Louis Bourgeois : THE FLAT EARTH EXCAVATION COMPANY : (Conversation with Ernest Hekkanen)

 

 

Arguably, The New Orphic Review is one of the most important literary journals in Canada, and its influence is certainly felt in small but profound pockets of the avant-garde in the states.  Please give a detailed account of how The New Orphic Review came about.

The New Orphic Review grew out of New Orphic Publishers. By the early 1990s I had become disenchanted with mainstream publishing in Canada and the United States.  My experiences with Stoddart Publishing and Thistledown Press had left a sour taste in my mouth.  In addition to that, I realized that the type of literature I was interested in producing wasn’t going to allow me to survive financially; that is, if I was fortunate enough to find a publisher.  By then, I had had contracts with three different trade houses and had many dozens of stories and poems published in literary magazines.  However, I didn’t like second-guessing whether a manuscript would meet with the approval of a publishing house.  That sort of thing tends to dampen my creativity, I find.  So, I decided to become my own publisher.  That meant soiling the ‘good name’ I had established for myself in the literary environs of Canada.  It also meant having to take a financial risk—to put my money where my mouth was, to use a vernacular phrase.

I’m a writer who enjoys employing a wide range of approaches and voices.  Writing two books in the same manner has a deadly effect on my creativity.  In creative writing programs, students are taught to find a voice.  Usually, that means finding a voice deemed publishable by trade publishers.  Once a writer has a book published by a commercial house, he is expected to churn out books in the same manner.  Employing one voice is too restrictive for someone like me.  There are a myriad of voices clamoring for recognition in my head.  By becoming my own publisher, I was able to give voice to the clamoring multitudes, if you will.

You’ve no doubt noticed that The New Orphic Review doesn’t cater to any particular approach, style or voice.  That’s because it is the idiosyncratic product of an editor who likes to entertain many types of writing—from surrealism to naturalism to meta-fiction.  Nowadays, most literary magazines are connected to university writing programs.  Writing programs turn out students with voices very similar to their instructors.  For a while, certain voices become fashionable in fiction and poetry.  I find literary journals often suffer from a deadly sameness.  My hope is that The New Orphic Review doesn’t suffer from that.

In brief, The New Orphic Review reflects the editor-in-chief’s quirky, obstinate, eclectic disposition.  However, in the best Orphic tradition, I prefer literature that gets to the essence of existence.  That’s a rather broad mandate.

One of my favorite New Orphic publications is The Flat Earth Excavation Company, a collection of contemporary Surrealist writing.  In the collection, you write a detailed account of the original Surrealist movement as it began in France:  this poses the question, is Surrealism still truly alive after the original movement began?  How do practitioners of modern Surrealism  differ from the original movement, how might they be the same?

Back in the early 20^th century Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and critic, coined two terms that he applied to artists and writers:  Orphist and surrealist.  The first term didn’t have a lot of longevity, but the second one did.  André Breton picked up the surrealist banner and ran with it.  However, after publishing the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton become something of a tyrant, one who enjoyed excommunicating fellow surrealists.  Apparently, he was of the opinion that the unconscious, which is responsible for producing ‘thought’s dictation’, was in need of an iron-fisted ruler.  When I created my publishing house I wanted to give a nod of recognition in the direction of Apollinaire more than Breton.

Writers who are disenchanted with mainstream literature, for personal if not social reasons, often write out of defiance.  There’s something in them that they feel is worth preserving, but which society doesn’t deem all that necessary to its survival.  That’s the case with me; I write out of defiance.  I suspect today’s practitioners of surrealism operate out of a similar modus operandi.  Many of the current practitioners of surrealism might not be aware of its historic underpinnings; my guess is that they feel instructed by the unconscious to follow a very personal agenda—an agenda they might only be dimly aware of—but nonetheless that would meet the original surrealist mandate.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that Hans Arp and Carl Jung moved in circles that generously overlapped.  Inventions having to do with psychoanalysis roughly paralleled the inventions having to do with surrealism.  Take a look at Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead; it reads like a surreal text.  As long as there is an unconscious, I suspect there will be surrealist writers and artists.  They will share similarities to the original surrealists, but they will be products of the times in which they live.

Personally, after writing a historical novel like Good Ol’ Boy:  Willis V. McCall, I find it refreshing to write a surreal novella like The Shipwrecked Heart, in which a mammoth, beating heart ends up being stranded on a rocky beach.  The shipwrecked heart arrives with an implied question:  why has it become stranded on the beach?  My unconscious mind ultimately had to provide the answer.  Although Good Ol’ Boy and The Shipwrecked Heart are extremely different in style and approach, they nonetheless have many themes in common.

Similarly, The Flat Earth Excavation Company enfolds a question:  how deeply can one dig before breaking through to the other side?  As long as we ask ourselves such questions, and allow the imagination lots of range when it comes to providing an answer, surrealism will survive.

Existentialism, as a literary movement, seems quite dead in contemporary literature.  It even seems difficult to find echoes of it at all in today’s writers.  You’ll never find anyone these days calling themselves an existential writer, or poet for that matter, but quite a few are quick to call themselves Surrealists.  How to explain this?  How is it that Surrealism has seemingly outlived Existentialism, which for quite some time seemed much more potent and everlasting than Surrealism?

The answer to this question is implied in my answer to the above question.  Surrealism is the product of the unconscious and existentialism is the product of the will—of someone who is engage.  I have written in both the surreal and the existential tradition; for instance, Medieval Hour in the Author’s Mind is an example of the former and Man’s Sadness is an example of the latter.  Existentialism thrived because of the strong personalities of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and because of its historic underpinnings in the French Resistance during the Second World War.

