by Carey Toane

Part of TDR’s Behemoth Gargantuan Canadian Poetry in Review

The first essay in Roo Borson's Personal History (Pedlar Press, 2008) is quintessentially "personal"; "Annis Minion Long" is a short and emotional recollection of her beloved childhood housekeeper. But like all eight essays in Borson's eleventh book - the first exclusively in prose - it is also about writing, memory, magic, art, and how they intersect.

Borson casually calls her approach "the personal-in-the-impersonal, or the impersonal-in-the-personal," and uses it throughout the collection to range from the work of artists Andy Patton (with whom she has collaborated along with Kim Maltman as Pain Not Bread) and Sheila Ayearst to the deaths of her parents, all the while quietly revising the reader’s definition of "personal."

Previously Borson, who has twice won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, as well as the Griffin Prize in 2005, published seven of these essays individually in various journals ­ this collection from Pedlar links them together and rounds it out with one more, "Blackberrying in the Metropolis." She is currently working on her tenth solo collection of poetry, as well as a new collaboration with Maltman under the pen name Baziju. She lives in Toronto.

RB: The original motivation was to learn how to write prose, or rather to discover what kind of prose I (as a poet) could work in. It turned out that I was drawn toward the personal-in-the-impersonal, or the impersonal-in-the-personal, or, if I can say it this way, the transpersonal. Many people who look at varieties of writing think in fixed categories: non-fiction versus fiction, personal versus objective, and this applies especially to the essay form. It's common for people to expect to find opinions, arguments, proofs, and answers in essays, things I don't believe are intrinsic to the form. I'm interested in the essay as a mode of exploration. I like the feeling that a piece can venture anywhere, and make connections that are not necessarily expected but conform to an internal logic that can only be encountered in the unfolding of the thought.

I write from experience, including but not limited to experiences absorbed through reading, or looking at paintings, or walking in particular landscapes; experiences that arise from what are often considered different sectors of life spark off one another. The result is always "personal," in the sense that I can't claim to speak for anyone else, though what I'm looking at is the world, whether up close or at some distance. Essays, for me, are motivated by curiosity. In general I listen for echoes rather than answers. Even asking another question in response to a question can be a kind of answer, in the sense of a variation, or echo.

RB: In that particular essay I was of course talking about what Sheila was doing in her paintings, or rather about some of the ways they affected me as a viewer. I would say that at this point I'm too close to the book to be able to step back. I'm still in that up-close, hazy consciousness state of mind. It takes me around ten years, or however long it takes to have forgotten that I've written something, to see it clearly, as from a distance, or as if someone other than myself had written it. By then, the younger person who wrote it will be, in many ways, no longer me, no longer a person who thinks as I do.

RB: They are indeed arranged in roughly, but not precisely, chronological order, or rather they are arranged in not-quite-chronological order if you look at the date each essay might have been started. Everything I write is worked on for a very long time, and some pieces may be finished long before others (which may actually have been started earlier) feel complete. It is not an orderly process. I can only think of working (as if forever) on a given piece. It is only in this way that the connections, or transactions between events, that have meaning for me can be made. Events have to take place in the life outside of writing before they can take place, as if for a second time, and with new connections, inside it. But the order of the pieces in this collection was arrived at not by chronology but by listening to the music of the ending and the beginning of each of the essays I wanted to include, which is one way to organize a poetry manuscript as well.

A manuscript can be sewn together musically so that if one reads from the first page to the last, an arc, or particular gesture, is made, primarily in sound (which is nothing but the sound of the language read aloud) but also through image and emotional tone. The simple way to say this is that it starts somewhere, and ends somewhere else, with echoes that multiply along the way. If it's read more than once, more of the echoes, including some of the subtler ones, may become hearable.

In an age of "short shelf life," I still work on pieces of writing such that they can be read many times, and hopefully more can be gained by doing so. Though this attitude is out of date, it still seems to me the only thing worth doing.

RB: In the most ordinary, material sense, poetry is a traveller's art form because of course you don't need to haul canvasses, or pianos, around with you. Scraps of paper and a pen will do. They're light and easy to transport and can be kept near at hand with little trouble.

In a second sense, we carry language around with us always. If you own a print of a painting, you don't have the artwork as it was made; whereas if you have memorized a poem (unless it's one of the varieties of concrete poem), you have the actual object. This seems miraculous. (If, on the other hand, you've illegally copied someone's poem, you've stolen it, and you may well be depriving the writer of the livelihood needed to make more poems as well as to simply continue to live.) These are some of the mysteries around reproduction in the different art forms.

But as for travel, I think someone very wise once said that each year you should travel to a place you've never been. It doesn't matter if the place is near or far, it matters only that it's new to you. This keeps a sense of perspective alive, which may be an answer to one of your earlier questions. One place I keep going back to, when I'm able, is South Australia. It's a place where my usual compunctions and worries fall away. I've so far been to Japan only once, but I'd like to go back. Ditto lots of places. The mountainous regions of China. Nearer at hand, I like to walk in the ravines in Toronto. Wherever I am, I like to walk a lot and look around. Walking and speaking have the same rhythm for me.

RB: I wish I did. That is, I wish I were already able to practice any or all of them. But given limited resources and time, I'm happy enough working with words. They are endlessly surprising and recalcitrant, as I suppose are the materials of all the other arts. If things had been slightly different, I might have gone in the direction of music instead.

RB: Hmmm. An interesting question, but how can I answer? On one level, I "left out" a number of other essays I've written, but these were not intended to be part of this book, as it's neither a miscellany nor a "collected." And of course I "left out" parts that were revised away through the many drafts, even as other parts were added in their place. None of the other "leavings out" are of my own choosing, as I can only

work with the materials that present themselves. I felt there was something subtle that could only be conveyed in this form, and so I was motivated to add this "something" to the fossil record in the shape of a book. And of course I was lucky in that [Pedlar publisher] Beth Follett was willing to make this happen, and in such a beautiful physical form.

I suppose this might be an appropriate place to reiterate something about the personal and the impersonal. Some readers might be surprised to find very little they consider "personal," while others may be surprised to find so much that strikes them as being so. If the paintings of certain artists are included in my "personal history," then possibly this "personal history" might potentially have some effect in the lives of a few particular readers. Experience remains private in a certain sense, but intellection and emotion and bodily sensation all play a part in each person's experience of the world, and the world itself is composed in part of other people and their experiences, transmitted, rather magically, through language, sensation, and art. And now it occurs to me: one answer to your question (what is hidden?) might be that very something that takes place in the interchange between the title of the book and its contents: in this life, what is personal, and what is impersonal? If so, the hidden thing is in plain sight, like Poe's letter.

Carey Toane is an editor at a trade magazine and the host of Toronto reading series Pivot at the Press Club (http://pivotreadings.wordpress.com)