2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Ed Roberson

Asked What Has Changed, Ed Roberson
Wesleyan University Press, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Ed Roberson, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a contemporary poet interested in the environment, visuality, and spirituality. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including MPH + Other Road Poems (2021), the chapbook Closest Pronunciation (2013), To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010), which was a runner up for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Award, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (2009), City Eclogue (2006), and Atmosphere Conditions (1999), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University.

I’m curious about the way you structure poems, each of which seem to expand out of a single, opening point, usually articulated through your use of titles. What brought you to where you are now, of composing poems as such forms of inquiry, opening and engagement?

I see form as information, structure as information about what it encompasses, an argument; then I see balance as a form of answer.

I first thought of poems as a different way of seeing that enlarged our seeing in ways simpler language couldn’t. Now I’ve begun to see the forms and structures of poetry not just as a way of seeing, or as a discourse in/on a different level, but as a way of discovery, of inquiry, as a way of solving questions or problems. So the ABA form; or the strophe, antistrophe, epode; or the octet, volta, and sestet all come to be methodologies of music, of imageries, of poetry right now.

The way this collection is structured suggests poems that sit together less through an array of narrative propulsion or through-line than as a suite of poems that flow across a broader canvas, allowing for the ebb and flow of subject and lyric. How do your poetry manuscripts, then, form themselves? Have you a particular series of subjects or structures you wish to engage, or do books form more organically?

There is no typical way in which my manuscripts are formed other than the pile in which the poems collect on my desk. My writing style is similarly unorganized—or, rather to say, organic. I write on anything: newspaper or magazine blank spaces, the tear-off section of bills and renewal forms, packaging—anything. I write with anything—ink, pencil—and only later put the writing into the computer. I continue refining the compositions for rhythmical timing (by line and by spacing, open and vertical), for graphic image and form (by line count, repetition, and stanzaic structure), and for music (by reading aloud). Then a final typed copy is made, saving all the revisions. This can take a day or several weeks. I work on several ideas/poems simultaneously.

Are there particular pieces composed through this system that might not fit into the manuscript you are currently working on, but might land in something else down the line? I suppose this question leans into wondering if you compose multiple manuscript-threads simultaneously.

I learned to draw from my dad, who would draw what he was going to build as a way of understanding what he was about to do as much as envisioning his finished box, cabinet, or room extension on the house. I take seeing as a way of explaining or understanding from him. My understanding, and love, of poetry took off like a slingshot when I discovered images and what different figurations could do. My work is visual, yes, but not simply descriptive.

I’m curious to read that you studied painting in your youth. I’m wondering how your engagement in visual art might have informed the structure of how you approach or construct poems?

I seem interested in the language of vision, the rhythms and conceptualizations that go on when seeing and the transformations that occur. So images that talk back and forth, take stands (masks) and work it out or not, is what impels my poems. Hence, the serial poem and its choral, community format. Any image or visual statement can set off a poem, so I’m always open to a poem, but what pile, what discussion, i.e., what manuscript it will join is up to the mind of the group. Yes, multiple threads because I’m always watching, looking at multiple things in a changing world from fluctuating engaged viewpoints.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since asked what has changed was completed? What have you been working on since?

I’m writing a lot of art reviews, criticism, which seems in line with the poems’ review and criticism of seeing, of perception and knowledge. I like the way a figure or an image in a poem can line out the knowledge within something while also drawing out the emotional encompass of its mystery.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, translated from the Ukrainian written by Natalka Bilotserkivets
Lost Horse Press, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian for nine years. Her published works include essays, poetry, monographs, and subtitles to various films. With Ostap Kin she translated Vasyl Lozynsky’s chapbook The Maidan After Hours (2017). She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s Anna’s Other Days. She holds an MA in Slavic studies from Columbia University, where she focused on Eastern European history and literature. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Ali lived in both Western and Central Ukraine for nearly five years. She now lives in Chicago, where she also sometimes works as a baker.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of six poetry collections, including Bad Harvest (2019), a Massachusetts Book Awards ‘Must Read’ in Poetry. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. She is a contributing poetry editor to Solstice Literary Magazine and founder of Night Riffs: A Solstice Magazine Readings & Music Series. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Providence College, and is a Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Natalka Bilotserkivets has published five volumes of poetry. Her work, known for lyricism and the quiet power of despair, became a hallmark of Ukraine’s literary life of the 1980s and 1990s. The collections Allergy and Central Hotel were Books of the Year in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Still, the majority of her oeuvre remains unknown in the West. She lives and works in Kyiv.

I’m curious about the process of two translators on a single work. What was your process of working together, and how did this particular project emerge?

Ali Kinsella: This project was very new for me in that I hadn’t ever worked so intensively on poetry, nor had I ever collaborated so thoroughly with another translator. We agreed that I should do the first, quite literal drafts and that Dzvinia should come in after me and shape them into something more resembling poems. This approach was sort of obvious, given our respective strengths. Each draft then had at least one collaborative editing session over the phone, but sometimes three with extra notes emailed back and forth. As we have now been working together for over two years, we can work much faster. In working with Dzvinia, I have really had a master class in poetry and I can anticipate some of her critiques and concerns better—or at least I’d like to think so.