To live a life that is engage requires moral if not historic commitment and that can often result in a writer making an easy target of himself.  Nowadays, writers aren’t keen on making targets of themselves—by standing up in defiance of America’s invasion of Iraq, for instance.  They fear being ostracized; they fear being investigated by Homeland Security.  To tell you the truth, I have discovered that most writers are pretty weak-kneed.  Gestures of defiance, even in the name of freedom, don’t interest them all that much; they are a lot more concerned with establishing careers for themselves.

Being a surrealist is a more passive position to take than being an Existentialist.  Psychologically, one can be in opposition to this, that or the other thing, but one doesn’t have to stand up in opposition to anything in particular.  General, ill-defined discontent is what motivates many surrealists.  It’s easier to express one’s discontent than it is to act in defiance of the prevailing social order.

Another thing that might have contributed to surrealism’s longevity is the fact that it doesn’t depend on strong personalities who are prepared to take stands on political issues—not nowadays, anyway.  Many of the original surrealists were political, but that has since gone by the wayside, for the most part.  Another reason why surrealism continues to thrive might have to do with the fact that it is a lot more playful than existentialism could possibly be; it is a repository for unconscious play.  When I say this I’m reminded of the paintings of Paul Klee.  But, let’s not forget, Paul Klee, who wasn’t a particularly political fellow, found himself designated a ‘degenerated artist’ during Hitler’s nightmarish reign of power.

Also, it mustn’t be overlooked that the term ‘surreal’ has become part of today’s lexicon.  It is employed by people who know absolutely nothing about surrealism’s historic underpinnings.  Surrealism has been taken out of the hands of surrealists and put in the hands of the unknowing public, which has contributed to its survival.  That wasn’t the case with existentialism.

You’re on record for saying that Canadian publishing has become incestuous, and I’ve noticed that many Canadian literary journals will not accept submissions from outside Canada, why is this the case?  Almost no journal in the states excludes submissions from Canada or any other country for that matter.

Most Canadian literary magazines are funded by the Canada Council, as well as provincial funding bodies.  Magazines that receive Canada Council funds are expected to tip the scale heavily in favor of Canadian writers.  A mediocre Canadian writer will get the nod before a good American writer, because the magazine’s financial survival depends on it.

As you have probably noticed, The New Orphic Review isn’t funded by Canadian taxpayers.  It is a totally independent publication.  I publish what appeals to me, without deference to the Canada Council or other funding bodies.  Most of the writers you see in the pages of The New Orphic Review happen to be Americans; indeed, my associate editor, Margrith Schraner, has jokingly suggested that I call it The Expatriate Review.  In Canada, I’m still viewed as an interloper, as an outsider, but that’s just fine with me.

As editor of The New Orphic Review, do you detect any changes in contemporary writing since the inception of your journal over ten years ago?  Is there anyway you can comment on the direction you think literature is going in the 21^st century?

Right now, from my limited vantage point as editor-in-chief of The New Orphic Review, literature seems to be heading in every direction simultaneously.  However, that impression might be due to the sort of writing the NOR is in the habit of attracting.  My big regret is that I can’t afford to publish a lot more of the manuscripts that arrive in the mail.  I’d be a pauper if I did that.

I don’t have my finger on the pulse of mainstream literature.  Because I write and publish out of defiance, I tend not to care what is happening in the mainstream.

Please give a detailed account of how The New Orphic Review is published.  How do you select material for publication?  How do you print it and distribute it, etc?

The New Orphic Review is published twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.  I select what appeals to me, but I always make room for first-time writers who show promise.  Because I like a range of approaches, styles and content, the NOR reflects my personal biases.  I used to take the prototype of the magazine to a printer here in Nelson.  The pages and covers came back to me in a pile, and I would then bind them so they assumed the disguise of a book.  However, that approach has since become too expensive as well as too time-consuming, so now I put the text into PageMaker and the cover into PhotoShop and send each issue to Blitzprint in Calgary, Alberta.

As far as distribution goes, libraries are the most consistent among my subscribers.  Harvard, Wisconsin-Madison and York are a few of the subscribing universities.  Individual subscribers vary in number.  Many of them are also writers.  Many have stuck with me from the beginning, but an equal number have since fallen to the wayside.  For the most part, publishing a literary magazine is a thankless task.  To be quite frank, the NOR is a money drain to the parent company, New Orphic Publishers.  I publish it out of defiance, and because it offers me a small window onto the literary landscape.  Certainly, it doesn’t make sound financial sense to be publishing The New Orphic Review.

For many of us, the small press is the last hope for saving authentic literature from disappearing forever into the jaws of commercial publishing.  Certainly journals like The New Orphic Review are a sanctuary for true literature.  Please comment on why you think The New Orphic Review is important for the preservation of authentic writing.

Your question flatters me.  I’m not sure The New Orphic Review is ‘important to the preservation of authentic writing’.  I have made a habit of doing what I like to do most—despite the odds!  I like ‘discovering’ talented writers more than I like ‘preserving authentic writing’.  Because, by nature, I am defiant, quirky and an iconoclast, I tend to attract writers of a similar nature to the magazine.  We should all write as those we don’t care about acquiring an audience.  We should publish in the same spirit—out of defiance, because, after all, the solar system is sooner or later going to collapse, and everything we are familiar with is going to perish, now isn’t it?

What do you believe the future of literature to be in the 21^st century?

I haven’t the vaguest notion.  There may not even be any paper to print our missives on in the future.

Are you at liberty to describe your escape from the U.S. military during the Vietnam War?  How has your own writing been affected by living in exile in British Columbia?

