2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Donna Kane

Orrery, Donna Kane
Harbour Publishing, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

Donna Kane, a recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture and an honorary Associate of Arts degree from Northern Lights College, is the current executive director of the Peace Laird Regional Arts Council and co-founder of Writing on the Ridge (a non-profit society that has, for over twenty years, organized arts festivals, literary readings, artist retreats and writer-in-residence programs). Her work has appeared in journals and magazines across Canada. She is the author of two previous poetry titles, Somewhere, a Fire and Erratic (Hagios Press, 2004 and 2007), and the memoir Summer of the Horse (Harbour Publishing, 2018). She divides her time between Rolla, BC and Halifax, NS.

The book description for Orrery offers that “Orrery is a collection that orbits around the theme of Pioneer 10, an American space probe launched in 1972 to study Jupiter’s moons.” What prompted you to write a book around Pioneer 10?

Before Facebook, msn.ca was my go-to place for procrastination. I’d sit at the computer and watch the frames of curated news items roll by, usually on the lookout for some empty distraction like “This Week’s Best and Worst Dressed List.” One evening in 2003, an article on Pioneer 10 came up – “Pioneer 10 Calls Home Last Time.” The source of the CBC article was NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The media release read, “After more than 30 years, it appears the venerable Pioneer 10 spacecraft has sent its last signal to Earth. Pioneer’s last, very weak signal was received on Jan. 22, 2003. NASA has no additional contact attempts planned for Pioneer 10.” The idea of shutting off communication to Pioneer 10, of this human made object drifting from earth until the earth no longer existed (scientists predict that given Pioneer 10’s trajectory, it could still be travelling long after our sun has consumed the earth), haunted me. This initial fascination grew into a kind of obsession, an impulse to keep track of P10, to keep it in my imagination. I gathered as many facts as I could find, its speed, its trajectory, its weight, the number of instruments it carried. And I started to write poems inspired by the probe, ideas around transformation, materiality, consciousness.

I’m curious about the ways in which you approach a poem, akin to the notion of Dorothy Livesay’s “documentary” poem: composing lyrics that explore and document details of lived experience. What brought you to this approach?

It’s true that my poetry is lyric, and that I almost always use the material world as my launching point. Most of my concerns revolve around the material world and our relationships with each other and with other-than-human animals and life. While I admire all forms of poetry, for me, language is a way to explore these concerns. I don’t think I came to this approach in a calculated way; it is more that this was the approach that, for me, felt the most meaningful. Writing poetry (and reading it) forces me to slow down and to think things through and in so doing, often changes the way I think and perceive the world. I love the jolt of an insight which can be reassuring, surprising, or any number of other emotional responses. I love the mysteries in life, and poetry often helps me feel a bit closer to them.

In an interview posted at Geosi Reads around your prior collection, you respond that “metaphor is the engine, the workhorse of poetry.” Does this still hold true for the poems in this current collection?

I hope so. In Jan Zwicky’s recent book, The Experience of Meaning, she writes about gestalt comprehension, the phenomena of how our senses apprehend the world, and in her previous work, such as Wisdom and Metaphor, she explores how metaphor gives rise to meaning, so that, in some ways, wisdom is metaphor. This kind of thinking rings true for me and feels important to my own work. When a metaphor works (mine or someone else’s), it resonates with what feels like a truth. While I can’t say if all of my poems in Orrery achieve this, it is what I aspire to.

What was the process of organizing the final manuscript for Orrery? Many of your poems feel akin to lyric bursts, which would require a particular order and shape to the final collection. Did this emerge organically, or was there a shape you were aiming toward?

The poems in Orrery are not so much about Pioneer 10 as inspired by philosophical ideas arising from the probe. In ordering the final manuscript, poems that directly reference P10 or space travel were put into the first section of the book as more of a logical choice; the second section accesses more of the human “I” while the third section employs more other-than-human life as the subject. But there was also an organic ordering in each section and as a whole I hoped to build an overall shape of wonder and empathy for the world around us.

