Sixty Seconds of Happiness: An Interview with Jonathan Bennet

Jonathan Bennett is a poet and novelist. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is the book of poems Happinesswise (ECW Press, 2018). His previous work includes the critically acclaimed novels, The Colonial Hotel, Entitlement, and After Battersea Park, along with two collections of poetry, Civil and Civic and Here is my street, this tree I planted, and a collection of short stories, Verandah People, which was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Jonathan is a winner of the K.M. Hunter Artists’ Award in Literature.Jonathan Bennett’s other writing has appeared in many periodicals and journals including: The Globe and Mail, Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Southerly, Cordite, and Antipodes. Born in Vancouver, raised in Sydney, Australia, Jonathan lives near Peterborough, Ontario. Happinesswise is a complex poetic narrative. In this interview, Bennett explains how the poems are about the ups and downs of his relationship with his autistic son, as well as highly sensitive poems about palliative care patients and physicians, and poems that play on the concept and construct of happiness, or, in some cases, the complete opposite.

Nathaniel G. Moore: Can you explain the nexus of “Vegetarians Use the Backdoor”? I'm hoping for a behind-the-scenes exclusive. Or we could ask, how did this poem morph from its original?

Jonathan Bennett: Probably half the poems in this book have some anchor to real moments or situations that have occurred to me, or things that I’ve witnessed. But, then I push them to somewhere else, fictionalize them, and that can mean I end up adopting a voice that isn’t really my point of view or opinion. In this case, yes, I’m a vegetarian. Yes, there is a rib shack near where I live that has a sign, “vegetarians use the back door.” Yes, I’ve been to many local rib festivals where the scene, as I paint it in this poem, more or less unfolds. But, the exact story here is imagined. So, the ingredients are real, but the poem’s story is invention.

NGM: “Let Me Speak Softly of Two Days” seems to be an interpersonal telepathic postcard to a specific being.  Yet it's not an atypical “you person / second person” Leonard-Cohen-styled song-poem. It’s enigmatic but shifts from the droning you did this you did that which poets other than Cohen are guilty of leaning on. It's a poem about real life versus our nature to say, “That sounds like this show I love called Frasier,” or “that is like a movie or something.” Which I think people seem to say about their lives quite often. I like this poem, and wanted to know, for the trivia fans out there, if the poem or the title came first.

JB: The poem is an elegy for the Nigerian-British writer and journalist Ken Wiwa. He lived in Toronto for a time in the ’90s; we became friends. He died unexpectedly in 2016. I was very sad and just had this urge to tell about how I knew him and the way we understood one another. So, these two moments we’d once shared came to mind and they seemed sort of emblematic of him, to me. I don’t remember if the first line came first or not, but I do remember that when it was done, and I was considering a title, the first line seemed to be it.

NGM: You arrange language and furnish it in your poems such as, "signs for butter tarts and bait," which gives the poems a boast in a lilting way. How important to you is the lyric quality in a poem?

JB: That poem—it’s supposed to be ironic, or at least wry. So, there is a boastful aspect to its voice, yes, I can see that. I suppose tuning a poem to sound the right lyric quality is important to me. I often like ordinary phrases, especially ones found in everyday, practical use. That section of Happinesswise is called “Concession Lines Signs” and each of the poems are titled after a sign I’ve seen hanging somewhere as I make my way around the county where I live in rural Ontario.

Somewhere in the fog of pain meds and held hands, of DNR’s and oncoming grief, people retell stories that have bound them to one another over the course of a lifetime.

NGM: Not to get all Danny from The Shining asking about a certain room number, but can you talk about the map on page 43? (I know about this a bit, but the readers of this interview will not).

JB: Sure. It’s a map of an imaginary world, drawn by my son, Thomas. That section is called “Neurotypcial Sketches” and each of the poems were written about a year apart over the course of about seven years. They are about my relationship with Thomas—who is autistic. The idea of writing about autism as a neurotypical person is fraught. Generally, I’m not in favour of it. I think autistic people are the experts in autism, and that we should make space for them. Yet, my son has profoundly changed my life and I wanted to chart that change along the way. So, I wrote these poems and read them to him, and he edited them. Finally, I had the chance to include an illustration by him that is referenced in one of the poems, and so, his expression is included in the suite.

NGM: Are you generally happy? Do you think happiness is an illusion, or subjective?

JB: Yes, I am generally happy I suppose. I’m no Brené Brown, so I am just talking shit here. I don’t think happiness is an illusion, but presumably it’s totally subjective. The idea of Happinesswise for this book of poems came from that deadly question only an old friend can ask, to cut to the quick, and take the pulse of your whole life at that shared moment: “but how are you doing, happinesswise?” I love the word (which really isn’t a word) because it marries happiness and wisdom. Conceptually, they sure travel close together.

NGM: The book opens with a series of poems [Palliative Care Reflective Portfolio] that seems to describe with acuity each patient's make-up with impressive empathy and reach. Can you tell me what inspired this suite of poems?

JB: Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it. They are end of life poems, yes, but they are about how these people are doing, have done, happinesswise. What inspired them? I worked in a hospital for a while. During that time, I met a young doctor and we became acquaintances. One day, he announced on Twitter that he was finishing up his Palliative Care Reflective Portfolio. I asked if I could read it. He shared it with me (redacted to protect the patient’s privacy.) I was struck by the mostly-impenetrable clinical language, but also how the patient’s life stories were seeping through as this young physician was grappling with his own feelings about death and dying, about “losing” patients, about the family members supporting their loved ones as they received end-stage care. I asked him if I could re-work them, fictionalize the stories, push them to new places, and invent what wasn’t there in real life, but might have been, if they could only hold the pen, as it were. I’ve written about doctors before, both in fiction and poems—I’m drawn to their perspectives and points of view. We ask so much of them; we expect so much of them. Which is why, in the first poem, I made the patient a dying doctor—the clinical language being useless around him because he spoke it fluently. In the end, there is no overall reconciliation; no one was keeping score. Somewhere in the fog of pain meds and held hands, of DNR’s and oncoming grief, people retell stories that have bound them to one another over the course of a lifetime. Or else they sit in silence and just know, together. Is this happiness? Is it the end of happiness? These are the things the poem pursues.