rob mclennan : 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award Poetry Shortlist: Ashleigh A. Allen

Ashleigh A. Allen, for “Balcony buffalo”
read Allen’s shortlisted work here
2024 Bronwen Wallace Award • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

Established in memory of writer Bronwen Wallace, this award has a proven track record of helping talented developing authors secure their first book deal. Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short fiction. The 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award will be announced on June 3, 2024.

Ashleigh A. Allen is a poet, writer, and educator. She has taught literature, writing, and creative writing in various classroom and community settings in New York City and Toronto. A graduate of The New School’s MFA program, Allen is currently a PhD candidate in curriculum and pedagogy at OISE – University of Toronto. Her poetry has been published in PRISM international, ROOM, Contemporary Verse 2, and The Malahat Review. In 2023, she was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Allen lives in Toronto. 

I’m fascinated by your use of the prose poem in this cluster of pieces. What first brought you to the form, and what made you decide upon utilizing the prose poem for this particular grouping?

Thanks for this question! This is how I write—in this grouping of poems and elsewhere. I think we tell stories and write in ways that we enjoy reading, and I have appreciated prose poems since I was a kid listening to hip hop in my room, which was my introduction to poetry and when I began being a devotee of clever wordplay. I’d also add that I’ve not been drawn to writing using traditional forms for a long while, even though I teach them and believe they can be fun to play with. (Similarly, I admire modern forms writers invent for specific pieces of writing, such as the constraints OuLiPo employ for their projects.)

What is it that the form of the prose poem provides for you, do you think, that might not have been possible otherwise?

I’m not sure if it’s a matter of what is possible, but when I write prose poems, I am differently in tune with what I’m writing – thinking more about the language in the air than on the page; it’s maybe more patterns and rhythms and sounds. But then again, even if these are prose poems, I ultimately play with constraint because the length of the lines is still contained in this grouping of poems.

What writers or works sit at the back of your head as you write? Who are your models?

Some poets I turn to regularly are Terrance Hayes, Ocean Vuong, Diane Wakoski, Frank O’Hara, and many more New York School poets. I was also lucky enough to learn from many excellent poets in graduate seminars or community learning spaces, so I know their writing and processes, which inform my writing—these include poets like Paul Violi, Mark Bibbins, and Hoa Nguyen.

The Jury citation for your piece speaks to your “Frequent use of assonance and sibilance, concrete language, and a startling diction reveals a narrative which slowly develops through ‘clusters of curses’ and ‘dice and discomfort.’” I’m fascinated by how you use sound through these poems. How important is sound to the way that you write? How do you manage to get such evocative sound through poems composed for the page?

I think I mentioned earlier that writing poetry is a way for me to play. It’s not that sound is important, per se, but that it’s interesting to me and is something I often employ. I like having fun with sound, but it’s not a deal breaker if a poem isn’t doing anything interesting sonically.

Regarding your second question, I don’t know exactly how I “get such evocative sound” (though thank you for that compliment). In part, it comes from practice, but I also believe my relationship with sound has to do with my lifelong fascination with and respect for genius MCs. Even as a kid, I was entirely captivated by the early days of hip hop—that’s what originally inspired me to write poetry, to be honest. 

Is this selection part of a larger grouping or stand-alone? Is this something you are working to make book-length?

This selection is part of a book-length collection I put together in the winter. I sometimes go back and edit here and there or add and subtract poems if something new fits well, but for the first time, I have something book-length, and that is exciting!

That is exciting! What has the process been like to put together a debut full-length collection? Did the manuscript evolve organically, or has there been much in the way of editing, revision and/or reorganization?

I returned to my writing during COVID-19, especially the first year of lockdown, and have maintained, in part, that dedication. Like so many others, I had the time to make art for the first time in many years. My writing felt unpredictable to me (and more violent and grotesque than ever before), but that was the moment we were in. My writing practice became a necessary ritual, and this manuscript emerged from there. So yes, it did emerge organically. It’s not a collection of “COVID poems” or whatever that would be, but it is a collection of what I found when I finally tended to the things I had been shoving into the periphery of my life. I sat with as many things as I could pull from the shadows and took stock. I constantly revise poems and occasionally re-order pieces in the manuscript. The process of putting the manuscript together has been wholly rewarding, even if the order may be a bit clumsy since I am new to this.