Dzvinia Orlowsky: You definitely do, Ali! And thanks to Ali’s careful attention to detail, I’ve broadened my understanding and appreciation of unexpected tense shifts, gender fluidity, and the nuances of the Ukrainian language.

With respect to our collaborative process, Ali summed it up perfectly. I would only add that in finding our complementary strengths as translators, we also had to develop a sense of trust for each other as readers. I lean more toward figurative rather than literal interpretations—leaps of faith! So I tended to look for metaphors where maybe Natalka didn’t intend them. Ali favored staying closer to the original text and its literal meaning. We also interpreted several of the poems in this collection differently. For example, Ali understood Wolf Wine Bar to be about climate change, whereas I saw it as a poem about war (note: this was prior to Russia’s February invasion). Honestly, it could be read both ways. This kind of discussion made our project that much more challenging and exciting. Natalka gave us the freedom to interpret her poems as we felt them, but we were also able to reach out to her for help on poems that touched on subject matter we weren’t familiar with.

I suppose a question I should ask Ali, given your previous experience of translating works from Ukrainian, how did the experience of translating Bilotserkivets’ work differ? Were there elements you needed to approach through translation that were unique to her poetry?

AK: Translating poetry is very different from prose, mainly because the art form is so compact. An obvious sacrifice that must often be made in poetry translation is rhyme, but beyond rhyme, there are meter, sound, imagery, and meaning. Not all of these elements can be preserved and choices have to be made. Of course, there are other considerations when translating prose—tone, register—but the endless blank page leaves so much room for compensation. If a joke or pun doesn’t work where it was in the original, throw one in somewhere else!

Most of the poems included in Eccentric Days were originally written in free verse, but there were a few that we “converted” since we were sure we couldn’t preserve the rhyme scheme and have the poem still come off as serious. So, the real new challenge for me as someone who came from primarily translating prose, was paying so much attention to sound (especially since musicality is such an important element to Bilotserkivets), lyricism, and image. Dzvinia was more willing than I to consider metaphorical rather than literal meaning in order to benefit the poem as a whole, and I’m very grateful to her for helping to lead me away from strict literalness (which isn’t exactly how I’d categorize my prose translations, but by comparison they certainly approach verbatim).

The collection is an impressive size, in no small part to the decision to include Natalka Bilotserkivets’ original writing in Ukrainian alongside your translations. For such a hefty work, what was behind the choice to include the work in its original form?

AK: The book came out as part of a bilingual series. The publisher, Christine Lysnewycz Holbert, had a minimum length for us, but put no cap on the number of poems or quantity of miscellanea. Still, we only included the poems that we wanted to be a part of this collection; this was far from an exercise in throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck.

DO:  Many literary magazines and journals publish the original text alongside the translated work. In addition to other advantages, it grants ocular proof that such a poem exists!  As a translator, I welcome the presence of a foreign language on the page. In our book, you’ll see that the poems mirror each other fairly consistently. There are exceptions, however. For example, in our translation of Natalka’s poem “Nature,” the last stanza is elongated in comparison to the original. The poem’s intention and meaning hasn’t changed; but the artistic decision, here, is to slow the pace—to emphasize the speaker losing those cherished and no longer audible, sensory sounds. We wanted to hold that line, the word “secret,” in suspension before resolving to “tears, laughter.” After all, if it’s given up too easily, it never really was a secret…

Given the way the Ukrainian language has shifted and changed over the years, I feel Lost Horse Press’s bilingual books provide an invaluable record of Ukrainian-language poetry at specific time in its literary history. I appreciate being able to switch between Ukrainian and English—with the end goal of improving my Ukrainian. 

Was there a difficulty, through your translations, of maintaining what you referred to as her “ungendered present tense”?

AK: Well, the specific problem of gender is an issue having to do with Ukrainian grammar that doesn’t exist in English. Ukrainian is a highly inflected language with cases that give us noun and adjective declensions, verbal conjugations, and gender, which affects nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the past tense. This might make Ukrainian sound rigid, but the words’ taking all these modifications actually means speakers can be quite creative and also leave many things—like the sentences of subjects—merely implied. (Perhaps you, too, remember that eye-opening day in Spanish 101 when you learned you could just say, “tienes,” to mean you and have.) So, while the past tense has often felt too restrictive for Natalka as it forces her to pick a gender for her speaker (something English speakers never face), the present tense allows her to get away without using pronouns (something English speakers can’t usually pull off).

There were times when we were, in fact, made to choose either “he” or “she,” but mostly we found other ways to sidestep getting boxed in—“you” is the most obvious choice, and one that Natalka herself often makes. On the topic of grammatical gender in language, I do remember just barely catching a big mistake before the book went to press. Natalka has a small little untitled poem that punches above its weight class that starts, “Life is simple and quiet / and I love it.” I had mistakenly translated the pronoun “it” here as “he” (they are the same in this case), which completely changes the poem and actually in that state we had considered discarding it. But this is the challenge of a non-native speaker who has to actively remind herself that the “hes” and “shes” she sees are often just “its.”

DO: I’d say Ali has answered this question thoroughly, and I feel lucky that I didn’t have to wrestle with these considerations to the extent that she did. 