I have discussed my reasons for leaving the U.S. in many articles, books, and TV interviews.  Anyone who wants to become familiar with my past should read Margrith Schraner’s book, The Reluctant Author:  The Life and Literature of Ernest Hekkanen.  But, in short, I was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s.  My anti-Vietnam War activities brought me to the attention of the FBI, which found it necessary to monitor my movements.  By my third draft notice in 1969, I decided it was wise to move to Canada. My father, who worked for the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers, lost his job because of my political involvements.  In its efforts to monitor my whereabouts, the FBI interviewed neighbors, instructors, employers and friends; the idea was to poison the environment in which I lived, which is a favorite tactic of the FBI.  Even now, I’m on the FBI watch list, and because of that I no longer set foot in the U.S.

I have lived in Canada for 38 years.  I continue to feel like someone who straddles a fence.  In Canada, I’m too American for the likes of my colleagues in the literary community.  In America, I’m a literary nonentity.  Last year, I participated in the first Our Way Home Peace Event and Reunion—indeed, I was the main financial backer of the event.  I was fortunate not to lose my shirt, as well as a considerable layer of skin.  The Our Way Home Reunion is a political event where draft dodgers and deserters mix with anti-war veterans and political activists—in defiance of America’s foreign policy!

Because my resistance to the Vietnam War was a pivotal event in my life, it often surfaces in my writing.  The Vietnam War, and now the Iraq War, have a lot to say about America’s looming shadow.  As you may or may not know, America killed something like 3.5 million Vietnamese civilians.  America has never admitted to that fact, let alone dealt with it.  The atrocities committed by America have been conveniently deleted from its history books.

You also teach writing from time to time; do you think writing can be taught, do you think writing should be taught?

Teaching creative writing, especially at universities, has become an industry.  One can facilitate a writer’s progress, but one can’t teach an individual to become a writer.  Writing programs exist in order to provide destitute writers with a steady income.

Your question also begs a further question:  What sort of writers are being produced by writing programs?  Do they write text for TV Today or do they write significant literature?  To tell you the truth, a writer determined to write significant literature must, out of necessity, have a pretty tough hide. It also helps to be a bit obsessed.

I feel a sign should be posted above every creative writing department in the country:  Enter at Your Own Risk.  For most of us, writing isn’t a wise career move.  Only since the year 2000 have I been able to write fulltime, and even now the rewards aren’t great.  But as I have already said, I write out of defiance.

Any last comments on the small press in the 21^st century?

Be prepared to be ignored, and thrive despite it.

I noticed you don’t correspond by email.  Do you have a particular aversion to technology?  Are you of the opinion that a writer’s work is somehow weakened or played false by too much contact with technology?

I use email to correspond with a select number of individuals.  I have nothing against technology.  Indeed, I wouldn’t be able to perform my job as a writer, editor and publisher without taking advantage of today’s technology.  However, I do need to protect my time; I do that by not making myself too available to the public.

Do you have any advice for would be editors who want to start-up their own literary journals in this day and age?

Do it because you love literature, not because you expect applause or acclaim.  Expect most people to be indifferent to your magazine.  Do it out of defiance, because you value what is immutable in human experience.

 

 

 

Ernest Hekkanen’s intimidating versatility and productivity have increasingly defied easy categorization and marketing. Although Hekkanen is clearly one of British Columbia’s most remarkable writers, his work is seldom recognized in mainstream publications and Canada’s literary festivals have consistently overlooked him. Library systems and bookstores depend on established conduits for ordering books, leaving staunchly independent producers such as Hekkanen out in the cold. His work frequently points to dark but universal recesses of the mind. As a sophisticated do-it-yourselfer, Hekkanen has gradually outpaced Adolf Hungry Wolf as British Columbia’s most prolific and serious self-publisher. He and partner Margrith Schrander also operate the New Orphic Gallery and New Orphic Review from their home.

Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of the Mississippi non-profit arts coalition, VOX PRESS, and is the Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Institute, a literacy agency that serves incarcerated writers and artists. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over 300 magazines and journals and is the author of the National Book Award nominated, The Gar Diaries, and the award-winning collection of poems, OLGA. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing..

Michael Sikkema : An interview with Aakriti Kuntal (part two,

Small Press Intravues: 

Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem

Interview #21 (part two [see part one here]: Aakriti Kuntal is a poet, writer, and multidisciplinary artist whose creative pursuits span literature, visual arts, and experimental film. She finds inspiration in nature, often retreating into its embrace to write and reflect. In addition to poetry and prose, she explores photography, asemic writing, and short experimental films. Her work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rasputin: A Poetry Thread, IceFloe Press, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Recognized for her contributions to literature, she was awarded the Reuel International Prize (2017) and shortlisted for the RL Poetry Award (2018). She is the author of the chapbook God, Am I Your Eyelid? (Sigilist Press, USA). Her debut book Night Breaks apart, like pomegranate seeds in my palm (Seagull Books), was listed in Ms. Magazine’s best poetry books for 2025-2026.

Michael Sikkema: Can you tell us how these poems came to be? How does poetry start for you? What is your writing process? Do you feel like we are more inside poetry or poetry is more inside us? 

 

Aakriti Kuntal: These poems emerged and ripened over the last decade. I’m not sure what pushes me to the threshold of writing, to the very act of creation, but usually there is a strong sensation in my being, an urge, an overwhelming need to pick up the pen and start jotting. All the emotions that have been marinating in the flesh catapult into being. I remember in my earliest years, I sat in front of my garden window. It was praise that first incited poetry in me. The grandeur of earth, manifesting itself in my simple garden, drew the poet out of me.

