Poet Questionnaire #4: Paul Lisson answering Stan Rogal (with an essay by J.S. Porter

 

 

 

 

To be honest, I don't know that many writers these days, on a personal level. During the 1990’s there was a vibrant group I hung out with, partied with, put on events with, but this group has (sadly) long since dispersed. I thought it might be worthwhile to re-create some of that old-time camaraderie and "the interview" format seemed a nice, relaxed entry. I also wanted to interview writers who contributed to the literary community in broader ways, not only as writers, but as publishers, editors, event organizers, and such. I met Paul several years ago via email, due to our association with poet Judith Fitzgerald. I have since met him in person several times, including at his book launch for The Perfect Archive, where he put on a theatrical production that hearkened back to the wilder days of poetry events. Paul is, indeed, a wild and crazy guy, and a mover and shaker in the Hamilton art scene.  

1. Will the real Paul Lisson please stand up! Meaning, Paul, please give our readers some history and an overview of who you are and why you do what you do, as a multi-faceted and creative force in the Hamilton arts scene.

I was born.

I was born in Hamilton, beside the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

Proctor and Gamble, Dofasco, and the Steel Company of Canada (STELCO) were nearby.

I was born into a family of union-card-carrying steelworkers who played in bagpipe bands. In Hamilton.

"Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. You’re in Hamilton. There’s no cure for that." – adapted from Samuel Beckett’s, The Unnamable

2. What are your thoughts about Hamilton, affectionately known as “The Hammer”, as a culturally diverse and active arts centre?

Per capita, I believe there are more hammers in the city of Hamilton than in any other city in Canada. When I worked at STELCO there were more sledgehammers than you could shake a stick at. And you know they’re still around somewhere.

The name on my Dad’s STELCO union card was Jimmy Lisson. The President of the union was John Lisson. The Vice President was Brian Lisson. The union treasurer was another Lisson. These guys had been through a lot. They weren’t going to let the bosses have everything go their way. Labour activism continues to inform and influence what Hamilton is.

You can do anything in Hamilton. Anything.

You can start a magazine. Produce a play. My sister opened a gallery. It’s possible nobody will care, but they won’t stop you.

3. How and what is your involvement with the Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine?

There’s no one else to blame.

4. COVID seems to have been a catalyst that necessitated a shift from HA&L as a physical entity to an online magazine. How was your experience with that shift? How did it change the magazine?

That fucking plague…………

5. You are a poet in your own right, with one published book, The Perfect Archive, which I reviewed and recommended to readers. How does your involvement as an editor with the magazine affect your work as a poet? Or, does it?

Write for yourself. Edit for your reader.

6. Do you have another poetry collection on the back burner?

Yeah. It’s full of words. Some of them rhyme but most don’t. It will either be titled Ink Bone or Frail Deities. Not sure. It will likely never see the light of day. Never be published. But it is my monster and I am devoted to it.

7. What keeps you writing/publishing poetry given there are fewer poetry publishers and even fewer poetry books being sold? Or am I wrong in this evaluation?

I yam what I yam said Popeye. A poet is what I yam. There is no hope for a cure. Poet is scrimshawed across all me bones.

8. Poets deal in words. What is your favourite word and why? What about another word that maybe strikes your funny bone or makes you feel uneasy/awkward for no particular reason when you say it?

OK, it’s hyphenated: beef-witted. And the way Shakespeare uses it: “The plague of Greece upon thee, thou Mungrel beefe-witted Lord!”

9. Do you feel that poetry has the power to end war, hunger, discrimination and environmental destruction in the world?

Yes.

In his book Philosophy for Militants Alain Badiou says that “Wherever a human collective is working in the direction of equality, the conditions are met for everyone to become a philosopher.”

We are living in beef-witted times. Trumpian times. Poilievre times. A time of lies and liars.

Poets are part of the collective opposing these beef-witted times and working in the direction of equality.

10. Do you have any advice for anyone who’d like to be(come) a poet?

Yes. Send $5 and all shall be revealed.

11. What question is it that you’ve always wished an interviewer would ask, and hasn’t?

Q: “If you could be anyone else, would you be Stan Rogal?”

12. Add any additional comments of your own choosing. Manifestos included.

Stan! I'm shit at interviews. I've given it a go, but there ain't much to say about me. At the end I've tacked on a piece John Porter wrote about a talk I gave in 2013 at the Hamilton Public Library titled: “Thoughtcrime and the 14 Egg Cake”. John’s piece has never been published. It's better than my answers to the questions.

