“Morning. The plane dispenses you.
We enfold each other,”
From “Recursion”
Scroll down for the rest of the poem
Peter Norman’s debut collection, At the Gates of the Theme Park is the newest book forming the parade of class-A Canadian poetic debuts this year. The book was published by the very surprising little Toronto house (literally, it’s just a house), Mansfield Press. The book is a variegated and exceptionally dexterous first collection, using landscapes real and imagined to stage dramas that concern romance, history, work, identity, and more.
Peter Norman exchanged emails with Torontoist’s poetry columnist, Jacob McArthur Mooney, on either side of a move from Halifax to Toronto.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this Peter. At the Gates of the Theme Park is a book with a rather complicated, often shifting sense of time. Some of the poems seem comfortable working with memory as a reliable source, others (I’m thinking of “Unwelcome” as a prime example) seem quite suspicious of memory, or maybe they’re suspicious of retelling, and so they shirk and shift through a battery of times and locations. I wonder how you feel about the anecdote, in the end. Do you consider yourself a reliable source of your own material?
Peter Norman: Memory is deceptive; I imagine we all rearrange our histories to fit some sort of narrative. Retelling distorts things further. I have a few stock anecdotes—the time I inadvertently sat on a piece of art in a gallery; the time the cops mistook me for an armed robber—and these have probably mutated to become sleeker or funnier, while memory scrambles along behind, modifying itself to match the tale. So yeah, I distrust the precision of memory and anecdote, and very few of my poems are pure autobiography.
On the other hand, I have tried over and over again to write serviceably about certain events in my life, one in particular, and have failed every time. That’s made me wary when I find myself hell-bent on relating some part of my experience. A poem that serves itself, not me, is probably a better poem.
As for “Unwelcome,” it began as a simple expression of my unease in the wild. Somewhere along the way, “my” became “our” and “the wild” became something like “existence.” “My” faulty memory (not sure why I came here; can’t remember where I was before) corresponds to the apparently entrenched desire humans have to understand and return to some kind of shrouded origin predating our biological beginnings. That’s my conscious take on the poem, anyway. My distrust of memory probably wormed its way in, subliminally.
JMM: That idea of writing “serviceably” about one’s life is an interesting one, and likely worthy of some unpacking. By serviceably, do you mean accurately, or do you mean it in the broader sense of “with utility?”
It’s true that very few of your poems are pure autobiography, but it seems a solid percent of them are, for lack of a better expression, impure autobiographies, or “laced with” autobiography. “Unwelcome” is certainly an example, but not a lonely one. I wonder where the tool of memoir sits in your toolbox. You seem wary of it, both in conversation and in the poems, and it’s that wariness, I think, that makes your dealing with it interesting to follow. What is a serviceable use of the personal, for you? What are the dangers it presents?
PN: I was using “serviceable” as a stand-in for “good” (or at least “half-decent”). And by “good” I mean “doing the work it has to do.” Sometimes a poem seems to have a mind of its own, and I can get in the way with my blundering efforts to impose an agenda. Obviously a poem comes from the poet’s mind, nothing more mystical than that. But the sub- or unconscious plays a part, and perhaps it’s there that this “mind of its own” is housed.
I guess “serviceable” turns out to be a pretty appropriate word, then, even if I didn’t think too hard before using it. A serviceable poem serves its own purpose rather than mine; it is a poem in which my role is that of servant rather than master.
You’re right that I’m wary of autobiography. I’m quite private. I feel glutted by the spectacle of people turning themselves inside out for public consumption, and my reaction is to go the other way. Plus I’m leery of the urge to nail a particular experience, to encapsulate and convey it. That urge is often what drives me to “get in the way.”
For example, let’s go back to this life event I referred to earlier, the one I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to write about. It was a robbery at gunpoint, and it was the only time I’ve felt myself to be in danger of being killed. The trauma turned out to be pretty negligible—no one was shot—but it made an impact. So why have I failed to address it poetically? Maybe because I’m trying to serve me, my own agenda, the agenda of enshrining this experience. Maybe the material will sneak into some other project and serve it well.
Then again, maybe the robbery experience is a Rosetta stone: if I pull off a decent poem about it, I’ll have cracked the code and will transform into a confessional poet. Who knows!