I’m wondering your take on nostalgia. How does one write without romanticising the past?

I am not a fan of nostalgia, and I am not a Romantic. When I do address the subject of nostalgia or write in what one might call high lyricism, that is, expressing emotion or reverence for the material world, I find that humour, restraint, and demotic speech help to quell sentimentality.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Orrery was completed? What have you been working on since?

I am currently working on another poetry manuscript that explores the ways Western society continues to distinguish between humans and other animals in ways that suggest we are not the same organism. I’ve been doing a lot of research into the work of philosophers, biologists, naturalists, and writers engaged in animal studies. I’m also exploring the double-edged sword of anthropomorphism, how anthropomorphizing other animals can negatively affect our thoughts about and therefore our relationships with them as well as risks evaluating another animal’s intelligence based solely on our own capacities. But then, on its other edge, denouncing anthropomorphism can deny other animals similar capacities such as emotions, languages, and dreaming, resulting in their exploitation and the loss of their habitat. In my work, I’m considering the sentience, cognition and emotion that exists in all animals and I’m addressing in a more general way the underlying structures of thought that contribute to intolerance and lack of empathy as it affects not only other animals, but also differences in race, class, and gender identity within our own species.

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Anne Carson

norma jean baker of troy, Anne Carson
New Directions, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

Anne Carson [photo credit: Peter Smith] was born in Canada and lives partly in Iceland now. 

I’m fascinated with the ways in which you approach books, especially given how many you’ve published so far. Does each new project begin as a potential extension of a far wider, ongoing canvas, or do you see each work as uniquely separate? Or a bit of both?

each one a new push into unknown places on tracks not yet possible.

Your work has long been engaged with blendings of ideas and forms, with this new work, a play shortlisted for a poetry prize, exploring both Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy “from their point of view.” What is it that such blendings provide that might not be possible otherwise?

i think of it more as juxtaposition than blending.  i find it more fruitful to think about 2 things in interaction with each other, rather than to think about either of them alone.  a triangular conversation is often easier than one on one.

The mythological Helen of Troy continues to fascinate contemporary poets, from H.D.’s infamous take to Georgia poet Gale Marie Thompson, who published her Helen Or My Hunger last year with YesYes Books. Has the mythological Helen become a figure that changes with each era because we require new ways of thinking about her?

yes certainly.  but Greek myths were always a vehicle for rethinking whatever problems are present to society’s mind at the moment – infinitely malleable substances, like play-doh with an air of ancient truth.

Given your exploration of form, what is it about the poem that holds your attention? Everything else you seem to do in your writing, from librettos to plays to essays, circles the foundation of poetry. What is it about poetry that anchors your attention from falling more fully into other forms?

falling is key.  there is no real falling in a prose medium, prose is a mechanism of intention and control.  only in poetry can you simply step off the building and fall. 

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since norma jean baker of troy was completed? What have you been working on since?

a comic book version of Euripides’ Trojan Women with artist Rosanna Bruno is to be published this month (may 2021) by New Directions. 

a 12-minute opera libretto for composer Caroline Shaw and the Philadelphia Opera, available online.  title We Need To Talk.

a full-length opera libretto for composer Bryce Desmond and the Chicago Lyric Opera, to be mounted in 2024.  title Herakles.

an illustrated version of Euripides' Herakles (illustration by me).

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Oana Avasilichioaei

Eight Track, Oana Avasilichioaei
Talonbooks, 2019
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry hybrids include Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019, finalist for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015). She has created many performance/sound works, written a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, 2020), and translated ten books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, including Catherine Lalonde’s The Faerie Devouring (Book*hug 2018, QWF’s Cole Foundation Prize for Translation) and Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis (Book*hug, 2017, Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation). She’s physically based in Montreal and virtually at oanalab.com.

 

Eight Track seems very much constructed as a book-length project. How did it originally begin, and what did you learn through the process? 

