Interview by Doyali Islam
Heartfelt congratulations on your debut poetry book, Still Point! Immediately, from the first few lines of the first poem, the voice of the poet-speaker pulls me in. How long did this collection take to write and revise – to fully come into being?
Thanks so much. You could say this book took roughly 13 years to write. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I started to see some similarities between that city and my hometown of Detroit. So that’s when the central concern of the book emerged, and I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since. Most of the poems from back then are now totally altered or replaced, but some lines remain. “This is not survivor’s guilt. I was always gonna leave,” for instance, is largely unchanged. I was sitting by that window, the curtain was blown in, and most of those lines haven’t changed since I wrote them down at that time.
But also about one-fifth of the book was written in the last year or two, and a lot of those are poems that really brought the book together and completed. I think the whole process can be framed as that voice slowly emerging from a rich, but obscure, mix that I was trying to figure out.
Speaking of that which is “altered or replaced” and that which “remain[s]” – throughout the book, I sense the poet-speaker’s interest in – dare I say obsession with? – both place and the passage of time, with what is lost versus what survives and/or thrives. I think that place and time are the only factors that poets have the ability to manipulate, but we all go about this handling in unique ways. In your poems, the poet-speaker observes keenly as elements both urban and natural change, at odds with the workings of memory. The poems reveal both microscopic attention and a longer view of time/history. Houses, condos, restaurants, stores, neighbourhood demographics, vegetation – everything is in flux. My question is simple, but I really want to know: why are you interested in these particular things, or how did you come to be interested in these things?
Obsession is a fine word for it, and for that reason I will attempt to keep my answer below one million words.
It has a lot to do with where I’ve lived and how I’ve encountered those places. My family goes back a few generations in Detroit, and I was made aware of the history of that city, and thus of America. In Detroit the sweep of history is immediately obvious. An abandoned building shows both how opulent it once was, the strength of the historical forces that produced that wealth, and eventually took it away. And Detroit’s rate of change is overwhelming, and I’d argue sublime. In 1900 the population was under 300,000. In 1950, it was close to 2 million. It’s declined ever since, to where it’s now less than 700,000. From major American industrial metropolis, to smaller in population than Mississauga.
That’s the longview, perhaps, but you have to go beyond the famous things, the “ruin porn” of abandoned skyscrapers and formerly opulent theatres. You have to look at the neighbourhoods. There are still many thriving neighbourhoods in the city. I grew up in one. As I try to make clear in the book, I had a beautiful childhood. Detroit is and has been a great city to visit, to go out in. The people and culture there are fantastic.
There are also whole blocks of open prairie that used to be full neighbourhoods. As Danny Brown puts it: “it was house, field, field/ field, field, house/abandoned house, field, field.” It’s those areas outside of downtown, with dead commercial corridors and wide open spaces, that show the extent of the history. Detroit is huge, geographically, so only by driving through it a lot and looking at the little things do you get a sense of its scale. It’s easy to focus on the way nature comes back and changes these abandoned areas, because it is quite profound, and even bucolic. But you also have to remember that one empty plot of land was a family’s home, and that empty building down the street was their grocery store. To contemplate a thing like this, you have consider it at the personal, human level, and then realize how impossible it is to comprehend the magnitude of all those combined stories, and all that suffering. It’s humbling. Or, it should be.
Hurricane Katrina did something similar to me in New Orleans. The government neglect and mismanagement that went into that man-made disaster was quite old by the time the storm came through and exposed it, tragically. That was more history happening right before my eyes, and I could identify things there that seemed to embody it. Not explain, but embody somehow, or show, intuitively. That was my privilege: to see these things, and be able to try to capture them, but not suffer from them myself for the most part. I do want to acknowledge that that makes me lucky. But it was also the way I witnessed these events.
And then I moved to booming Toronto, growing towers like mushrooms, building up so quickly, in such stark contrast to Detroit and New Orleans. That provided not only its own flux, but also one that conflicted with my previous experience of cities. So I had to think about that, and find particulars that could embody something of this new universal I was encountering.
William Carlos Williams once quoted William James as saying “the local is the only universal.” I totally agree. So I guess to answer your question more directly: I was interested in place and time because I sensed that that’s where I could begin the search for the big questions I was trying to ask, and maybe to begin answering.
Moving from the philosophical to the concrete, I love the size of this book and its dimensions: I can carry it easily in a purse or even a coat pocket, depending on the coat. How much decision-making power did you have in terms of the physicality of the book?
Very little. There were some long lines, so I did want a wider book at one point. But that actually ended up forcing me to cut some down to get it onto the page, or deciding it had to be a dropped line. So the trim size helped tighten it up a bit. I appreciate the size now more than I thought I would. I think it makes it more approachable, and I hope it’s deceptively small. And I love books that fit in your pocket. You can be unburdened, but still have a book with you.
Still Poin
t comprises five distinct sections – STORM, FLIGHT, BOOM, SPILL, and THE PEACE NORTH AMERICANA – but the poems within each section have no titles. First lines are in bold, serving as both first line and title. I find it very effective in your book, as it offers me a sense of intimacy as a reader – almost as if I’m reading journal entries that offer place-based and time-bound glimpses into your life and mind. How did this strategy emerge, or why did you feel it was suitable for this particular collection of poems?
