“Black Liquor and the Poetics of Violence”: An Interview with Dennis E. Bolen

Dennis E. Bolen hails from British Columbia where he helped build subTerrain magazine in 1989. Bolen is an established novelist, short fiction author, teacher, and he also served as a parole officer for many years. His most recent publications include Anticipated Results (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011), Kaspoit! (Anvil Press, 2009), and Toy Gun (Anvil Press, 2005). For this interview we delved inside his first poetry collection, Black Liquor (Caitlin Press, 2013), and found out what “Growing Up Industrial” was like on the West Coast.  This interview was conducted via email between October and December 2013.   Tracy Kyncl: You have written several novels and two short fiction collections, but Black Liquor is your first book of poetry, and one that Mark Little described (at your Type Books launch) as a kind of memoir. You worked for the Correctional Services of Canada for over two decades and much of your fiction deals with crime, but Black Liquor deals with your roots—your experience of “Growing Up Industrial”—in addition to your career as a parole officer. Why have you turned to poetry at this point in your career? Does poetry allow you to write more autobiographically than fiction? Would you say that Black Liquor is your poetic Künstlerroman?  Dennis E. Bolen: It’s true that I spent a long time in the Parole Service and three of my eight books involve that experience, but I must clarify at the outset—lest anyone mistake—I am not now, nor have I ever been, a “crime writer.” Those novels of the Stupid Crimes trilogy are what I like to call (even if nobody else does!) “hard-hitting sociological realism” (though you’d be hard-pressed to find that section in even the biggest bookstore). They have little of the “crime” conventions such as a puzzle, a body found on the first page and a murderer revealed at the last, or an invincible protagonist, though I do admire the hard-boiled prose style of the best of the genre classics. Way back when, I enjoyed channeling Raymond Chandler, trying by way of gritty observation and noble character to explain my life on the social-work streets of heroin-soaked Vancouver. In real life, I aspired—though not often successfully—to live up to his “Philip Marlow” maxim: “The Detective must be the best man for his world and a good enough man for any world.” Even though it was the dawn of the baseball-cap era, it was fun to imagine myself wearing a fedora. But no, after all those years getting culture in the creative writing workshops of UVic, I wrote literary novels with what was sometimes described as “elegant prose” and which both inhabited and employed a criminal milieu. The first book—Stupid Crimes—made Editor’s Choice at the Globe & Mail, and I was soon at Random House signing a deal to re-issue that one and write two more. I was so jazzed at getting a big-time publishing deal that neither myself nor my agent fully examined their big-league brains to see if RH actually understood this literary/crime variation subtlety that I was practicing. Thus, come time to market, I never did get anyone to see what my stuff actually was. Crime geeks can tell a book with literary pretensions from across a bookstore. Literary fans wouldn’t normally give “crime” books a first look. So I appealed to neither market. I am thus, despite a good stack of major publications, unencumbered with the mantle of fame and fortune, alas (especially as regards the latter). All this is by way of expressing my personal conviction that, were one to come and examine the prose in the Stupid Crimes volumes now, or my Holocaust novel Stand in Hell (hate that title!), or Kaspoit!, which is 300+ pages of unassigned dialogue about the missing women case, or especially my last prose book, Anticipated Results, wherein a reviewer described my handling of a car crash as “poetic,” one might see that I have not come to poetry lately. I have in fact been with poetry for most of my career—just not in such a concentrated fashion. With Black Liquor I’ve arrived in Poetry-Land, and I now find the focused, free, and agile properties of the genre perfect for the long distances I wish to travel. To wit: a full exploration and discussion of my perception of growing up on the wood-hewing West Coast of Canada. In all this, yes, I would say that this new book is at least the few opening acts of my personal artist’s saga. TK: When we met, you seemed to be quite excited about poetry allowing you to play with sound in interesting ways, and Black Liquor certainly lends itself to being read aloud. You combine technical jargon with emotional diction to create lines that are moving, unique, and loud in such a wonderfully aggressive way. “Picaroon,” for example, is practically distilled of unnecessary pronouns and conjunctions. It feels as dense as an overripe peach without all the grammatical filler, but the formal composition is still precise, controlled, and deliberate. You described Black Liquor as an attempt to “preserve the voice that was in style when [you] came of literary age”—namely, that of The Beats. Could you elaborate on how and why you made this collection so acoustically visceral and how it relates to or diverges from your “usual” mode of writing fiction? DB: For some odd reason I take your “loud” comment as gratifying praise. Nobody’s ever described my work as “loud” before and, in this instance at least, I think it fits. In fact, I would say that I’ve always tried to achieve visceral acoustics—for prose fiction and for poetry—while packing in as much detail, texture, colour, and contrast as I possibly could. What’s wrong with that? What I cannot stand about prose fiction these days—even as I see more and more of it—is the sustained descriptive/expository paragraph: the interrupter of narrative. There’ll be a line or two of dialogue and/or action and then two pages of dumbass explanation about all kinds of detail about things/characters we’re not yet emotionally connected to. It seems writers nowadays—with little apparent confidence in their ability to create suspension of disbelief—assume readers are largely non-intuitive, and in fact, based on the evidence at hand, unable to fill in the blanks themselves. In poetry, I know there is a movement today toward a less intense writing, what I call a “laundry list” poetic style. This school rues calling attention to itself, with little attempt to create sound, rhythm, or any kind of syntactical innovation. The verse is often droningly recited in such a way as to say to me that it is poetry in name only—a pet peeve of mine—but I digress. In my writing, I’ve taken pains to ensure when you get to the end and close the book you’ll realize that you’ve been given a lot of information about woodworking or car driving or social work, along with whatever story I’ve been telling, but not remember ever reading any long passages on those subjects. Feather that expository crap into your action, dialogue, and transitions, I tell my students. It’s hard work, yes, but if writing were easy everybody would do it. It’s the craft. I would never presume to “preserve” a particular writing style and I regret actually saying that. Certainly I could be said to be speaking in the accent of the Beats, the Black Mountaineers, and even some of the predecessors of those schools. My favourite poet is Kenneth Rexroth, who was long established and viewed as somewhat staid by the new verse practitioners he mentored in the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1940s and ’50s. Much of his bibliography is rather conventional, though there are sounds of some of the rhythmic-political strophes that turned up in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl-era work. Rexroth’s fixations were women and social injustice. He was passionate and weird about the former, savagely inflamed against the latter. In fact, of all the writers I’ve admired, I can think of no one who does anger quite like Rexroth. I mean: “They are murdering all the young men./ For half a century now, every day,/ They have hunted them down and killed them”—give me poetry that opens like that! It’s not difficult to detect a definite Rexroth-style anger in my writing. You will also hear giddy laughter at the newfound freedom I feel at being able to cover much ground so economically, and with license to create extravagant sound and rhythm. Much of my early life—before I became a desk-sitter—was spent watching, listening, working on, and operating various machines, from bicycles to tractors. These things make noise. So “loud” works well for me, no question, and I’m delighted that these sounds show up so clearly in the reading. TK: On the first page of the book you include numerous definitions for “Black Liquor.” Amidst the “bile,” “toxic water,” and “cellulose-breakdown” there is also an entry that defines “Black Liquor” as a “renewable resource for industrial power generation.” Does the collection seek to represent or work though the possibility of something (or somewhere, or someone) being both creative and destructive at the same time? Is the “static” dictionary definition of “Black Liquor” a mere launching pad for a kind of poetry that can re-invigorate the bleakness of industrial towns, tragedy, or violence? DB: Poetry sets out to elevate through simple illustration the wonder of the ordinary, the potential of the prosaic. In this sense it is an ideal form to, as you put it, “re-invigorate the bleakness,” I’ve had listeners at some readings come up later and confess that they never expected to hear a phrase like “Alberni Pacific Division” uttered in a poetry reading at a downtown big city university campus, and proclaim their wonder at “hearing” the clink of the green chain conveyer belt, smelling rain-fragrant cedars at the lakeside make-out spot, knowing close at hand the dull, terrifying proximity of highway and industrial death. TK: While reading your poetry, I