 

I tend to work on book-length (and in recent years, beyond the book too) projects as I’m very interested in exploring the fuller world of a particular idea. The first piece I worked on for Eight Track (before I had even conceptualized it as so) is the final long poem in the book, “Tracking Animal.” I worked on this poem, on and off, for years, so in a sense it was written throughout the writing of the rest of the book too. I knew from the start that “Tracking Animal” would be a long work, long enough to be a book in itself, but I wasn’t satisfied with leaving it at that. In writing it, and because the idea of “tracking” was in it from the very beginning, I became fascinated with how many meanings this seemingly simple word has in English, and thus embarked on more fully delving into these meanings.

 

Having seen you perform, I’m fascinated by the ways in which you approach layerings of sound. Sound is something that Eight Track explores far more openly than some of your previous published work. How important do you consider sound on the page? Do you feel there is anything lost at all in sound or cadence through working on the page? What is the difference? 

Sound on the page has been very important to me for a long time, and it led initially to my exploration of it off the page as well. With each book, I am curious to discover ways of investigating sound in more depth or from more varied perspectives on the page. I certainly don’t think of it in terms of loss, but of how rich and generative the page can be. The spacing, syntax, punctuation, phonemes, font, gradations of type are all ways of examining or mining the sonic qualities and meanings of language. One of the differences, however, between the page and live performance is that once printed, the page is set in one particular way (though as readers, we of course bring our own individual interpretations to it), whereas in performance, the acoustic qualities of the space, the bodies of the audience, the specificities of the sound system, and how I as a performer I might be feeling that day (in my body and voice, for example), among other aspects, will all affect the performance in the live moment. This demands much active and attentive listening from the performer, so that they can adjust what they might do in any one instance.    

 

Given your exploration of form, from visual to sound, in this collection, what is it about the poem that holds your attention? What is it about poetry that anchors your attention from falling more fully into other forms?  

Because I feel that language shapes and defines human beings to such a profound extent, I am (and will likely always be) endlessly curious about how this happens. For me, the poem remains the most versatile and malleable way of exploring this because of its concision, focus, attention to the paralinguistic qualities of language, boundless possibility of form, and dynamic presence, among many other aspects.

Can you expand on how you have been working “beyond the book”? 

By this I mean taking poetry and literature out of the book and into other mediums such as performance, audio works, and even video. Eight Track is in a sense a multiform project that includes the book Eight Track, but that also exceeds the boundaries of the book with audio works such as “Eight over Two: A Soundtrack,” a multimedia performance called OPERATOR, and the filmpoem “Tracking Animal (an extemporization).”

I’m fascinated with the ways in which you move between different languages, exploring the connections, overlaps and disconnects both through translation of other works, and utilizing multiple languages within your own writing. How did this particular play first emerge? 

In a way, you could say it emerged as far back as when I first began to learn a second language (i.e. English) as a child (Romanian is my first language), as through this conscious learning of another language I realized how differently one thinks in different languages, how plastic and malleable languages can be, how much they change and evolve by how we use them, by how we place them in our bodies and mouths, how fundamentally social they are. Exploring the interstices between them, using the syntax of one to influence the syntax of another, creating fractures and interventions by bringing the sounds of one into the sounds of another, all this gives me incredible freedom in writing and thinking, as well as, more importantly, makes me discover any language in new ways, compels me to keep reconsidering, learning, and pushing its meanings.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Eight Track was completed? What have you been working on since? 

I’ve began another large, multiform poetic project called CHAMBERSONIC that translates between different ways of scripting language and voice experiments, performing scores, and capturing/transmitting audio. With a focus on voice—its aural potential, silencing, inscribed interpretation—it will ultimately figure a hybrid poetry book and other traces such as an octophonic sound installation, audio works, graphic scores, and live performances. A poetry and audio sample from this current work was published in The Capilano Review last fall.

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry/2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Canisia Lubrin

The Dyzgraphxst, Canisia Lubrin
McClelland and Stewart, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist ; 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 23, 2021.

Canisia Lubrin [photo credit: Samuel Engelking] is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lubrin’s most recent poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst, was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, named a finalist for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and twice longlisted for the Journey Prize. In 2019, she was Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, and was named a Writers’ Trust 2020 Rising Star. In 2021, Lubrin was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction debut, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.