Well, the best part about assembling a poetry collection is that there isn’t any “single, right answer,” but multiple ways to approach connections; I’m sure four equally-experienced editors going through your manuscript might provide suggestions and observations that would produce manuscripts potentially quite different from each other. Finally: how close is this project to completion? Have you any sense of what might come next, or is that too soon a question?

That’s true about editors. This manuscript is done, and I don’t know if I’d make many changes to what it is today. (Although maybe if there’s an editor who has a convincing vision…)

What’s next? I will keep writing poetry. I also have an idea for a children’s book I hope to finally finish this summer, and, looking further down the road, I would like to write a collection of short fiction pieces. I don’t often write fiction, but I have edited fiction and currently teach fiction writing in my creative writing course. Each semester, my students inspire me to give it an honest go, so I think one of these days I will!

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in August 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a suite of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).

rob mclennan : 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award Poetry Shortlist: Faith Paré

Faith Paré for “Selections from ‘a fine African head’”
read Paré’s shortlisted work here
2024 Bronwen Wallace Award • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

Established in memory of writer Bronwen Wallace, this award has a proven track record of helping talented developing authors secure their first book deal. Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short fiction. The 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award will be announced on June 3, 2024.

Faith Paré is a poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese ancestry. Her work appears in publications including The Capilano Review, The Ex-Puritan, and Contemporary Verse 2. She has performed at York University’s Art Gallery, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, and the Winter Garden Theatre. Paré was the inaugural winner of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship and served as curator of the Atwater Poetry Project from 2021 to 2023. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal).

The Jury citation for your piece writes that “Faith Paré returns the truth not only to the victims, but also to the survivors of the 1969 Sir George Williams University computer centre incident. This urgent, chimerical, and devastating work is finely crafted from the unreliability of archive and the misery of memory.” What was it that drew you to write about and around this event? How does one even begin to write about such an event?

Thanks for having me on the blog, rob!

I will try to answer both of your questions at once, because the mystery of both — of writing impulse and of empathy across space and time — implicate the other.

Early on, as I waded through the small, but dense and vibrant, body of research on the Sir George Williams Computer Centre Occupation, something inside of me had decided that what we know about the student uprising still wasn’t enough for me to live with.

That impulse had also rejected a scholarly treatment of the material. This was in part from my lack of historical training, as well as wringing over my resentments about being educationally ‘rewired’ in university. But ultimately, poetry insisted on being the form that I wrote about CJH—the protestor that the poems address—and the other anti-racist occupiers of the SGW Computer Centre in 1969, is because poetry is the method of love that I know best.

Many people find the historian’s approach to be cold and invasive, but what I find in the literature on the SGW Computer Centre Occupation is a tremendous amount of investment and care. I return to the scholarship of David Austin, Nalini Mohabir and Ronald Cummings, Christiana Abraham, Stéphane Martelly, Kelann Currie-Williams, among others, because their loving endeavour to ask questions of the historical record informs my own: to honour, through poetry, the grief and possibility that dwells in the lapses of historiography.

Perhaps this honouring may help prevent similar historical erasures. This feels critical to me as we watch in real time a rising revisionist narrative about campus occupiers across North America, who are demanding university divestment from the Israeli invasion in Gaza.

Or, perhaps this honouring won't help. It's a big demand for something small like a book.

Writing this manuscript has involved, even depended upon, a push-pull between the roles of poet or researcher, and failing at both. If I fail ‘right’, then I hope the book will capture a kind of truth that neither form can do in isolation.

What first drew you to writing about this at all, let alone through the lens of the poem? What do you think the shape or form of the poem allows the material that might otherwise be possible?

I began the poems while completing my undergraduate degree at Concordia University. Sir George Williams University is one of Concordia’s parent institutions. I learned of the computer centre occupation, the police brutality and fire that ended it, and the subsequent suspension, shunning, and prosecution of the protestors, as an urban legend passed between students.

For a long time, the history of the occupation was part of an unofficial record of the university. Decades of hard work from community organizers, some of who were computer centre occupiers or allies themselves, eventually prompted Concordia’s 2022 apology for its response to the protestors in 1969. I also presume that, for the university, it was eventually less advantageous to treat the occupation as an embarrassment than to find some claim to the students’ bravery — or even some ownership of it.

