Interview by Uchechukwu Umezurike
Uchechukwu Umezurike: I want to thank you for having this conversation with me, Margaret. First off, congratulations on your latest work, charger. There are many beautiful lines in charger. My favourites are: “hear / birds / nibbling / back the / skin / of this / momentary / retrieval”; “memory / which is / an / ovoid / grey / lake / lashing / at the / shore”; “your hands / bright-naked / and chilled / as if / stroking / rain / from a mallard’s bare / neck.”
How did the idea for this book come about?
Margaret Christakos: Thank you, Uche, for asking about the book. I began writing poems for charger seven or eight years ago, as an outgrowth of my interest in the ways we use social media to catapult fragments of thought and speech across distances and temporalities. This dovetailed with my sense of remaining in memory-space with my parents, who died over the writing period. And perhaps an expanded sense of earth-time, and cosmic time.
Virtual connection takes a shape that must be sustained across intervals of illegibility and inaudibility. I began this particular body of poems writing by hand outdoors, situated in natural spaces, and writing in notebooks using the full double spread as a writing space, feeling the momentum and leap of the long sentence unspool and curve and continue to move and shift—the opposite composition process from sending digital media posts. For these poems, I didn’t want to write in contained chunks. I wanted to improvise reaching into a beyond space, connecting in some ways with practices of drawing I have used for many years.
UU: What is it like having a book published during a pandemic?
MC: Having a book published during a pandemic means the public reception of the book is very muted. All of the opportunities to read aloud from the book and place it in various contexts and gatherings have dissolved—so it is a pleasure to know individual readers are spending time with the poems.
UU: Retreat Diary (above/ground press, 2019), and charger share similar themes such that one might be tempted to assume the latter is an elaboration of the former. In Retreat Diary, for example, the speaker says, “I am caught in the / conundrum of wanting solitude & / craving connection,” and in charger, “and / what’s / special / or / natural / about / quiet / anyhow?” Both poems touch on questions of silence. I’m wondering, how has the lockdown affected your writing experience?
MC: I am very interested in listening practices and improvisation as aspects of poetic composition. I write with an interest in responding to the intricate pull of becoming engaged in a situated writing procedure, at whatever hour, in relation to whatever else I am doing. Being at home with time in its most liquid organization allows me to embark on writing explorations as I wish, so in some ways the lockdown has cracked open time boundaries in an interesting way for writing.
One image that became active to me over the writing of charger was how haunting and stressful it was to experience a deadly hurricane in my childhood. I recognized that there is a synaesthetic memory of mounting wind and a darkening sky that truly terrifies me. A sonic figure of local weather looming into global emergency asserted itself across the poems.
UU: Something I deeply liked about charger is how each poem cycle, even though it has its own story to relay, is interconnected with the other cycles. The casual reader might find the typographical style––the fragments, spaces, and abrupt pauses––quite challenging. Why did you choose to write in this form?
MC: At this moment in poetry, there is nothing too surprising about a text that is widely distributed across pages. Open field poetics are well understood—Marlatt, Nichol, Kroetsch, Wah, Shikatani, Tostevin, Moure, all of whom have influenced me—it’s easy to understand the page as a concrete field within which language events happen. For a reader, though, it does mean participating in the reading of the text more actively. You have to generate the semantic and grammatical flow between the segments through your own attention procedure. You have to perhaps take a little more time to focus upon reading as composition. In charger, since the poems are splayed across the gutter with a lot of spatialized distribution, there are several ways that a reader can come to the page and begin to read. Our standard way of reading is to move from top to bottom, from left page to right page, and if you read the charger poems in that way, the experience is highly fragmentary and allusive. The referential world of the poem is loosened from grammatical direction; it becomes multidirectional and a bit bewildering, which is an effect I like a lot that mirrors the disjunctive digital media world we live in. If you then read the same poem moving across the spreads, the poem coheres into this long unravelling sentence shape with a grammar that delivers quite a lot of “directed” meaning, and the narrative situation also becomes quite delineated. If you choose to use the text more like a score, you can also read fragments in whatever order you like, making various versions that cohere in different ways. I hope readers will have this awareness of being free to read the poems in a few different ways.
