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Poetic Profile
Sina Queyras
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in my mother's forest green Chrysler, chasing
my father from one construction job to the next. She loved to sing, Hank
Williams, Patsty Cline, and she loved to drive. She also wrote
lyrics-predictable rhyming quatrains, limericks-usually quite funny or risqué if
not focused on her heartache. That was my exposure until I was eleven or so and
discovered Atwood's THE JOURNALS OF SUSANNA MOODIE and POWER POLITICS with its
opening poem:
you fit into melike a hook into an eye a fish hookan open eye
Those poems blew my mind: no rhyme, all this fragmented imagery, assertive
women, and references to life in our time. The language vibrated with intensity
and freshness.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other
things that inform your work?
Visual art is central to my being: painting, sculpture, photography,
video-all art forms. I go to a lot of galleries and to some extent, prefer
talking to visual artists. I also spend a lot of time taking photographs and
thinking about photography and composition.
My poetic influences have changed over the years, particularly since moving to
the US four years ago--I've been tugging around Anne Carson, Gertrude Stein,
Juliana Spahr, Harryette Mullen, Catherine Daily, kari
edwards, Mairead Byrne, CD Wright, Marie Ponsot, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon,
and many, many others. Many younger women in particular--on HOW2 for instance.
However, since I'm editing an anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry at the
moment, I'm steeped in the stuff. I just re-read all of Erin Mouré's work, for
instance: SHEEPISH BEAUTY, CIVILIAN LOVE, WEST SOUTH WEST, FURIOUS.she blows me
away, she's so funny and smart, and from the beginning, has been relentlessly
investigating technology and nature, a
kind of cyborgian, urban pastoral of unhinged language. Compression, inter-text,
everyday event, physical body-her poetics as described in FURIOUS is so
succinct. But I'd add play of course. She has so much fun in her work, but her
work is anything but simple, or simply playful, and clearly she has influenced
me more than I have been aware of. She and
bpNichol have been my favourite re-discoveries so far.
I was formed by so many poets-most of them Canadian-that I can't list them here.
There are a few, such as Daphne Marlatt, Robert Kroetsch, Fred Wah, Christoper
Dewdney, Don McKay, Tim Lilburn, Phyllis Webb, Dionne Brand, Erin Mouré, Dennis
Lee, and Michael Ondaatje who have been more influential than others, but there
are so many others too.
3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday
life?
I came to literature with such awe, and with such a deficit of
language and historical knowledge that I still find it difficult to take myself
too seriously, or to identify as a poet. And I'm always just catching up, it
seems, just trying to figure it out...
The first poem that impressed me as being remotely authentic in any way appeared
when I was about 25. I wrote in workshops, and was encouraged to submit, but I
thought of the poems I was writing as exercises. The fact that my fellow
students were sending these poems off to magazines (and being published!) was a
constant source of amazement to me. I
thought I needed to get to a much bigger, original canvas than I was able to as
a young writer-I suppose I still feel that way.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
I used to scan the shelves in Granville Books, a late night bookstore in
Vancouver. Entering into poetry felt like being dumped into the middle of the
ocean without a life jacket. You didn't find a big selection of Canadian poetry
then. It just wasn't that available. I didn't know any poets. It seemed to me
that I either needed to find a mentor, a way in,
or go back to school. The mentor never arrived so I went back to school in my
mid-twenties.
After bouncing around a bit I settled into UBC to do a BFA in creative writing.
I was nearly 30 when I graduated and that undergraduate degree meant a lot. I
worked with Daphne Marlatt in my third year. She made me think about poetry in a
way that no one else had done. She was the first person who talked about poetics
and she scared the hell out of me. It
was exciting but it also seemed an anathema to my relationship to poetry, which
was about escape from poverty and cyclical victimization, a desire to tell a
certain kind of story that I hadn't heard to a certain audience-largely
uneducated-a kind of transformative impulse. I was resistant and in retrospect,
though I understood instinctually what
she was talking about, I realize I didn't have the language, the formal learning
required to enter into the kind of discussion she was trying to set up for us.
Nor was I sure I wanted it.
Coming to Fred Wah's MUSIC AT THE HEART OF THINKING for example. While it was
exciting-deconstructing everything I'd learned the year before which was a kind
of Oldsian quasi-lyric narrative celebration of middle
class values-it was also alienating in its humour, its curtness, and insularity.
My response was to write a series of collage-like prose poems that made
reference to people in my life, books that I had read and was thinking about,
very insular, lowbrow wit. It was mocking, but there was direct protest: I was
angry. I thought that Wah was being
elitist, that he wasn't welcoming me into the poem; that he was in fact,
shutting me out. I struggled with that sense for a long time.
At Concordia, in Montreal Erin Mouré and Christopher Dewdney were the two that
really shook me up. Dewdney made me dream of fossils and the inside of
tornadoes. But I still struggled with this split-the gorgeous narrative poet
Bronwen Wallace on one side and Erin Mouré on the other and I wanted, and still
want, to have them both at my table or on my
shelf, and in my own work.
And I'm still struggling with that gap.which in fact may be my major influence.
In my reading this summer I've been trying to put my finger on this schism
between the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the so-called formal poets (the split is
similar in Canada to the US) and I think that it has something to do with this
humour it seems to me, this perceived "aloofness", this lack of "holiness",
which is of course, ridiculous. In an interview between Carmine Starnino and
Eric Ormsby in the book WHERE THE WORDS COME FROM: CANADIAN POETS IN
CONVERSATION, for example, Ormsby describes Olson, bpNichol and the Black
Mountain poets as producing "amazingly forgettable verse". He describes
"enduring" these readings, and the interviewer, Starnino says that he too has
"no sympathy for
those poets". When asked to describe his "aversion" to them Ormsby replies:
"Ultimately, I don't feel as though such poets are uniquely possessed by their
language. Their words do not emerge from them as if they were originating with
them. And I recognized this flatness instantly when I pick up their books..."
