Of Excerpts and Other Innovations
Books@Torontoist is proud to announce that we will soon be re-launching the books site as The Excerpt (theexcerpt.com). The new site will allow for a wider variety of visuals and posting lengths as well as facilitating reader interaction and site navigation. We’ll also be tweeting and doing more of that social media stuff the kids love so much these days. We’re still working out the final details for the re-launched site, but we’ll be continuing all the regular features that have proven popular with our readers: the Book Marks series, author Q&As, coverage of book festivals, Jacob and Dave’s in-depth interviews, etc. We can also assure any of you who have generously added the books site to your bookmarks bar that you won’t need to change the url—going to books.torontoist.com will still take you here.
In the meantime, we’d like to know what you think is working on the site and what isn’t, what you’d like to see more of it and what you could easily do without. Should we doing more events coverage and listings? More news? More author Q&As? More comics? Do you want to see more dedicated coverage of literary “genres” such as horror, mystery, sci-fi, romance, thrillers, and/or historical fiction? Sites stats and comments only tell us so much about the tastes of our readership so any comments you can send our way would be greatly appreciated and will help us deliver a better, more timely site. Please email me at james@torontoist.com or books@torontoist.com.
We’ll be posting an official re-launch date in the next week or so, along with more details about what you can expect to see on the site.
Thanks again for your continued support of Torontoist’s books site.
Seven Questions with Gordon Korman
Gordon Korman is one of the busiest, most prolific, and beloved authors writing for young people today. If that weren’t enough to recommend him to the books site, he also spent most of his childhood and teen years right here in Toronto, where he wrote his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, as a Grade 7 English class assignment. The novel was published in 1978, when Korman was 14, and he’s been a working writer ever since, publishing witty, intensely readable series and stand-alone novels for a loyal fan base.
Korman is back in the city this weekend to promote his latest addition to the 39 Clues series, an action-adventure series for 9- to-12-year-olds that has landed Korman on the New York Times best seller list. Books@Torontoist managed to snag a few minutes of Korman’s time for a Q&A. (Scroll down for event details.)
Torontoist: You’ve been living on Long Island for some time now. How often do you get back to Toronto?
Gordon Korman: My parents are in Thornhill, so I still get up there a few times per year.
Torontoist: Do you still draw on your experiences growing up in Toronto (and Montreal) for your writing for young people?
GK: Absolutely. That’s where I was a kid.
Glossomancy: An Interview with kevin mcpherson eckhoff
Coach House Books, long the wacky younger sibling of Toronto’s poetry presses, has just released a notably weird little book. It’s called Rhapsodomancy, by West-coast poet kevin mcpherson eckhoff. Composed of drawings, concrete poems, and visual hybrids, the book is a challenge and a trip. Written in response to (and celebration of) two specific attempts to recreate language through the efficiency of visual expression, the book sets sail to strangenesses of all colours and forms.
Torontoist’s poetry editor Jacob McArthur Mooney exchanged messages with kevin mcpherson eckhoff last month between intense bouts of end-of-semester marking (on kevin’s side) and Optimisms Project work (on Jacob’s). Here’s what happened.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this, kevin. Rhapsodomancy is a brave thing, in that it’s written in a way that demands a lot of focus, and written about things that very few people know anything about. I can’t do anything about the first part of that predicament, except to tell the people that they should pick up the book and give it an honest shot. But how about you start by filling us all in on the second part. What is Unifon? What is Pitman’s Shorthand? In what kind of ways did you try to incorporate their ideas into poetry?
kevin mcpherson eckhoff: Thanks for this opportunity to dialogue about the book. I don’t know if it’s brave—I never think of my work in such heroic terms. The idea seems shockingly generous, but then again, I’m one who tends to lean towards self-flagellation.
The poetry began as a Master’s project, one that had me bent on finding a poetics of failure. I was fascinated by the idea that world-changing inventions—penicillin, krazy glue, microwaves, etc.—could result from failed experiments or accidents. So, I think I interpreted this process as celebrating discovery, attention, and reframing, very much in the spirit of bpNichol’s work: “where there are barriers the art is made small” (“Statement”) and “there must be an order in all things / to be discovered not imposed” (The Martyrology: Book 3). During this time, I gave both my eyes to a copy of Pitman’s Shorthand Manual in a thrift store and was mesmerized by the handwriting as a purely visual—to me—language. Although it was not designed accidentally, Pitman’s Shorthand, a form of speed-writing, had outlived its success as a tool of journalism and stenography. Shorthand had become language reduced to material, like lego blocks or brush strokes, perfect for visual poetry. I began researching different obsolete scripts and found a few, including Unifon (for a brief history of Unifon, read Evan Munday’s handsome pamphlet here). I suppose I put up a barrier or two by limiting the scope of the project to Shorthand and Unifon, but I did so in order to keep it manageable and because these two very different writing systems had such similar goals: to capture accurately and completely the voice (that wonderful, terrible metaphor for self in poetry). I suppose since both Shorthand and Unifon are now foreign to the point of being unreadable or silent, they are, by their own standards, beautiful failures. And hopefully these poems give them a second beauty.