 

PAVEL IN PERFORMANCe by J.S. Porter

          (for David Cohen and Simon Richards)

 

I want to give you everything I’ve got, he says.

Looking like a Coptic priest or a Jordanian rabbi, with his long, mussed white hair, he begins in Russian by introducing himself, saying his name and getting us to say ours.  Then he says самизда́т, Samizdat, a Russian word describing literature that must be written and copied in secret, “shared and read through clandestine distribution networks.”

A cigarettes-and-wine voice, deeply resonant. The voice, regardless of content, would hold your attention. He says the name Daniil Kharms. He says he’s fond of the letter B: Bulgakov.  Böll, Balzac. Beckett, Barthes, Breton, too?

He says that his publishing house is called Samizdat Press; it puts beauty on the Internet in the form of Hamilton Arts & Letters (HALmagazine.com).

He says Dostoyevsky was beaten by his father. Is that why he turned to deep and intense reading?

Paul makes sounds. Sometimes his sounds are a kind of throat-poetry, hissed, whistled or hummed.  Often, he says, I fail.  But it’s good to try. He mentions the names of sound poets whom he admires.

 While I’m listening, I silently repeat lines from his poem “Awaiting the arrival of the butcher:” “O, But what shall I tell you?”  That’s the question I think Paul is asking himself as he walks back and forth, talking as he walks. How much do I tell? Too much: overburdening, failure. Too little: underwhelming, failure. Blowing words is as complicated as blowing glass. The word sparks, flames and burns. When the word burns, there’s always a danger that it burns out.

 Again from the butcher: “O, But what's left to say?”

Judith Fitzgerald: “Lisson's work — difficult, demanding and utterly transfixing — requires work, hard mental work on the part of its readers.” Words to Judith by Pavel – to find audience — pages are copied and distributed. This by hand. Audience huddles around table. Words are spoken. Recited.

Samizdat.

Only a few in attendance, but the energy Paul has worked up would have rippled through a football stadium. He paces back and forth the way his Russian history professor R. H. Johnston once did — a caged lion? Where does the cage come from? You understand why it’s exhausting being Paul Lisson, all the energy required, why he sometimes calls on other people to be him.

Shuffling through his papers, he looks for a story. He can’t find it. He starts to tell a story. He can’t remember it. Throws a line as far as he can throw it, reels it in a little, tells a joke, makes a sound poem. First we were in Russia (its serpentine history, its clandestine literature) and now we’re not sure where we are…tells us we must read a certain Russian novel (“It makes other books look safe” The Guardian), says the name Mikhail Bulgakov, starts to tell the story, then pulls back.  If he tells the wrong story, or he tells the right story wrongly, we may be repelled. No story sometimes is better than the wrong story or the right story wrongly told.  Pavel makes other performances look safe.

And the woman, with the surname of an Irish poet, whom he invokes throughout the talk, who is she? Who is Fiona? Co-creator. Co-maker of Samizdat Press. Deep and abiding Friend. Wife. Muse. Angel-Artist.  Her wedding cakes have teeth in them, and hair.  She believes in his genius (Lou-Andreas Salomé and Nietzsche) and he believes in hers (Rilke and Lou-Andreas Salomé).

Every now and then when he feels lost, he throws out her name like a clamp to grip the ice, for stabilization, for energy to climb some more. FIONA – his spiritbookword, his sun-and-moon word, his life-raft.

I’m sorry, Paul says. I haven’t been able to give you everything.

 

 

 

 

Paul Lisson – Born into a family of union-card-carrying steelworkers who played in bagpipe bands. Founding Member – Ontario D/deaf/HoH, Disabled, Mad, Sick and Neuroatypical Poetics Collective, (OD/d/HoH/DMSNPC) 2018. Facilitator – the AbleHamilton Poetry Festival - among the first disability-focused poetry festivals in Canada, annual. Founding Member of the VOKS Collective. VOKS began as a group instigating HIV activism in the 1990s. VOKS materials are held by the ArQuives in Toronto. Member of the League of Canadian Poets. Paul acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council for both his writing and visual art. (PaulLisson.com)

 

 

Belfast-born, J.S. Porter is a poet and essayist who reads and writes in Hamilton in company with his wife Cheryl and his dog Sophia.  He is currently looking for a publisher for his book of notes and poems (Reedrite) and his book of prose (Furrawn: Talk that Leads to Intimacy). He is best known for his Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality and Lightness and Soul: Musings on Eight Jewish Writers.

