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.

Rawn and Jérôme Melançon : Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, by Liz Howard

Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Liz Howard
McClelland & Stewart, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

When Rawn decided they would take up the reading challenge at their school, we went off to the bookstore to find a book of poetry they might like for one of the bingo card squares – read a book of poetry. They were drawn to the gorgeous and intriguing cover of Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, and to the pink spine. Jerome was already familiar with Howard’s work and jumped on the opportunity to read this with them. This is a continuation of our short discussions around the book.

These poems are woven with dying and life, and with the need to forgive and the difficulty to do it. For Rawn, who has been learning about World War II through Anne Frank, the collection brings associations with diaries written during war time. And there is a lot here about surviving in the midst of a genocide, and finding ways to remain, or remake oneself whole. Part of this search is for mechanism of identification: Howard describes the portraits at the hospital where the narrator works, including Warhol’s “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century”; the great-grandfather who fought in the First World War and the relatives who fought in the Second; the generations of women whose lives included sexual violence. These figures are all points of reference, they offer the possibility of partial identification. And Howard presents them without setting them in stone, acknowledging that their lives and selves went beyond what she can see of them. And many of her poems are letters, remaining open, following from a previous or ongoing relationship, expecting a response. Nothing is closed off. Not even a difficult relationship with a recently deceased father whom she does not attempt to exorcise.

The writing in this collection is expansive, it glides and sometimes skids between registers. It embraces vastness and accidents alike. Smooth passages suddenly hit bumps: “The future history of mind / takes everything to forgive / the impulse to to rue the day / I met you at the university / I cannot make peace with that / which will not leave me / to test the surface tension / of deeper blues.” (14) Both of us were surprised by the title “I dream in gmail”: this is not something you usually hear. It reminds Rawn of funny things they said as a younger child, the hilarity of absurdity, the kinds of nonsense ideas friends exchange: Howard talks to readers as if talking to a friend.

Words float in space on the pages, always in different forms and arrangements. In the poem “Superposition” the lines twist and twirl, looking like waves. In “True Value” and “Father’s Day” the simplicity of the line spacing – a space between each line – and the text breaking up into small, short lines create an inexact pattern. It’s easy to read each line, there’s time to breathe, and the space makes room for more: it’s almost like there’s words in-between. For Rawn, these constellations are a reproduction of how in your brain there are lots of thoughts floating around. Most of the pages are full of words like stars in the night sky. Words Howard picks out and makes poems out of. And the night sky, or the cosmos, act as a metaphor for the mind. It makes sense then that poetry and the speaker’s (and Howard’s) work doing research on the brain are so closely interwoven.

Searching personal experiences and history, searching the brain are two ways to pick out elements to create meaning. The short poem “Spring Letter,” in tiny stanzas, stops on three images. The most striking, unexpected, “Geese fly backwards in my mind,” points to processes outside of our reach. Longer poems like “Letter from Halifax” catch echoes of family history, cosmologies that correspond in unexpected ways – and of the stories our own friends have told us about the city. And Howard constantly plays with expectations: of poetry, of Indigenous people who also have settler family, of forgiveness or resentment, and of women. In the beautifully titled “Life Cycle of the Animal Called She” she lists women’s roles in the margin of the text, as part of the text, interrogates relationships and definitions of bodies. If the words suggest acceptance, the juxtaposition carry a sense of refusal and struggle, a knowledge that peace is only ever a passing state.

 

 

 

 

 

Rawn and Jérôme Melançon live in Regina.

Rawn Melançon loves Disney. They are an actress and like to make up characters with funny relatives with their friends.

Jérôme Melançon loves music. He is a poet and teaches philosophy, social science, and sometimes even poetry, at the University. He likes to research and write with his friends, or make new ones to do it.