How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
When I was about twelve years old I really got into Edgar Allan Poe. The stories, but also the poems. Poe was really big on effects, and everything he wrote was intense and dramatic. All of the stories and poems had dense atmospheres. It was easy to wow me then, and I was wowed.
When I was fifteen I developed my first crush on a girl who lived in my neighborhood. Tongue-tied, I started writing those over the top love poems that all adolescents write.
Later on in my teens I encountered the poetry of Leonard Cohen. It made me want to go into the business.
I believe it was Robert Creeley who told us that form is never more than an extension of content. Poetry has always been the best way to write about what I want to write about. It welcomes me. It suits who I am. I feel at home in poetry, whereas I don’t feel at home in prose fiction. Like everybody, I have an unpublished novel in the bottom drawer. I had absolutely zero fun in writing it. So it was one novel and out. Whereas I’ve written thousands of poems.
How does a poem begin?
For the last thirty years or so, the poem begins with a first line. I don’t sit down to write. Somewhere in the course of a day I am given a first line, and the poem proceeds from there. Following the first line, I sit down and write the rest of the poem, having absolutely no idea where it is going. By the time I get to the last line the last line seems inevitable.
Do you see your writing as a single extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
For twenty-four years I wrote a very long poem in twenty-two books called Report On The Second Half of the Twentieth Century. That was very much a single extended project. But the whole time I was writing it I was also writing collections of lyric poems.
The English Romantic poets are the kings of the lyric poem. I love how they journey out into these vast lyrically-rooted cosmological projects. I love that their poems go on and on and on.
My own lyric poems are mostly haunted by the form of the sonnet. Most of my poems are between eight and twenty lines long, and more often than I would have ever expected they check in at fourteen lines.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I have never had a daily schedule for writing poetry. Poems happen when poems happen. I know writerly discipline when it comes to writing other things like critical articles, reviews, or theses and dissertations. And the novel I wrote was written under the 750 words a day rule.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I’m 71 years old, so I don’t read around in literary journals the way I used to when I was in my twenties. I also don’t send poems out to literary journals the way I used to in my twenties. It’s certainly an interesting realm of engagement when you are a younger writer just getting going.
My favourite online journal is Periodicities. My favourite print journal is probably The Capilano Review.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I don’t read a lot of fiction. But I am always in the process of rereading Herman Melville. Yes, he’s back there in the nineteenth century, but a lot of twenty-first century fiction hasn’t caught up to him yet. He has a lot to offer a practicing poet.
In the past twenty years (which to me is lately), the fiction writers I have read extensively are Milan Kundera and Haruki Murakami.
I just finally got a copy of Phyllis Webb’s Peacock Blue. I will be spending a lot
of time with that book. Probably years. Young and on the horizon: I really
liked Grace Lau’s first book, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak.
Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.
A selection of his work appeared in the ninth issue.