JMM: That idea of the “purely visual” language is interesting. For me, reading the book with only a simple, wikipedia-based knowledge of the alphabets, the Pitman Shorthand looked like cuneiform, which is also a symbolic system we tend to look at as a visual thing, as art, but to its originators was likely just considered a vehicle for language. I wonder, for writers and readers coming from other traditions of poetry, if you have any parallels you could use to describe your working process. Do you have an equivalent to what a lyric poet would call “brainstorming”? Or “drafting”? Or “editing”? Or “polishing”? I know there’s irony in my asking you to translate your visual poetry process into my conception of the typical language poetry process, given the subject of the book. But, I guess what I’m asking is: How are these poems created?
kme: An exciting question, I think, because I’m not sure I’ve ever meditated on my process of composing visual poetry. That sounds wrong and pathetic, doesn’t it? And I don’t know if my process differs all that much from how I write normal word poetry. Double and, moreover, I’m not convinced that visual, constraint-based, flarf, lyric, and neo-lyric poetries are all that fucking different. But to tra-la-la back to your question: for most of my poetry, I tend to think in terms of concepts. Of course? And these concepts span anywhere from three to thirty pages, which informs the brain-thundering process, then each piece also demands its own edits.
For example, once I arrived at the concept of illustrating the Unifon alphabet as rope twisted into knots that don’t knot, drawing the forty letters required very little edits. The Apantomancy section, on the other hand, involved the following kind of 1-2-3: discovering—through reading, pub hearsaying, dreaming, whatever—that Shorthand writing somewhat resembles magical or runic scripts; researching/reflecting on ways that mysticism and writing intersect, i.e. divination; and stumbling across a list of divination methods, several of which easily inspire objects and images, such as hands, dice, water, and birds. I suppose revisions focus not only on the language, but also on the perspective and composition of the image for clarity and beauty. I had a piece called Necromancy that had Shorthand scrawled between the upper and lower teeth of a skull; I redrew the skull about three times trying to angle the teeth into the foreground, but couldn’t seem to get it right, so I dropped the piece like a cinder and moved on. In another poem, “Ornithomancy (divination through the flight or sounds of birds),” I knew I wanted to soar as many seagull-like Shorthand symbols as I could find on a page, but the arrangement of the visual scripts depended on editing the text version toward a poemly beauty. So, I guess the revision process involves approaching the text in quite an expected, non-visual poetry way, or approaching the image in an analogous, equally mundane way. I’m sure some pieces also evolved more symbiotically as well, but even then, the revision process is a cup of tea from mountainside to sewer.
Speaking in Tongues: Gemma Files on the Hexslinger Series
Bloodthirsty ancient gods, sociopathic sharpshooters, and lone magicians of all stripes vie for supremacy in a deadly battle for power in Gemma Files’s A Book of Tongues, a darkly fantastic tale of the “Weird West” recently published by Toronto’s own ChiZine Publications. Files—who was born in England but grew up and lives in Toronto—originally aspired to being a science fiction writer but realized that her knowledge of science was, as she says, “pretty much confined to the biological and the metaphorical.” At around the same time, she discovered horror writers Stephen King and Peter Straub, so feeling the call of the dark side she began to work in the horror/dark fantasy genre. She’s never looked back.
Files’ work has been compared to that of Clive Barker, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Kathe Koja, and Poppy Z. Brite—writers she also names as strong influences. But for the latest book, she was also inspired by such fictional characters as DC Comics’ Arcanna Jones (from Squadron Supreme) and the Scarlet Witch, from Marvel’s Avengers series. “These are the kind of people who can simply think something, want it to happen badly enough, and it happens,” she says. “No wonder some of them become literal gods on earth!”