In terms of making poetic/thematic choices while maintaining an “ungendered present tense,” I agree—particularly early on, this created some difficulty for us because, as Ali notes, if we got the pronoun wrong, we could easily miss the point of the poem. And we didn’t want to overwhelm Natalka with picky, poem-to-poem questions. Early on, I spent too much time making sure I got individual poems “right.” I had to remind myself what I know as a poet shaping my own work into a collection:  each poem informs the poems that follow it. By the time Ali and I were half-way through our manuscript, we had a better sense of its constellation and were able to resolve gender and tense questions more quickly. As for Natalka’s proclivity toward using the present tense, that worked well for us. It contributed to a sense of immediacy and intimacy which we strove to capture in her work.

Since the completion of Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, have there been any further translation projects the two of you might consider collaborating on, whether Natalka Bilotserkivets’ work or anyone else?

DO: We are always interested in Natalka’s work and have published several co-translations of her newer poems. In addition, Ali and I are very moved by the work of a Lviv-based award-winning poet, translator, and fiction writer for children, Halyna Kruk. We have been translating some of her poems. Serendipitously, this past spring Lost Horse Press approached us about publishing a collection of her poetry. I was at AWP at the time we signed the contract. Look for that book in 2024!

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Douglas Kearney

Sho, Douglas Kearney
Wave Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Douglas Kearney [photo credit: Bao Phi] has published seven books, most recently Sho (2021), a National Book Award, Pen American, and Minnesota Book Award finalist. Buck Studies (2016) was the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection, and Starts Spinning (2019), a chapbook of poetry. His work is widely anthologized, and he is published widely in magazines and journals. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul, MN.

You’ve described your work as a kind of “performative typography,” a phrase that just sings across a whole range of possibilities. How do you feel this element of your work has evolved across the length and breadth of your work-to-date?

Thank you for this question. I’d argue that any typeset poem is a designed object; but when the design hews to more conventional typography (in English, say, left margin aligned, consistent point sizing, etc), a practiced reader perhaps doesn’t notice the decisions they’re making about where to begin, proceed through, and end a reading of a poem. When I think of what I’ve been calling performative typography, I mean to mean poems that make us conscious of our active participation as readers and the inherent agency of that activity. Most of my development in this vein has paired technology with compositional possibility. The bulk of my praxis has used page layout software and, as such, has pushed a bit at the idea of spaciality as a means of creating associations even when sentences do not. It has also been important to me to use similar typographic styling within the performative typography poems to assert similarities between those and the more conventionally-arranged ones.

Where I find myself now—and these aren’t in Sho, though there are some published on the internet—is in a closer conversation with hip-hop sampling techniques. These poems are more truly collaged from found sources, marking my interest in the textural as well as the textual.  For these poems, I compose them in photoediting software, often revised from freehand drafts in my journals.

There is very much a sense of music and rhythm in your work, one that plays off such wonderful collisions and contusions of rhythm and vernacular. Do you see this as an element of performance? How did this emerge?

I’ve grown up listening to hip-hop, so what you describe richly as collisions and contusions has accompanied my own life almost long as I can remember. Yet, hip-hop music expressed through rap felt close enough to the kinds of rhetorical performances that featured in my Black household and block that I understood it simultaneously as folk music and commercial music. I sometimes have to remind myself how dynamic and weird it is to hold those two characterizations as the music and culture were developing in real time with my listening.

Another important aspect of collision and contusion (a new C&C music factory!) was that where I grew up—Altadena, CA—was nestled right in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes when we would drive around, the valley would make the radio station signals careen into one another. Generic and cultural interruption were features of my radio listening, an audio equivalent to seeing signage in Spanish, Armenian, and Chinese logograms while looking out the backseat window of a car.

Your work has long been known for an engagement with a variety of political and social concerns. How do you feel your response has evolved over the space of your published work?

When I first started, I think I was deeply invested in the fiction that I had all of the answers. This led to a style in which I wasn’t trying to understand people—including myself—rather I wanted to project certitude in a way that diminished its power. Understand, I’m not interested in creating ambivalence when I don’t feel it. Like: white supremacist-driven domestic terrorism is f_ _ king evil. Certainly. Yet I am interested in blending/bending tones to create unsettling effects. I want myself and my reader to think about what we assume is the response that makes us comfortable and what happens when we question that response.

I find myself pushing back against false equivalencies, it’s why I’m wary of simile and metaphor. I’m often less driven by literary effects that remove the reader from the conscious act of reading, seeing letterforms on a page, so I find myself being more deliberate and sparing of images than I used to be. But I don’t know how programmatic I am about that. Sho draws poems from as far back as 2008 and while I did revise the poems to speak to each other, I wanted many of them to retain their particularities and peculiarities. Thorns.

Still, one of the things that I find exciting about a praxis of intentional constraint is that when I change constraints, I’ve rewired my approach. I once wrote an opera in a counterfeit language. It was my MFA Thesis at California Institute of the Arts (it was called Jungaeyé then, but it’s published as Benbannik). In the act of creating the language (‘Ngmbo), I realized it wasn’t enough for me to focus on words for nouns and verbs. The real complexity was imagining prepositions and conjunctions, prefixes and suffixes. When I finished the first version back in 2004 and wrote in English again, I found that my sense of syntax had fundamentally changed. It was wild!

