How did you first come to composing
visual poems? What is it about the form that resonates?
Beginning when I was about 8, I used to write in made-up scripts, poems which were all visual suggestions. Asemic, cryptic, mysterious writing that was all evocation without any identifable meaning. Later, I studied Hebrew in Jewish Sunday School. I loved the look and feel of the script even though I didn’t know what it meant. As a Bar Mitzvah boy, I learned how to identity and sound out Hebrew, though again, I didn’t know what the sounds referred to. These experiences suggested the posibility of a language-based art that functioned beyond consensual reality, beyond the solely rational, beyond the limitations of Western enlightenment thinking and the structures of traditional language.
As a teenager, I would create visual work which were settings of poems which I liked or that I created. I learned about the tradition of visual poetry proper when I studied with bpNichol at York University in undergrad. As soon as I saw what was possible, I was smitten.
How did publishing your first book change your writing?
My first chapbook allowed me to further participate in the small press community in Toronto, enabling conversation, dialogue, feedback, a feeling of relevance and belonging. It gave me a sense of my writing as part of a larger conversation yet as part of a specific and localized dialogue between readers and writers. I felt as if I was part of a tradition of creation and that the writing that I was doing was part of a network of other writing, the writing of the past, but also the writing being created at that moment, and that would be created in the future. Still very local and specific—I was writing for my little small press community network—yet exciting and energizing. I don’t know that the publication of the first chapbook or book changed my writing specifically—I didn’t feel that I was any more “legitimate” as a writer, but I did begin to see how publishing and the context of text was part of its meaning, that it was part of how the work interacted with its society and culture and that that could be an element that the writing attended to and played with.
You’ve published work in multiple genres. Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of disconnected threads? How do you keep the genres straight?
I see each different genre as providing a set of opportunities, expectations and conventions that can be explored, and that can energize meaning-making or the aesthetic possibilities of the work. Likewise, I’m interested in playing with the borders of each genre, with what can happen when one confounds, plays with, or explores the assumptions inherent in each and what happen when things get ambiguous or multiple or messy.
Both readers and writers consider different genres somewhat differently and that, for me, provides an exciting opportunity to engage with and subvert expectations. For example, if you’re telling a knock-knock joke, you know that it begins, “Knock, knock? Who’s there?” and there is an inherent structural drama in seeing how the form is either fulfilled or detourned, whether elements from another form is brought in or how all the various moments of charged structual expectation are addressed. Ivanna? Ivanna who? Ivanna consider how footprints in the butter may represent the small grey steps of the semiotic elephant of consciousness as it attempts to determine whether twilight is more night than day and orange you glad I didn’t say Barthes Simpson.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I’m working on a new novel and for a work of this length and complexity, I schedule a more regular writing time, not considering the day’s work done until I’ve written 500 words. I set my goal to be one of quantity rather than quality, because the goal is ultimately to move forward and not lose either faith, confidence, or momentum. While I’m working on this larger project, I engage in many other writing activities. Collaborations. Poetry collections. Visual work. Music. I find it energizing to switch between media, between genre. They cause me to use a different configuration of neurons and skills and I have a different relation with the process of writing.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I’ve been following the publishing of two relatively recent discoveries for me: the small presses Timglaset (out of Sweden) and Penteract Press (out of the UK.) Always a source of beautiful and surprising new work from a range of international writers. I do keep up with rob mclennan’s blog as he always reviews, discusses and quotes from interesting new work. Jacket2 is also a source of much work and discussion that is very interesting to me. I also listen to PennSound recordings a lot. Likewise, David Naimon’s Between the Covers has fascinating and indepth extended interviews with interesting writers.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I recently reviewed the poetry collection Delet This by MLA Chernoff and it knocked me out. I also just read Sabrina Orah Mark’s fantastic short story/prose poem collection Wild Milk. Lucinda Sherlock’s visual work astounds. I just ordered Aase Berg’s collection of essay and I’m excited to dig into that. And a shout-out to Katherine Mockler and Kaie Kellough’s recent work. And Mark Laba has a new and very strange new poetry book out soon from Stuart Ross’s Feed Dog imprint with Anvil. And finally, I read the ARCs of Sister Language by Christine Baillie and Martha Baillie and was amazed. Likewise, Jonathan’s new poetry book with Coach House, National Gallery.