perceived a certain element of determinism running through the pieces. In “Everybody,” tragedy is ubiquitous. “Everybody knew beltless toddler” and “only the responsibly parented survive.” These lines, in tandem with the image of an unbuckled child being hurled out of the car “to the outskirts of wisdom,” point to a certain lack of control, or an unwillingness to take control. In “Tough,” (we assume that) the violent schoolboy ends up in jail, and in “Root Beer,” Gordy ends up addicted to drugs. Many of your characters’ trajectories appear to be laid out for them at an early age. Is there a way out of the violence? Or are fatigue and complacency inevitable in the locales you write about? DB: Perhaps what’s missing in the narratives between the lines of those poems is the fact that in the 1960s we working-class school kids were being drilled with the idea that our options were vastly more wide and accommodating than were those of our recent forebears. I took this seriously, but was confounded when most of my classmates seemed not to, and followed their fathers into millwork and their mothers into young motherhood. To some of us—the fraction that left town and re-invented themselves in the universities and new economies of the blossoming outside world—there was no option but to get out and strive. I couldn’t wait to leave that stifling little burg. It was like a vise tightening on my skull. I literally raged at the notion that there was life and fascination going on outside the city limits of my stultifying industrial town. It’s an old story, really, but it keeps regenerating with each new economic cohort, I think. We were an exceptional generation due to the time we graduated high school. It was 1972: the ’60s had taken full hold and would last, in Western Canada at least, until around 1981. You could crawl under the blanket of social change and virtually birth yourself into a new brand of civilization. The chasm between those who left the industrial towns and those who stayed is given expression, I hope, in a documentary-style book such as Black Liquor. Only a wondering ex-denizen of that life and that time, one who honed his or her expressive skill, could or would bother to try to tell the greater world where he or she came from. I’ve been gratified to hear that people who grew up intellectual—in cities, attending the theatre, jazz concerts, art openings, all the other stuff I craved to be exposed to as a kid—nevertheless derive an elation of discovery from my work. It shows them a world they only heard about, but did not experience. I’m even more thrilled when a guy comes up and says my reading made him smell fresh-cut douglas fir and remember how heavy wet hemlock is to tug off a speedy conveyor. TK: Similarly, I am intrigued by the role of the witness in your work. In “Mr. Rage,” you have a character who has been profoundly impacted by his experience as a soldier. “Witness Statement” very clearly complicates the 1:1 ratio between witnessing and self-presence. In other poems, such as “To the 1969 Ambulance,” there is a strong sense of regret tied to not paying enough attention. Could you elaborate on this motif? Is it something you purposefully tried to work though in this collection, or is it more of a subconscious, organic theme that particularly resonates with you? DB: Early on, I knew I would define the world and all my experiences by the cast of characters I encountered in it. This is where my background as a novelist might be enhancing my poetics (not for me to judge; I’ll let the experts make that determination). I’ve tried to develop a talent for interpreting characters who speak and act in naturalistic ways, thus grounding whatever it is I’m writing about, or trying to say, in a prose or poetic piece. Thus “witness,” yes, that’s a fine way to put it. And to miss something that then comes hauntingly back to suggest that one’s neglect in such small detail might have saved a person’s life—that is a real crusher. TK: I also picked up a strong interplay between reality and illusion. In “Tough” the schoolboys “self-pictured” themselves “as dramatic stars” using “some TV imagistic manoeuvre.” In “Play”—which follows “Tough”—the little boy “twirls the prop” and launches “TV grenades.” The syntax in the first four stanzas relays a sense of breathlessness, as though one is experiencing “reality” in snippets. Once you focus on the boy’s play, however, the “narrowed seriousness” comes through and the lines are more grammatically fleshed out. You refer to the boy’s mock war games as “playing true.” As a writer, do you see art (or media) as something potentially dangerous? “On the Supposed Road” debunks Kerouac’s mythical idealism, highlighting the difficulties in just packing up and starting over. How have portrayals of heroism and adventure impacted your writing and what, to you, is “playing true”? DB: “Playing true” is my interpretation of the psychology of childhood; that is, belief in the magical—the magic as real—and