Interview with Meredith Quartermain
(conducted by e-mail from July 2003 to December 2004)
Meredith Quartermain’s books and chapbooks include Terms of Sale (Meow, 1996),
Spatial Relations (Diaeresis, 2001), Inland Passage (housepress, 2001), A Thousand
Mornings (Nomados, 2002), The Eye-Shift of Surface (greenboathouse books, 2003)
and Vancouver Walking (to be published by NeWest Press in spring 2005). With
Robin Blaser, she recently completed a series of poems, entitled Wanders (Nomados,
2002). A long poem Matter is forthcoming from Chax, and her collection of four
long poems “Highway 99” appeared as STANZAS #35 (above/ground press, 2003).
Her work has also appeared in Matrix, Canadian Literature, Prism International,
ecopoetics, Queen Street Quarterly, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Raddle
Moon, Chain, Sulfur, Jacket, and other magazines. She is co-editor with Jacqueline
Turner of The News at www.interchange.ubc.ca/quarterm/TheNews.htm, and
founder, with husband Peter, of the small press Nomados.
rob mclennan: Your publishing over the years seems to have been furtive, almost
secretive; a broadsheet here, a chapbook there, almost as though you are
cultivating an absence. With the recent collaborative Wanders (with Robin Blaser),
and A Thousand Mornings, both published by your Nomados, you seem to be placing
yourself deliberately, à la jwcurry or Maxine Gadd, as someone whose work is
difficult to find unless you know the author. How deliberate is this?
Meredith Quartermain: It might be a good idea to clarify what my "publishing
over the years" has been. In 1996 Meow Press in Buffalo (buffalo meow, as
Lawrence Upton joked, introducing me in London) published my first chapbook of
poems, Terms of Sale. This book is still available through SPD as far as I know. In
1997, I started a long project which is still unfolding, called The Book of Words. In
1998, Keefer Street brought out 100 copies of the first section, Abstract Relations.
Then Diaeresis in Florida brought out the second section, Spatial Relations (2001 —
still available, by ordering on-line) and Chax is set to bring out the third section,
Matter. It is quite difficult in Canada (especially if you live far from Toronto or
Montreal) to publish writing that explores new formalities. I self-published Abstract
Relations and more recently A Thousand Mornings — both are prose poems —
mainly because I simply did not know of any Canadian publisher who would take
such work. However, it is getting somewhat easier. housepress brought out Inland
Passage in 2001 and greenboathouse published The Eye-Shift of Surface in 2003.
And now above/ground is doing Highway 99. So I'm beginning to find Canadian
connections.
This little history is not so unusual. If you look back at our first poet laureate's
early writing years, you will find him self-publishing via Tish magazine which was
distributed free at Duthie Books in Vancouver, and you will find him appearing in
small books from unknown presses. Coach House was one that became known —
later.
As for deliberation — well — people who engage in artistic practice, especially
practices that challenge accepted conventions, mainly do so because their
sensibility works that way, and they must write, paint, compose — because if they
don't they go mad. Many go mad anyway in cultures where these skills are devalued
or suppressed. Some are lucky and make connections with the community (or a
community) through their art during their life times. Many remain unrecognized
until after their deaths. I find Lisa Robertson apropos on the question of
deliberation: "The problem of the shape of choice," she says in Soft Architecture: A
Manifesto, "is mainly retrospective."
rm: True, and not long after Bowering’s Tish days, he was going to parties hosted
by the Ryerson Press, and was published as part of Contact Press’ last gasp. What
I’ve always found appealing about George, was that he never gave up on the small
when he went with larger presses, going back and forth depending on what he was
working on.
It’s interesting, too, the three presses you mention — housepress, greenboathouse
books and above/ground press — are far removed from Toronto and Montreal, but
there have always been Canadian presses interested in the new formalities, as you
call them, such as Tsunami Editions, Talonbooks, Coach House, hole books, New
Star. What do you think has changed, for you to now find Canadian connections?
MQ: I'm going to answer that by discussing two e-mails that came to me this
summer within a week of each other. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to reveal
names. Editor of a mid-sized Canadian press comments: "I should say that even if
I like it, it has to go through 3 readers, & we tend, because of that, not to go for
too abstract or innovative, I mean rather but not way out, because even when, say
[well-known Canadian author] & I like one, the other readers may not. . . . The
thing is, we are not a 'small press' in the usual sense any more & have learned,
even against our desires sometimes, & because we have a large editorial board, to
think much more in terms of a wide range & hopefully popular reach for our
general publications, while still doing some of the stuff we used to do a lot of."
