The poems in Something Burned Along the Southern Border range deftly from the surreal to the deeply personal. How does the collection reconcile these discrete poetic modes? Is there a purpose behind the fusing of the two?

I’m not sure there’s really any reconciliation of the surreal and the personal happening in the book. They coexist seamlessly inside of me; I think they can coexist seamlessly on the page. I don’t think at any time I made the conscious decision to make certain poems surreal and certain others “deeply personal,” though the poems in the “Flicker Rate” section of the book are clearly of a deeply personal nature. And even though those poems are about my mother’s illness and death, there are some surreal moments in them, like in “Umbilical,” where I imagine myself plugging the ghost of my umbilicus into the dirt around a red oak tree we’ve planted in her memory, hoping to feed off some of her ashes sprinkled in the soil there. And I envision the whole setting as an amusement park. As diverse as the surreal and personal may seem to some, I tend to see the surreal elements that maybe slipped by unnoticed in the moment. The purpose and mechanism of the fusion is opaque to me.

Many of the poems also make reference to or are about films. What role does cinema play in the collection?

At one point, film and cinema played an even bigger role in earlier versions of the manuscript that became Something Burned Along the Southern Border. In the editing process, a lot of the movie-based poems were cut out, in large part, so the book wouldn’t become a theme-based collection of poems. I think good fiction and good films have a lot to say to each other. Films have always provided watershed-type moments in my life where, say, I learn something about storytelling—the possibilities, the limits, the emotional impact. Being forced to watch Ricardo Balducci’s Clown in school as a young boy had a huge impact on me. It’s a sadistic film about a boy losing his dog, and even though it was traumatic and scarring, there’s something beautiful and sublime about it that makes me understand why our music teacher made us sit through repeated screenings. So of course, I wrote a poem about it called “Punishment Via 14-Minute French Film.” But there are references to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and Nosferatu the Vampyre,  Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and I’ve even picked up on some oblique references to David Lynch films that I didn’t realize were there (Lynch’s Lost Highway being one of those movies that really opened up some space in my head). The poem “Cinema du Parc” is about Montreal’s most amazing movie house, where I spent many blissed out hours when I lived in Montreal. 

As a poet, journalist, and fiction writer, how do you balance your literary education and work with the responsibilities and enticements of everyday life?

I’m always very careful about thinking of myself or referring to myself as a journalist. I’m not a trained journalist, though I’ve worked as a reporter and photographer at a major daily and, for the last four years, as the editor of a weekly paper in LaSalle, Ontario (just southwest of Windsor). For me, working in newspapers has allowed me to earn a living in something that I find relatively tolerable. But like a lot of writers and creative types, I’ve had a rather checkered relationship with employment. For me, writing is the enticement of everyday life. I don’t look at writing as work. It’s more like play. Finding balance being a husband and father is kind of tricky sometimes, though. I’m lucky that my wife, Jennifer, is really happy about all that’s happened since the book came out, though there were times when I was working it that there was uncertainty about what this would all amount to. Kurt Vonnegut said “All male writers… no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives.” In my case, I would also add the words forgiving, understanding and patient. Jennifer has a good job, so that allows me a certain amount of leeway, where I don’t have to go out and find some major breadwinner kind of job that would make all the creative stuff grind to a halt. Ideally, I would like to be at home writing full-time and taking care of the kids—getting them off to school, making lunches, getting dinner started: what’s commonly called a kept husband. I’ve done a bit of that over the years when the kids were babies, and it’s heaven.    

The creative writer is often regarded as a marginalized figure. Do you agree?

For the most part, I think writers tend to marginalize themselves. We think too much, we watch what other people are doing (which David Foster Wallace described as our general ‘creepiness’), we obsess over things, we isolate…. All things health professionals advise against. Plus, we tend to take unconventional routes to achieve goals. Nothing upsets and frustrates some people more than nonconformity—when they see someone who’s very obviously going against the grain and doesn’t care. I’ve taken a lot of flak from family and friends over the years about my relaxed attitude towards my job, my lack of concern about upward mobility and having nothing that resembles a financial portfolio or a retirement plan. The people I know who have those things, and, God forbid, talk about them in casual conversation, don’t seem very happy or interesting to me. They seem worried. If you’re going to worry about something, at least make it entertaining or completely irrational. Worry about a nuclear strike, or male menopause, or tornados, or various rare and improbable afflictions.