UU: The first section, “passing on information,” has these resonant lines: “for something to occur in memory / the skin is a membrane / for something to touch my insides / i have to involve it in movement / information moves.” It reminds me of Erin Manning’s remarks about the skin and touch: “When we reach toward to touch, we reach toward that which is in-formation or transformation.” Though charger contemplates issues about motherhood, mortality, memory, and mourning, it speaks also to how technology has penetrated our bodies, reshaping “the shared social,” as you put it. Moreover, the imagery evoked by “the social / prosthesis / of / public / radio” somewhat recalls Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, especially how we have become “machine body” or “wired” through the digitizing of human lives. We are plugged or unplugged by others, and we are charged or even uncharged by others. Would you want to talk a little bit more about embodiment in relation to technoculture?
MC: Some of the charger poems speak to mortality, and control over physical death. The relationship of our bodies to technology has been a pretty central site of my poetics for the last 30 years. My first chapbook in 1991 is about a message from a lover scrolling across a computer screen, and throughout Not Egypt (1989) I am toggling between “Lips ghostwritten, electronic replay.” Multitudes (2013) is an exploration of Whitmanian self-portraiture as self-knowing alongside face recognition surveillance for right-wing social control, and 24/7 digital news media, and Excessive Love Prostheses (2002) connects subjectivity, erotic pleasure and electronic media, and our desire to re-deploy representations of our own experience. Baudrillard and Brossard have both had a hand in some of my core metaphors. In charger I’m thinking about the kind of infantile craving we have for the sensational pull of social media—“our brain / quickens / for something / more intense or / less streamlined / like a cow / with four / stomachs / we’re / restless / for / all the chambers / to be / filled in”—waiting to suckle, to be continuous with the technomothership.
UU: Retreat Diary also pulsates with beautiful imagery: “we are nostalgic afflicted by memory / assuaged by appetite / strung together with the living promise / of co-presence.” There is something portentous about the following stanza: “as the world catapults toward explosion / and implosion on many levels I / cleave toward poesis of address from / private to public from individual / to social from inchoate to provisional / as relationality across difference enacted through labour of finding words.” Could we read this as a summary of your poetics?
MC: Yes, pretty much! The notion of co-presence is more and more important to my work, I think. I have done a lot of writing about maternality over many books; I think the concept of co-presence now resonates for me in an expanded sense in relation to existing with others, across difference, the transhumance world, the ecological world.
UU: Sometimes I am hunting for definitions, and this line in Retreat Diary stands out for me as I think of poetry as “an event of both mind / language & body / sense.” What is poetry for you?
MC: I hunt for definitions too. Poetry is an ethical inquiry. It’s a set of questions that keeps opening and opening. Mostly I just try to keep putting that work of words back into the body.
UU: The concluding section, “coda,” explores (amongst others) issues of futurity and capitalism, and ends on a haunting note: “charged with / the lives / yet / to come.” What is it that you hope to communicate about the future?
MC: I am trying to connect past and future and reaffirm temporalities beyond the capitalist instantaneity. The image of the present as a large swaying carcass hanging off of a construction crane is macabre, yes, but fitting I think for the moment we are facing. We have to face what we’ve done to our children and the generations to come.
UU: Thank you very much, Margaret, for your illuminating responses. When is your forthcoming work, Dear Birch, out in print?
MC: Thank you Uche, for your great questions and for taking the time to consider my work and shape some conversation about it. I think Palimpsest Press is aiming for March or April 2021. It’s really exciting to be able to work on this publication through the coming months.
Margaret Christakos is a Canadian author of ten collections of poetry, numerous chapbooks, a novel, and an inter-genre memoir. She has worked as an editor, instructor and poetry-culture builder in Toronto since the late 1980s. Margaret has held appointments as Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University and the University of Alberta. She currently teaches creative writing at Ryerson University. Her latest poetry book, charger, was published by Talonbooks in Spring 2020. margaretchristakos.com
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is a PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar in the English and Film Studies department of the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), his critical writing has appeared in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, Postcolonial Text, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Journal of African Literature Association, and African Literature Today. His research focuses on postcolonial and Black diaspora literatures, gender and sexuality studies, cultural and critical studies. Umezurikeis a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems.