Interview by David Ly
Anton Pooles’ Monster 36, one of the latest chapbooks from Anstruther Press, invites readers on a fantastical journey with fourteen short fairy tale-like poems, each packed with an emotional frequency akin to what could be conjured through cinematic imagery.
What follows is an interview with Anton about his inspirations, storytelling hopes, and the monsters in between it all.
David Ly: So many monsters in your chapbook, Anton! Congratulations on this very intriguing collection. Where did the idea for this collection originate? I’d also love to know what constitutes a “monster” to you. What makes something “monstrous”?
Anton Pooles: Thank you, David! My fascination with monsters does not stem from a love of horror, but from a love of fairy tale and fantasy. Fairy tale and horror are cousins and fairy tale is riddled with all kinds of monsters—good, bad, and between. Monsters can say something profound about our fears and anxieties about the outside world and about ourselves, as well as just being fantastical. I think every poem in Monster 36 is a little fairy tale or at least contributes to a larger fantasy. Poetry is the perfect stage for monsters and I would be doing them a disservice if I set them aside.
I don’t actually have set criteria for what a monster is or what makes a monster. What I find attractive about monsters is their durability. They can take any shape, any function; they’re not weighed down by logic. Monsters fill me with wonder, dread and humility. They can be killers, victims, or both. There is a distinct difference, I feel, between the non-human and the monstrous. In the case of two of my favourite movie monsters, King Kong and Creature from the Black Lagoon, they are both killers and victims.
The term monstrous can of course be contributed to someone or something hideous in appearance or large in stature, but I contribute it to someone or something that actively tries to harm others. I would not consider Kong or the Gil-Man monstrous because their main purpose is not to kill but to protect, whether it’s their homes that have been invaded, or a girl they have fallen in love with—their main purpose is to protect,which is a quality they share with humans and animals. Ultimately, Kong and the Gil-Man are tragic, sympathetic characters. Certainly, you can have a monster that’s just a symbol of pure evil, but it’s that gray area that fascinates me.
DL: I found that your chapbook challenges the concept of monsters and ideas of what is “monstrous”. The poem “The Sea”, for instance, is about a woman who runs out of her house to dance by the sea. It’s like a beautiful cinematic scene with a bit of eeriness; not the typical idea of something monstrous, yet still disturbing in a sense. Could you speak a bit about this poem and how it fits in with the theme? What are the different ways monsters present themselves? Does a monster always have to be something scary?
AP: The Sea was a strangely fun poem to write. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, that has a tragically beautiful ending, inspired it. I wanted to tell a horrible story in a beautiful way — dress up the tragedy of someone drowning themselves using colour, light, and motion.
For me, this poem is about the monsters that live inside us. They can be the most terrifying and the most dangerous kind of monsters. Some people learn to live with them, control them, expel them, use them, but sometimes those monsters win. The metaphorical and the sociological sides of monsters fascinate me. Our fears and anxieties are always changing, growing and being reborn, both in society and within ourselves.
Monsters represent the possibility of failure and our own imperfections, so they’ll always be scary on some level, I suppose. But, if you allow room for failure and learn to live with or love your imperfections, then I think you can work past a fear of monsters and maybe even learn to love them like I have.
DL: What do you think monsters are scared of, Anton?
AP: I love the idea that monsters can have irrational fears just like we do. Maybe, there’s a ghoul that can extend his jaw wide enough to eat grown men whole, but when he sees a spider, he runs for the hills — that just makes sense to me, because we all have an irrational fear of some kind. There is also a universal fear of the unfamiliar and the unknown, and in monster movies and literature, that unfamiliar thing is more often than not, human.
DL: There is such precision in these poems; pieces composed of few lines that pack what feels like such a vast story within them. The opening poem “Antlers”, for example, has only four lines where the narrator expresses that they don’t want wings like everyone else, but antlers like an elk, ending with:
“Follow the elk’s bugle through the twisted halls of dirt / and you’ll know I am king by my antlered crown.”
How did the idea for this piece come about, and what was the narrative/tone you wanted it to establish for the chapbook? I felt like I was being greeted by an eerie creature about to lead me on a journey.