If syntax is a significant component of how a culture organizes its sense of the world, how it presents that ordering and its values. I find myself treating syntax—thus, prosody—as a political and social concern. I imagine, then, that the content and execution of my poems is that engagement your question names.

The beauty of working any art form for an extended period, naturally, is in the realization of just how much we might not know, and creating as a way through which to discover. I’m curious if you had any particular poets or writers that prompted, or even confirmed, some of these thoughts or directions in your writing?

Harryette Mullen changed everything for me. When I read S*PeRM**K*T, I realized that a poem could focus on the systems of rhetorical play associated with the Black praxis of signifyin(g). A poem with this orientation didn’t have to center images, but language itself as a site of dynamic emotional, intellectual, and political engagement. Pun, repetition & revision, and irony became the devices that meant the most to me and they’ve animated my poetry ever since. I had encountered signifyin(g) in my parent's house, parts of the community, and hip-hop, but Mullen’s work struck me as the apotheosis of it.

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

As far as poetry, I’m working on two manuscripts. I Believe I Been Science Fiction Always, which actually coalesced at the same time as Sho took shape. IBIBSFA pushes the visual poetry absent from Sho into a direction that I find as textural as it is textual. There’s a series of poems that imagine armor pieces via Afro-Diasporic musical practices; several poems combining image and text to consider the preposition “over” as it relates to cultural practice and tropes; a long poem that works with and about time by way of turntablism. Fun stuff. The other manuscript is called Mysteries! Give Me Power. The sentences that seem to want to cleave together in that manuscript have been a trip to think and feel through.

I’ve a collection of craft/critical writing—the lectures I wrote for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. That book is called Optic Subwoof, and Wave is putting that out this fall. There’s stuff in there about banter as self-destruction, visuality in poetry, taxonomies for violence in poetry, and my lifelong ambition to be a werewolf. I’m working on a children’s opera and a monograph on dramaturgy as a strategy for listening to Black music. Fun!

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Sharon Dolin and Gemma Gorga

Late to the House of Words, Sharon Dolin, translated from the Catalan written by Gemma Gorga
Saturnalia Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (2016), Whirlwind (2012), and Burn and Dodge (2008), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.  She is also the author of a book of translations, Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (2019), and a prose memoir, Hitchcock Blonde (2020).  The recipient of a 2021 NEA Fellowship in Translation, she lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona.

Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968.  She has a PhD in Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature.  She has published seven collections of poetry in Catalan: Ocellania (1977), El desordre de les mans (2003), Instruments òptics (2005), Llibre dels minuts (2006) which won the 2006 Premi Miquel de Palol, Diafragma (2012), Mur (2015); and Viatge al centre (2020).  She is also the author of a prose journal of her time spent in India entitled Indi visible (2018).

I suppose this is a kind of chicken-or-egg question,but what was the process of simultaneously building both a book of translation and a selected poems? Were the poems first gathered for the sake of selection, or for the sake of translation? Were there questions you had to solve that might not have emerged otherwise?

Sharon Dolin: I was already acquainted with Gemma Gorga’s work through my translation of her book of prose poems Llibre dels minuts (2006), which appeared as Book of Minutes in 2019. So when I decided I wanted to continue translating her poems written in lines in 2017, I first began by translating her then most recent book Wall (Mur, 2015), but soon realized that certain poems were more successful in English than others. It then occurred to me that a Selected Poems might be a better idea and so I began to translate poems from her other books. Much of my selection process was by intuition: That is, I read through the poems and decided which ones appealed to me as a reader; then I worked on the translations. If I was not satisfied with the poem in English, I discarded it in favor of another. At some point, I believe early on, I had chosen the title for the collection, Late to the House of Words, a phrase from the poem “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” and that choice led me to make sure I translated any poems that were directly concerned with issues of language. Of course, I had already noticed a preponderance of poems that were in love with words, with the dictionary, with the richness as well as the limits of language, so I intentionally highlighted those poems in this Selected Poems. Gemma Gorga was a delight to work with and seemed very happy with the choices I had made for this selection from her six books.

Gemma Gorga: The book wasn’t conceived as a simultaneous work. Actually, Sharon explained to me her idea of gathering poems from all my previous books and arming a representative anthology. Of course, I couldn’t be more happy and grateful. But, from that moment on, this book was her work: she selected the poems, translated them and wrote a prologue which I think is key to understand the collection. But, as you can see, my role during the process has been rather discreet.

Gemma, having yourself done translation work, how was it seeing your own work shift through translation? How involved were you, if at all, with Sharon through the process?

Gemma Gorga: The first impression is kind of vertigo, like living in a recursive world: while I translate a poet, I’m being translated at the same time by another poet. And while I, doing my own translation, have to solve all the tricky aspects inherent to language, I know that my translator will have to solve this same kind of problems.

But, at the same time, I chose not to be too involved in Sharon’s translation process, because a translator needs a lot of space and freedom of movements. Of course, I tried to answer all her consultations, but without interfering too much in the final solution.