Set in the American West in the period immediately after the Civil War, A Book of Tongues centres on “hexslinger” Asher Rook, a former Confederate Army chaplain turned leader of a band of dissolute, murdering outlaws that includes his male lover, the violent and compelling Chess Pargeter. Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow is assigned the task of infiltrating the band in order to learn as much as possible about Rook’s magic, but as he soon discovers, Rook has plans to shake up the traditional laws that govern hexslingers, and unleash the powers of hell on Earth.
The post-bellum setting is quite unusual in the horror genre, and Files cites her “enduring love” for certain Westerns as heavily influencing her choice of setting, especially James Mangold’s 2007 remake of Delmer Daves’ 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma. “I’ve never made any attempt to conceal that the originating template for Chess Pargeter was definitely Ben Foster’s performance as Charlie Prince, Ben Wade (Russell Crowe)’s ambiguously gay sidekick. But as I went further, Chess started to change, along with the narrative—I mean, just making him aware of his own motivations makes him very much not Charlie, just as Reverend Rook sure isn’t Ben Wade,” Files insists.
An Interview with Stuart and Kathryn Immonen
Cover for Moving Pictures - click through to be taken to publisher's website for sample pages
Kathryn and Stuart Immonen are an enormously talented couple living in Southern Ontario who have been working in the comics industry for over 20 years. Kathryn writes and Stuart draws, and together they have worked on such well-known series as Spiderman, Superman, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. If you visit their website at immonen.ca you’ll find that their output of work is astonishing. It’s no wonder they are both up for Joe Shuster Awards next month, in the Writer and Artist categories.
Their latest collaboration, Moving Pictures, published by Top Shelf, offers a rare opportunity for the Immonens to showcase their more personal work. Moving Pictures tells the story of a Canadian living in Paris, working to clean, catalogue, and perhaps hide some of France’s art treasures during the city’s occupation by the Nazis. It is an engaging story that comments on art and value, decency and free will, and what it means to follow your convictions.
Last week Kathryn and Stuart took the time to answer questions for Books@Toronotist via email.
Torontoist: Where did the idea for Moving Pictures originate?
Kathryn Immonen: Years ago, I was reading Janet Flanner’s Letters from Paris. It collects the journalistic letters she wrote as the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker during the Second World War. And at one point she mentioned that the cleaning of the Louvre was a by-product of the efforts to protect the individual works. It was just so strange and funny. But I really started thinking about those guys with the rags and the cans of Pledge and the buckets of ammonia water, the small domestic activities that were a side effect of enormous global acts of violence. So, I guess, I’m not really interested at all in the big subject of the art theft but in the really small moment. There are so many personal memoirs from the time that seem to exist in the gaps or interstitial spaces. MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is another work, in the same vein, that I really love.
Torontoist: How long did process take to create Moving Pictures? How long was the writing process for Kathryn?
K. Immonen: I think it was about three years from start to finish.
Stuart Immonen: That doesn’t include the couple of years waiting for me to find the time to start drawing. But yes, actual time spent working on it was almost three years to the day.
K. Immonen: We’ve been asked a lot about the difference between Moving Pictures as a web comic and as a book and really, we never considered it to be the former. It was a comic on the web and I think that’s a different beast. We serialized it weekly and put it online simply as a way to impose a deadline that would ensure that it got done. The script itself, if you can call it that because it really was composed almost solely of dialogue, was completed quite some time ago. So by the time we got around to turning it into a comic, it was kind of a new and unfamiliar work for both of us.
Torontoist: Moving Pictures is historical fiction. Why did you choose occupied France during the Second World War? Is it because it’s easier to distinguish good from bad in this way?
K. Immonen: I wouldn’t say it’s historical fiction, actually. It’s a story set against an historical backdrop that the characters, in a lot of ways, turn their backs on. I wanted to talk about value and commodification and desire, and the setting provided a context within which to do that.
S. Immonen: I think it’s pretty clear in the art as well that the “France” and “World War II” elements are secondary to the very personal story being told. At almost every turn, we took the opportunity to avoid photographic realism in the setting; this also points up the renderings of the art works throughout.
Torontoist: How much historical research did you have to do? How did you approach it for this project?
K. Immonen: The script was completed such a long time ago and any time I glance back at the notes I kept, I’m surprised by how much I read, how much I knew. I think I’d categorize it more as reading rather than research. Typically, I don’t keep stuff either in real life or in my head. So, while there was a lot of prep, I wouldn’t say that a whole lot of it found its way into the story in any kind of overt way. It’s not a work that’s overridden with those kinds of details—at least I hope not. There comes a point, too, where you just have to put a stop to the research and it’s mostly because you are in danger of finding yourself wanting to include things that you find interesting but that your characters couldn’t care less about.
