Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What
took you away?
I was born in Ottawa and although I briefly lived in Moncton and Edmonton as a young child, I lived in Ottawa from 1972 until 1996. I moved to Vancouver in search of a job. Prospects in Ottawa were dim. The Mulroney government had launched an assault on government workers, laying off thousands and the Chretien government did not bring significant change to employment possibilities. I knew people living in Vancouver and the Kootenay School of Writing was also a significant draw.
Q: How did you first get
involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I started a writing club in my first year at
Carleton University and then became involved with the Carleton Literary
Review. In 1986, Louis Cabri formed the experimental writing group (ewg)
and he and I began to produce poetry talks and readings. In 1990, we started hole
magazine and then hole books. Bob Hogg was a huge influence on me
and the direction my writing and reading took. We were, however, largely
influenced by writing communities located elsewhere, such as the Kootenay
School of Writing in Vancouver; Steve McCaffery, bp nichol and their Toronto
Research Group project; and the language writing communities centred in New
York and San Francisco.
I did not feel very connected to the more visible writing communities in Ottawa when I lived there. In some ways, we were more connected to the visual arts community than the writing community in Ottawa. Gallery 101 was certainly a supportive organization that hosted many of our events. SAW Gallery also hosted several events. We also were very fortunate to be asked to organize a series of readings and talks at Art Court.
Q: How did being in such a
community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there
been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
Bob and Louis certainly
were the biggest influences. I took courses with Bob at Carleton and in
addition to introducing me to Black Mountain poets, the TISH poets, and John
Ashbery, suggested that I read the language poets. The Carleton library had
quite a few books by language poets, including Silliman’s anthology In the
American Tree and Perelman’s Writing/Talks. I read these works with
bewilderment. When I met Louis, he was reading the same poets and so we began
to get together to talk about this work, trying to understand it. There did not
seem to be many others in Ottawa (or elsewhere) who were interested in this
work, so it felt like Louis and I were initially a community of two, although
we also met regularly with Bob. The Transparency Machine series was our attempt
to initiate discussion about the work of the poets we were reading. These
events asked writers to situate their work in the context of other work. At the
events, the poems were projected onto a wall and the presenting writer and
audience would discuss it. The series attracted a small but engaged audience,
and I think this formed an important community for us.
My thinking about poetry
was certainly shaped by these events, but the greatest influence was the work I
was reading at that time, people like Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron
Silliman, Alan Davies, and Jackson Mac Low. Mac Low’s chance procedures and
Silliman’s procedural writing had a profound influence on my own writing
practice.
I have lived in Vancouver
since 1996 and have certainly been privileged to be involved in the community
of writers associated with KSW. I am certain my writing has been influenced by
the community here, but the influences are not as formative as the work of the
language poets and of Bob Hogg or the ewg talks and readings. The changes that have
occurred are largely a result of being older, being exposed to a greater
diversity of writing, and thinking about poetry in a more complex manner than
the somewhat simplistic understandings I had in my twenties.
Q: What did you see
happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or
allow?
When I lived in Ottawa, Arc
magazine and the Arc reading series were the main venues for poetry.
There was also the Tree reading series, but not much else. You and
Warren Fulton began hosting events in the mid-nineties, I believe? I felt very
much outside of the Arc and Tree series. Nonetheless, there were
many individuals in Ottawa who were writing in interesting ways or who were
doing interesting things with language. Dennis Tourbin, Marwan Hassan, Jorge
Etcheverry, and Colin Morton were people whose work I was reading and learning
from. The universities also brought me into contact with important teachers. I
have already mentioned Bob Hogg, but I took several courses with Christopher
Levenson, who was the prime force behind Arc at that time. While our
poetic sensibilities are obviously very different, I learned a great deal from
Dr. Levenson, particularly around metrics. I am forever grateful for his course
on the Metaphysical poets and for his poetry workshop. As a graduate student, I
took a course at the University of Ottawa with Seymour Mayne on the history of
little magazines in Canada. Louis and I were editing hole at that time,
and the course helped to contextualize what we were doing (at least, in my
mind) and to illuminate a number of considerations for the magazine. Dr. Mayne,
of course, was part of the Montreal scene of Layton and Cohen, and he had a
particular view on the role of the literary magazine which was instructive for
me. The ewg events also brought us into contact with other interesting people,
like Mark Robertson (aka Max Middle) and Christian Bök, who I met at Carleton.
Q: What are you working on now?
I am working on a series of what I am calling embedded poems. These
poems are composed so that another poem, or part of a poem, are embedded within
the poem although in a manner that is unrecognizable. The embedded poems are
all, so far, by people I know and whose work has been important to me.
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