What is this prescribed "holiness"? Is this as in "there's only one way to pray
and only one God to pray to?" Really. How can anyone accuse bpNichol of being
"flat" or not "uniquely possessed" by his own language? This ongoing un-dialogue
is not useful or constructive; it doesn't open up into anything positive or new.
Fortunately there are other conversations happening in Canada-much more useful
ones one finds in OPEN LETTER, WEST COAST LINE, or CV2. WHERE THE WORDS COME
FROM is also a great-if sadly one-sided-way to eavesdrop on
contemporary Canadian poetics.
5) You are a Canadian, particularly a Western Canadian what does this have to
do to your work?
See above.. Being from the west coast you come to poetry hearing a lot about
Charles Olson, the Black Mountain poets, Tish, the Kootenay School of Writing,
Bowering, Wah, bisset, etc. so yes, I've been steeped in that fundamentally
"wild" and "experimental" western aesthetic even though I didn't really
understand it for a long time.
The west is something I long for, and write back to. It's a place and a poetry
that I'm constantly rediscovering.
5.1) You are a prolific writer and professor how do you balance these things?
I'm not technically a professor, but I do teach, yes. A friend of mine said
recently that it's impossible to be balanced and successful. I also hear you
can't be a great artist and have a full life. This doesn't bode well for me
because I pride myself on balance and having a full life.
6) What is your favorite food?
Watermelon. Curry. Chocolate. Odd mixes. Comfort foods.
7) Sports Team?
You have to love the Canucks because they're always down n out, always just
about to break out. I used to be in love with the Quebec Nordique, but they're
in Colorado now. I can't get used to Florida and hockey. Now Florida and the
Stanley Cup (insert a swell of nationalism here).
8) Vacation Spot?
The west coast of Canada, the French Alps, these are the landscapes I long for.
9) Curse Word?
Curses come and go in waves.
10) As a Canadian writer what is the most difficult thing working in the
USA?
It took a while to find my feet in America, but moving to Brooklyn was a good
move. The poetry community in New York is amazing: open, diverse, exciting,
challenging and always engaging. I met a few people, Gabe
Fried, Elaine Sexton, Marilyn Hacker, Yerra Sugarman, and really, the doors just
keep flying open from them. There are so many reading series: The Ear Inn, The
Bowery, Halcyon... I live on the same block as Soft Skull so for a whole year I
had awesome weekly readings I could pop in to. Then there's Rachel Levitsky's
belladonna series, which is I think
is hot, hot, hot...
On the down side, poetry has been so professionalized in the US-particularly the
whole book publication prize treadmill-that it's sometimes depressing. People
have such high expectations for the reception of their poetry rather than for
the poetry itself that the focus gets skewed. Discussions are so often about
which prize, publication, program, retreat, honor.not about the work. We even
describe people in terms of what they've won-this is beginning to happen
in Canada is well. I come from a place of feeling honored just to be part of the
world and I don't want to forget that.
On the up side-and this is a major plus-despite the intense competition
I've found the American poetry scene graceful, curious, and open to
reading and hearing new work, much more so than a Canadian might think.
Living north of America is not unlike Trudeau's analogy of sleeping next
to an elephant, or Naomi Klein's analogy of the two-way mirror: we can
see you, you can't see us and we just hope you don't roll over. I used
to feel like the proverbial mad woman in the attic: just lock the door
and pretend she's not there, even when she's pissing through the
radiators or slipping angry notes under the dinner guest's plates...
Being here has changed that. The openness of American poets has been
wonderfully surprising.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
That depends on the poem and the time of writing. Half of the poems in
TEETHMARKS, due out in October, came about by my experiments with form,
wanting to fit a certain "poetic moment" into a given structure--probably me
trying to come to terms not only with the two solitudes in Canada, but the
influence of the extreme streak of formalism I was coming into contact with in
the US. Unlike SLIP, which I had a lot of fun writing-responding to Marilyn
Hacker's ecstatic use of
form in LOVE DEATH AND THE CHANGING OF THE SEASON'S, among others-this
last book was difficult. I began to feel like I was in a straight jacket-I'd
write a poem, but that wasn't good enough. I had to then shape it into a sonnet
or something. I was determined to discover how to write in these traditional
forms and I think the book reflects that. It also reflects how that blew up in
my face.
2) Do you use collage, Parataxis, fusion cutups or other tools?
Yes, I've been playing a lot with collage and cutups and other tools,
although by the time this generative material finds itself in a poem it'
s much different than the play. I still feel the need to craft things,
but I'm questioning what I think of as "craft", and I'm trying to avoid
over doing that now, and I'm trying to let myself have more fun. Holy
fun.
I use a lot of Mayer's experiments when I teach introductory poetry
classes. I find that the more I deconstruct my student's ideas of what
poetry is, the better the results. Ultimately they can write whatever
kind of poetry they want, but I want them to bring a deep, playful
consciousness to it.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
As a young poet I was heavily invested in organic and all that it
signifies, so yes, I would love to say organic, but I'm not sure what
that is anymore.
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits
when you write?
What I need are waves of quiet and stimulus. I've always been attracted
to extremes. Being in the middle of nowhere is great, but only after
being in the middle of everything. At the edge is where I like to write.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does
your work fall? Do you use many sources?
I'm not sure I understand this question entirely, but I do use found
language yes. Technical language, the language of plants, the language
of science, the language of place, is exciting, but what I do with this
is dabbling. I can't conceive of a canvas the size of Christopher
Dewdney's PREDATORS OF THE ADORATION, or Lisa Robertson's THE WEATHER,
but these are poets whose work I carry around with me.