I'm heartened by the editor's willingness to consider the manuscript, but dismayed
at the phrase "too abstract or innovative" and wonder what "wide range" and
"popular reach" really mean.
Meanwhile, a well-known Canadian writer whose work ranges into the "innovative"
writes of Press X, which has been known to publish innovative work, "Their poetry
series is edited by [Z], the fellow who badmouths everything "post-modern" and
writes very conservative articles and reviews on poetry in places like Books in
Canada, not unintelligent but his view of poetry is very narrow . . . I keep thinking
to find something to suggest, but I think the poetry publishing scene is dismal at
the moment — [writer's publisher, known for bringing out ground-breaking
Canadian work] rejected my essay book and may not take me back on . . . [A]nyhow,
[another Canadian press known for work in post-modern formalities] . . . is taking
a hiatus . . . then there's [R's press] but she does need more than a bit of a
narrative line though she's pleasantly quirky . . . Gerry Shikatani is publishing his
next book as a special issue of Cap Review! Somehow I think the other presses are,
as you suspect, more open to people from their regions . . . Once you step out of
your own region, it's extensive appearance in magazines (and look, sigh, what we
have for magazines) that attracts presses' attention." The writer advised me to try
the U.S., where of course I already have published.
There's an eerie sense in these communications of the pressures operating in the
Canadian publishing scene which have the overall effect of keeping Canada
producing fairly conventional, somewhat provincial books. On the one hand, we
aspire to a mirage known as "wide-ranging" and "popular" — suggesting mass
markets and best-sellers. On the other hand, we are bound up in regionalism. And
this is at a time of intensely global activity generally but also particularly among
English writers. A lot of the most interesting (and I would say innovative) work
these days involves a kind of internationalism — writing that, for instance, blends
several languages in the same piece. John Havelda mixing Portuguese, Hungarian
and English. Or Erin Mouré's French/English, Galician/English or
Portuguese/English. Or Tomson Highway's Ojibway/English. Internationalism too
in the hybriding of genres — Ashok Mathur's play/novel Once Upon an Elephant.
Gail Scott's and Daphne Marlatt's prose inflected with poetry. Steve McCaffery's
borrowings from musical form, melding of discourses from different historical
epochs, or collaging of literary with non-literary genres.
At the same time there's a crisis of intelligibility. What's innovative is thought not
to be intelligible. And what's intelligible is tangled up by the requirement that it
must sell. So there's a crisis of values here as well. What's changing also is that
the last generation of innovators (which established some of the non-mainstream
publishers like Coach House) is now retiring and the presses themselves are
developing ruts — big editorial boards, e.g. — bureaucratic rules, etc. — no longer
driven by visionary founders. So the next generation of innovators must found
their own presses and their own nexus of intelligence. It feels as though, in
Canada, we still need to do what Pound, Williams and Olson did for the U.S.
rm: That’s true. Most Canadian writing doesn’t really interest me anymore, and I
find I have to work much harder to find what does, and regionalism becomes a
serious problem. It works on one level, but if there’s no one there to connect the
regions, then what’s the point? Is this frustration with publishers part of the
reason you started publishing as Nomados?
MQ: Nomados grew from a nomadic act, which was the writing back to another
poet in poetry — hence a conversation at the level of poetic community. I had been
reading the Philly Talks and was particularly struck by the Lisa Robertson/Steve
McCaffery issue — how in some ways they talked across each other — their world
views seemed so different leaving a sort of Lyotardian incommensurable gap. Their
conversation was particularly brilliant at making this gap visible. I had received
some poems from Robin Blaser and decided to conduct my own Philly Talk but this
time in poetry. This is how the Wanders poems emerged. But who would publish
such a thing? Nomados was founded to do that.
And the thing is, I really like lots of Canadian writers. Some very interesting work
is emerging in this country — but institutionalized Canadian Literature lags
behind. Locked into conventional genre forms, for instance. So Nomados is
continuing to publish writers whose work breaks conventional locks — freeing
boats from canals — letting hair down out up.
rm: I think the whole very nature of “institutionalized” literature, in any context,
is to lag behind. It seems to be that CanLit has yet to catch up to bpNichol, despite
him having co-won a Governor General’s Award around the time I was born. It’s
almost as though our literature isn’t mature enough to acknowledge its own
“avant-garde.” More like a seventeen-year-old boy who wants to be different, but in
the way everyone else is different.
It’s interesting you mention Philly Talks, run by former Ottawa lad Louis Cabri,
compiled as a series of conversations between writers & writing, and available
almost completely on-line. Do you think the internet has allowed a number of
Canadian works, specifically, to get around the institutions, or even thrive despite
them? When I met poet Jennifer Moxley in Maine, for example, her notion of
CanLit was completely unburdened by the 1960's & 1970's canon.
