Juan Is a College Student Who Loves Poetry and Art and Says Hes Becoming More Cultured
The poet's dinner political party: Second course
Zoe Whittall talks to Ann Shin, Dani Couture, and Linda Besner virtually community, how to begin a poem, and who they'd invite to a dinner party.
On October 10, Diaspora Dialogues is hosting the second of three Poet's Dinner Parties at Grano Restaurant. Diaspora Dialogues is an organization that focuses on the power of fine art and literature to foster conversations between Toronto's various communities, and the dinner party series shines a spotlight on discussions between some of our city's almost vibrant poets. Artistic Director Zoe Whittall recently interviewed poets Ann Shin, Dani Couture, and Linda Besner about community, how to brainstorm a verse form, and who they'd invite to a dinner party.
Q: Which poets would you most like to invite to a dinner party?
Ann Shin: I like Seamus Heaney's poesy a lot, simply think maybe Dylan Thomas might be funnier at the dinner tabular array. I'd also invite Sylvia Plath, but I'd keep her out of the kitchen. (Sorry, I couldn't help myself).
Dani Couture: For equally long every bit at that place have been recordings of John Berryman's phonation on the Internet, I've been listening to them. If i tin can invite the dead to a dinner party, I would invite Berryman if just so I could inquire him to say "Nobody is ever missing" simply once. Of the living, my pick would exist Stevie Howell. I've never met Howell, but her new poem on Hazlitt is staggeringly skillful. I would like to meet the person who penned "A Gospel." Reason enough.
Linda Besner: I would go for Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson. Non a peculiarly sophisticated option, I guess, but it would be incommunicable to overstate how influential the Alice books are for me. Nosotros had the story tapes when I was a kid and the whole sense of sort of grave nonsense, that highly structured and
ordered world governed by spic-and-span logic that just happens to produce a totally different reality from the one we live in is all the same something I think about a lot. The other affair that would be so great would be to meet whoever actually came up with one of those old runic type things — the ones that are always authored by
"Trad." or "Anonymous," and we're supposed to think of them as somehow coming out of the collective consciousness of a pre-modern society. Who was the starting time person to say ii words that sounded alike, think "that sounds pretty proficient," and invent the concept of rhyming? I'd like the come across the person who just had
that thought for the first time.
Q: Practise y'all have any poetic obsessions?
Shin: My obsessions seems to exist about homes and houses, and natural settings. I think equally a kid of immigrants whose family moved about 12 times equally I was growing up, I've ever yearned for a solid and enduring domicile base. Now I'm married to a programmer who likes to have on new housing projects and so, keeps us moving. As for natural settings — I love living in a city, but nature was my retreat as a kid, and I guess information technology still is.
Besner: I did go through my book just before information technology went to printing to try to excise repeated words — I recollect I concluded up taking out a few instances of the word "tinkling," which in retrospect is such a terrible pick I can't believe I fifty-fifty have it in there once. I too have to watch myself with the give-and-take "globe." I seem to have a thing for both the very modest and the very big.
Couture: There are images I revisit with each book: ships, water, ritual, illness and injury, bears, birthmarks. I return to these things time and time over again to say what I demand to say. Possibly with new knowledge, a ameliorate agreement. I can hope.
Q: How do you brainstorm a poem?
Shin: For me a verse form starts with an image, or a feeling, i or the other. That feeling or image breathes into words and becomes a line of verse … and I build the poem from there.
Couture: I write on transit a great deal. A line or phrase in a notebook. Later, the words are rewritten and rearranged a dozen times or more than. Small variations. Like trying to effigy out a combination lock. What works continues to be worked on, lengthened. What does non is abandoned.
Besner: For me, poems often brainstorm with a title — a few words coalesce into a phrase that has some internal conflict or tension that interests me. I've had an empty file binder marked "2 Pelicans Humping" for years just waiting for the poem that deserves this championship.
Q: Is it of import to you to belong to a community of poets? You all work in other mediums that require a sure amount of community-building or networking and visibility (movie, fiction, journalism) – is the poetry globe a nice respite from this?
Besner: Information technology'southward definitely important to me to belong to a community of poets. for me, the principal do good is just hanging out with other people who are a) in my income bracket, and b) don't think my lifestyle choices are weird. I'm simply in the midst of moving out of the terrible mold-fest of an apartment where I've been for the past iv years, and over that time I've definitely institute that my family and friends who have normal jobs think that apartment is a hellhole, but my writer friends are always asking me if they can move in there when I leave. And it's just nice to be able to bear witness up places and know that y'all'll see lots of people you know — Toronto's poetry community is cracking for that. Especially since I piece of work from home for my job at Hazlitt, information technology'southward important for me to occasionally get dressed and leave the house.