At other times when it isn’t a pressing urge, and I go with a deep intention to create, I usually like to become empty. Barren, like a blue landscape. I listen to music—usually classical, and begin observing things. I pay my utmost attention to all that surrounds me. Whatever whispers its way through a poem does. 

Sometimes I jot down ideas or fleeting thoughts—fish in the phone's cast net. These I return to later and allow them to sleep into me again. The act of writing is more an act of allowance, of surrendering. The words mutate their way into the very chorus of existence.

Poetry is the abacus of being. The way things, events, and emotions are arranged and rearranged. These then become fertile spots, a plucked string, where poems occur. I feel we are inside poetry— always swimming inside its large stomach, swathed in its saliva, and occasionally these transform into poems. It seems like while we do go fishing for ideas, there is an unconscious from which the ideas arrive. I feel this collective unconscious is kind of like poetry. The way the elements of life coexist, their diameters and diagonals. The space in which thoughts bunch and become lines.

After a health issue and the consequent brush with mortality, I slipped back into the cocoon of my former self. A self that used to dream along the tangents of death. These poems touch that tissue of mortality and how, in its shadow, it makes life glimmer.

Ekphrasis is also a practice I have often followed. Art as a response to art, filling the vacancy that only art can fill. Poems have emerged in response to photographs I’ve taken or to classical music. The congruence of colours, rhythms, and words inspires me to wave from one form to another.

MS: Can you talk a little bit about how you think of the term surrealism in relationship to your writing? 

AK: A dissociative experience lends itself to shaping the membranes through which I express my world. This world is particularly shaped by the landscape of the body. After some health issues, the body slipped into my work unconsciously.

Many poem drafts do not commence with a rational thought in mind or an intention to express a particular idea, but rather are the overwhelming, brimming sensations finding themselves in the current of words. The mouth, the eye, and the body occur repeatedly as motifs that draw out the urgency of one’s primal existence. Blood pukes and occurs, dreaming a surrealistic portrayal of life’s most vital pulse, that which extends through us and is unnameable.

There is a disjointed energy to the flesh of the poems, their organs working in many directions and yet somehow finding a confluence, a binding tether. I think the mind, at any instance, does not think only in a linear fashion, as is usually exploited in poems. It is thinking along many parallels at any time. While most poems coalesce in this collection, there is invariably a haphazard movement in the process of arrival. It mimics the threaded thought processes of being alive and is a vomit of incoherent feelings and thoughts.

Surrealism perhaps requires an automated response. An almost involuntary impulse takes over the body, and the body starts creating. There has been festering and cooking that has been going on as we interact with various elements of life. We have assimilated our environment and woven it with our thoughts. This fermented brew then suddenly hiccups at a trigger, at an image, a line, a fleeting thought.

MS: Do you think your art is continuous with nature? Are you mimicking nature or collaborating with nature when you create? Sometimes it seems like some of your poems are ecosystems of images and ideas. 

AK: I think art begins for me in the lap of nature. There is a lullaby, a screech, sounds, and echoes drifting in nature’s magical landscape. The poem Evening, for instance, sprang open in the silence of an evening. The day slit, it was as if the same silence that permeated everything as the veils opened and closed, entered me too. I was connected to all living things around me,  stretching inside their bodies to invite a large yawn. This collective yawn felt like the poem Evening.

The unsayable, the permeating flesh of life, the spores of nature are as much the catalysts in poems as the agent that is the poet.  We begin in nature and breathe and hiccup in it. Nature is the somatic cycles of plants, the climate of dust, and the animacy of microbes. We are lulled by beauty to sunrises and sunsets; we carry the many sounds of all that exists. I believe we are invariably connected to everything. Nature binds the rhythms of the body and the mind. Nature provides the visual landscape against which we flit and sweep. Nature enters us, if we allow it to. We can feel the weightlessness that comes from being untethered. At other times, we also feel the breath and hiccupping weight of so many living things. A single plant can get woven into our own living imprint.

In that sense, I feel I’m often collaborating with nature. Nature, too, is translating itself through us. Our pains, illusions, bodies get woven into this geography of thin air—the night breeze that calms us, creating a lap and echo on the cheek. The ear is no longer separate from the cuckoo’s song; it has been enshrined into the memory of the lobe and the terrains of the spiking heart in joy. Also, the locus of light—how it moves like gelatine through the sieve of trees. The mind transforms in these slowly stirred songs. When it stirs you, it works through you.

I like how metaphors and images can embed themselves in another, like a tree flowering. It is not a singular emotion or thought that is being alluded to then, but a tapestry of mycelial impulses, like an ecosystem.

MS: Can you talk about your interest is asemic making? I find that that kind of mark making can really light up parts of my brain that little else does. 

AK: I feel that when you try mark-making that is asemic, you allow a rhythm to overtake you and scratch at the innards of your consciousness. There is a vast sea that occurs and bears at our seams. I feel like with asemic making, we create a bridge, a switch to something that transcends language. Language facilitates communication and expression. However, I feel many emotions cannot be captured in the substrate of words. Just like thinking is not exactly done in words, but is something more primal. I feel asemic writing is similar to accessing more primal and unseen plateaus of the self.

The reader enters a multi-plane dialogue with the asemic marks. The reader brings her own consciousness and entwines with the currents of the marks. Since no intentional meaning is being forced, the mark-making is like two seas meeting. Each wanders into their own recesses and excesses, creating a garden.

Asemic is at the brink of language; this boat shelves right at its edges, courting language’s first instinct. The instinct to express is primordial. The first instinct that may have occurred in man when he held a pen or a brush. The volatile explosion takes place in the chest. The knowledge at the brink of the discovery of language and art. This ability of man to reflect on himself with a tool. Asemic marks channel this energy of the unconscious. It employs the movement of the hand; the synaptic symphony between writing, wrist, and the mind/soul as a means to span consciousness or emotions onto the paper. 