What other Catalan poets should one be reading to further expand upon the context of Gemma Gorga’s work more generally?

Sharon Dolin: I do think it’s important to read the poetry of Francesc Parcerisas, who was one of Gorga’s teachers. About other Catalan poets, I defer to Gorga herself.

Gemma Gorga: Catalan poets are, of course, my closest tradition, my immediate reference. Names such as Joan Vinyoli, Maria Mercè Marçal or Màrius Sampere are the dearest to me, since I grew up as a poet under their shadow. This said, since very young age I was eager to know other traditions, so I began to read as much translated poetry as I could. And this turned out a fundamental school.

Gemma, given your engagement with English-language writing, have you noticed an influence upon your writing in Catalan? Or are you able to keep those trains of thought separated?

Gemma Gorga: I see translation as a great school to learn and improve my own writing. We generally think of translation as a constant struggle with “impossibilities”, while I see it as an infinite source of “possibilities”, a place where I find solutions that I have never thought of before. Being bilingual Catalan-Spanish all my life has taught me to take advantage of the richness that each language contains and has made me realize how interesting it is to build bridges between languages. So I don’t want to keep those trains of thought separated; after all, they are heading to the same place.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: David Bradford

Dream of No One but Myself, David Bradford
Brick Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

David Bradford [photo credit: Sarah Bodri] is a poet, editor, and organizer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). He is the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is his first book.

Dream of No One but Myself is very much constructed as a book-length project, writing around the live and loss of your father. What prompted you to tell the story of your father, and that loss, through the form of the book-length poem, or even poetry at all?

You know, I had a mind that, if I was going to come at this flashpoint in my family history, in my family’s historical debris field, I was gone really come at it, so as to only do it once. Because writing, iterating, editing, presenting this book has been to learn a few things all over again: you can just keep cycling back through the process of these kinds of family histories, revelations, realizations. They stick, but the body forgets their feeling a bit, can want them unlocked all again. So, if I was going to do this, show the depth of the mess, I was going to dig deep enough to feel that maybe the digging could never end and you had to just call it—the end, that is. The openness of a hybrid, braided together bunch of coordinated, iterative forms all somehow poetry gave me room to explore the levels and questions I felt I needed to shape that kind of book.

So, an element of that I wanted to shape at the book level was sparked and organized by the felt experience of the sick trick of the dead, abusive parent: the way there were things about him I could only safely wade through, accept, empathize with once he had passed. Things that leave me ready to let the dead him back into my life but not the live him, were that an option. Basically, the insights of this book required death, and their staying power depends on it.

With that in mind, I think this book nurtures a relationship with haunting—a coming to terms tensioned by the impossibility, for me, of coming to terms with him when there was still a person to come to terms with. And the terms of that tension haunt themselves: the attempts below, the attempts above, the attempts out over there, haunted by the attempts over here. The ectoplasm spilling over from one form—one rip and cut and suture—to the next, to get goofy about it. There’s an element of letting it all through, then channeling these literally unspeakable tensions in the spectrum of ways all of this history is encountered and re-encountered, going through those motions knowing where they can’t go, to see where they can and can’t go, to put a reader through those motions too. To take readers through a spectral, gestural record of channeling the wake and drift of this personal, historical accrual, this urge to do some magic on it.

The uncontainable nature of this kind of family histories that comes back around and around, has no final answer, maybe just an end to the questions—poetry gave me a lot of room to explore the impulses all that entailed for me.

What do you think the form of the poem allowed you to articulate that might not have been possible had you worked the same material through the form of a memoir, or even a novel?

The thing about poetry for me is mostly permission to encourage my thinking to give in to the forces that give the genre its heft—the attention and tension.

The family stuff in this book started as a hulking lyrical essay, but I didn’t like any of the options before me for taking that work into a nonfiction publishing space. It didn’t feel like nonfiction processes would get me as far as I wanted to get with using up this material, going all in with the mutual haunting, bidding that stuff goodbye.  That initial lyrical essay form also felt too editorialized for this irresolvability I was trying pattern, move on from, document: the essay pulled all the emotional strings, it tried to get the words right (even as it said it didn’t believe in the right words), and as is, it was kind of unbearable. It took a while to put together, but it felt like the surface, or the first layer.

So, turning to poetry—first with the idea of the soft erasures, the grey-and-black versioning technique—got me to keep digging, keep layering and re-arranging, keep growing the verbal and non-verbal gestures that left the record of this material feeling just barely exhausted (I hope), and gave its tattered, lossy fabric its due.

I guess my idea or ideal of poetry gave me the space to contain and really go after the stakes of that effort in a way non-poetic forms didn’t feel like they would.

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?

I think about the fraughtness of the decision-making processes involved in holding this kind of family stuff, family debt, family mess together—how much I ask readers to go through that process with this book—and I think my intense attention to sound, and working that out on the page over the last couple of decades, helped prepare me for that. Sound is so important for me, but same as the fraughtness, you can at best lay out and hedge for possible readings, give the reader some tools to work with in sounding out these poems.

But no matter the tools—line breaks, half rhymes, white space on the line, the careful aeration of erasures, the propellent or halting use of sometimes jarring periods—something of what these pieces sound like to me, or sound like coming from me, is always lost on the page. The beauty in that is something is always gained, too: the way it sounds to the reader, the decisions they’ll make in hearing these pieces out.