Keats wrote, “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.” How do you define literary ambition? What are your ambitions as a writer?   

I don’t know a lot about Keats except that he died when he was 25 and he packed all his works into the last five years of his life. I understand how he felt when he said that, though. I don’t think he’s talking about ‘greatness’ as the only goal. I think he’s saying ‘swing for the fences’ every time. The alternative is like stepping to the plate and hoping to get hit by a pitch. No one strives for mediocrity. As in all things, we should have perfection in mind, but understand, and maybe even revel in the fact that, ultimately, it’s unattainable. My ambition as a writer is to be happy writing and to produce more publishable work. I really try to stay in the moment, otherwise I’m lost. Right now, I know that I have another manuscript of poetry well under way. I have several hundred pages of a novel that I need time to complete. I have about a dozen short stories in various stages of incompletion, and notebooks full of ideas. I guess the ambition plays itself out in 24-hour increments.

                    Sparks

                    stupefied ex-beauty queens

                    facebooking old flames.

                    husbands, freshly neutered,

                    mowing america’s lawns.

                    the unspeakable realization

                    of futility, the superstitious

                    rabble with their pitchforks.

                    have a beer, read the paper.

                    circular logic, like after a

                    layoff.  sweaty comedians

                    dying for a laugh.  photons

                     like a shower of sparks,

                     jolting the extras back into

                    wakefulness.  it doesn’t last.

                    focus on the routine, forget what

                    you see when you close your eyes.

Iain kept breathing and decided to play it cool. He briefly looked about the terrace and listened in on the conversation going on behind Erica, between the huge Indian man and the black woman. The Indian was holding the black woman’s hands and rubbing his nose against hers.

“Nah, baby,” he said. “I deposited that cheque. Prob’ly didn’t show up ‘cause they gotta put a hold on it an’ shit.”

“I trus’ you, honey, ‘cept if they don’t take that hold off by Friday I got no money to buy good clothes. Understand? I don’t wanna look like no bitch at my interview.”

Iain smiled and took a sip of his beer.

“You have a boyfriend?” he finally said.      

“I do,” said Erica.          

A cold blast rippled his brain and spread through his body. The blood in his veins seemed to coagulate and, for some reason, his sphincter cramped.

A boyfriend. 

Then what were they doing out here, drinking together at who knows what hour of the night? Why had she called him? Why the shameless flirting? He wanted to blurt out these questions. He wanted to stand up and scream at her. He wanted answers. He wanted to have sex.

 “I thought you said you broke up.”

“No, I met a new guy. About three weeks ago. I’m so in love. It’s crazy. I never thought I could love anybody so much, so fast.”

He looked away and realized the Indian man and the black woman were completely soused. Their eyes were half-shut, their faces stunned and blank. They both just sat there, staring off into space, the Indian man looking down, the black woman looking up.

“You deposited that cheque? ” slurred the black woman. “Cause I need that money…I don’t wanna…”

With a huge hand the Indian slammed the table.

“I fuckin’ told you …cheque’s fuckin’…why you keep…”

Was this a game? A test? Did she say she had a boyfriend, and one she loved so much, to test his integrity? Was she not too drunk to be staging such an elaborate hoax? How could she fall in love so deeply in three weeks? Because she’s young and naive? And then the thought flashed through his mind: he hoped she did have a boyfriend; he hoped she was in love; he hoped they did have sex. He hoped her boyfriend found out.

“Lovely. Congratulations. It’s great to be in love. My aunt and uncle, they’ve been married for thirty-seven years and they’re still in love. It’s great. They never had kids, though. Didn’t want kids. They have a lot in common that way. Another thing they have in common is a love of cats. They have eleven cats in their house.”

“Eleven!?”

“Eleven.”

“That’s crazy!”

“It is. They’re all strays they found on the street. Their house is a cat nursery.”