Personally, I feel it taps into the fluidity or conduction that occurs when one writes and is very innate to both writing and painting, at the same time taking a departure from both. The process of writing employs the body or hand as an intuitive medium where the hand becomes a passage, transmitting thoughts and emotions at great speed. One could entertain that asemic writing takes script, geometry, space, art forms, curves, and ink as its mediums.

A leap one could take is with phonetics. Asemic writing in an aural space could dissolve the units of phonetic sounds as we employ them, or allow phonetics into play but not words. An incoherent language where sounds/phonetic sounds merge into another in a manner that each phonetic syllable is deconstructed, and all stray particles roam. Asemic sounds would be unintelligible. They could then perhaps be anything. They could carry a likeness to how language sounds, and yet stray from it completely.

MS: Maybe related? Can you talk about your interest in the invisible, or in making the invisible visible, maybe visible is the wrong word? 

AK: Poems touch the bone of intangible bodies. For instance, the poem Presence presses upon the emergence of being that occurs in the overlapping field of connections to other life forms. The poem tries to capture this wick, this thread that binds life through simple acknowledgement of each other’s existence. The language does not use a narrative fashion, but rather, through more amorphous channels, attempts to elucidate the energy of this field.

Vispo too captures the rhythms, the textures, the energy fields like a bird’s song or the sound of a sea by making use of visual elements along with language’s innards.

My interest is in making intangible energies that our world is tethered to bare. The poems rarely explicitly try to explain the substrate but rather use a more surrealistic language to capture the many parallels and energies of the poem.

The language that snakes through the world we inhabit, outside and within, doesn’t fall into neat categories and compartments. It instead flows like rivulets, meandering outside of meaning into threads of pure feeling. Poetry, I think, transcends language or at least attempts to. It catapults the slime that is at the bottom, and gives it a shape, a colour.

 

 

 

Michael Sikkema is a poet, visual artist, forager, amateur mycologist, and an enthusiastic but bad drummer. He lives in West Michigan.

 

Louis Bourgeois : NELSON & THE HURUBURU BIRD (Interview with Mairéad Byrne)

Mairéad Byrne began her career in Dublin, writing for newspapers, magazines, radio and theater. Her first book, Joyce—A Clew, was a short experimental biography of James Joyce, with illustrations by Henry J. Sharpe. Since then she has published six collections of poetry: The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius, 2010/2019), Famosa na sua cabeça (Dobra Editorial, 2015), You Have to Laugh: New & Selected Poems (Barrow Street, 2013), SOS Poetry (ubu /Editions 2007), Talk Poetry (Miami University Press), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey 2003); as well as nine poetry chapbooks and three collaborative books with visual artists. Essays include “Light in July,” in David Jhave Johnston’s ReRites: Raw Data/Response (Anteism 2019) and “The Shed of Poetry,” in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric: Essays on the Poetry of Maurice Scully, edited by Ken Keating (Shearsman, 2020) and a poem stamped into the sidewalk (City of Providence Art in City Life/Sidewalk Tattoo Project).

Although you do not appear to be a poet who seems particularly overwhelmed by your personal history, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the poems in Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, such as “Cycling to Marino” and “Elegy without Tooth or Heart,” exhibit at least a glimpse of a longing for childhood as you grew up in Ireland.  Please describe your upbringing in Ireland and how it perhaps played into your development as a poet.

I’m so disinterested in my personal history that I had a devil of a time turning to this interview!  “Cycling to Marino,” a poem about cycling to school when I was seven, was written in Indiana in 1995, shortly after I immigrated.  I think I was conscious that this might be the sort of poem the poets in my graduate program might like.  When I came to America, I was writing with great gusto but after six months or so someone commented “That’s the first poem of yours I’ve understood.”  So I became more conscious of an American audience.

“Elegy without Tooth or Heart” was written in 1988, in a workshop with Alan Dugan in Truro on Cape Cod—I lived in Provincetown for a year.  It was a type of challenge poem:  write a poem using as many words as possible from this list of words whose meanings have remained most stable over the centuries.  I couldn’t fit “tooth” or “heart” into the poem so I used them in the title.  The poem was about the death of a childhood friend, eighteen years before.  It was the first time I’d written about it; the exercise unlocked it.  I remembered Dugan said, “Put that in your publication pile”.  I didn’t have a publication pile before I met him.  I’ve never really longed for my childhood.  I’ll be fifty this year and I’m delighted.

Were you raised religiously?

I was raised Roman Catholic, though only Ian Paisley said Roman Catholic.  We just said Catholic; and everyone was.  When my good friend the painter Michael Cullen told me he was Protestant, when I was in my twenties, I thought he was joking.

When I was small I wanted to be a nun.  I stopped believing in God when I was thirteen and became passionately critical of the church, and organized religion, I was expelled from school when I was fifteen because, according to the head nun anyway, I had pretended I wanted to join the convent.  What happened was that a new wing of the convent was built, and myself and a friend wanted to see what it was like, so we visited the Mistress of Novices who kindly showed us around.  Well, I can’t remember anything else.  The place was nice though, very seventies, very clean and quiet.  I believe in God again now; an adult can be more forgiving than a child.

Why do you believe in God now after so many years of atheism?