Beginning when I was about 8, I used to write in made-up scripts, poems which were all visual suggestions. Asemic, cryptic, mysterious writing that was all evocation without any identifable meaning. Later, I studied Hebrew in Jewish Sunday School. I loved the look and feel of the script even though I didn’t know what it meant. As a Bar Mitzvah boy, I learned how to identity and sound out Hebrew, though again, I didn’t know what the sounds referred to. These experiences suggested the posibility of a language-based art that functioned beyond consensual reality, beyond the solely rational, beyond the limitations of Western enlightenment thinking and the structures of traditional language.
As a teenager, I would create visual work which were settings of poems which I liked or that I created. I learned about the tradition of visual poetry proper when I studied with bpNichol at York University in undergrad. As soon as I saw what was possible, I was smitten.
How did publishing your first book change your writing?
My first chapbook allowed me to further participate in the small press community in Toronto, enabling conversation, dialogue, feedback, a feeling of relevance and belonging. It gave me a sense of my writing as part of a larger conversation yet as part of a specific and localized dialogue between readers and writers. I felt as if I was part of a tradition of creation and that the writing that I was doing was part of a network of other writing, the writing of the past, but also the writing being created at that moment, and that would be created in the future. Still very local and specific—I was writing for my little small press community network—yet exciting and energizing. I don’t know that the publication of the first chapbook or book changed my writing specifically—I didn’t feel that I was any more “legitimate” as a writer, but I did begin to see how publishing and the context of text was part of its meaning, that it was part of how the work interacted with its society and culture and that that could be an element that the writing attended to and played with.
You’ve published work in multiple genres. Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of disconnected threads? How do you keep the genres straight?
I see each different genre as providing a set of opportunities, expectations and conventions that can be explored, and that can energize meaning-making or the aesthetic possibilities of the work. Likewise, I’m interested in playing with the borders of each genre, with what can happen when one confounds, plays with, or explores the assumptions inherent in each and what happen when things get ambiguous or multiple or messy.
Both readers and writers consider different genres somewhat differently and that, for me, provides an exciting opportunity to engage with and subvert expectations. For example, if you’re telling a knock-knock joke, you know that it begins, “Knock, knock? Who’s there?” and there is an inherent structural drama in seeing how the form is either fulfilled or detourned, whether elements from another form is brought in or how all the various moments of charged structual expectation are addressed. Ivanna? Ivanna who? Ivanna consider how footprints in the butter may represent the small grey steps of the semiotic elephant of consciousness as it attempts to determine whether twilight is more night than day and orange you glad I didn’t say Barthes Simpson.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I’m working on a new novel and for a work of this length and complexity, I schedule a more regular writing time, not considering the day’s work done until I’ve written 500 words. I set my goal to be one of quantity rather than quality, because the goal is ultimately to move forward and not lose either faith, confidence, or momentum. While I’m working on this larger project, I engage in many other writing activities. Collaborations. Poetry collections. Visual work. Music. I find it energizing to switch between media, between genre. They cause me to use a different configuration of neurons and skills and I have a different relation with the process of writing.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I’ve been following the publishing of two relatively recent discoveries for me: the small presses Timglaset (out of Sweden) and Penteract Press (out of the UK.) Always a source of beautiful and surprising new work from a range of international writers. I do keep up with rob mclennan’s blog as he always reviews, discusses and quotes from interesting new work. Jacket2 is also a source of much work and discussion that is very interesting to me. I also listen to PennSound recordings a lot. Likewise, David Naimon’s Between the Covers has fascinating and indepth extended interviews with interesting writers.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I recently reviewed the poetry collection Delet This by MLA Chernoff and it knocked me out. I also just read Sabrina Orah Mark’s fantastic short story/prose poem collection Wild Milk. Lucinda Sherlock’s visual work astounds. I just ordered Aase Berg’s collection of essay and I’m excited to dig into that. And a shout-out to Katherine Mockler and Kaie Kellough’s recent work. And Mark Laba has a new and very strange new poetry book out soon from Stuart Ross’s Feed Dog imprint with Anvil. And finally, I read the ARCs of Sister Language by Christine Baillie and Martha Baillie and was amazed. Likewise, Jonathan’s new poetry book with Coach House, National Gallery.
The author of twenty-two books of poetry and fiction, Gary Barwin
is a writer, musician and multimedia artist from Hamilton, Ontario and the
author of the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates (Random
House) which won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary
Award and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award and the
Scotiabank Giller Prize. His poetry includes No TV for Woodpeckers
(poetry; Wolsak & Wynn, 2018), many chapbooks some with his own serif of
nottingham editions, and, forthcoming, A Cemetery for Holes, a
poetry collaboration with Tom Prime (Gordon Hill, 2019), Muttertongue
(a CD and recording with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Book*hug) and For It is a
Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems,
ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019.) garybarwin.com