The poems used to have titles. Or many of them did. But then with 5 sections that I wanted to flow together–both across sections and within them–I thought giving titles would make the poems too individual. The title/first line combo makes the reader have to stop less, so the section becomes more of the main unit of the book. It also made me make sure every first line was especially on point, as it had to serve that double purpose. Sometimes the titles just became the first line too. It was definitely an important breakthrough when I got the idea to do it that way.
Jeff Latosik was your editor. What was your experience working with him?
I can’t say enough good things about that. I think I’ve already embarrassed Jeff in public about that, but I’ll do it again. He was amazing to work with. For instance, on titles: he had correctly identified some unevenness in the titles as they existed before, and had flagged that as an issue. He didn’t really get why I wanted to do it the way they ended up, but was patient enough to hear me out and eventually agreed on the strategy. That’s a minor example. He did a bunch of other things that showed that same kind of attentiveness and care–and he had a lot to do with pushing me to write more, even after I’d been writing this thing for 10+ years. That one fifth of the book that’s fairly new work owes him big time. I don’t think there’s a lot of editors out there that would have invested so much in the work.
How did that feel – being pushed to write new poems in the final year before the book’s publication?
Great, in the end. I agreed the book needed something more, and once I saw that, it was easy motivation. Also nerve wracking. I was working past the extended deadline. But those final poems and edits really locked everything in place for me. The timing of it all felt right. Like I was finally ready to write those final poems the book needed. There’s a poem in there about the Pacific, just off Vancouver Island. If I had finished the book last April, that poem wouldn’t exist, because I would never have been to Vancouver Island yet.
One of my favourite poems in Still Point is the one that begins, “On most Mondays I recover an inability,” which I first heard you read at Pivot, at The Tranzac in Toronto. Was this one of the most recent poems to be added, within that one-fifth?
No, that’s an older one. But it got a significant rework in the last year. Took me a while to figure that one out. Maybe it has something of what I was trying to nail down to finish the book. It’s about an open office hour. Which is a peaceful thing.
What role does music play in your life and poetic practice?
A gigantic one. I didn’t hang out with writers or literary types during undergrad in New Orleans. I hung out with Jazz Studies kids. I probably saw 3 shows a week, on average. And this is New Orleans, the best music city in the world, so these shows were both challenging and joyful. And I learned a lot from my musician peers about how to be an artist, from how much they practiced, and how focused they were on mastering forms and the technical side of their art. It was because of them that I learned scansion on my own, so I could figure out how poems work on that technical level. And who’s to say what I absorbed in all that listening? Johnny Vidacovich (drummer) and Skerik (saxophone) remain among my most important artistic models. New Orleans is a city of drummers and to me a poet is doing a lot of things that a drummer does rhythmically (especially because in both cases the melody part of music is muted). It was down there, too, that I really started to study rap seriously. I remember scanning Nas’s “What Goes Around” and being amazed by the stress patterns, and how they lined up with the beat.
The vibe of the music down there was also huge for me. They play music that is funky and pleasing, yet also intricate and surprising and just out there. There is no low brow or high brow, there is just music and the soul. But also the street, and the people. Music is a civic institution there, and it is to a lesser extent in Detroit too. When I came to Toronto, I was quite sad at how much harder it was to find that joyful musical vibe. It’s getting better now, I think, but that lack made me realized that live music had become a kind of temple for me. I feel spiritually ill at ease when I go too long without touching that spirit. Thank god for Grossman’s Tavern.
For me, personally, it is a delight to see you and your partner, Catriona Wright, at literary events. What is it like to have a partner who is invested in the same artistic practice and community? Living together, how do you negotiate your boundaries for creative work? What has it been like, having your debut launch this year, and hers last year?
I wrote a bunch of poems about New Orleans, and food is hardly mentioned at all. This is a crime Catriona Wright would never have committed. That is to say, we are different poets. One of the amazing things about poetry is how varied it can be. I wonder how much of a stretch it is to say that being poets makes us no more inherently similar than being human does. So maybe being poets just kind of dovetails into our being humans who support each other.
It is true that we both launched books this year, and with things like that it’s nice to have someone nearby who understands how things go. We also teach in the same program at U of T. In that case, we have to draw some lines, like “no more work talk.” But with poetry, and even with The Puritan, I’d say that’s more just a part of living, and not as much of a separate thing.
E Martin Nolan is a poet, essayist and editor. He edits interviews at The Puritan. His illustrated poem about Donald Trump, “Great Again,” can be found greatagainpoem.com. His first book of poems, Still Point, was published with Invisible Publishing in Fall, 2017. Learn more at emartinnolan.com.
Doyali Islam is an award-winning poet, a 2017 National Magazine Award finalist, and the poetry editor of Arc. Her work can be found in Kenyon Review Online; CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition; and The Best Canadian Poetry in English: 2018. Doyali’s second poetry book is heft (McClelland & Stewart, 2019). She lives in Toronto.