The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Ken Hunt

Edited by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance highlights some of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.

For further (ongoing) interviews with contributors to The Calgary Renaissance, check out the link here.

Ken Hunt’s work has appeared in small press editions from Chromium Dioxide, No Press and Spacecraft Press and in Rampike, NōD, and Matrix magazines. His first book of poetry, Space Administration, was published in 2014 by the LUMA Foundation as part of Hans Ulrich and Kenneth Goldsmith’s 89+ Project. For three years, Ken served as managing editor of NōD Magazine, and for one year, he served as poetry editor of filling Station. In 2014, Ken founded Spacecraft Press, a publisher of experimental writing inspired by science and technology. Ken is currently pursuing an English MA at Concordia University in Montréal.

Q: How long were you in Calgary, and what first took you there?

A: I was born in Pasadena, California in 1991. My parents travelled frequently for their work at that time. When I was one year old, my parents moved to Bragg Creek, Alberta, where I lived for 8 years before moving to Calgary. I lived in Calgary for about 16 years, before coming to Montreal to pursue my MA at Concordia. So, you might say what brought me to Calgary was my parents, or if you prefer a more mystical euphemism, fate. I still have friends and colleagues in Calgary, and I wouldn't mind living there again, if the opportunity presented itself. The poetry community in Calgary is incredibly rich and diverse. I owe both the genesis and the refinement of my writing practice in part to many of the Canadian literary figureheads still living and working there, such as Aritha Van Herk, Derek Beaulieu, Larissa Lai, and Suzette Mayr.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?

A: I’ll preface my answer by saying that I would not be a writer were it not for my parents. They both read to me from a wide variety of books starting when I was very young. I think that kind of attention and exposure to poetry and fiction made a lasting impression. The first major writing that I remember doing occurred when my parents tried homeschooling me when I was in third grade. I was performing well in public school, but they wanted to try the experiment of homeschooling, and I was eager to participate. I wrote several short stories (some of which my mother still has original copies of), inspired by everything from old Scooby Doo cartoons to Pokémon to Indiana Jones. In sixth grade I wrote a short story for a provincial exam based on a prompt about a boy bandaging an injured bird, written from the bird’s perspective. In high school, I edited my school’s poetry and fiction anthologies; from 7^th to 12^th grade I participated in speech competitions, where I recited poetry, prose, and brief excerpts from plays. My introduction to the Calgary writing community occurred when I enrolled at the University of Calgary in the fall of 2009. Over the 6 years that I studied there, earning degrees in English and in History, I managed to squeeze every single creative writing workshop that the university offered into my schedule. The creative writing department at the U of C was extraordinary at the time. I was fortunate enough to be instructed, at one time or another, by Christian Bök, Mark Giles, Robert Majzels, Aritha Van Herk, and Suzette Mayr. I was also introduced to Calgary's poetry scene, and attended readings and lectures given by the aforementioned authors, as well as others (some visitors, some residents) who have become friends and colleagues, such as Derek Beaulieu, Braydon Beaulieu, Rachel Zolf, Bill Bisset, Ron Silliman, Peter Jaeger, Gregory Betts, Ian Kinney, and many more. During this time I helped edit two local Calgary publications, NōD and later filling Station. My time in Calgary was instrumental in ‘finding my voice,’ to indulge in an authorial cliché.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? What did Calgary provide, or allow?

A: Calgary’s community not only taught me the fundamentals of the craft, but also introduced me to contemporary conceptual practices, automatic writing, machine writing, asemic writing, flarf, and other forms of expression. This shifted, or rather broadened, how I thought about writing. My understanding of the craft was limited to more normative writing practices prior to my introduction to these alternative modes of textual/linguistic/visual expression. Calgary provided me with a new set of tools for writing, and allowed me to experiment with them.

Q: What do you see happening in Calgary that you don’t see anywhere else?

A: I think Calgary has collected a particularly diverse range of creative practices amongst its oeuvre of practitioners. This range of practices has so far prevented the community from homogenizing, or from stagnating within any single political or aesthetic paradigm. Derek’s visual poetry, Artiha Van Herk’s fiction and historical non-fiction, Suzette Mayr’s poetic prose, Ian Kinney’s experimental writing, Paul Zits’s postcolonial poetry, Helen Hajnozky’s Hungarian poetry, and the myriad of feminists, flarfists, and other writers yet to create or invent labels for themselves have create a mixture that makes for a community anyone can access.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements there? How did the city and its community, if at all, change the way you approached your work?

A: Calgary’s writing community introduced me to visual poetry, experimental writing, constraint-based writing, found poetry, and ‘plunderverse’ tactics such as erasure, all of which completely changed how I write. I came up with the idea for my book The Odyssey, an erasure of the Apollo 11 mission transcript forthcoming from BookThug in 2019, in a U of C workshop run my Robert Majzels. That book, and my book Space Administration (which comprises the first 1/6 of The Odyssey, and is available online as a free .PDF) arose from my efforts to respond to Robert’s challenge to the workshop class to find an interesting document to perform an erasure on. My book The Lost Cosmonauts, also forthcoming from BookThug in 2017, is a response to Christian Bök's work, as are parts of The Odyssey. Another section of The Odyssey is also inspired by Derek Beaulieu’s visual poetry. Additionally, I received feedback from numerous others on the two aforementioned manuscripts while in Calgary, and their comments changed the direction of several poems and sections. My current manuscript is similar to The Lost Cosmonauts, insofar as parts of it are informed by Christian’s experimental, science-inspired poetry, while other parts are inspired by Derek’s visual work.

Q: What prompted your move away, and what kind of effect has the shift made in your work?

A: I came to Concordia to work with Darren Wershler as my MA supervisor. My experience in Montréal has been one of reflection upon my practice and upon my academic trajectory. The feedback I have received has prompted me to more deeply scrutinize the emotive potential of my work, which can easily be eclipsed by my impulse to focus on its structure and upon my related research. My efforts to blend science, history, and poetry necessitate juggling these three elements in the resulting writing, which can lead to a ‘suffocation’ of language at times. I have learned that, when editing my work, I need to keep this balance in mind.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I’m working mainly on a book of poetry as part of my Creative English MA. The working title of the book is “The Manhattan Project.” The book is informed by the history of atomic energy technologies, from the discovery of nuclear radiation to its use as a weapon and energy source, to speculation about future technologies. “The Manhattan Project” utilizes various processes to generate, mutate, and assimilate poetry that elucidates the science and the history of atomic technologies. In terms of theoretical grounding, the book draws from Joyelle McSweeney’s recent critical publication The Necropastoral, a term which the author elaborates on in this article. I post excerpts of poems to my Twitter and my Facebook pages frequently, if this sort of work is of interest. In terms of ongoing side projects, I am also working on an erasure of Christian Bök’s “Axaxaxas Mlo,” and an erasure of George Orwell’s 1984.