MQ: I don't know about specific Canadian works getting around the canon. But
there has been a proliferation of websites publishing writing that refuses to adopt
traditional forms of coherence and writing that is developing new ways to make
formal sense. I'm thinking of Canadian sites like The Alterran Poetry Assemblage
run by David Dowker, Alienated.net, The North American Centre for
Interdisciplinary Poetics run by Steve McCaffery. The Kootenay School of Writing
has put their publication W on-line. And of course I started The News with
Jacqueline Turner. There's also Narrativity, a site that explores new narrative forms,
run by Gail Scott and three others, and Poetics.ca. Then there are other well-known
sites for literary counterculture such as the Buffalo Poetics list, with members all
over North America. Potepoetzine, run by Peter Ganick, and Jacket, edited by John
Trantor in Australia, are a couple more that I'm aware of.I think the literary counterculture is thriving on the net. Writers are meeting each
other via large forums like the Buffalo Poetics List which was started by language
poet Charles Bernstein. Calls for submissions are frequently posted on this list
from print magazines and e-zines publishing new writing. These resources
maintain a community of possibilities for writers interested in bending literary
practice out of the standard fare in college textbooks.
rm: You’re so sweet to mention poetics.ca. I didn’t know potepoetzine still existed.
Wasn’t Ganick once a Vancouver poet? And I hear you’ve just had a poetry
manuscript accepted by Edmonton’s NeWest Press. How does it feel to (finally)
have your first full collection (with a trade publisher) about to appear? And do you
see this altering your own considerations of your writing? What about your novel,
for example?
MQ: I'm very pleased about the NeWest publication. It feels great. I don't know
how it will change things, but it's bound to have some effect. Most unconventional
writers experience some angst when they are recognized by a more conventional
audience. There is often the temptation to try to repeat something that was seen as
conventionally "successful". In the meantime I'm continuing to approach writing as
discovery. My current project is not a "novel" but rather prose poems, something
along the lines of A Thousand Mornings — a series of short pieces and letters —
somewhat diaristic, based on a 6-month period of research and mapping
expeditions in the City of Vancouver.
rm: The prose-poem is something that doesn’t seem to be too prevalent in
Canadian writing, most corners still stuck in the lyric. What is it about working in
the prose-poem that appeals to you?
MQ: One prose writer whom I enjoy a great deal is the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa
(also a poet). His Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, consists of a
series of prose fragments written over several decades, and mostly published after
his death. One passage that really struck me is the following (from text 227):
"Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these
are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints,
automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak
freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can
incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An
occasional poetic rhythm won't disturb prose, but an occasional prose
rhythm makes poetry fall down.
Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole
world, and in part because the untrammelled word contains every
possibility for saying and thinking. In prose, through transposition,
we're able to render everything: colour and form, which painting can
render only directly, in themselves, with no inner dimension; rhythm,
which music likewise renders only directly, in itself, without a formal
body, let alone that second body which is the idea . . .
I'm convinced that in a perfect civilized world there would be no other
art but prose. We would let sunsets be sunsets, using art merely to
understand them verbally, by conveying them in an intelligible music
of colour. . . .
Even what we might call the minor arts have their echoes in prose.
There is prose that dances, sings and recites to itself. There are verbal
rhythms with a sinuous choreography, in which the idea being
expressed strips off its clothing with veritable and exemplary
sensuality. And there are also in prose gestural subtleties carried out
by a great actor, the Word, which rhythmically transforms into its
bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe."
Of course, Pessoa here is speaking through Bernardo Soares, one of his many alter
egos, who claims to be incapable of writing poetry, so the whole thing must be
taken as a somewhat ironic statement. Yet there is a certain amount of truth in it.
Prose, as a medium, includes poetic moves, maybe all the poetic moves. Prose is an
open territory in which all the other genres may play parts.
Speaking of Paris Spleen, Baudelaire asks "Which one of us, in his moments of
ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without
rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the
lyrical impulses of the soul, undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience . . ." One
of the advantages of poetic prose, Baudelaire notes, is that it is not bound by the
plot formulas of conventional fiction: "We can cut wherever we please, I my
dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not keep the
reader's restive mind hanging in suspense on the threads of an interminable and
superfluous plot."
rm: A thread that runs through much of your work is not only geography, but maps,
repeatedly used both as cover image and content. Does the fascination stem from
the notions of “place,” “travel” or “destination?”MQ: So far, three thoughts on this question. One of my student jobs was being a
fire-tower lookout, which meant living alone on top of a mountain and reading
contour maps to locate fires. Writer as fire detector, hmmm.