Patrick Kavanagh has a line:  “you…take up religion bitterly/which you laughed at in your youth,/well not actually laughed/but it wasn’t your kind of truth.”  I didn’t laugh at religion when I was young; I was much more bitter about it then than I am now.  I haven’t taken it up again, and I can’t ever see myself joining a church, though you never know.  I would say that I believe in God; if God is everything I can’t know.  It’s a little strange to me how I came to suddenly believe in God after not believing for more than thirty years.  It was just a suggestion and I accepted it without hesitation.  The time I was in Mississippi was very shocking to me.  In the space of a year or so, I got a job, moved to Mississippi with my partner and two children, my partner left me, I got another job, moved to Rhode Island with my children; my partner returned, we got married, and divorced.  That’s the short version.  The fallout from all this shook me to the core; but what happened was that fantastic gifts came flooding into my life, and spirituality was one of them.  It’s surprising for me to notice though that the poets I loved most since childhood, for example Hopkins or Hart Crane, are incandescent, prone to ecstasy.  Also, some of my greatest teachers rooted themselves in faith, e.g., Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

At what age did you begin to write poems?

Maybe about sixteen.  I remember writing some poems—actually prayers—for a religious magazine called The Furrow.  My father was very encouraging about them but I had qualms, partly because of my lack of religious faith, and partly because of my terror of poetry.  I didn’t submit them.  But I’m glad my father read them because he died shortly afterwards.  He loved poetry and I think he’d be happy that I’ve made it my life’s work.

Did others in your family write?

My father wrote poetry before he married.  He also started an autobiography, unfinished perhaps because of eight children, and the painful circumstances of his own family origins.  My older sister, Elizabeth Gosling, is the author of Bivalve Mollusks: Biology, Ecology and Culture, which sells for only $188.89 on Amazon.  My niece Maria Scott is the author of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris:  Shifting Perspectives, which sells for only $99.95, and just won a major prize.  Of my two most recent books, the first SOS Poetry is free at www.ubu.com; the second Talk Poetry can be purchased for only $10.00.  What’s wrong with this picture? 

What are some of your early literary influences?

The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh was my greatest early influence.  He was from the border between North and South of Ireland, as were my parents.  He was the first poet from an Irish Catholic peasant background to achieve major status in English language poetry in Ireland.  He wrote in a wide range of traditions:  lyric, satire, sonnet, epic, beat, occasional casual verse, journalism, fiction.  My father collected everything Kavanagh published, in multiple copies of every edition, no matter how rare or scarce.  I felt I had a direct and living connection to him.  As a teenager I read Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien.  I was almost as soaked in Flann O’Brien as I was in Kavanagh.  Those two did a number on me.

Did you ever have any other career in mind other than becoming a poet and professor?

I was a journalist for eight years; that was my education in the city of Dublin, night and day, and in writing.  Last night I watched a documentary about Daniel Pearl.  I don’t think I could have worked for the Wall Street Journal, or really have made a significant contribution in international journalism.  But I think I did make a small contribution to Irish journalism.  When I came to America the first time, in 1987, I left my portfolio in the The Village Voice and immediately got work.  I did some work for the Voice but my heart wasn’t in the enterprise of starting over again as a journalist in a new city.  In 1988, I worked for the Provincetown Advocate and could have moved on to bigger newspapers, but again my heart wasn’t really in it.  By then I was writing the sort of poetry I wanted to write.  Finally.

I wrote two plays which were produced in Dublin in 1982 and in 1985.  I still miss the theatre and would love to return to it.

I teach at an art school, Rhode Island School of Design.  I might have liked to be a painter if I had known in time that such a possibility existed.  I would love to be a singer and to sing my heart out without causing pain to my audience.  I still want to sling my laptop over my shoulder and jump on trains and have jam sessions with virtuoso poets in bars and hotel rooms all across America.  The only other thing might be to have been an obstetrician.  But it’s probably best that I’m not.

You have lived in the states now for over a decade.  Do you consider yourself to be an “American” poet?

Well I came to America so that I could be an American poet.  I’m looking pretty Irish at the moment but that might change.  Meanwhile America is good at accommodating a range of cultures.  That’s why I’m here.

As early as Nelson & the Huruburu Bird”, there is a tendency toward “experimentation” in your work, e.g., found poems, list poems, collage…was this a conscious effort on your part to render poems in this way or did it come quite naturally to employ these techniques, etc?

I think it came naturally.  From an early point I was interested in visual art; also the writings of painters.  I was interested in translation and all sorts of mediated work, even postcards of paintings. As a journalist, my main interest was form, the economy of form, how to make form do the job of content.  I always liked problem-solving of that kind.  I always liked to experiment.  My first play, in particular, was a grab-bag of opportunity.  I never saw the point of doing things in one genre which could be done better in another.  If I was working in theatre, I wanted there to be magic—stuff that could only happen on a stage.  The stuff of poetry is language, so it’s natural that I wanted to play with that, to move it around, stretch it, cut it up.  Poetry isn’t about something; it is something.  So I was always very interested in the materiality of it:  the look of it, and the sound of it.

What books have been important to you through the years?  What books are still important to you?

Well, I have just returned my year’s worth of books to the RISD and Brown libraries but have retained a few which I’m not willing to part with just yet.  These are; The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, by Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, by Waldo E. Martin, Jr, Gregory Stephens’ On Racial Frontiers:  The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley, The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vladimir Markov’s Russian Futurism:  A History; and Benedikt Livshits’ The One and a Half-Eyed Archer which I had to pry from my own hands when I went to Rome earlier this year (there was a question of weight, time, and serious fines if I lost it).  Also, a book arrived from half.com this morning:  The Academic Self:  An Owner’s Manuel, by Donald E. Hall (not the poet laureate).  Usually I read a novel set in academia when the academic year is over.  This year I need something stronger.

