When
it works, it goes something like this:
1.
I start with a question or a set of questions, a discomfort, a hunch. Sometimes
it has to do with the way people are talking to one another. Sometimes I want
to respond to an event, the conditions, something in the world.
2.
I prototype. Maybe I do something that’s worked for me before. Maybe I cop an
approach from someone or somewhere else.
3.
The prototype settles into some kind of processual container that helps me
think. I serialize that container until it hits some kind of limit.
4.
I take that serialized mess and try to comb it into something that has a shape
or an arc, not necessarily narrative, not necessarily dialectical, but where it
makes some kind of slant sense as a thread of thought.
Ultimately,
this is meant as a messy kind of way to look to poetics as a mode of thinking
or even research, to do things that “academic” research methodologies can’t.
This is probably always the way I worked, though it didn’t completely make
sense to me until I was doing academic research in an intensive way. Poetry
isn’t magic, but it might be utopian, making allowances for different ways of
thinking. I think that’s important even if I get annoyed sometimes with other
poets who lean a bit too hard on that sense of possibility.
I’ve
always been resistant to writing a poetics statement like this, because the
thing we sometimes call craft is still bound up with a sense that there are
right and wrong ways to write. We carry around all these truisms (show don’t
tell, use only necessary words, etc.) about how to write a poem that maybe we
picked up in an MFA workshop or on the not-so-hard streets of Poetryworld.
They’re things we swallowed for our own good – and they are useful, don’t get
me wrong – but all of it could be replaced with a more exploratory practice
related to the way poetic form shapes thinking. Which isn’t anything new, but
it is something we need to remind ourselves of.
So
maybe, to get more nuts and bolts, I can talk about how I worked through a
suite of poems in my next book Coast
Mountain Foot (forthcoming in 2022, probably). The poems started as an
attempt to write during my bus commute up and down Burnaby Mountain by tapping
short-lined pieces into the notes app on my phone. The size of the lines was
driven by the restrictions of my phone, but were also informed by the short
lines of Robert Creeley. I wrote a few of these and shelved them after
realizing that tapping out these poems set off my motion sickness. I came back
to them a few years later out of a desire to cobble something together out of
all my stray pieces of work. The form of these Creeleyesque bus pieces allowed
me to be attentive to the spaces around me. I joined the pieces to a joke I had
been making that I wanted to write a book that voiced all my complaints about
Vancouver, reversing the gesture of George Bowering’s Rocky Mountain Foot, where he complains pretty vociferously about
Calgary. Instead, the poems gave me a chance to reflect on both cities, their
approaches to urban development, and what it was like for me to shuttle between
them literally and conceptually.
When
I started writing the poems, they looked something like this:
A century wide
lot
to renovict.
Crisis
neighbours
normalize
streets.
Stand
each façade up
to
make a block.
Provided
history
is
hetero,
art
is only
demolition;
art
a buckling
garment
factory.
Suspension
bridge
between
bungalows.
Collapse
frames
each
owner;
instead
supports
no
teary hold.
Even though this
poem ended up in the manuscript (along with a few more like it), after a while
I found this style obscured my thinking in a way I didn’t want. I like this
poem. It has a nice swing from couplet to couplet, but my problem is precisely
this dependence on parataxis that carried over not only from my earlier work,
but from other poems I was writing concurrently for another project. The tightness
of the parataxis limits how I can write through the things I was thinking
about: the problems around heritage homes, the celebratory vibes of Calgary’s
Wreck City, the way these crash against the renovictions that were an epidemic
in Vancouver at that moment.
My
solution, worked out over weeks of writing, was to maintain the parataxis, but
loosen it, stretching images and observations out so that the poems could carry
more of the things I was trying to be attentive to. This is maybe a roundabout
way to say that I started writing lyric poems, but I don’t like the way that
just snaps me into a genre category instead of acknowledging that the lyric
carries a set of formal possibilities too. The newest poems in the manuscript
look something like this:
Walking down
West Georgia
on the north side.
Across the street,
Telus’ window
celebrates Pride
by celebrating
their expansive
LTE network:
“Love is
the greatest
connection.”
A block down
another slogan
courtesy of Westbank
across from
the VPL’s
central branch:
“Culture
reflects
society.”
Is this
the best
we can do?
Our relations
and affects
just grist
for the
ongoing millwork
of value generation?
I turn
the corner
at Beatty,
heading to
Anahita’s reading
at 8EAST
(an art space
in Chinatown
formerly Selector’s
Records).
They’ve changed
the B.C.
history mural
to something
more Indigenous
themed.
That’s great, but
what happens
to this piece
when the
new VAG
goes up?
Will they
build up
around it
like the
King Edward
Hotel in Calgary?
A “cornerstone
for the development
of the East Village.”
Folded into
Studio Bell, near
the new library.
What culture
reflects
this society?
Whose blues
gets sung in
an emptied space?
This
poem trades the terse abutments of the first poem for the leisureliness of the
walk (something that has a very specific history in Vancouver poetry). Other
poems written like this trade the walk for the coffee shop window, the bus
ride, or the bed of my Mount Pleasant garden suite. The decision to stretch out
the angular shifts actually makes the angles seem to disappear. The kind of
aggressive specificity that gets papered over in the first poem’s
suggestiveness is very upfront here, making it clear, I hope, when the shift
from Vancouver to Calgary happens, allowing the content, rather than the form,
of the juxtaposition to be the focus of the poem. The poems of the manuscript
play between the formal poles set up by these two poems, teasing at the possibilities
of putting together the pieces of urban life that seems so fragmentary or
contradictory even when we understand that the systems and places we live in
are connected.
What
I hope I’m making clear here is the way that form and content lead one another
through a kind of open-ended decision making. Writing, for me at least, needs
to find ways to be intuitive and improvisational within a form-oriented process,
though maybe that’s only because every time I try to plan things ahead of time,
I write myself into a ditch.
ryan fitzpatrick lives and writes in Toronto. He is the
author of two books of poetry: Fortified Castles (Talon, 2014) and Fake
Math (Snare, 2007).
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