S. Immonen: Again, the picture-making demanded at least a nod to what Paris looked like in the 1940s, and there was a considerable file of clippings, website references, and books, but in the end, there was a persistent effort to strip away the literal.
The Original Book Ninja: An Interview with George Murray
Bookninja began as an online forum for a bunch of writers to kibitz and argue about the state of the book world but has since evolved into…an online form for a bunch of writers to kibitz and argue about the book world. The difference? Now thousands of other people—including other writers, publishing folk, and many intrigued readers—are listening in and even joining the chat. The conductor, head vocalist, and stage hand for this bookish choir is George Murray, who co-founded Bookninja with fellow author Peter Darbyshire back in 2003, when the phrase “book blog” still had to qualified with some form of descriptor for the web-challenged.
Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger spoke with Murray about the past, present, and future of the pioneering books blog.
Torontoist: Why did you decide to start a books blog in those bygone days of yore? What did you want the site to be?
George Murray: I started the blog with my friend (The Warhol Gang novelist) Peter Darbyshire in August of 2003 in order to help keep what had been a tightly knit group of friends from Toronto in touch. We were a group of young writers and editors who used to hang out at the Victory Café in Mirvish Village back when it wasn’t such a yuppie paradise. We’d spend long evenings pounding the table debating literary issues and talking books, but with adulthood and ambition slowly bearing down on us like the hand of an oppressive god, we started moving all over the place (New York, Winnipeg, Vancouver, etc). So the evenings got thinner and we tried to keep the discussions going via email, but it was confusing and burdensome to have so many messages flying back and forth. That was when Pete and I started Bookninja as a place we could each pop into when we had time and drop a comment or two.
We started by hand-editing an html webpage daily, Pete and I emailing each other to make sure we weren’t accidentally overwriting each others’ posts, and occasionally mounting discussion reviews (which we called “inverse omnibus reviews”—the opposite of what the Globe was doing, wherein three or four books were reviewed by one reviewer—in our system one book was reviewed by three or four reviewers, roundtable-style), and interviews, etc.
We really wanted the site to be a chatty place for a few friends (and perhaps anyone new who stumbled on to us) to discuss books the way we used to at the pub—fast, loose, and intelligent. Very little editing, sharp opinion, and a no-bullshit policy. I would say the initial email announcing the site only went out to about 20 or so people. Within a couple months there were 200 attending, then 500, 1,000, 2,000, etc. until we are where we are today, around 5,000 daily users with peaks of 10,000, and a total unique user base of about 25,000 over the course of a month. People attend from all over the world, but it’s really concentrated in Canada, the UK, America, and Australia. And all that growth was “word-of-mouth” or “word-of-link” as it were. I think people appreciate the humourous, no-BS tone (or lots of BS tone, depending), and the fact that I write for the internet, instead of the newspaper.
Pete left the site a few years ago to concentrate on his novel (and it’s great, by the way), so it’s been just me and some guest editors since then.
Book Marks: She Said Boom!
We all had that friend. That friend who was a hipster before being a hipster became a thing, that friend who slacked off in school but got great grades, who knew about the next big band before anyone else, and who read books by authors you only pretended you’d heard of. That friend that you were in awe of and you envied. Well, visiting either location of She Said Boom! is like hanging out with that friend. The stores are comfortable to hang out in but they keep you on your toes. You never know what you’re going to discover next, the crowded shelves serving up a mix of comfortable classics and the next big things in both music and books.
The first location of She Said Boom! opened its doors on College Street in 1995. Former academic Randy Harnett was looking to open a book store while his colleague, former journalism student John Bowker, wanted to open a music store. The two combined forces and opened the city’s first joint used books and music store (a model that many have emulated in the following decade). The pair has since split up the business, with Harnett taking the reins of the original College Street location and Bowker managing the Roncesvalles location, which opened in 1999.
The two stores share a name, a website, and a philosophy. Both are avid supporters of the local literary and local music scenes. But what makes these stores successful is their emphasis on servicing their immediate surrounding communities. The College store focuses on the needs of the University of Toronto student body, offering up wares with a scholarly slant. The Roncesvalles store is more family friendly, with large childrens’ and lifestyle sections.