As you’ve spotted, though, autobiography (pure and impure) does appear in Theme Park. In some poems, globs of memoir are flung at other characters—for example, the retired judge who narrates “Sentences” has had my childhood memories thrust upon him. Other poems faithfully report events I’ve merely witnessed (“A Man on the Bus,” for example). And my own experiences show up, distorted or intact (“Plucked” and “The Slough” come to mind).
JMM: The book has a couple of poems that have a slightly more conceptual vein than their lyrical brothers and sisters. Both “What He Found in the Vacuum Bag” and “Three Metaphors in Search of Antecedents” read exactly as described in their titles. In those cases, does the concept precede the poem? Or is the titular concept of the work something that is added later on in the poem’s development. For example, in “Three Metaphors…”, did your metaphors all have stated antecedents that were later plucked from the poem? As someone who writes lyrical poetry that often has a dramatic conceit at its centre (both in these two examples and in more subtle ones, like the scene-setting concepts behind “Oval Bay” and “My Collection”), I wonder how you approach the conceptual. Do you write poems in service of a central idea, or is it less directed than that, more random?
PN: In those two examples, the concept did come first—in fact, the titles were the first things I wrote. When I start fleshing out an idea, a narrative will sometimes appear on its own. As I got into “Vacuum Bag,” the list of vacuum-swallowed items became more and more focused on the demise of a romantic relationship. Edits sharpened this focus. “Three Metaphors,” on the other hand, didn’t develop a narrative. Maybe it could use one.
Another example, returning to autobiography, is “Recursion.” It began as a simple description of things happening in reverse. (Julie Bruck’s “Summer on Rewind” was one big influence; I hadn’t yet read Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.) A rejection letter from a magazine complained that the poem was just “listing backwards stuff.” As I revised, an actual event that I would have loved to reverse—a painful separation—thrust itself into the mix. (As it happens, the separation was reversed, and we’re now blissfully married.) Having found its narrative core, the poem improved. I had tried confronting the separation head-on in other poems, but these didn’t work so well; the personal material needed to find an existing venue where it could make itself helpful.
Once I get to the writing stage, my focus is usually musical, not conceptual. The idea has been set up, the trellis is raised, and now I try to weave some sonically interesting or effective phrases around it. The narrative part really does seem to transpire of its own accord.
JMM: It’s interesting to ear you talk about “the writing stage”. As described therein, it almost sounds like the act of putting together a first draft is itself a kind of editing, specifically of editing the poem’s pre-written concept, with an ear to the unrevealed music of the piece. But maybe it’s more creative than that, as the idea is a short thing (a list of events reported backwards) and the actual draft is much more expansive and multifaceted than that. There’s that old William Burroughs line about editing being a form self-censorship. But maybe, to that end, a first draft is a form of self-editing.
I wonder where your musical decisions come from at the “writing stage.” Do you think certain ideas have essential music that the poem’s then tasked with finding out? Does sound ever lead sense, or is it always about adorning the idea (the trellis) with as interesting a musical score as you can make for it? To me, it seems like a worryingly secondary role for sound to play, that of the sugar to sense’s medicine. Is it always like you’ve described, the sound weaving around the structure?
PN: Yeah, maybe I should take back the trellis analogy. Like you, I’d find it worrisome to cast sound as the plant that has to yield when it strikes the sterner wood. So here’s another analogy. On those occasions when an idea prompts a poem, the idea is not a trellis, it’s a springboard. It helps the gymnast off the ground, but the good stuff comes afterward—the flips and contortions, the actual athletics. This is not a metaphor of staggering originality (neither was the trellis), but it is a better fit.
I’m happy to let sound lead sense—or, more accurately, lead me to sense—but I do want to reach sense in the end. Not sure why. I enjoy lots of poetry that dumps meaning in favour of pure music, but I do want my own stuff to make “sense,” at least at the grammatical level. Recognizing, of course, that ideas like “sense” and “grammar” are slippery.
Do certain ideas have an essential music? Probably not. A poet grappling with a subject seeks out her music for it, the music that embodies her approach to it. Poets make music about the world; I doubt they uncover a music already there.
But I may have missed your point: you’re asking about ideas, not the exterior world. An idea comes from a mind, and the mind probably knows the most suitable music with which to express its idea. The best poems embody their content so thoroughly that the idea becomes inextricable from its wording. The medium perfects the message. If a message won’t benefit from the medium of poetry, it should be stated artlessly and sent right away. When you have to call 911, don’t bother crafting a poem of it.
