Douglas Barbour Feature

Douglas Barbour in conversation with Jenna Butler Conducted by e-mail, April-June 2009

Jenna: I’m curious about your latest collection from the University of Alberta Press, Continuations, with Sheila E. Murphy. I realize that you and Sheila have been working on the Continuations project for some time now. What is it about the project that draws you back? (The necessity of responding to / engaging with language as it’s offered in that continual back-and-forth?)

Doug: Well, we have been writing at this thing now for almost a decade & it remains, at least for me, a delight & a challenge. We’re working on Section 82 now, & it just gathers, I guess I’d say. I think we’d like to find a publisher for #s 26–50, as 24 sections are certainly a good book length. I think we’d edit it down a bit too, as we did 1–25, which was also interesting as even the editing was a collaborative enterprise. After we wrote the Postscript to Continuations, & it was published, I found this great quote by EmmyLou Harris about her collaboration with Mark Knopfler (tho it could apply to all her collaborations): ‘When you combine two unique voices it creates a third, phantom voice.’ That, it seems to me, is the ideal of poetic collaboration, too: that the ‘voice’ of the poem is something ‘other’ than either of our ‘voices’ when we write our own work (although I’ll happily talk about why ‘voice’ is a kind of will o’ the wisp in poetics, & should perhaps be put aside as a way of talking about how a poem sounds the way it does).

What draws me back to continue the project is partly the fun, partly the way it keeps me grounded in some writing every day or so, & most certainly the challenge ‘of responding to / engaging with language as it’s offered in that continual back-and-forth,’ as you put it. I think we both ‘listen’ to the other’s ongoing writing, in the 6 line stanzas, trying to pick up something in the previous stanza & riffing off that, but I have found looking back (& perhaps with more awareness as we go on) that all kinds of other contextual stuff gets in there, so each of our politics, & political situations. As well as probably more personal experiences enter in one way or another. But not ‘lyrically,’ in the usual sense because there is no ‘I’ emoting here. Tho some performing ‘I’s undoubtedly get in every so often. It remains, for me, & I hope for Sheila, an engaging exploration of possibilities.

Jenna: You mention the idea of ‘listening’ to each other’s writing, sounding out what’s come before in your collaborative work and ‘riffing’ off that. The jazz terminology reminds of something you said earlier, in Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing:

Poetry is, for me as a writer anyway, an act of rhythm, & it is in that act that the body emerges in action. I am a jazz fan, & I write for rhythm’s sake. To make the words dance. Across the field of the page, the stage they play upon. But in the ear, listening, too. Free, & easy, sounding, pounding out the rhythms of life as we breathe it.

I love this notion of writing for the sake of the rhythm in the words, both in the ear and on the page, that sense of attentiveness. How easy is it to attune yourself to that rhythm when working with a collaborator? Has it become easier to ‘listen out for one another,’ as it were, as you’ve gone along?

Doug: I think so, certainly I can see how carefully Sheila listens, to everything really. I hope I do so, too. I think we write from stanza to stanza watching the rhythm of each, & striving for it line by line. I will say that rhythm, not meter, remains critically important to me as I write. And for me, such rhythm is tied to that notion of Pound’s about ‘an absolute rhythm’ & what he called ‘melopoeia,’ as transferred down the line thru such poets as Creeley (who loved jazz) & Webb, to name just two of many influences. So I still believe & try to write in a manner dependent upon that comment you quote.

This leads to my continuing interest in the line as such, in how to always put line breaks to use, & in hoping that such rhythmic play comes across to the ear, but also to the eye. Phyllis Webb has a great essay on the line, but said even more in an interview with Stephen Scobie & me (which, alas, only appeared in an issue of Writing some time ago). At any rate, although I agree somewhat with Pound’s idea that rhythm is one’s own, ‘uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable,’ I also believe that a collaboration’s rhythm(s) will be unique to that particular writing. But it definitely helps if the collaborators share a more or less similar poetics (which Sheila & I do).

Jenna: You’ve spoken before of how, for you, the rhythms of language are intrinsically connected to / influenced by the prairie landscape. Just as jazz is contingent upon this continual listening, being open to & accepting of rhythm, how would you say you’re “listening for the land,” as it were, in your writing? Do you find yourself doing this to such an extent now as you did with the poems in, for example, Story for a Saskatchewan Night?