At Roncesvalles, where this Books@Torontoist editor spent a recent weekend afternoon, the vinyl section is quite substantial, with both The Sadies’ and Broken Social Scene’s latest proudly on display. Vinyl might be an old technology, but it’s a new and market growing market. “Vinyl is something that’s substantial. It’s the music that’s physically imprinted onto an object you can own,” Bowker argues. The CD selection, on the other hand, is small and tightly edited, a reaction to a decade of declining sales of the technology.
Post Rapture: The Bizarre World of Sword of My Mouth
Cover of Sword of My Mouth - click through to go to publisher's site
One of the many graphic novels launched at this year’s TCAF was indie enabler Jim Munroe and Toronto comics artist Shannon Gerard’s Sword of My Mouth, the second installment of the post-apocalyptic series Munroe began with Therefore Repent! (drawn by talented comics artist Max Douglas, aka Salgood Sam). The series is smart, post-apocalyptic sci-fi-fantasy that employs strong metaphors and stark characterization to comment not on what may be waiting for us in the future but what is happening in today’s world.
Sword of My Mouth works as a stand-alone novel, but it’s best to read the first part, which sets up the series narrative lexicon: the Rapture has occurred, and a significant portion of the population have ascended—quite literally—into the heavens, leaving behind a shattered, shame-filled society that has fallen into anarchy. The chaos is exacerbated by a post-Rapture reality that now tolerates magic spells, body transfigurations, and daily miracles. The normal laws of physics no longer seem to apply. The economy has collapsed; money has lost all value because gold can be now be made magic by magical means; Marine-style soldiers descend from the sky as angels complete to establish a brutal military rule, endorsed by the remnants of the government. Survivors either work to appease their new righteous masters or work to organize a new resistance to overthrow them.
Sword takes place in Detroit, some time after Therefore. Things have calmed down quite a bit since the end of the first novel. People are banding together to form the loose fittings of a normal society, provided that you can live with the mutations of others, not to mention your own. We follow Ellie, a single mom beginning to venture out again after her partner, the father of her baby, has left. We see this world on a very personal level, through the people she meets, the other parents she talks to at the drop-in, and the reflections in her diary. Through a series of events Ellie is soon taken in by a good-natured anarchist co-op, a familial set of cast offs who have come together to help each other out and grow their own food to eat.
The most striking thing you’ll find in Sword of My Mouth is Gerard’s arresting black and white line art. She employs a detailed clean line style referenced directly from photographs, creating a very engaging effect where the inescapable photo realism pulls organically against the tiny imperfections in the hand-drawn lines. I wanted to look at some of the panels over and over again. Though I admit it was peppered by an occasional clunky panel or a claustrophobic lack of movement, her line art really drew me in. While her stylized lettering works so wonderfully when used sparingly in her own poetic and autobiographic comics, it took a bit of getting used to in Sword, in which the narrative relies heavily on dialogue.
Once you accept Munroe’s Rapture conceit, you find yourself not fighting against an idea of what a post-apocalyptic world would really be like but slowly realizing how familiar this scenario already is, how it is played over and over again in so many of the world’s war-torn places. We’re not looking at a future, but at what has already happened. We’re looking at the past.
Strolling TO: An Interview with Shawn Micallef
(Illustration by Marlena Zuber)
Eye columnist and Spacing editor Shawn Micallef launches his book Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto tonight at the Lula Lounge on Dundas West. Besides plying his trade as a writer, editor, artist, and OCAD instructor, Micallef finds time to play the role of flaneur, “someone who wanders the city with the sole purpose of paying attention to it” in his own words. Those wanderings, and a whole lot of background reading and trips to the city archives, have resulted in Stroll, a fascinating compendium of Toronto lore both geographical and historical that does double duty as a flaneur’s guide to the city. Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger spoke to Micallef about the book and the art of the flaneur. (For Torontoist‘s feature on Stroll go here.)
Torontoist: Were you a flaneur before you moved to Toronto or was your interest in the art develop as a result of the new environment?
Shawn Micallef: It’s funny, I always liked to walk, and I wanted to go for walks in Windsor (where I came from), but my hometown is an automotive one. I always drove everywhere—I lived in the suburbs where I needed a car to live (it was generally a beater, and when it died and was in the shop, I’d start to feel like I was suffocating as my mobility was gone)—so the car was just part of life, and led to a certain way of living. We went on some walks in Windsor, and though they were always good, the culture was (for me anyway: people I knew who lived downtown walked just fine) car-centric and walking seemed like it had to be a planned event rather than an easy, everyday thing. Now when I go back I drive around (I do kind of miss driving and enjoy it when I’m doing it occasionally—here in Toronto too) I intentionally park in neighbourhoods I only saw from four wheels for years, and explore it the way I have done Toronto’s neighbourhoods.