I guess that’s one big difference: the reader’s in charge on the page. It makes me want to hear them read what they hear. Because I can’t really sound that out myself.

Was there anything that writing through grief revealed that you weren’t expecting? Are the poems in Dream of No One but Myself part of a longer, ongoing process?

I think the text-book nature of the abuse came for me a bit. Some of these things you take to thinking about them as just “difficult” or “not good.” But calling them abuse can take a minute, or at least it did for me and my mother, both individually and together.

One embarrassing thing about trauma, particularly amidst and in the aftermath of contexts where you’re just going through the motions of it, is it’s true form sort of hides from you, then reveals itself plainly. There were lots of those moments in the process of writing this book.

A maybe even fleshier thing that revealed itself, though: how little my mother and I understood—how little we could understand, given our orientation to him—how few words we had, and how little healthcare was truly available to my father in terms of what he was dealing with mentally. A key part of the process for this book was asking my mother to confirm certain details over and over again. Some of the ups and downs that were challenging him emerged more clearly in those talks. And the complete uselessness of the institutions at this disposal, same as at other times in his life, also emerged more clearly, if unsurprisingly.

In terms of a longer, ongoing process: I really, warmly, deeply hope the answer is no. I’ve done a lot of thinking and growing out of the thoughts I laid out in for this book, but in terms of writing, this feels like it’s it for me. The whole point was to get to where it was done for me, even if, in a greater context, it might never be done for me.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Dream of No One but Myself was completed? What have you been working on since?

For better or worse, I jumped right in to the next thing when I completed my penultimate draft of the book in spring 2018.

I had the idea to do something less personal, maybe lighter. But that very quickly turned into Bottom Rail on Top, poems about dominant Black and white histories of Blackness in the antebellum South set against the day-to-day of the personal present—my present—that mediates it.

It’s a two-hander, in a sense: it brings together two strands of poetic sequences, popping back and forth between the experience of learning about and arranging all of these big and small Black histories and places and their echoes and contrasts in comparison with my life, the way my body does and doesn’t carry, the way I do and don’t want it to carry, the legacy of that past. It’s a project first built on a lot of the conflation I saw at play in Black radical theory that’s had a major impact on my work: the way a straight line is often drawn from slave narratives to, say, the Harlem Renaissance and then to us now. And in a way, I believe in that line. But I also believe that so much of my life—even amidst the racism and mindfucks and creative rub of being this kind of body in this kind of modern world—looks a lot like mastry, to borrow Kerry James Marshall’s phrase. So many material itches, so many supply chains ending at my door, so many platforms, so much modern self-making, so much funding, so much stuff, etc. Or to put it another way a bit more couched in disparities among Black people in the present, I need to acknowledge what it means that I’ve been called upon to speak, sometimes on behalf of… And as Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten have articulated crucially but too occasionally, that call means I’ve already become estranged from some of conditions I’ve been called upon to articulate. The problems of that estrangement, alongside some of the important echoes I describe above, are things I wanted to explore and describe on the page. Among a lot of other things to do with some of the ways Black folx formulate Blackness for themselves outside of the monolithic.

So, there’s a lot more I could say, but I worked on that a couple of years, then worked on it some more with Diasporic theorist Michelle M. Wright, which was an invaluable experience. And now I’m entering the editing stages with Cecily Nicholson, thinking about a few things we might add to it. The book should be out in fall of 2023.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Liz Howard

Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Liz Howard
McClelland & Stewart, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Liz Howard’s [Photo credit: Ralph Kolewe] debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was named a Globe and Mail top 100 book. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian Art, The Fiddlehead, Poetry Magazine, and Best Canadian Poetry 2018. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.

Your debut collection managed a great deal of critical attention, including winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. Did you feel any kind of pressure when attempting to move beyond the poems in that collection to compose something new? Or were you already well on your way into the new book?

After my first book, the question of what I would do next was often posed to me, especially after all the aforementioned attention. The success of that book was exciting, affirming, and overwhelming but also invited criticism about my worth. After a time, I reconciled myself to the fact that whatever I did it would be held up against the unexpected success of the first and found lacking. This gave me some permission to “write whatever I wanted”. When I was a student in Dionne Brand’s poetry workshop she talked about bringing forward whatever she felt wasn’t adequately addressed in one book into the next. I had also received some criticism about the first book not being accessible. In the second book I wanted to work with direct address, to write about my lived experiences in a less coded way, and to curtail my habit of linguistic pyrotechnics (failed somewhat on that count).

I completely agree with Brand’s suggestion of continuing a conversation or thought: to write simply isn’t a matter of addressing the perceived failures of prior work, but a consideration of evolution, even as one might engage with certain themes or concerns in an ongoing way. Do you approach your work in terms of ongoingness, or a kind of progression or evolution? Or are you working from manuscript to manuscript, poem to poem, to get to that next point?