Doug: Hmmnn, good question, as I haven’t really thought about that. I would argue that in a funny way being grounded in a prairie landscape allows (I’m not sure of the right term here) for a sense of minimalism that, in my case anyway, has led me to a love of abstract art, for example, a willingness to sink into, for example, the paintings of Mark Rothko (who wasn’t from the prairies, so it isn’t a necessary given), an excitement at very small shifts & changes. I see something of this in, for example, the sly understatement of John Newlove, but it’s clear that for some prairie dwellers a richly symbolic & metaphoric writing works, so this is probably me. Do I listen to the land? I don’t know, as I have moved, as I have sometimes said, from a sense of landscape to languagescape, but the latter is metaphorically tied to the former. I think.

How did jazz etc attach to this? I don’t know, & yet I do know that I still find myself looking, in the work I read as well as my own writing, for some kind of rhythmic intensity, although I’m never sure exactly how to define it (how in prose poems? How in certain kinds of deliberately ‘flat’ verse?). And I know that that’s not exactly what some writers want to have in their writing, so then I have to recognize that & not deny the writing because it lacks something I like so much. But that’s a whole other conundrum.

There’s more to it than this, of course. Certain poetries also influenced my sense of rhythm. And some of the poets I admired obviously also listened to music (& I assume found it influenced them). bpNichol listened to jazz, for sure, also classical & avant garde & various kinds of rock (he showed me just how great The Beach Boys were). Phyllis Webb I assume knows a lot about classical music; she may have listened to jazz, but I’ve never heard her talk about music as such. Among the New American poets whose influence I have felt, Robert Creeley was deeply into bop, & I suspect they all listened to jazz, which was very much a part of the scene in the 50s & 60s. I think I hear jazz, as The USAmerican art form, inherent in their writing. Given that I listen to music all the time, I cannot think that it isn’t in mine.

Hmmn, I see that I’ve gone back to an earlier question more than forward into the one you asked. Well, to get back to one kind of ‘prairie poetics,’ I do think that my sense of minimal landscape changes, how exciting the smallest shifts in vision can be, has affected my approach to writing poetry. but so many further aspects of poetics have added to my sense of what’s possible in the years since my early, mostly outward, landscape, poems, & I didn’t want to keep repeating the same kind of poems, so many other influences came to bear upon the way I approach each moment of writing (which simply means, I hope, that I have many more ways to draw upon as I begin to write).

Jenna:Well, your latest publication, Wednesdays’, from rob mclennan’s above/ground press, certainly strikes out in a different direction. It’s a beautiful and highly-charged little chapbook, and I can definitely see your visceral reaction to the Iraq War in there. But there’s also a great deal that is closer to home underpinning the poems, a certain uneasy balance struck between the familiar and the foreign. Can you speak to what’s going on for you in this chapbook?

Doug:Aside from trying to get some poems written? In fact, the title points to the fact that some time ago on poetryetc., an international poetry and poetics listserve (as it styles itself), someone suggested starting a weekly posting of new, & usually immediately written, poems, called ‘snaps,’ to underline the quick take aspect they were supposed to manifest. And it caught on. There are a couple of people in there who have managed to get something in every week, but many of those who join in do so sporadically. Anyway, snaps day is Wednesday, so these are Wednesday’s poems.

As some of the dates show, I wrote them (usually on the Wednesday) over a period of years, & so many of them do, in fact, respond to news headlines, local & international, as well as to stuff just happening in the neighbourhood. The snaps really invited Ginsberg’s ‘First thought, best thought’ approach, which in itself was (is) interesting. I wanted to keep them short, snappy, & yet somehow try to make them sound as solid, rhythmically, as I could. I like that you feel they have ‘a certain uneasy balance struck between the familiar and the foreign’; am not sure I thought of them attempting that, but it pleases me if they achieved it. Certainly, they are, in a specific way, ‘occasional poems,’ something I usually don’t think of myself as trying, but what occasioned them ranges fairly widely, from the highly public to the specifically personal.

Wednesdays’, Douglas Barbour’s newest collection of poetry, is now available online from above/ground press at http://www.ottawater.com/albertaseries/albertaseven.html

Jenna Butler is the founding editor of Rubicon Press. Her work has garnered a number of awards and has been published both in Canada and internationally in literary magazines, anthologies and journals. Butler lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she teaches literature and rhetoric at MacEwan College. Her first full-length collection of poems, Aphelion, is forthcoming from NeWest Press.