“Wow, that’s crazy. Good for them.”

She pressed her shoulder and arm against his and laughed her throaty laugh, then leaned back and swallowed more beer. He filled his glass with the remaining beer in the pitcher, drank it all down and slammed the glass on the table.

“The funniest thing about my aunt and uncle is, once I asked them, ‘Okay, I understand how deep your love of cats is, but why do you keep so many of them in the house? What I mean is, you never had kids, yet you have eleven cats. Why?’ They looked at each other and smiled, then my uncle looked at me and said, ‘We’re very disappointed in humans.’”

“Wow, that’s hilarious! Your aunt and uncle sound so cool and eccentric.”

He just stared right into her eyes, not angrily, a blank stare. She smiled and looked down at the table.

“Sometimes I totally know how they feel. Like, a few weeks ago I was at this very bar, on this very patio and I met a prostitute named Samira. She’s Indian. I mean, not Native Canadian, she’s from India.”

His ex-girlfriend invaded his mind. She was sitting at her desk at work. Her cubicle was surrounded by cubicles filled with handsome Indian men. They all leaned back in their chairs, gazing at her.

“She said she was eighteen but she could’ve been younger. Her mom was from one of the lowest castes and she fell in love with a guy from a higher caste.”

The Indian in the cubicle beside Iain’s ex-girlfriend got up and stood behind her, turned her chair around. She looked up at him and he stroked her cheek with his hand. She undid his belt, started pulling down his zipper.

“He got her pregnant and he wanted to marry her, but when he told his family, they forced him to give her up, so Samira ended up in an orphanage. She never met her mother, but her uncle took her out of the orphanage when she was ten and brought her to Montreal.”

His ex-girlfriend took out the Indian’s penis and put it in her mouth.

“He sexually abused her and forced her to work as a sex slave. She ran away when she was fifteen and became a prostitute. Isn’t that the saddest story ever? Stories like that make me understand the way your aunt and uncle feel.”

The other Indians in the office formed a line-up behind the Indian getting fellated. He was moaning and running his fingers through Iain’s ex-girlfriend’s hair.

Iain was torn from his reverie by the Indian man and the black woman arguing.

“How’re we supposed to get money if I can’t get no fuckin’ job? How am I supposed to get a fuckin’ job if I can’t buy no good clothes!? How am I supposed to buy good clothes if you didn’t deposit that fuckin’ cheque!?”

The Indian leaned forward over the table. “In this world there’s black people and there’s niggers. And yer a fuckin’ nigger!”

She slapped his cheek; he punched her mouth and she toppled over, slamming her head on the patio floor. The grizzled, middle-aged men at the next table bolted out of their chairs and pounced on the Indian who stood up, throwing punches in all directions.

“Fuckin’ wagon burner!” shouted one of the middle-aged white men.

The Indian took several blows but within moments two of the white men were on the ground. As the other four tackled the Indian onto a table, bottles crashing, beer spilling everywhere, Erica grabbed Iain’s arm and pulled him out of his chair and onto the sidewalk. A crowd of spectators encircled the terrace.

“I don’t live far from here,” she said. “Let’s go to my place.”

Bedroom

Light, by stealth, at last has occupied

The citadels and forests thus made plain,

The intricacy frost has ramified,

Our mingled breath condensed upon the pane

Of simple glass that keeps us from the night;

And in which after dark, returned by chance,

Darkened reflection offered us the sight

Of all our naked likeness at a glance.

I waken, still enamoured, given pause

By you, my deeply sleeping wife,

The certainty of death, as a lost cause,

The luminous unlikelihood of life.

This pushing for the door was the nurse, and everyone knew in the same moment: George was missing.

The guests took up the search from where they each stood in the barn, their words nosing through the air, sniffing, watching and whispering loudly as the nurse spun about in alarm: “A day-dreamer…Did you know she came from London only last week?  And already charged with the boy… Belongs in the kitchen… He’s queer, that boy… Never got on with my William, though only ten months the junior…Likely asleep under a tree, they don’t feed those children properly, always wanting sleep…”

Giles stood in the center of the room, caressing his teacup.  There was, he guessed, a problem, and in his mind he saw the dimpled surface of the lily pond, and below it the pink face of a boy, his hair waving gently in the imprecise murk—Giles stopped when Bartholomew’s hand landed suddenly, jarringly on his shoulder. “Your boy,” said his father, “Is a cry-baby.  They’ll hear him from his crying.”