The books that have probably remained most important to me over the years are probably my various editions of the poems, journals, and letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  When I first left Ireland, I took some books in Irish with me, including An BéalBocht, by Myles nag Copaleen, and Irish language dictionaries; also my Anglo-Saxon grammars and readers.  I’d like to read more philosophy, political journalism, current theory in the arts.

I’m not a big collector but I would love to own every single thing Charles Reznikoff ever published.

Some of my teaching stalwarts are Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Jen Bervin’s Nets, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Arthur Waley’s Chinese Poems (also a very early influence), William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Langston Hughes’ Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, and Russell Edson’s The Tunnel.  I maintained an interest in Anne Bradstreet, William Blake, Walt Whitman—and my interest in the Romantics , especially Keats and Shelley, flared recently when I was teaching for a short time in Rome.  Also Cummings.  And of course everything on UbuWeb.

It seems to me that in your early work your poems are of two types often merging into one; one type leaning toward your personal past (“Cycling to Marino”) and the other toward “language” type poems (the list poems for example).  However, in your later work I noticed two predominant strands of poetry:  personal poems that take place in a more immediate sense and poems like “Baghdad,” “Trapped,” and “Rubble” which are overtly political.  Please explain this apparent shift of focus in your work.

It’s worth pointing out that I didn’t publish a single poem until I was thirty years of age, and my first collection was published when I was 43.  This wasn’t a matter of choice.  That first book, Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, was really a compendium of three books, and is an awkward collection as a result.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait too long to be published.  I’d really recommend the course you’re taking, editing your own magazine.  I’d also recommend self-publication, in print or online or both, and founding a press for publishing the works of others.

In the case of Nelson & the Huruburu Bird, the starker work was written in Ireland; the lusher or more lyrical work in America.  I myself didn’t know how those two roads would eventually work out.  Eventually they met in the prose poem.

In the last few years, I’ve been able to publish in a more timely way: with three recent chapbooks, An Educated Heart (Palm Press 2005), Vivas (Wild Honey Press 2005), and Kalends (Belladonna 2005), and two collections, Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007) and SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007). All that work was written within the last 4 years.  So it’s a great relief to have it published.  I can see the identity of each phase of work much more easily:  the recalcitrant shock of An Educated Heart, trying to address days toppled by the invasion of Iraq and the break-up of my family, as I knew it; the flagrant mania of SOS Poetry; the sustained strategy of Talk Poetry, which may be my Leaves of Grass.  I have been able to publish all my work from the last four years, except half a book called Broken.  An Educated Heart is the first half of that book.

What I would say is most different about my work now is that I am more prolific and I am able to publish and collect it more immediately.  A poetry blog is the quintessence of this, though I am profoundly indebted to my editors and publishers in the print and internet worlds.  What may seem fragmentary and inchoate about the earlier work isn’t that exactly; I just wasn’t able to publish and collect in a timely fashion.  Things lose their momentum, and one poem survives to represent ten.

My formal interests haven’t changed that much.  I’m still interested in appropriated and found work, still interested in colloquialism and the textures of the human voice—an interest in journalism and theatre addressed and developed.  I’m more interested in performance and audience than I ever was.  I’m much more explicitly interested in comedy.  I could see myself sailing off on the boat of the prose poem into fiction.  I can’t be sure that will happen though.  I love, adore and have total faith in poetry.

There is a poem in VIVAS that I find to be particularly intriguing, “Another Self Portrait”:

pinwheels
***pinwheels****pinwheels
**PINWHEELS!!!PINWHEELS!!!!****pinwheels!
*******pinwheels********************************PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!
pinwheels***pinwheels!
****pinwheels!!********
PINWHEELS!!!!!!PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!*******PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
**************PINWHEELS***********
pinwheels***PINWHEELS**************!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*PINWHEELS!!!!!
***********************************pinwheels
*****************pinwheels**************************************
pinwheels!!!!PINWHEELS!!!!!!!****************PINWHEELS***********
pinwheels****pinwheels!****PINwheels!!!!!!pinWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PINWHEELS!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!PINWHEELS******************
PINWHEELS!PINWHEELS!!!!!!!!*************
*********PINWHEELS!*********** 

Language seems to crumble into randomness here, but a highly structured randomness; the poem seems to radiate great meaning without using words (except one of course).  The poem seems intricately objective and personal…in any case, can you say what you were attempting to achieve in this poem?

There is an element in me of just being starry-eyed and going out and about everywhere saying “WOW”!!! That’s why this is a self-portrait.  My own eyes are pinwheels and the stars are spinning in the sky.  I once was amazed to see a peacock alongside the Natchez Trace.  But when we drove back to check it was a wooden stick with a daub of paint on it.

Have you ever attempted to write stories and novels, etc?

I’ve only written two stories in my life and they were both published.  I’ve an idea for a story right now.  Hopefully that will be published too, if I write it.

In VIVAS, toward the end of the collection, there is a total shift toward prose poetry, and your latest collection, Talk Poetry, is a full length collection of prose poems.  Please explain this turning away from the poetic line and writing exclusively in the prose form.

Over the past few years I moved fairly inexorably towards the form you see exemplified in Talk Poetry:  the shortish chunky text block, right and left justified.  Talk Poetry collects 60 such pieces.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t continue to write in other forms also.  I do. Especially the very short lyric.  Nevertheless, when I saw that this squarish prose form was establishing itself, I was excited and intrigued.  It seems to have infinite possibility.  I’m just scratching the surface so far.

What is your general opinion on the prose poem?

It’s a tough form.  I love its economy, its unassuming demeanor, its ability to function as a little theatre.  It’s very accessible and surreal. I’m not sure how best to read it in public.  There isn’t much context for prose poetry.  I want new venues, new audiences.