Shin: Whether verse or fiction, I definitely need a customs of writers around because writing is such a long-term lone, intimate activity — it's elective alone confinement. At that place'southward definitely some kind of masochistic streak in all writers, but that's another point I gauge. Equally a writer, I actually do relish the fourth dimension alone with the work, but if I'g not able to talk about information technology with others for a long time, and if the writing project is a lengthy 1 that won't get published for a while (if ever) then I feel, after a time, that the piece of work is invisible, and that I too am becoming invisible. Meeting with other writers and talking about piece of work helps requite me perspective on the work, and allows me to "air" pieces of information technology equally I'one thousand working on it. Interestingly enough, I observe that with poesy in detail even so, I feel I carry a community of poets in my head. At that place are a certain handful of poems or moments of poems that are always with me, and the voices of those poems, those rhythms are always in me, like a melody — piece of work by Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, JH Prynne, Jeramy Dodds, Jacob Polley.
Couture: Community. I grew upwardly on Canadian armed forces bases and however afford a neat deal of respect to anyone wearing fatigues. I tin't aid information technology. I meet them on the subway, or driving downward the highway, and feel like I know them, or something well-nigh them. Some fundamental drive. Servicemen and women, to me, feel similar extended family, or at the very least, someone carrying the same linguistic communication. Like a cousin you haven't seen in years, but still have an intimate autograph with. My base brat days are long gone, but I still find my back from time to time. One never really leaves. Hunting with an ex-MP whose children I used to babysit. A visit to an former base. And once, standing street-side at CFB Trenton with my father to bear witness to a repatriation anniversary. I have a fundamental need for customs, a shared language and understanding. And with poets, have discovered that again. Whether newly acquainted or known for years, we talk into the dark on darkened porches, exchange work, bulldoze to far-off readings, crash at one another's homes, and share beers from modestly stocked fridges. There was a twelvemonth when and then many visiting poets crashed at my apartment, I nicknamed information technology "the hostel." And others have done the aforementioned for me. At that place is a generosity and spirit I'k glad to be acquainted with. I met my closest friend — no, not a poet, simply the writer Stacey May Fowles — because I spilled vino on her at a reading. The ties that bind are not ever the ones you look, simply should welcome.
Q: How would y'all draw your poetic style? Has it inverse?
Besner: I'd say when I first started writing poetry seriously, when I was about xx, I was afraid to exist funny. I thought poetry was this sort of serious-voiced thing that was all near gravitas, and I tried to write like that. merely that'southward just not really the kind of person i am, and funny bits kept sort of sneaking in. I remember workshopping a verse form in one case with a line about fish on a plate "feathering forth stuttering dill," and these awesome ladies in the group — Marilyn Lerch, a New Brunswick poet, and her partner Janet Hammock — finding this hilarious, and existence super confused by that; I thought being funny was something I had done incorrect. I think I've learned that originality is sort of funny — even if the line itself isn't necessarily a joke per se, people laugh at the unexpected. I'k non sure I want to be funny just for the sake of existence funny, but I'chiliad definitely interested in surprise.
Couture: I use more words these days.
Shin: While I all the same dear lyrical images, I'm using longer lines and much more interested with structure, playing with how you can bend and subvert a thought, transform expectations.
*
A collaborative verse form past Dani Couture, Linda Besner, and Ann Shin:
The underground economy is crypt HQ,
where tourists can line upwards to see aboriginal travellers' cheques under glass.
The commutation, or possibility of, never expires,
just the tourists do. Closeted conch shells and hoarded mini shampoos
solidified in their bottles like amber nuggets of another time
spilled onto the backyard of tomorrow's garage auction
Ann Shin is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and new media maker based in Toronto. Her latest volume of poetry, The Family Red china, is published past Brick Books. Her previous book, The Concluding Affair Standing, was published by Mansfield Printing. Her documentary Defector: Escape from N Korea, which follows a Northward Korean defector and her banker across 5 countries, is playing in festivals across the globe.
Dani Couture is a Toronto-based author and editor. She is the author of ii collections of poetry: Practiced Meat (Pedlar Press, 2006), and Sweet (Pedlar Press, 2010), which won the Relit Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Honour for Verse. Her first novel, Algoma, was published past Invisible Publishing in 2011. Currently, she'southward the Literary Editor at This Magazine.
Linda Besner is originally from Wakefield, Quebec. Her poetry has appeared in journals across Canada and been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2012. Her impress and radio journalism accept been featured in The Walrus, Reader's Digest, and on CBC Radio, and she writes a weekly column for the digital magazine Hazlitt. Her first collection of verse, The Id Kid, was published in 2011 by Véhicule Press, and was named equally one of The National Post'southward Best Poetry Books of the Year. She lives in Toronto.
Event details:
The Poet'south Dinner Party, a special intimate dinner series featuring readings, performances and moderated conversations with some of the city's most creative people. Each night guests will also exist entertained by a alive acoustic performance past Jarek Dabrowski.
When: Thursday, October 10; doors open at 6:30 pm
Who: Ann Shin and Linda Besner, moderated by Dani Couture
Where: Grano restaurant, 2035 Yonge Street
Price: $50; includes dinner, a book and glass of prosecco
Source: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/the-poets-dinner-party-second-course
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