Second thought: scientists have discovered that rats in mazes will always explore
their surroundings before doing anything else, even hungry rats who are given food.
They’ve found out that the rat’s brain assigns every corner and every intersection in
the maze to a particular brain cell, in effect mapping the maze in a configuration
of individual brain cells. As a wired rat moves through the maze, each location is
marked by the firing of a different neuron, which the scientist watches on a
computer screen. See also the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
Third thought: the maze is the spectacle of the material economy (Guy Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle) where lived reality occurs outside a closed system of
appearances, false choices and pseudo-events (commodities contemplating each
other), in a world utterly enthralled by market economics. Lived experience is cut
off, uncommunicable in the language of this dominant spectacle — misunderstood
and forgotten. In other words, lived experience (life itself) is not on THE map.
Hence writer as cartographer.
Further thoughts on place: Is Canada a place? or a word? The Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben argues that the Spectacle is language itself, that the very
communicability which humans have can operate as an alienating totalitarianism.
Human cultures live in words; words are the quintessential places. Agamben also
argues that for the first time humans may now experience themselves as linguistic
beings; they may stop looking through language at mirages of things beyond and
instead recognize the way language empowers some and disempowers others — the
way language controls masses of people without their consciousness.
rm: How does one define geography in those terms? Considering how much you
write about geography, do you think it become a self-definition?
MQ: Geography means writing the earth, or you might say writing the world. It
seems to me that the act of writing the world is the act of creating it. As such I
would hope that this writing keeps rewriting itself, or that writers, as geographers
keep rewriting the world-space, and keep approaching it as an act which must
unfold in the presence of a plurality of such actors (geographers), so that there is
no definitive world or definitive geography, but rather an ongoing discussion or
network of stories. I am at the moment deeply engrossed in Hannah Arendt’s
The Human Condition, which sets out the ancient Greek notion of a public realm
where such a discussion could take place, free of the preoccupations of the
marketplace, and free of the necessity of subsistence. She argues that this public
realm is now completely filled up with the society of jobholders, leaving no room
for world-writing in the way I imagine might be possible as a political discussion.
Currently our whole lives are taken up with the two aspects of subsistence and
necessity: labour, and consumption, which really are entirely private matters. This
is not so because it has to be, but rather because of the forces that have come to
dominate our culture. I am indebted to Robin Blaser for leading me to Arendt’s
work. Much of what has preoccupied Robin Blaser has been the recovery of such a
public world, and of course Hannah Arendt’s work is seminal to his investigations.
As to whether geography can amount to self-definition, I think it’s completely
impossible to define oneself in the kind of world-writing in the public realm I’ve
described. The whole point of a public interaction between world-writer geographers
is a story that must be told by someone else. Who the geographer is unfolds in the
interaction. However, that said, I am constantly aware of the geography of language,
the contours, rifts, subductions, tectonic plates of the medium in which we exist. A
sculpturing of our land-base has already occurred over the millennia of linguistic
evolution and we too can erode it, or upheave it, and we can also map it.
If you’d like a poem that connects to some of my concerns with geography, here are
a couple:
Geography
No, I want Nana here and aunty there
under the bower —
brother disappeared, outfoxed her
well, where is he, mom,
it’s time for the garter toss —
white chiffon princess pacing the hall
smoking a cigarette
a bevy of Miss Northern Ontario contestants
flocks through —
arms dangling, shoulders slightly hunched,
heads of hair on swan-necks, all blonde
sprayed and highlighted — piled high —
all sporting diagonal ribbons through their breasts —
Miss Timmins, Miss Kapuskasing,
Miss Kirkland Lake . . . .
(2002)
Prayer for Geography
To all who fall
to matter
write the earth
a space of white
break of bread
plates break in relief
write stones cocks cry
to collected waters
or hollow fire of iron.
Eat atmosphere, a garland
sift on a drift
post out the earth's hearth
to horizon and swallow heat
of antipodes
plants ride out in leaves
to mirror oceans
to finger rivers tribulations
smooth away our tombs.
Figures of earth, press out our bodies.
Strange our urge into that which takes stand.
Distribute our loom
work through the scape the seek of air
each ear our forgotten art.
For these are our herdsmen
and without this earth as
risk we have no
right of river hear
our three yonders a sphere
of being of geography to the
ring
of ocean above them
the maps antipodean
tenderness in all who fall
to matter who come simply
to throw shadows on the moon's
shifting horizon who
devote constellations to the ends
of the earth wide
from the road of symmetry.
(1998)