Isa appeared before them, her face flushed, her hands tearing a program into tiny pieces that spiraled to the floor with the dust and the voices.

“Our son is missing,” she said.  Then, her eyes traveling downwards: “There’s blood on your shoe.”

The little boy, as it happened, was not missing at all.  He knew exactly where he was: in the bushes, beside the stage, pausing on his hands and knees and holding his breath to better hear the strange, rasping voice that invited him forward, as though the trees themselves were whispering: chuff-chuff-chuff…

George had temporarily forgotten his nurse.  He had forgotten his grandfather, and the Afghan hound, and the blob of foam on the hound’s nostril: he had, in truth, suddenly forgotten everything that had been occupying his mind until that very moment.  He remembered only the sound when there was no sound, and he saw the bushes in front of him, and the movement behind them, and he smiled without realizing it and crawled forward on his knees.

And suddenly, just as he was reaching out to part the beckoning leaves, George was seized round the middle by two rough hands and the ground was gone from under his legs and the bushes swung away from him.  He was transported through the air.  The empty seats streamed past him, his legs dangling, his feet knocking against the chairs. 

George opened his mouth to the wind and howled.

From the barn came all the bodies, all the arms held out stiff in front, all the fingers wagging, and from Albert the Idiot’s grip traveled George, catapulting, somersaulting, until the arms closed around him and he heard his Grandfather’s voice, and his mother’s, and a thousand other voices:  “There he is!  Crying again… Oh, he is found…Albert, Albert, thank you, have some tea… Have some cake… Oh, the poor darling…”  

Then the music played.  The crowd pressed forward.  George was found; the audience took their seats.  “Such excitement,” they whispered.  “Such drama.  We will never be done by midnight!”

I popped my P’s, but other than that I think it went well. My new drinking game poem was a resounding hit. Here’s a recap:

Kasper takes the stage after a warm introduction. He looks nervous, drunk, grips a beer in one hand and takes hold of the mic in the other.

“Does everyone have a beer?” he asks. “You’re all going to need beers for this…”

He waits stubbornly while someone orders a beer.

After about forty seconds of awkward silence, he begins:

“Drinking Game.”

“Never have I ever cursed the goddamn weather.”

He drinks. People in the audience drink too. Someone in the back says, “This could get expensive.”

“Never have I ever kissed who I shouldn’t have,

wanted who I couldn’t have,

nor slept where I wouldn’t have had the night not grown so dim”.

He drinks. A few people think about it, then drink as well.

“Never have I ever been a bit too clever for my own damn good.”

He drinks a lot.

“When we were schoolboys, we tried many different things — the times we hunted kittens, or tested cardboard wings — but never did I ever let a boy named Trevor take his knife and sever a pimple from my cheek.”

Kasper pauses, then drinks. The audience laughs.

“Never did it bleed all week.”

He drinks, they laugh, and he sets up for the big Dostoevskian finale:

“Never has it been easier to mask than confess,

to begin but then digress,

to stand up and say “I am guilty!”

only when there is proof

and nothing less.”

Kasper drains his beer, kicks the mic off the stage, and walks out into the cold, rainy night.

Aerialists 

Nothing, of course, from the first, but weighed against

Such parlous folly: family; friends; and the appeal,

Not lightly to be discounted, of common sense;

And last but not least, vertigo, dreadfully real.

High in tumultuous oaks, through the wind-threshed tops,

Squirrels play frenzied touch-tag at dizzying speed,

Flinging contortions, black synapse across bright gaps,

One after the other; driven, if not by our need.

With a heavy deadening shudder a helicopter

Batters above us: by instinct made much afraid

One freezes against the trunk from the vast raptor,

Like a hide nailed to bark, flattened and splayed.