AP: There’s a little Celtic mythology, a little Pan’s Labyrinth, but the biggest inspiration, I think, was this wooden ball thing I bought the last time I was in England. It’s made up of all these stags twisted together, and the poem came shortly after buying it.
When creating a collection, each poem that once stood alone now has to work in unison with all the others and I began to favour poems that I hadn’t favoured as highly before. “Antlers” is one of those poems. It never worked for me on its own, but when I stuck it at the beginning of the collection it became my rabbit hole, or my wardrobe. It was the perfect way to welcome readers into the odd little fantasy. You’re quite literally being guided into this world and are confronted by whatever this thing is, maybe a monster, maybe me declaring myself as king of this place, I don’t really know. It is a fantasy and it is a journey and it won’t always make sense.
DL: Being that these poems are composed of such few lines, which poem was particularly challenging to write, in the sense that you had to really work at it to get it to a place you were happy with?
AP: I am so rarely happy with my work that I have a tendency to over edit and ruin what was perfectly good to begin with. But like Frankenstein, you take the remains of things that don’t work and create something new out of them—all poets do that, I think. It’s important for the odd poem to die, it becomes fertilizer, and the poems I stitch together from the dead ones tend to be my favourites.
The most personal poem in the chapbook—and the hardest to write for that reason—was Father, Ghost, Monkey. It’s about my birth father, who I never knew. Normally, if a poem isn’t coming together I move on, but I really beat my head against the wall with that one. It didn’t go through too many drafts, but it was dormant for a very long time. I couldn’t express the feeling and the knowledge that he is likely out there and that we’ll probably never meet, or would we even want to? I then stumbled upon the line “You’re deep in the jungle and you’re not coming back,” and that was the lightning that brought it back to life.
DL: In the poem “The Scale of Man” (where you reference H.P. Lovecraft, creator of one of the most iconic monsters, Cthulu) you write, “Monsters are here to test our convictions.” How do you feel our convictions are tested by things that go bump in the night?
AP: For as long as we have been telling stories we’ve used monster to teach and enlighten. It was a way to make sense of ourselves, whether it’s a heroic tale like those of Greek mythology or a cautionary tale like Little Red Riding Hood. The monsters in those tales were usually tests for our characters to grow stronger and wiser. And I think the monsters we face in our lives have the same purpose.
In the case of Lovecraft, I think, his monsters were born from his extreme loneliness as a child. Eventually he discovered astronomy and learned about the loneliness of man in the galaxy, I think his monsters became his salvation, as well as his downfall.
DL: What do you hope people take away from reading your poetry?
AP: Well, Monster 36 was born out of the great difficulty I had finding a gateway into contemporary poetry. I was dead set on writing fairy tales, fantasy, horror and I thought they had no place in poetry — I was wrong. I will continue to push those genres in my poetry to greater extremes. I want my work to be that gateway for other genre lovers to find poetry. It’s a great stage for experimenting with genre, it gives you more freedom than prose and your poemscan always grow into something bigger.
DL: Last words: are there more monsters you have hiding in poems we will hopefully see one day? And, who or what is your favourite monster of all time?
AP: I am currently finishing up a full collection of poems, so with a bit of luck, there will be many more coming. As for my favourite monster, well, I think there are a few. In film it has to be Kong and the Gil-man, but also Cesare The Somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and, of course, anything Guillermo De Toro cooks up.
In literature, I think I’ll go with the Elder Things in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Gollum and the Nazgul from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings must be included. Then, finally, there is the crying monster on page 36 of Justinus Kerner’s Klecksographien, which my chapbook is named after. It’s an inkblot painting I stumbled upon, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
Anton Pooles was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia and lives in Toronto. He has a film degree from Humber College and studied poetry and creative writing at the University of Toronto. He was a Staff Writer for AWS Publishing and his work has appeared in Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series in the U.K. His debut Chapbook Monster 36 was published with Anstruther Press in November 2018. He watches far too many movies and is obsessed with things that don’t exist.
David Ly‘s poems have appeared in several anthologies and magazines. He is the author of the chapbook Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018) and a forthcoming poetry collection Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020). He can be found on Twitter @dlylyly and responds well to GIFs of Michael Fassbender.