Jérôme Melançon now makes noises when he gets up off a
couch. He tries to pass them off as sound poetry but his two children know
better and say so, and his two cats give him dirty looks. His wife shrugs
lovingly. He thinks. He often tries to ignore emails from the University of Regina in order to live in different headspaces. He recently turned into a
chair. Over time people have thought it would be a good idea to place his name
on four packages of sheets where the lines of ink don’t reach the right
margins, which can be traced back to above/ground press, Éditions des Plaines,
and Prise de parole. He is grateful to those people. The best parts of these
packages of sheets are doubtlessly their top sheet: his first concrete poem
(which he didn’t recognize as such then), the photographs by Gérôme Truc
(@socioeye), and the artwork by Isabelle Gagné (@misspixels). He also hires yet
other people to kill trees or their descendents so that full lines of ink can
live without ever seeing the light of day in the B section of university
libraries and behind exorbitantly priced paywalls. He has very little clout on
social media accounts registered under @lethejerome but what else do you expect
from a piece of furniture?
How long were you in
Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I
suppose beginning in 1994 – my family moved there after a couple of years close
to Barrie, Ontario. Ottawa was my father’s last posting in the military. I
finished high school in Gatineau, went to Cégep in Hull, then started as an
undergrad in economics at Ottawa U. I switched quickly to philosophy when I
realized economics was all math and entirely made up – might as well do
metaphysics. I got a job at the National Arts Centre parking lot thanks to a
friend, directing an orderly flow of traffic and patrolling in a golf cart and
running cash. Lots of time to read, lots of music in my walkman on that hour
long bus ride back and forth from Gatineau. Then I worked at the Librairie du
Soleil for a while, before it was all about research assistant work while I did
my master’s degree. I moved out to Hull, a couple blocks from the Galeries, the
same neighbourhood where I had spent a lot of time back when I played in a
basement band - we did maybe two shows but wow did we ever rehearse. I actually
moved in with this great girl whom I ended up marrying and who took me out
West. Until then I spent a lot of time in the market, waiting for the bus by
the Rideau Centre. I’ve got fond memories of Record Runner. When we both
finished our master’s degrees in 2004 we moved to France so I could do my PhD
there. We stayed there for a year while I completed my courses, then we moved
to Saskatoon. Because why not.
So
family brought me there. And as a child my family would often drive through
Ottawa to see my grand-parents in the Témiscamingue region. We’d stop at my
uncle and aunt’s place in Gloo-cess-t-heure, sometimes we’d even visit the
attractions, I have early-ish memories of Parliament Hill and the National
Gallery and this clown poster I hated in my cousin’s bedroom. Many of my
relatives and extended family ended up in the Outaouais region, at least for a
while, some for good. It’s like a magnet for that whole region. My father had
even studied at Ottawa U, and was extremely proud of taking me for registration
day, when we had to fill out forms by hand based on printed schedules and hard
copies of the course catalogue.
How did you first get
involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
In
my first French class in Cégep we read Baudelaire from our textbook. I barely
read at the time – played bass, some video games, lots of time posting on
newsgroups and chatting on IRC. I was wasting time at the Cégep co-op bookstore
and they had a few copies of Les Fleurs
du mal so I thought meh, why not. I don’t know what possessed me to buy it;
this was likely the first book I bought on impulse and the beginning of, well,
everything. I have this clear image of a small stack of them, with this one
copy standing up on top, the really cheap “Le livre de poche” édition with the
yellow paper (which has since been replaced, sadly). I read it every night,
thought Baudelaire could say things I didn’t know were possible. Some of my
first poems were sonnets, but I really didn’t get them. I left a couple of my
professor’s desk, he told me no one wrote sonnets anymore but why don’t you
submit them to this province-wide contest. That was also a beginning, of
submitting to poetry contests and never hearing back. But I thought I could do
it, and that was something.
By
university I was reading a lot, working at the bookstore we were encouraged to
take books home (carefully) overnight to read them so we’d know more about our
stock. At Ottawa U there was a group of philosophy students who hung out
together quite a bit, mostly at the French bar (which was not the Fulcrum, I
forget its name now, but it also closed while I was still there – the one on
the second floor). We talked about writing a lot, thought we were really High
Culture, and snobby too. I remember being at a bar on the Promenade du Portage
one night, and there just happened to be a poetry reading and we were being
loud and obnoxious. This one writer yelled “VOS GUEULES” and some of us (not
me, I wanted to disappear in my chair) started yelling back, then we just left
out of boredom. That wasn’t very nice. And it was my only contact with the
writing community at the time. Oh and I published a couple of poems in the
French lit department journal, Textures I think. But we really pushed each
other even though I don’t think we even really read each other very much. Turns
out we did ok after that, even though we, or I at least, haven’t kept in touch:
Annie-Claude Thériault keeps winning contests and being featured in Québec
newspapers for her fiction, I just happened upon Maya Ombasic’s memoir in
translation at the public library in Regina, and I’ve got a few things out
myself. I don’t know what the others are up to. During that time I wrote a full
manuscript’s worth of poems and submitted them to the Salon du livre de
l’Outaouais’ book prize, which came with a publication. When an employee of the
festival stopped by the bookstore I asked who had won, and they told me they
hadn’t received any manuscripts worth publishing. That stung, and I actually
stopped writing for a couple of years after that, maybe but probably not for
that reason.