A ruthless question:  has free verse run its course in contemporary poetry in the 21^st century?  Do you detect any tendencies in poets to return to the use of standard meter in poetry writing?

Free verse certainly hasn’t run its course for me.  Heck I’m only beginning to learn about silence.  There may be people who’ve done for poetry what Erik Satie did for music (Mallarmé), but I’m still investigating all that.  There can be something sickening about traditional forms, something tight and sealed.  Continuity in itself can be irritating, in this culture of fragmentation and interruption.  I consider myself a formal poet; I work with contemporary forms.  I’m not athletic but if I were, I’d play tennis without a net.  What did Hopkins do?  Play tennis with forty nets?

You’ve lived in the northern and southern states of America…please describe how you feel about these two regions.

My first impression of Mississippi was that it was a place of utter strangeness.  The earth was orange.  Kudzu was snaking to the sky.  Everything was alive, especially consciousness of history.  I felt fear.  At the same time, I wasn’t American—I wasn’t even an American citizen when I lived in Mississippi, though I am now. I didn’t have to be bound by the perspective and guilt of either north or south.  When I moved to Oxford, Mississippi, I had lived in Indiana, upstate New York, and New York City.  Mississippi was the most foreign place to me.  The white women on the Square seemed almost European—beautifully dressed, impeccably groomed older women but with improbable bows in their hair.  I was only there for a year.  It seemed very racially divided.  But it’s a strongly African-American culture.  I didn’t have time to find my feet socially:  the white world made me uneasy and the black world was outside Oxford.  Besides teaching at the University of Mississippi, I taught in a medium security prison—it was my first time teaching all-male classes.  I left Mississippi abruptly, when my business there had just begun.  There’s a lot of personal sadness in my thoughts of the place.  I went to Mississippi with a great deal of excitement, I had a job teaching in the new MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, my first full-time teaching job; I met brilliant people; we had a wonderful place to live.  I loved teaching in the university and prison; always there was this palpable excitement.  But, for personal reasons, I let go of everything.

In Providence, I live in a very racially-mixed neighborhood, on the wrong side of the tracks, but not egregiously.  Both my children went to public school, which can be harrowing in an American city.  Clio, who is now 10, will be going into 5^th Grade this year.  Public schools in cities are principally for the poor; children don’t have much of a chance in America.  But we fight the good fight and so far all’s well.

Both my children are girls.  I think Providence probably suits them better than Oxford would have.  There seemed to be a cult of the feminine among white girls that might have been hard to take.

What do you think of writing programs?  How is becoming a writer/poet different in Europe?  Are writing programs as prevalent in Europe for example?

Before I left Ireland in 1994, I asked Gerald Dawe, then teaching in the Department of English at Trinity College Dublin, if he thought it likely that a creative writing program would be founded at Trinity in the foreseeable future—there was no such program at any Irish university at that time; hence my departure.  He said it would never happen.  Now he’s the director of Trinity’s M. Phil. in Creative Writing and the Oscar Wilde Centre of Irish Writing.  That all happened shortly after I left, along with the complete reversal of the Irish economy from being crippled by unemployment to becoming one of the richest countries in the world; the transformation of Irish society from homogeneous, rural, and Catholic to multicultural, urban, and a la carte (picking and choosing what aspects of Catholicism to practice); and the resolution of political strife in the North of Ireland.  My timing was impeccable.

When I left Ireland, there was a tiny M.A. Program in creative writing being run by James Simmons and Janice Fitzpatrick from their home in Portmuc, in Antrim, a very remote place.  It was a two year program, with mainly American students; the M.A. was granted by Durham University in England, I think.  Jimmy and Janice were very generous to me, giving me a short-term scholarship at one point.  I didn’t feel I could do the M.A. though, as I had a small child and felt I needed to be in a non-isolated environment with library and job opportunities.  At that time in Ireland, there was a great deal of prejudice against creative writing workshops and programs.  I thought it was mindless, like all prejudice.  It’s more or less evaporated now anyway, as far as I can see.  People who were withering in their contempt are now facilitating workshops, and there are various types of creative writing degree programs at universities.  For me, the creative writing workshop has always been a venue far superior to the pub, which was the twentieth century Irish cultural Centre for exchange.  I did a Master’s in Poetry at Purdue University, then a Ph. D in Theory & Cultural Studies:  the combination of these qualifications, together with book publications and teaching experience, led to jobs I liked, first at the University of Mississippi and now at Rhode Island School of Design, where I am an Associate Professor of English.  If I could support myself and my two children as a writer outside academia that would probably be my first preference.  Otherwise, I like that puzzling work-in-progress called teaching.  I certainly have known the inexorable sadness of grading; it’s hard on creative writers, whether they’re on the giving or receiving end.  I think Gerald Manley Hopkins died of it, when he was a classical examiner at University College, Dublin.

In your opinion, what is the future of Poetry in the 21^st century?

I haven’t yet taught a course called 21^st Century Poetry but I’ll be teaching Contemporary Poetry this spring.  The 20^th Century was a very powerful century for poetry and I’m still very fond of it.  Poetry is very alive in music and performance, especially but not only rap and slam.  It has very successfully made a transition to the internet, where it is increasing and multiplying on listservs, blogs, journals, online editions, archives, etc.  In America, there is a stunning selection of small poetry presses; also publishers like Granary which cherish and glorify the book.

On the other hand, independent bookstores have been crippled, and poetry distribution seems increasingly difficult.  I’m not pessimistic though. 

I think there is a demand and need for poetry; it has a function.  Shelley’s dictum that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe has been misunderstood.  They are the artists of verbal language, which occupies, and has always occupied, human culture in crucial ways.

 

 

 

 

 

Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing.  He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.