Where do the musical decisions come from? In my case, mostly from intuition. Once in a while I’ll do something consciously (“Hey, a string of fricatives sure would bolster the aggression in the fourth stanza! It’ll sound like cussing!”), but mostly I go with the flow and tidy up later. The intuition is fed by anything it can swallow: stuff I’ve read (and especially stuff I’ve memorized), music I’ve listened to, conversations I overhear.
JMM: That springboard does seem like a metaphor I can work with, and one that appears reflected in the text itself. About inherent music versus invested music, though, there’s perhaps a more practical element to it, too. There’s things like jargon, vocabulary. Your poem “Hired Help”, about cleaners, benefits from all the specific vocabulary of the janitorial profession: mop, broom, debristled, sweepers, swabbers. It’s also a poem about history, and so is tuned by the many allusions available there: Babel, Babylon, The Colossus, mobs, Versailles. Now, obviously, that still leaves oodles of room for authorial input (you could have had Sumer and the Samaritans, instead of Babel and Babylon, and had a very different-sounding first graph), but the flip side to this idea of sense predicated on sound is the idea of sound predicated on sense, an awareness of the sonic lifeblood of your chosen “aboutnesses”. Having read the book, I don’t imagine this is something you need to be convinced of, as it’s there on the page. But, as someone whose work demands that dual attention, maybe you have something more to say about it? How far to either extreme are you willing to go? For example, are there subjects you’re interested in writing about primarily for their music?
PN: The writing of “Hired Help” began with the first sentence—it just sprang to mind, intact, never to be altered. That sentence included the words “Babel” and “mop,” so the vocabularies of edifice and custodial toil were there from the get-go. Soundwise, “Babel” has that aggressive double B; on the meaning side of the ledger, it suggests divisions among humans and also connotes the punishment of arrogance. No big surprise, then, that the poem ends with its workers confronting a presumably arrogant master. I’m intrigued by your idea of what might have happened if “Sumer” and “Samaritans” had been the triggering words. Sibilance; agricultural society; the kindly Samaritan of parable… that really would have had a different feel!
I’m reminded of childhood picture books that show a nice big scene: a city street, or a farm, or an airport. Labels spell out the names of the items on display: cow, barn, tractor. “Hired Help” is like I turned to the “Janitors of Antiquity” picture and started scanning labels. For whatever reason, the B-words jumped out instead of the S-words.
As for “mopping” and “swabbing,” to me those words are semi-onomatopoeic. They may not reproduce the sound of an action, but they do evoke its rhythm and the feel of performing it. With a mop in the first line, it was pretty much inevitable that swabbing turn up in the poem. “Mop” and “swab” fuse to make “mob,” and the poem concludes with moppers and swabbers advancing as an enraged gang, an extreme embodiment of labour unrest. It’s almost as if that first line wrote the poem by itself.
How far to an extreme am I comfortable going? I’m quite comfortable writing toward the extreme of pure sound. The problem is that if I stray past the borders of meaning, I leave behind all my tools for self-assessment. I love a lot of sound poetry, but I wouldn’t know how to judge my own. I’d have no clue whether it worked. The topic-related vocab or the narrative line or the underlying concept may be acting as a helpful container, keeping me within confines where I can still figure out how to revise.
The other extreme—idea trumping sound—is one I stay away from these days. In my early twenties, I wrote poems that were eager to make some point. They were usually oafish, but one way to make them presentable was pouring them into a form. The sonnet I found especially helpful.
So you could say I’ve been using meaning and form as lifeguard flags, showing me where I can safely swim. That’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I guess it’s good to avoid drowning when you’re still learning the basic strokes.
Do certain subjects attract me because of their musical potential? I don’t think so. Subjects that obsess me in real life obsess me in poetry. Going back to the picture-book analogy, if I like a particular picture I’ll spend a lot of time staring at it. Eventually, I’ll start concentrating on the labels as well as the images—at which point the poetic part of my brain gets interested.
JMM: I like that thing about self-evaluation. It sounds familiar to me.
If we can close by turning again to the poem we’ve reprinted below, “Recursion,” it’s one of several poems in At the Gates of the Theme Park that uses a sort of conceptual hook to examine one of your favourite themes, the ebb and flow of a romantic relationship. Is this something you write about naturally, or was there a specific attempt to coax out that vein in your writing? Also, what’s the relationship like between the written expression of your partnership, and its life in reality? Is it hard living with a poet? And, just as importantly, is it hard living as a poet with an other in your life who often finds him/herself in the pages you create?