that pliable region between the magical and non-magical. I draw an image of a child playing personal war games. The era is the early 1960s. In those days many of our fathers and uncles were fairly fresh war veterans. Television always had at least one World War II series running (Combat!, Twelve-O’clock High, Desert Rats, Hogan’s Heroes, etc.). As kids, we played war without irony, in a perfectly serious magical belief in its importance that had its roots in what we’d seen on TV and heard from our elders. In doing so, we entered a kinship with those elders and also knew we’d joined human history in some way. We’d become part of the great tradition of human strife. Many of us understood this, I think, if not consciously, then in a deeply internalized way. A lot of young men in America fled the draft when Vietnam started looking like the uber-ridiculous econo-political grind machine that it was, but a lot more of that cohort went to war, with little question as to validity. They were conditioned to wear green, throw grenades, and risk their lives. Their “true play” had prepared them for authentic gravely adult action. Illusion had become reality in a near seamless way. So, “art (or media) as something potentially dangerous”? On the evidence, yes, I rather do see art in the perilous position of pointing out the terrible possibilities of unquestioned obedience, blind patriotism, casual acceptance of authority. The fatalism and inevitability you sense in my verse is the negative arrival of fate when people stop asking questions of themselves, their leaders, and their surroundings. This series of poems, too, is my specific questioning of what happened to me. The later “Federal Parole Officer” section has fairly blatant confessional content about my coming to terms with this—if you will—sinister 1950s and early ’60s social conditioning. Upon being conferred the parole officer’s special authority, I rebelled against arbitrary rules.

"They were conditioned to wear green, throw grenades, and risk their lives."

I became a law unto myself, held as my major objective justice in the sense of what I deemed to be fair play. This involved all kinds of regulatory and even statutory transgression. I could have been fired a hundred times if only the bureaucratic machinery had been efficient enough to detect my lawlessness. Read between the lines of “Witness Statement” for my true attitude toward authority in general and, more especially, my own Crown-granted authority. What is governmental warrant anyway but a strange melding of reality and illusion? We get along in society only because we agree to abide by legislated rules. If the enforcement of these rules becomes incompetent—or in the case of police, law, and corrections, unjust—then somebody has to take an independent hand or the illusion will evaporate. The reality will acidify the social contract and encourage chaos. Great themes to wrestle with poetically, no? TK: I am also very curious about your “Attractions” section, formatted quite differently than the rest of the collection, with the section reading as one long poem. Does writing about women, love, heartbreak, and pain require different stylistic registers? Do you enter a different creative mind space in “Attractions”? How does it reflect and/or refract the themes you’ve laid out in the rest of Black Liquor? DB: I struggled with the decision to include the “love” poetry section. My editor (the fabulous George Payerle) liked the change of tone and occasional whimsy (“your hair is a nest/ I want to infest”); he felt the book needed it. Others advised me that it did not fit. But I’m glad we included it after all, because the reaction I’ve been getting is that it lends another aspect to the notion of self-examination and discovery through auto-historical recollection. The pieces are a disparate group in that they were written at wildly different times about, and to, different women. As you’ll recall, a major influence of mine is Rexroth; perhaps a section of paeans to male-female lust/love is my salute to that great booming voice of the recent past.

"Rexroth’s fixations were women and social injustice. He was passionate and weird about the former, savagely inflamed against the latter."

There are quotation marks around “love” when I write about this section because the verse—as it is in the rest of the collection—is somewhat acidic, fatalist, even determinist, if you will. I was flattered by a review by the great Catherine Owen, who referred to one of the “Attractions” poems thusly: “its male speaker being ‘staggered by the beauty’ not only of the later ‘flakes of ice’ on his beloved’s sweater but by the earlier ‘solitary construction sites’ merges industrial and human preoccupations in a most poignant way.” I couldn’t ask for a better consideration of all I wish to do as a poet: express my awe at beauty and simultaneously caution all to the pitfalls of modern life, while celebrating existence and human connection at the same time!