As a Black student, knowing the ill treatment that the occupiers endured, especially the Black and Caribbean-born participants, became inextricable from my university experience. It helped me understand the DNA of the university I attended, and why I struggled so immensely during my time as a student, back to my earliest memories of schooling. The computer centre occupation and its legacy taught me, among many lessons, how bound together the education, carceral, and immigration systems are in this country.

The computer centre occupation has also taught me to be discerning about how we tell stories about the past. This is most obviously demonstrated by how university administration, Canadian courts, and the press distorted the protestors’ motivations; but also through how narratives form, by who is considered a major or minor figure. When I learned from a peer about student protestor CJH, who is the focus of my manuscript, she was tacked-on to the end of a story about the protests. I was disturbed by the details of her death and its rumoured connection to the police violence at the scene, but also by how a life — a non-Canadian Black woman’s life — can be made peripheral, except when useful to a grander narrative.

I wanted to imagine the life that CJH may have lived during the occupation, what brought her there, and what followed. I won’t pretend that this desire is uncomplicated or even unselfish. Poetry, too, can be sensational, and extractive, and apocryphal. I think, though, that poetry’s devotion to the minute allows us to attend to the peripheral and to wondering beyond it. Scholarship demands concessions to relevance and rhetorical usefulness, whereas the poetic lingers in the marginal and tangential.

Did you have any models for the kind of poems you were attempting with this project? How did the poems themselves find their form?

The initial writing was really invested in contemporaneity, and the pieces found that through prose poetry. I wanted to articulate being Black in the university 50 years after the occupation and its violent suppression. Most of those poems touch on the turmoil of my early undergraduate years. I felt that I couldn’t scrutinize CJH’s life without implicating my own.

Prose poetry as a form was new and unwieldy after I spent so much time during my degree learning how to write better verse. I liked, though, how the form evoked so many associations for me: with the present, due to prose’s dominance in public life; with mundanity, which defines university bureaucracy; and with academia, because of the distant, incisive objectivity of research writing.

Most of the poems that wade into CJH’s life in the late 1960s/early 1970s, however, skewed back to verse. This serves a practical necessity of delineating temporal setting poem to poem in a project in which timelines intertwine. But I was also curious to re-learn the importance of time as a poetic tool. The line break and the caesura can rupture passing time, like the magic of a jump cut in film. 

An incomplete list of writers who served as guides throughout the work: Kaie Kellough, Jordan Abel, Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Jay Bernard, Hoa Nguyen, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Aimé Césaire.

How important is sound on the page as you work? Do you feel there is anything lost at all in sound or cadence through working on the page? What is the difference?

When I began writing poetry, I was a teenager enamoured by Toronto’s spoken word scene. I was fascinated by the art form for its attention to the voice and the body as integral to the text. It’s impossible to exactly re-stage a spoken word performance twice. I liked how, if treated carefully on the page, sound could command a certain poetic voice to come to the forefront regardless of the mouth reading it. I was hungry to achieve as close to a perfect mimetic space as I could between the written words and the performance. I saw this as a vital physical and artistic challenge.

Then I grew up a little, and began reading and listening to different work. I started to like the possibilities found in discrepancy or destabilization between the voice and the text. For example, in a fine African head, threading cut-outs from academic and journalistic sources into the text is a very simple gesture of building discord by incorporating various authors and modes of address. The creative impulse has become, “What are the different ways someone can read this?”

I’m also negotiating how to read these pieces aloud as I structure this book out of poems written across three years, with many shifts in poetic voice. That cavern between the voice and the text becomes wider and, I hope, richer with each day that passes, because I’m increasingly less of the person who wrote those poems. Poetic voice, to me, is an invitation to be embodied differently, and I love sound’s role in that. 

How close is this project to completion? Have you any sense of what might come next, or is that too soon a question?

I would like to finish the manuscript this year and to develop a couple of short performances based on pieces in the book. Beyond that, I am mostly planning toward deepening parts of my non-writing life. I’m skeptical of industry pressures to produce more. I’m grateful to the university for teaching me the dangers of tunnel vision. The writing will always be there. I have a lot of other learning to do.

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in August 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a suite of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).