“Bass Guitar and Bathtub Readings”: An Interview with Catherine Owen
Catherine Owen is a Vancouver poet who has published seven trade books and five chapbooks. Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009) won the Alberta literary award. Seeing Lessons is recently out from Wolsak and Wynn, also the publishers of Catalysts, a collection of essays and memoirs, due out in fall 2011. Her work has been nominated for the BC Book Award, the CBC prize, and the ARC Poem of the Year Award, among others. She plays bass in the metal band Medea and works as a freelance tutor-editor.
The following interview was conducted via email between December 19th and 21st, 2010.
Darryl Salach: You completed your master’s degree at Simon Fraser University with poet Robinson Jeffers being the focal point of your studies. How has Jeffers poetry influenced you in your own writing and what do you like best about his poetry? Do you have a few favourite poems by Jeffers you would like to mention?
Catherine Owen: Robinson Jeffers’ influence on my poetry has perhaps been more in relation to his writing & life praxis and less to his actual poems. I greatly admire his book length works, such as Cawdor or The Double Axe, with the massive breath of their quantitative lines and their epic and tragic subject matter. I also love his terse poignant ecologically grounded lyrics like “Love the Wild Swan” and “Return.” But my own work has drawn less from his style and more from his Inhumanist ideologies, as well as his utter devotion to a life in art as exemplified by his geographical removal from the mainstream and his regular writing routine.
DS: How important is form and structure to you when you’re writing poetry? Do you prefer writing within the parameters of more traditional structure such as the sonnet or ghazal?
CO: Form is definitely a powerful channel through which mystery can travel within certainty. Although I write poems outside of traditional forms, I do love a historically-based structure to explore within. When I compose the ghazal or sonnet forms however, I am aware that these are translations of the original form, adaptations, re-visionings, as in my free-verse collaborative sonnets written with Joe Rosenblatt or my “flood-ghazals” in Frenzy. Forms are essential elements in every poet’s “tool box” and at one time or another I have challenged myself to write at least one poem in every form I can find in order to extend my poetic skills.
DS: What constitutes a good poem in your opinion and when do you know that you’ve written a good poem, and how extensive is your editing process?
CO: I trust my ear. Whether I’m reading or writing poetry, I recite the piece aloud and listen for the chimings or echoings between vowels and consonants; breath pauses, end breaks, enjambments and the precision of the chosen diction. The extensiveness of editing depends on the particular poem. Longer pieces require more than shorter, generally, as I tend toward wordiness and abstractions when I stray away from the lyric. I like to write the entire piece, if possible, at once, in draft form and then leave it for awhile, tinker with it, torque it here and there, sometimes bring it to an online or actual writer’s group for a range of feedback. Poetry should be written with the ear. I can’t emphasize this enough. Poets are word musicians and a poem is a score for language.
DS: What has the experience of collaborating with poet Joe Rosenblatt been like for you and have you got any new projects planned together for 2011?
CO: Joe and I started collaborating on sonnets in about 2004. He would write the octet, I the sestet or vice versa, both of us inspired by Karen Moe’s photos of Cuban dogs in Havana. I find collaborations of most kinds invigorating, challenging, stimulating and at times, a tad aggravating. As Joe says, you have to put your ego on the shelf and enter the collaborator’s voice, their ways of seeing the world, even their little quirks like a tendency to neologise in my case. But mostly he’s a hell of a lot of fun to work with, pushing my imagination in new directions, especially in our most recent collaboration, out next year with both Jackpine and Black Moss in excerpted and entire versions, called dark fish & other infernos: epistles and poems. In this manuscript I not only wrote in a form I’d never written in before, but assumed multiple voices and personas in this rather surreal version of Rilke’s Letters to a (not so) young poet.
In the past few years, I have also collaborated with photographers like Paul Saturley on a year-long web based project and next Spring will see the fruition of my multi-media project with Sydney Lancaster, a piece that involves poetry, video, and installations. Recently, I’ve also begun co-writing a novella with Johnny Pigeau called Last Days of Delirium as well, so we’ll see where all this goes in the new year.
DS: When did you start playing the bass and what attracted you to metal music? What metal band are you currently involved with and what projects are you working on within the band?
CO: I didn’t start playing the bass until 2001. I was raised on classical and world music and played the violin from 3-11 years old. I then dabbled in drums and the guitar before picking up the bass when my partner, Chris, and I started our band, Inhuman. I have been listening to metal since I was 12, attracted I suppose by its sexy forms of aggression, its occult energies, its speeds and its moods. Inhuman was a blackmetal band lyrically influenced by The Bible and Robinson Jeffers; Helgrind, the doom band we later started in Edmonton in 2008, was shaped by existential texts from Camus to Sartre. Medea is my current solo project, and its lyrics are the reworking of Greek myths from occult perspectives. Musically, I listen to everything from Schuman to Absu and Eluveitie to Hildegard von Bingen.
DS: What are some of the similarities between your music and your poetry? Do you write all of the lyrics for the band?
