 poetry titles here.
Dennis Cooley is retired and
living in Winnipeg. Recent titles; gibbous moon and body works.
Photo credit: Jan Horner
rob mclennan will probably be
in Winnipeg on October 21, launching World’s End, (ARP Books).