In my writing practice I’m mostly focused on trying to get something, anything down on the page. I do a lot of “free”, “automatic”, or “stream-of-consciousness” writing, filling up pages of my notebook. Over several weeks I will return to these passages and find phrases, lines, images and so on that I can use to build a poem. I have the disposition of a scavenger, making use of what is on hand, and what I am reading and my larger concerns and daily life also enter my writing. When I get to the stage where I am putting a manuscript together I do have a sense in mind of how it might be in conversation with my prior work. I also have an urgency to work against the limit of my abilities. When I’d go out exploring in the bush as a kid I’d often be looking as far ahead as I could, trying to see places where the outline of trees thinned against the sky. I knew this meant that there could be a lake or some sort of clearing there and I felt compelled to go and see if I was right. I have a similar sensation when I’m writing. Pushing further in an experimental sort of way (hypothesis: a lake is there) to see what is on the other side. Sometimes it’s a lake and sometimes it’s a void. I find both interesting.

Much of the collection explores your attempts to reconcile your relationship with your father, from his absence during your childhood, to your eventual reconnection mere days prior to his death. What was it that prompted you to work through this material through the form of the poem? What is it you think the form of the poem allowed that might not have been possible otherwise?

Unfortunately, my father died 20 minutes after I arrived at the hospital. I was hoping for at least a day but that was not in the cards. He had resurfaced in Halifax in poor health and had reached out to family for records in order to receive health care. One night I received a call from my aunt saying that he was in hospital and in a coma and that she was flying to be with him. I asked if it would be okay for me to fly out as well and booked a flight for that morning. When I landed and turned my cell signal back on I had texts from aunt saying to get there as soon as possible. I got a cab and the driver tried to engage me in friendly conversation about where I was flying in from and what had brought me to Halifax. I tried to be polite and kept my answers as general as possible but when he continued to press I had to explain what was happening and he got quiet after that. When I managed to find the ICU I saw my father for the first time. That moment defies description for me but in a way it was like seeing myself. I resemble my mother in many ways but everything I found strange (not necessarily in a bad way) about my face was there in my father’s. A few minutes after I arrived a nurse announced that he was “in the process of actively dying”. After he passed I decided to stay in Halifax to help my aunt with body and funeral arrangements. I was in Halifax for a week, staying by myself at a bed and breakfast across from the hospital. I had a lot of time to think and I started writing and the writing took the form of a letter to a friend. After I sent the letter (email) I found myself returning to it. It was only a couple of degrees removed from a raw accounting of that time and the larger context it unfolded within. When you, rob, asked me a few times via email for work for your online poetry journal DUSIE I tried to edit the letter into something resembling a poem. I didn’t know if it was a poem. I’d never written anything like it. Who was going to tell me it wasn’t a poem, though? After it was published a number of people reached out to me to say how much they loved it and were touched by it. When I was invited to give readings the audience would often connect deeply with that poem. 

Why did I explore all of this in poetry? I think poetry allows for compression, uncertainty, and the unsaid to exist simultaneously which mirrors how I seem to experience the world. Poetry allows me to transmit some of that experience in the most authentic way possible, as a kind of offering, invitation, or inquiry.

How do you feel different, if at all, as a poet between your first collection to this one?

How do I feel differently as poet in regards to this second book? I feel as though, through trial, error, and great effort, I have widened the scope of what is possible for me in terms of form and what I can be in conversation with. I’ve also come to a realization that my work has a life entirely outside of my own, and I’m grateful to those who have told me that my work impacted them in positive way, be that creatively or in being seen.

Was there anything that writing through grief revealed that you weren’t expecting? Are the poems in Letters in a Bruised Cosmos part of a longer, ongoing process?

I suppose that I was relieved (a kind of unexpected happiness—that’s not quite the word but it’ll do) that I was able to sublimate my pain, grief, into something that spoke to other people. I wasn’t sure if the book was too much or not enough. I often have dreams where the flesh of my arms falls away and the raw, exposed nerves are dangling out in front of me. Writing this book was like composing with those raw, dangling nerves. Would I be able to have the manual “control” to craft something that was more than a reinscription of my personal hardships? By the time the manuscript was finalized I felt that I had accomplished more than that through elevated language, historical consciousness, and scaling—from invoking the quantum, the biological, the personal, the sociohistorical and the cosmological.

I would say yes; the poems of Letters are part of an ongoing process.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Letters in a Bruised Cosmos was completed? What have you been working on since?

I have had new poems published in The Ampersand, Canadian Literature, Room Magazine and The Capilano Review.

I am currently working on a hybrid prose-ish work titled The Confessions of Electra Rousseau (it will likely contain some poetry, memoir, fiction, speculative memoir, auto-theory, and true crime tropes and general weirdness) and a work of prose poetry that will continue my ongoing re-writing/investigation into the poem The Song of Hiawatha with a focus on the effects of colonization on mental health, the representation of Indigenous women in literature, and the resurgence of Indigenous voices, knowledges, and place names that the original poem appropriated or erased.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Tolu Oloruntoba

The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba
Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Tolu Oloruntoba [photo credit: Franctal Studios] is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium. His poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Entropy, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for health authorities in British Columbia. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver Area, where he lives with his family.

There aren’t too many poets who already have a new title published by the time they’ve a book shortlisted for such a prestigious prize. Given your second collection, Each One a Furnace (McClelland and Stewart, 2022), appeared this past spring, what do you see as the relationship between the two collections?