Another is lounged on a bough to reveal of a rear

Foot the long, delicate sole: and I did not think

Strangely to be disturbed, to discover it, bare,

Unexpectedly intimate; a naked, vaginal pink.

O lately we leaned free from the buoyant crown

Of the poised radiant Tree and forbidden flew

One void to another and Everything did Abound

Held in our perfect error perfectly true.

We at Encore Literary Magazine have glanced at a few of these CanLit Best of the Decade  lists floating around the “blogosphere” lately and while the appearance of certain titles causes us to roll our eyes, we choose for the moment to restrain our snarkier selves to instead offer up a pair of Canadian novels which, if there were any justice, should have found their way onto at least one or two of said lists but, as far as we can see, somehow, someway, have not.

First, Rogues’ Wedding by the prodigiously talented and always inventive Terry Griggs. Published in 2002 and nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Griggs’ second novel is a wild linguistic romp set in 19th century Ontario, a riotous ride affording her cunning and slightly demented imagination free rein. The story follows one Griffith Smolders who, having abandoned the eager Avice Smolders without so much as a kiss on their wedding night, finds himself running for his very life from a very angry young bride. The pursuit moves northward from London, Ontario to Manitoulin Island and culminates in one of the most bizarre and blistering climactic scenes in recent Canadian fiction. To quote from Shaun Smith’s starred review in Quill & Quire:

“For Griggs, every strange world is a portal into another equally strange one. With astonishing talent and control, she smashes apart Victorian society (and modern society by extension) and rebuilds it as a Swiftian fantasy, as raucous as Huckleberry Finn and as bizarre as Alice in Wonderland. This is a rich mixture, intensely intoxicating and bestowing delicious feelings of hallucination. Farce and satire elevate to a kind of surrealism or Dadaism. Bugs mysteriously emerge from people’s mouths; pretty girls vanish through doorways never to be seen again; a crow dons a baby’s bonnet; a woman wears a trout on a ribbon around her neck.”

Similarly bracing and original imagery is also on display in Griggs’ latest work, Thought You Were Dead, a gleeful send-up of both murder mystery novels and the Canadian literary scene which has been described as “Agatha Christie on crack.” 

Second, Muriella Pent by Russell Smith, a brilliant satire of the Toronto arts scene that spares nothing and no one while at the same time offering readers two of the most successfully realized and believable characters in all of CanLit. The story concerns the City Arts Board Action Council’s decision to sponsor a visit to Canada by Marcus Royston, a world-weary West Indian poet. However, Royston proves to be less interested in the “real issues” on the Action Council’s agenda than in publicly offending as many people as possible with his opinions on art and culture, while openly pursuing every attractive woman he meets and drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Muriella Pent, an affluent member of the Action Council, provides lodging to Royston in her Annex mansion and her time with him releases her from the restraints of upper-class, WASPish Canadian life, allowing her to become something altogether different from who she thought she was.

Nominated for the 2004 Impac Dublin Fiction Prize, Muriella Pent was acclaimed by André Alexis as the best novel of that year. The Ottawa Citizen declared it rivalled the satires of  Mordecai Richler, while Books in Canada raved that it was “funny, poignant, ambitious … and the boldest work yet,” in Smith’s oeuvre. All of us here at Encore Literary Magazine eagerly look forward to Girl Crazy.

Yes, The Life of Pi won the Booker Prize and is being made into an Ang Lee film. Yes, The Book of Negroes has sold a gazillion copies. Yes, Lullabies for Little Criminals somehow convinced tens of thousands of Canadian women in the plausibility of an amazingly articulate and unjaded 13-year-old prostitute. But Ten Best of the Decade? We respectfully disagree.  Our riposte? Rogues’ Wedding and Muriella Pent. For the time being at least, they will suffice.