PN: I do seem naturally drawn to that topic; no effort was made to introduce it. Other examples are “Vacuum Bag” and “Boy Germs,” each of which concerns a troubled relationship even though its conceptual springboard doesn’t (the relationships in those poems, unlike the one in “Recursion,” are fictional).
I’ve been writing poems for my wife since we first got together. Very few of them are likely to see the light of publication. Many are pure old-fashioned proclamations of love, often using set forms (her name and middle initial—Melanie J. Little—consist of 14 letters, so I’ve done a few acrostic sonnets) and unlikely to interest many contemporary editors. Others are effusions, written spontaneously and presented immediately. I have no idea whether they have any literary merit. Others are too full of private references or in-jokes to be enjoyable for other readers. The ones that do get published tend be “private words addressed to you in public,” as T.S. Eliot put it—they contain trace elements of private communication, but I hope they have something to say to complete strangers. To see our relationship more directly reflected in poems, you’d have to burgle our home and dig out the private ones.
There is one exception in Theme Park: “Little Rejection Slips,” which hinges on inside references. I don’t think I’ve ever submitted it anywhere for publication. So how does it end up in a book? Theme Park didn’t come out of the usual process, where the poet assembles a manuscript and ships it out. I’ve done that a few times, but have failed to muster a collection coherent enough to satisfy editors. Meanwhile, many years ago Stuart Ross asked to see my poetry, just as a friend. I gave him an indiscriminate stack. Last fall, he called me up, now as poetry editor at Mansfield Press, hoping to publish some of it. He sent a list of the poems he liked best, and there was “Rejection Slips.” I figured if Stuart likes it, it must have something public to offer.
Is it hard for two writers to live as partners? It’s a mixed bag. It can be jarring to see references to our life in Melanie’s work (she writes mostly fiction and non-fiction). Jarring but exciting—it’s very cool to read the literature a brilliant writer has crafted out of material you’re already familiar with.
On one occasion, a joke I cracked ended up in the mouth of one of her fictional characters, a marvelous foul-mouthed grandmother. Early in our marriage, Melanie worked at a hotel where a maid walked in on a bizarre scene involving a mother and son. They were having sex, and excrement had been smeared on the walls. When I heard this story, I exclaimed, “Shit disturbers and motherfuckers!” The same joke, with the same set up, ended up in the story. (I got credited in the endnotes.) It was gratifying to have contributed to this awesome creation, the grandmother. To have sworn the way she would have! What an honour.
What is difficult—and sometimes painful—is when circumstances prevent one partner but not the other from writing. It’s tough to be on either side of that non-equation. Currently I’m doing a fair bit of writing while Melanie devotes herself to a demanding day job. That’s hard to watch, and of course it tempers the satisfaction of getting writing done oneself.
But the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Melanie and I have the same priorities. I’d be a useless partner to someone who wanted to be solvent, buy a house, have kids. Mel and I understand the significance of what the other achieves, even when it’s modest. Any spouse is going to appreciate a Giller or Griffin. But running in from the mailbox shouting “I got a poem in the Upper Timmins Quarterly!” is a lot more fun when your partner shares the excitement.
Recursion
From At the Gates of the Theme Park
I fall awake alone. Outside,
nocturnal rain ascends.
Alarms rage, summoning a thief
who hurries to the store,
unpacks his duffel sack,
replaces items on the shelf.
Morning. The plane dispenses you.
We enfold each other,
celebrating your undeparture.
Tears scroll up our cheeks,
nestle into ducts.
Last night we wake
sweat-soaked and sated,
breathe flame to candlewick
and fuse, hips coaxing sheets
to smoothness.
Years ago, our meeting is unmade.
My life hurries back into ignorance,
days spent unrolling snowballs,
being chased by the ice cream truck,
gathering bread spat by ducks
beside a cool lake.
We will never disentangle
at the baggage check.
You won’t be tugged from me
by announcements,
gates, corridors, customs.
I am three years old.
I urge spilled milk into a jug,
right it on the table.
My mother’s alarmed eyes
flash calm.
Outside, a robin
cocks her head,
feeds worms
to the hungry soil