Thanks, rob. Because I had been emerging for some time (about 20 years) before my first collection was published, I had accumulated some manuscripts’ worth of poems. So, although the poems in my first two collections were mostly written between 2017 and 2021, the momentum of my former work carried me through. The two books are part of a continuum in my mind, a trilogy centering existential inquiry. My vehicles / motifs in this inquiry continue to be mental health / illness; dysfunctional family dynamics / the legacy of trauma; migrancy / instability; and urban ennui / disillusionment with a broken society within a setting of climate collapse. I stopped trying to veer away from my key meditations, and in each of the successive books, I have been able to refine the questions I am asking. The scope of my inquiry has remained the same, however.

What, for you, is the process of putting together a manuscript? At what point in the process of writing the poems that became The Junta of Happenstance, or even Each One a Furnace, did the shapes of the larger manuscripts begin to reveal themselves?

For most months of the year, I do not write many poems. I simply read, work, and wait. I realize now that this is my subconscious incubating and associating a lot of material. However, for two to three glorious months a year, my built-up psychic energy releases itself in dozens of poems. They invariably carry the heft of my recent meditations. The last manuscript I completed, in 2021, was apocalyptic. Which makes sense when you consider covid and the recent state of the world. I begin to sense the shape of a manuscript when the initial sheaf of poems, usually about ten or so, begin to coalesce around a theme that reveals the slope of my subconscious. For The Junta of Happenstance, the poems I began with arrived while I still lived in Pittsburgh, PA, about a year before I began a cross-continental drive to Surrey in BC. I had also recently begun to seek help for my mental health. That reckoning with my personal fragility and the precarity of my existence on this continent, animated the early poems. Some of the poems, like the ones in the final section of the book, were incantatory poems that helped me survive the worst of my dysphoria and panic. A poem like “Settlers’ Effects,” for instance was written in fragments while we left our former home behind, heavy with disillusionment. Sometimes, while driving, I would ask my partner to text a certain phrase to me before I forgot. Or I’d hold it in my head till we got to a rest stop. A poem like “Emerging” was written when we arrived in BC and began to look for a place to rent. The bee sting I referred to literally happened as we left one of the places we had been viewing. So, the book is a non-chronological account of my journey from Pittsburgh to Surrey, all the while searching for mental health and confronting the bloody realities and histories of the three countries I have lived in. On the other hand, I began to write Each One a Furnace when, nine months into my time in this country I lost my job. In the distressing six months that followed, I was able to channel a lot of my confusion, rage, fear, and sense of instability into the manuscript. In this way, if each of my books represents an era of my life, my eventual bibliography may be viewed as a somewhat autobiographical account of my life. I maintain complete deniability of course and will invoke my application of poetic license in any required parts of it, as all poets must. J

Your work as a physician connects you to a wide swath of poet-doctors over the years, from John Keats and William Carlos Williams to Shane Neilson and Conor Mc Donnell. Is this something you are conscious of as you are writing? How do you see these two elements of your life connecting, or even impacting each other?

I consider myself a poet that happens to have medical training and experience. It is not a central part of my identity. I simply use the resources my medical career left me with. Write what you know, eh? Or at least use it to frame what you don’t know and need to know. I view my project management and health technology work in corporate North America in the same way. It all goes in the sausage (if you pardon the gross analogy). I will admit, though, that my time in medical towers has improved my facility with Latinate and Greek etymologies, which then help me wend my way around the English language. Because I was a sensitive young person, my time in medicine also affected me deeply, and perhaps increased my capacity to imbibe and integrate information. I was a trivia club captain in my final year of medical school, for instance, which was a natural outlet for all the information I used to stash (and continue to collect). The impressions of medical practice, of course, sometimes find expression in poetry, but never because I am deliberately invoking them.

Given your self-described twenty years of “emerging,” what shifts, if at all, are you noticing now that you’ve begun to publish books? Has your relationship to writing changed through the process?

Because I have achieved the literary goal I held so close for two decades (getting ONE book published), I find myself in need of a new mission. This feeling of deflation and alienation after one's debut has been well described by several authors, most recently (for me) Alexander Chee in this short Twitter thread.

So what does a dog that has been chasing a car do when it finally catches it? I guess we're about to find out. The primary thought I have now, though, is that I have written everything I want to say in poetry for now (between the two books and three unpublished manuscripts). Time to try some other genres. Perhaps that long-abandoned novel of mine, or a screenplay. This might just be the massive burnout speaking, but it is how I feel at this time.

I’m curious about your relationship to form. Have you a potential shape in mind when you begin to compose? Are there particular structures in the back of your head, or is the process more intuitive, formed through the process of composition?

Occasionally, I give myself a literary challenge: to create a cento, or write a sestina or villanelle. More often, though, the form comes to me when I am writing the poem. I am in the “write first, edit later” camp, so I try to intuit where the poem needs to breathe, after (most of) it is written. I put my stanza breaks there. If the poem is more breathless, my lines will tend to be longer and stanza breaks fewer, or absent. As I arrange the poem around breath and format the poem for the page, I sometimes follow the interesting possibilities that occur to me based on what I know about form.