As the copy for the collection offers, The Dyzgraphxst is deeply engaged with issues of “intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster [.]” Given this, what do you think poetry can accomplish?

Given the snowflake, or the river, or the Candian woods, or the geese flying over head? I’m not sure I understand the dissection between the “this” of this question and poetry. Poetry is a wide-open space, where anything the poet is interested in can land. I don’t know if poetry is cabable of anything today that it hasn’t always been capable of. I am a poet who follows her interests into poetry. That’s all there is. I can’t tell anybody else what to do with poetry. As Dionne Brand says, poetry interrogates the reader. The nature of that interrogation depends on all kinds of things. All I know is where I am willing to go, and that I am willing to be lead, as Walcott says, into the home of the imagination.

There is such a wonderful polyvocal structure that holds the collection together. How were you able to keep all of the threads organized? Had you any models for this kind of work?

Both of my books arrive in the experimental tradition of Black diasporic art, and in the mode of Caribbean creolization. Polyvocality is very much deply embeded in Caribbean culture. Of course, if a reader is not familiar with the Caribbean as a space, as a grouping of ideas, as geography and poeple, etc., these modes would simply be missed entirely (as happens often). But I am concious about the writing being capacious enough that even if some crucial things are missed, in some places of the world, the poetry must still sing. I suppose I always want to write a book in which the reader must be involved actively in their own way through it. So, if 25 people read the book, they’ll come away each with their own signification of the work. And that is especially true for The Dyzhraphxst. In that way, The Dyzgraphxst does not hide its design, which is complicated, elaborate, even. So, if you’re looking for how the thing is working (which, of course, is part of the way it asks to be read), and you think you don’t quite get it (or whatever “it” is there suggesting itself), you must still be able to go along with the music, the rhythmic, the sonic. The pleasures of language. It is designed to be read both structurally and for something you might call epiphany. Complicated design but easy music, obvious emotional range. Like a completed house whose scaffolding you can see... a glass house whose interior is full of surprises, like one of those mirror playhouses, say. But the design isn't intended to keep the reader at bay. It is intended to let the reader become it, in this case. And that is hard, humbling, frustrating, work.

How was it working with Dionne Brand as editor? Were there elements of working with her that intimidated?

No. There’s no intimidation to report. Brand is an editor of immense sensitivity and nuance and skill. We were not strangers coming to this work, either. For a person like me who doesn’t need much push, a single gesture of hers would set me off in large ways. Simply brilliant working with Brand.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since The Dyzgraphxst was completed? What have you been working on since?

Always writing poetry. The next book is coming soon and it is a collection of short stories. That’s what holds my attention today, among many other things.

The Dyzgraphxst is constructed much more as a singular project than your debut. How did this project first reveal itself to you, and how different was it working on this collection?

Perhaps Voodoo Hypothesis prepared you for The Dyzgraphxst more than you might realize. The two books are quite different because they are different projects, but they are close siblings. I have answered this question about how the book “revealed itself” so many times that I fear I will become weary of repeating myself too often. The Dyzgraphxst has its roots in Voodoo Hypothesis. But, The Dyzgraphxst is my attempt to work through my distrust of the lyric I, especially in relation to the egologic individualism that has come to mark so much poetry, so much of the modern world. I wanted to put pressure on my own stakes in this work as a lyric poet with little confessional interest. I am interested in a thing. A question arrives. I follow its curiosities. That’s the movement. This process wasn’t different in terms of how I write.

There is such a joyous and playful sense of sound and rhythm in both of your collections. How important are sound and rhythm to you as you work?

Sound and rhythm are inseparable from poetry in my estimation. I have said this so many times already, but it might need to be repeated more than I’d like to admit: music is the anatomy of poetry. Which is to say my door into poetry is always aesthetic. No matter what the themes and all the serious business depict, sound is what I follow. I think sound carries its own kind of sense and challenges us who read and listen to make more of meaning than the predictable thing that syntax offers. Sound opens up something that puts us closer to the pre-verbal and then the oral roots of language. The page is an attempt to hold all that dynamism. And that dynamism is the sensorium of language that is given the pressurized space of the page in which to move us. I don’t let up until I feel moved in that sense.