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?
Being
part of this little group just made writing seem like something we could do.
One wrote novels, one wrote short stories, I wrote poetry, others wrote other
stuff, we all wrote philosophy papers all the time, and we retreated from
writing to be together then went back to writing. It normalized it at the time,
which was really important because I didn’t know other writers (unless you
count my uncle who was writing his dissertation in history and had written a
few oral history books already, which had always impressed me).
An
important shift took place when I lived in Paris. Writers, writing is
everywhere there, and the city is in everything people write about. So it’s in
the forefront of my first collection, and the background of the second. It was
a very isolating moment, living there after getting married, knowing no one,
studying, figuring out things that are simple only when you’re from somewhere.
SO I worked hard to find beauty through writing. I had this sense of having a
very, very small place in this world of French-language poetry, which still
revolves around Paris for many people.
Another
important shift happened when I published my first collection and started to be
invited to events in Winnipeg and Edmonton. I discovered a community of writers
there – a tight-knit one in Saint-Boniface, which had called itself the
post-néo-rielistes for a while, a loose one in Alberta. Charles Leblanc in
Winnipeg was incredible, gave me a copy of his book too. And through the French
Twist event at the Edmonton Poetry Festival I discovered bilingual writing,
which launched me in a new direction. Gisèle Villeneuve’s Visiting Elizabeth is a grand, wonderful example of messing around
with living in two languages. And just a fantastic book.
What did you see
happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or
allow?
Now
I feel actually connected to the English-language Ottawa poets’ community,
because I’ve spent so much time listening to old episodes of The Small Machine Talks and because I’ve
published with above/ground press. I pay more attention to what’s going on out
there than I ever did before. Moving out West I never really got into a
community of writers, although I know of
them, I read them, both in French and English.
Honestly
I have no idea what the French-language writers’ community is like in Outaouais
– so many writers end up in Montreal, anybody I knew in Gatineau who wanted to
make it with anything cultural ended up there and some maybe made their way
back after a while. There were a couple of poets my friend knew, both published
with L’Écrou in Montreal, which is just shutting down now, sadly. They have the
best titles – Fourrer le feu and En chaloupe dans l’crushed stone. I
maybe met them once each, I don’t remember.
So
I’m not really integrated in any writers’ community, although I’m hoping
that’ll change now that I’m publishing with Prise de parole and maybe attending
events. I want to be, but you know. The pandemic threw a wrench in that. I do
wish I had poet friends in Ottawa, and time to see them when I go back – I’m
certainly trying to create those connections through social media in the
meantime, somewhat deliberately, but mostly out of interest for people’s work.
It feels like Ottawa has a single English-language poets’ community, the size
is just right for it to be lively, and for there to be smaller groups, but also
for all of them to know of each other and come together for specific events.
Small enough that they all need one another. But the river is a real problem:
people just never cross into the other spaces, aside from the borderlands (from
the Promenade du Portage to Rideau Street). I never really got that. I’d move
between the two communities if I lived there, I imagine. I have a poem about
something like that, the bridges, stepping over the river (enjamber), in
my new collection.
Have any of your projects
responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its
community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
I
just published a collection, En d’sous
d’la langue, which mostly deals with all the normative aspects of speaking
French. Language politics is a big part of French speakers’ lives in Ottawa and
Gatineau, as everywhere else in Canada and really in the world. It’s really
messy. So I wanted to deal with that and apparently there was no getting around
linguistic identity and Québécois nationalism, and the period when I developed
a sense of identity (which has shifted a lot since), so there are quite a few
poems in this collection that deal directly with life in the suburbs, in
Gatineau.
I
once wrote a poem about being rejected from the Salon du livre de l’Outaouais’
manuscript prize – for the manuscript that became my first two collections. It
was not a good poem. They said I didn’t qualify because I wasn’t born there and
I didn’t live there, even though as far as I was concerned then I was very much
from Gatineau/Hull/Ottawa, more than from anywhere else. So that stung. I do
love how bywords.ca approaches the same issue – people who live, work, or study
in the Ottawa region, or have done so in the past. That’s a wonderful way to
recognize the role a place can play in people’s understanding of themselves and
their writing.
What are you working on
now?
At
this very moment, or at least up to the very moment when I sat down, it was
making my children into kind human beings. I’m also spending time getting the
word out about my new collection, En d’sous d’la langue, which came out
in late October with Prise de parole in Sudbury. It’s been nice to rediscover
the poems, read them out loud now and then, so I hope I get to do more of that.
Poetically speaking, I embarked, a bit by chance, on this massive project
that’s taken up quite a bit of the last two months. It began with writing a
poem in response to bp nichol’s use of French words, after reading him for the
first time this summer (yes, I know, I’m late to the party), then “reading” or
skimming through all of it, and writing a whole series of responses that might
be poems or essays. I’m throwing in other references, and I’m quite close to
being able to edit it, which feels quite daunting. It was just supposed to be
this little thing, then maybe a whatever chapbook, and how it’s the Next Big
Project. I think it has to do with interruption and the breaking within things
and of self and their connections, but I might be wrong. I’m experimenting,
which is not to say that it’s experimental. It’s probably been done. It’s fun
though, I hope that much comes through.