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs and their pet jackabee. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks. Currently seeking a new publisher: anyone??? Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

Stan Rogal : The Perfect Archive, by Paul Lisson

The Perfect Archive, Paul Lisson

Guernica Editions, 2019

I attended Paul Lisson’s launch at the Supermarket Restaurant and Bar in Toronto (those were the days!) last year. I was only familiar with Paul via email, through HAL magazine and a loose connection with Judith Fitzgerald. We’d never met, I knew nothing of his poetry, I did know from the invitation that this was his first book, otherwise I had little or no expectations of what I would encounter. To put it mildly, our initial meeting was a gas.

Paul turned his launch into something of a theatrical event. Friends were placed throughout the audience and took turns reading passages from the book while he sat at a table, in a suit, and hammered away at the keys of an antique typewriter. It was an indication that the book (and Paul) contained some sense of adventure and fun. The cover was the next giveaway that this might be the case. Plain and simple, an archive is generally a collection of documents or records organized under various rules and regulations so as to be an accurate and easily accessible account of the activities of a person, family, corporation or ETC, whereas the title of his book has the word “perfect” raggedly scratched out, as if with a pin or (more likely) a steel pen nib, a further indication that all (I suspected) would likely not be what it seemed.

Needless to say, I was not disappointed. The book is an archive, of sorts, comprised of an unreliable narrator, a text that continually undermines itself as an accurate accounting, ie: “Researchers investigating __________ _____ ________’s life are faced with revisionist histories, shifts in public perception, propagandizing and censorship… Biographers consulting the family papers privately held, are advised that they are notoriously unreliable.” Nothing is as it appears; nothing can be relied upon. The supposed “subject” remains unnamed and (for the most part, undescribed, except to be charged with criminal activity, to wit: “his careful cataloguing of our atrocities,” seemingly during WWII. What atrocities? We are never told). And if you think you might pick up some small degree of actual autobiographical information from the “subject’s” written works, forget about it!  

There are notes, poems, prose poems, found poems, list poems, indexes, marginalia (which more properly should be termed “end notes” says the narrator, also called “small poems” [apparently] by the mysterious “subject” of the archive), errata and erratum (which refer to references and page numbers that are unidentifiable and/or have no relation to the book in hand), appendices, definitions, plus a series of old black and white photographs that remain unexplained, except to say that some of the pictures may or may not be those of the “subject.” Further, in the poem ‘Epochal’ we read: “Vintage photographs blur animal and man.” In fact, the most [seeming] dependable and extant descriptors are of the various typewriters used by the “subject” to create his works: “The earliest poems were composed on an Optima typewriter, vintage 1940… Later poems were added using a desk-model Olivetti with an oversized carriage and unusual serif font…” So it continues, the “means” of production being much more clearly labelled and defined than the “subject” himself (we learn that typed Marginalia was added during imprisonment using a Remington portable that was “likely loaned surreptitiously by Captain Walter Kerr, Intelligence Corps” and that written marginalia “is in the colour Blau-Shwarz inked with a 1938 100N fountain pen” – perhaps the exact same pen used to scratch out the word “perfect,” why not?)

Of course, while we are meant to busy ourselves trying to piece together the life of this mysterious/elusive “subject,” other clues further undermine the text and point the reader in (an)other direction(s). On an untitled page that might be an example of marginalia, we read: “If you want to know how things really work, watch closely as you’re tearing them apart.” In the poem ‘Necromantic’ we see: “I / reconstruct / my bones / with others / of dead people / more interesting / than me.” Under the title ‘Erratum” we note: “Through a misunderstanding, the painting Abstract Painting was reproduced upside down in the last issue of the Archive Bulletin.” As an aside, I remember hearing the story of a well-known artist who, upon seeing one of his abstract paintings hanging upside down on a NY gallery wall, said, leave it, I prefer it this way.

It’s a great little Frankenstein of a book, with lots in it to tear apart, turn upside down, and reconfigure as some new and entirely provocative monster; something less about a mysterious “subject” and more about the creative process itself and the tools involved in that process. Metaphorically (perhaps, even, literally) Paul reconstructs the bones in order to make himself (the work) more interesting.  

I recommend you dive in and get your hands dirty.                  

Stan Rogal's natural habitat is the wilds of Toronto where he exists mainly on a diet of roots, berries and red wine. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies throughout the known (and lesser known) world. He is the author of 26 books, the most recent being a novel, titled The Comic (Guernica Editions), not so funny given its arrival coincides with the "Age of Isolation and Physical Distancing," a Kafka-esque sort of humour.