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Sachiko Murakami

Render, Sachiko Murakami
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

Sachiko Murakami is the author of Render (2020), Get Me Out of Here (2015), Rebuild (2011), and The Invisibility Exhibit (2008). As a literary worker, she has edited poetry, taught creative writing, worked for trade organizations, hosted reading series, sat on juries, and judged prizes. She lives in Toronto.

The book description for Render opens with a definition of the word. How important was it for you to articulate the elements of breaking, reshaping and translation?

When I was describing the book as it was taking shape, I often said I was ‘rendering’ dreams and half-remembered experiences in poems. Then I thought about how ‘render’ has multiple meanings that are sometimes at odds with each other. Just three are to submit; to give in retribution; to melt down, by heating. A word can hold so much; a poem, even more. The poems deal with dreams and memories fractured by trauma and addiction. The idea that these experiences could be “rendered” at all is complex. Do I give them in retribution? What is melted down by heating? To whom am I submitting? These questions were the starting point for the project.

I’m curious as to what brought you to explore some of this material through the shape of poetry, over a more traditional, even if possibly lyric, non-fiction memoir. What did working through the material via poetry allow that might not have been possible otherwise?

As I said, trauma and alcohol and drug abuse affected my memory. There are gaps where important stuff happened, and many of the poems in the book circle these absences. I didn’t have the satisfying narrative arc a memoir requires. Poetry works well with glimpses, moments, sudden flights of feeling, knowings beyond explanation. I had all those things, so I wrote poetry.

When I interviewed you for Jacket2 in 2015 on your prior collection, Get Me Out Of Here, you described it as “[…] a book about wanting to leave, really: the self, the present, the here-and-now. How does that manifest? Through self-harm, through disassociation, through love, through poetry.” In hindsight, one might see the poems and possibility of Render in the background of some of these responses, with Get Me Out Of Here as a kind of prequel to the current work. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, I guess Render is in relationship to Get Me Out Of Here, although that book was written in relationship to other people’s observations in airports, so those observations drove the poems. I didn’t have that escape hatch for these poems. Render is about attending to that “wanting to leave” response, staying with it and exploring what’s underneath it.

This collection is obviously deeply personal, working through an element of the confessional in a way outside of what you’ve published prior. What originally prompted you to attempt to work through some of this through writing?

I had originally thought I would do another collaborative project, this time about other people’s dreams. But I started writing poems in relationship to my own dream journal entries, and I realized most of them were about my own trauma, addiction, and recovery. I started writing more poems about those experiences, not always filtered through my dreams. I have written personal poems before, but I had always been made to feel that the confessional was a no-no in Serious Poetry. Then I started noticing the poets who were writing unapologetically – and well – about themselves and their own experiences, and that emboldened me.

I had “worked through” most of those experiences before writing poems about them – I tend to write from long after an intense experience, after I've worked through it with friends or in therapy or in reflection. Most of the poems were written in the middle of a long depressive episode when the flatness I felt gave me enough space to write into the really hard stuff. Although a few poems were written in the middle of intense feeling – I wrote “First Try or Failure” while I was having a miscarriage, for example, and the act of composition gave me something to focus on beyond what was happening in my body.

Did you have any models for this kind of work, this kind of collection?

Certainly Vivek Shraya’s Even This Page is White, Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life, Billy Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World, and Aisha Sasha John’s I Have To Live were all on my desk. Render isn’t modelled on any of these, but I took heart from them while I was writing.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Render was completed? What have you been working on since?

My mother died the day I handed in my final edits on this book, and then my daughter was born two weeks later. Grief and babies have a way of taking up a lot of space, and there hasn’t been a lot of the silence and calm I need for writing. I go through long periods where I don’t write, though, and I know that it will return when I'm ready.