CO: As I wrote earlier, poets are word musicians. The arts are not rigidly distinct for me, though I would say my primary artistic practice is always a poetic one and it is through this art form that other arts are manifested. Poetically and musically, I want to take risks, do things that haven’t perhaps been done before to that extent and engage with darker subject matter. With Inhuman I wrote most of the lyrics and a few of the riffs; with Helgrind all the lyrics and half the riffs and with Medea so far all the lyrics and all the instrumental parts too, except for two songs Chris composed prior to his death in April of 2010.
DS: Tell us about the last poetry book you read, other than your own, that made you go, WOW!
CO: There have been a few this year! But let me see, the last one. I suppose in the grieving state I’m in that American poet Mary Jo Bang’s book Elegy really affected me with its moving sequence of lyrics for her son who seems to have also died of a drug addiction. Canadian-wise, I’d have to say Steven Heighton’s Patient Frame for its unswerving commitment to difficult political subject matter and what could be cringing forms of nostalgia, but isn’t, due to the mastery of his ear.
DS: Do you think the Canadian poetry scene is as vibrant as it’s ever been and what changes if any would you like to see implemented in order to get more people reading poetry?
CO: As vibrant as it was when, the ’60s, the ’90s? I can only speak for the latter era, but no. I think that social networking tools, at their best, assist people to make connections they wouldn’t otherwise make and that this can revivify Canadian poetry by linking together disparate scenes and communities. I know I found Facebook invaluable in setting up my recent poetry tours, enabling me to access reading series and contacts that had formerly been hard to locate. However, social networking also leads to a deeper sense of isolation and less of a willingness to take risks in terms of setting up performance events. I would like to see more home-based series and events that meld writers from different genres and styles, as well as introducing them to artists in other mediums.
I also think we need to buy at least one book of poetry, especially us poets (!), per month. Or even every few months. Think of how that would boost the Canadian poetry market. As would more poets writing reviews, whether as blogs or for journals. Newspapers need to bring back the daily poem. And radio. Radio needs to draw on poets more avidly for its programming. To me this medium is perfect for the poetic arts. The oral nature of poetry requires further emphasis without sacrificing its textual integrity. I am also fine with being a bit of a pariah however. Find me in the dark.
DS: Do you have aspirations of writing a novel one day and do you think it’s important for a poet to try their hand at different genres of writing?
CO: I am working on what I’m loosely calling a novella-memoir at the moment, Wake, and yes I do think it’s vital that poets work on multiple forms and genres. Write a novel though? Not necessarily. My mind doesn’t function like a novelist’s does. My focus is always first on the sounds of language, its rhythms and structures. Content is second. I am learning how to write dialogue but still, my mind doesn’t operate on plot, but on tempo and cadence. I prefer to attempt children’s books, essays, plays and short, what I call sliver, fiction.
DS: How important is reading your poetry on stage in front of an audience? What sorts of things do you often learn from those experiences?
CO: Extremely important. Not because I’m a performance poet but because poetry is an aural and oral art form. As such, the act of composing can be completed in a sense by the act of performing. It is not essential, but certainly recommended. I have traveled across Canada many times now reciting from my books and I find it more and more satisfying. Through practice and trust and experience, my performances have become a kind of completion for the text, a way to enact its particular score. I turn from years of solitary writing and editing to working with a publisher to set up the tours and distribute the book. I do feel this is both a required duty for the poet in this vast land and a vital role I assume with joy.
I have learned that audiences come out; they may not always buy the book, but they love to hear poetry recited aloud and thereby participate in the discovery of new poetic visions.
DS: Do you consider yourself more a traditional poet or more of an experimental poet? Would the bathtub readings be an example of your experimental side?
CO: Both. My poetry can be traditional but I myself as a person am quite experimental. My willingness to collaborate attests to that facet. And yes, the bathtub reading on You Tube where I allowed myself to be pelted with all manner of objects from false limbs to cucumbers while I recited a piece of short fiction shows, I suppose, a side of myself that is a bit loopy and not afraid to look ridiculous in order to “see what happens.” More often than not, I have no regrets.
DS: What should readers expect from your forthcoming book Catalysts (Wolsak and Wynn) due out in 2011?
CO: It’s a compilation of essays, memoirs and reviews written over the past twelve years, mostly within the last four or five. There are four sections. The first is memoirs of childhood in relation to how its books and memories shape the writer; the second is reviews and critical essays on everything from ecological poetry to the connection between troubadour culture and the metal scene; the third attends to the collaborative process and the fourth features travelogues to places where I sought the muse in its manifest forms. It’s a mishmash miscellany of a lot of the flotsam and jetsam of life and art that compels me.
DS: What final words of advice would you give to up-and-coming writers who hope to one day be published?
CO: Have a fierce vision that cannot be dismantled by dissuasion. If you would rather die than write, truly, then you are meant to be writing. There will be dark paths you will go down. Persistence is essential. Read copiously. Be unafraid of revision. I am reminded of the 12th century poet Raimbaut D’Aurenga who said, “I take hail to be a flower.”