Torontoist: Did you have to do a lot of supplementary research to flesh out the essays or did you go in to the walks with a fair amount of knowledge about the particular neighbourhoods you (might) be passing through? Is it better, generally, to know more or less about the geography and history of a neighbourhood before exploring it? Does foreknowledge even impact the process?
SM: I’d visit each place I wrote about a few times usually, at different times and, in some cases, different years. Then I’d do archival research on the place. Usually not before—doing the research later is like not reading the instructions of some new device, much more fun to fumble around with, get a bit lost in it, and figure it out on your own. I like to see what I just see, and then dig a bit deeper later on.
This is similar to how I go visit other cities: usually I only quickly read a wikipedia entry or something similar like a tourist guide in an airport bookshop—to get the lay of the land—and then walk and walk when I get there. Often I’ll read about the history or deeper writing about the place back home, once I know what it looks like. When I read before I walk, though, the words don’t have any physical roots, and because it’s writting about a place, the lack of a personal connection with the place makes it hard, for me, to get into it. There’s something powerful about location—once you can root something somewhere physical, it has more meaning. You know where it is. You know it’s context.
I Used to Build Houses for Gnomes: An Interview with Meaghan Strimas
“Dwindled be the days spent
scanning, stocking, biding time…”
from “Seasons Greetings from Your Hometown IGA”
Scroll down for the full poem.
Meaghan Strimas’s second collection of poems, A Good Time Had by All, launched in mid-March from Exile Editions. The follow-up to her 2004 debut, Junkman’s Daughter, the collection is more dexterous and diverse than that first book, though it maintains all the vocal elements that make her a reliably engaging read. Fed equally by the intuitive and the intellectual, the common and the sublime, the poems in A Good Time Had by All are subtle in their invention, but nonetheless inventive.
Strimas has spent the six years between books getting better and a little wiser, as well as using that time on a worthy side-project (she edited The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen, a 2008 Globe and Mail Top 100 Book). The results are good, honest poetry. These pieces come across as unique personal stylizations, like a book of rural execrations re-imagined by the Kate Winslet character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Meaghan and Torontoist’s poetry editor Jacob McArthur Mooney talked it out, over emails, in the days leading up to her launch. What follows are the highlights.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this, Meaghan. You’re a very busy lady, we know, and the time is appreciated. A lot of the poems in A Good Time Had By All employ the twist/epiphanic ending. I’m thinking of things like “Sighting (with Great Aunt Jean)” and the very creepy “Man from the Abattoir.” Did you write these poems with an ending in mind, or is the act of writing more exploratory than that?
Meaghan Strimas: Jake, good question. The poems you’ve mentioned, “Sighting” and “Man from the Abattoir,” came about in very different ways. “Sighting” was a quick and dirty poem. I knew where I was heading with it right from the get-go. It was one of those rare poems that was relatively easy to write. I was able to lay it down, more or less from beginning to end, in the first draft. Of course, I kept editing until I thought I’d got it right, but I knew the image of a ribbon of black tape snagged on a telephone wire—mistook as a bird by Jean—was what the poem hinged on. Because it revealed the real tragedy, which is the fact that this old lady, who is being moved to a nursing home, is losing her grip.
“Man from the Abattoir “was a pain in the arse to write. The original version spanned about three pages in length and it didn’t have a narrative “through.” (Not that a poem requires a through, or narrative of any kind…) It was an unruly poem that consisted of a series of stacked images, and the poem didn’t have the centre it needed. I knew I wanted to tell the story of this guy who lived in his mother’s basement, drank too much, came home every day flattened from a shitty job, was a bit of a pervert, and so on, but I could never get the story out. The poem sat for a good two years. I had thought it was a goner, but closer to my final deadline, I took another run at it and for whatever reason I was able to get down what I’d always wanted to communicate. The ending came with the revision. Once I let go of all the pretty images, I knew the right note to end on was an unsentimental statement: “Then my mother heard a story, / & Puck, he moved away.” These final lines seemed right to me because they were true to the life I observed and experienced. When I was a kid, my parents, and most other adults around me, were always careful not to reveal the disgraces of other adults. For instance, I was never told that Lenny from down the road had been attacking women in the park, and so the bastard’s been thrown in jail. No, no. I was told that poor Lenny needed a vacation and so had gone to live in a big white house in Kingston. Maybe the lies were a good thing. Most kids like a good mystery.