P. K. Page … is, in brief, a phenomenon; a force majeur in Canadian literary and artistic life; a National Treasure. Her work, sprung from the praiseworthy ambition of the lavishly gifted, bestows upon us rich decades of protean accomplishment, of widespread honour and renown.   – Richard Outram

P.K. Page is a visionary, a descendant of Blake and the alchemist writers.   – Kenneth Sherman

Elegant, rigorous, fresh, P.K. Page’s work sings with a voice of independent character and maenad conjecture. It is a creature that lives on its own terms and terrain. It is startling, authoritative, and anti-sentimental, able to bear cool as well as passionate gazing at our own species. Her poems are always thinking – each line is thinking, while its six senses remain impeccably alert. Her poems live by wit, wisdom, sass, suspense and a muscular lissome synapse and diction.    – The Griffin Prize Judges’ Citation, 2003

One afternoon I sat at my desk writing a letter to a company that manufactures frozen food products. I was writing to let them know I was disappointed with their meat lasagna. At one time it had been really good, this meat lasagna, quite delicious, but the last few times we had it for dinner we noticed it wasn’t quite the same. After some consideration, I realized they were cutting down on the meat and using more noodles. This pissed me off. So while I worked on this letter, writing to let them know we weren’t happy with the meat-to-noodle ratio in their lasagna, it began to register in my brain that I was hearing, from somewhere, the singular sound, faint and infrequent, but still insistent and unmistakeable, of a woman in sexual bliss.

At that time we lived on the top floor of our building, a four storey walk-up, in a corner apartment, so after pausing to listen for a minute, I got off my chair and lay down and put my ear to the floor. At first all I could hear were vibrations, the noise of pipes, the hum of electric currents, but then, much more clearly, the voice of a woman, crying out rhythmically, fading away then returning, sometimes accompanied by low grunts, presumably of a man, presumably of our downstairs neighbour. I lay there on the floor for some time, listening. Jenn was in the living room getting ready to leave for work. She must have noticed me lying on the floor by then but she didn’t say anything. I wondered for a second if she thought I’d collapsed, had a seizure or something. I lay there on the floor, looking at the clumps of dust under the radiator, listening, transixed. Jenn didn’t say a word. 

This woman downstairs was enjoying herself very much. In fact, she was so vocal and expressive, I was starting to wonder if perhaps there wasn’t any actual sex going on downstairs but instead I was listening to someone watch a porn video. At one point the woman moaned, sort of laughed and said Bad boy, in a playful manner. That gave me the shivers. The man was grunting again. It went on. Jenn had to have seen me but she said nothing. The activity downstairs seemed to be reaching a climax. It was louder. The woman’s exclamations were prolonged, high-pitched, like she was crying. I was enjoying myself, lying there, listening. I was excited. This was definitely not a movie; the voices were right there underneath me. Then they stopped. They were done. I could hear them talking.

I stood up, feeling slightly self-conscious, embarrassed. Jenn had finished packing her bag and was putting on her coat. I went out and told her I thought Norman, the fellow who lives downstairs, was having an affair. She didn’t know what I was talking about. But I was having trouble equating the plump boyish looking woman who I knew lived with Norman with the sounds I’d just heard, those cries, that voice. Norman gives guitar lessons in his apartment. It was sometimes an inconvenience for us when we had to listen to guitars tuning and scales being played over and over. I wondered if he’d met some young woman who wanted to learn how to strum chords to her favourite Miley Cyrus songs and had some original ideas about how to pay for the lessons. I saw a tanned, petite go-go dancer type with long black hair and a waist the size of a pop bottle.

My imagination started working on this and I became certain that this woman I’d listened to could not be Norm’s live-in. It wasn’t possible. This conviction became even firmer when I went down to the end of the hallway to see Jenn off. We often did this. She’d go down and get into her taxi and I’d stand at the window on the top floor and look down and wave to her as the cab pulled away.  Directly in front of the building was a shiny black Volkswagen, its parking lights flashing, and I immediately decided this car had something to do with what I’d been listening to. Norman had hired a prostitute who’d parked her car in front of the building and ran in for a $200 afternoon quickie. Soon she would be out, all cleaned up and ready to go, dressed, I imagined, in a tight halter top, a very short black skirt and thigh-high leather boots. I waved to Jenn as she got into the taxi but she didn’t look or wave back and the taxi pulled away and was gone. The Volkswagen sat there, lights blinking, waiting. And I waited too, waited to get a glimpse of Norm’s whore, waited to see her come out and drive away.