Author Note: Rachel Crummey
Rachel Crummey wrote the poem "Kamouraska"Rachel Crummey wrote the poem “Kamouraska” in The Puritan, Issue 40, Winter 2018. In this author note, she answers a series of questions we pose to all our contributors as part of our author notes series.
Town Crier: Does your poem have an interesting origin story/compositional history you’d like to share? This could include interesting factoids or bits of research that informed the work.
Rachel Crummey: I wrote the poem after spending a week with my good friend and her family at a beach house near the Gaspé peninsula. It was the middle of August. I was having a pretty magical summer that included a week at a Zen monastery in upstate New York and a canoe trip with friends in Georgian Bay. The experience of writing is very connected to landscape for me. The place that I’m in exerts a strong influence, particularly if it’s new. That summer I was lucky to find myself in landscapes of beauty and power among people who were alive to those qualities, and it loosened up some of the habitual tracks in my mind and allowed for greater fluidity in how I strung ideas and images together. The sunflower has always been close to my heart probably ever since I saw Van Gogh’s famous sunflower painting. Even though they are cliché, whenever I really look at them I have found them both beautiful and terrifying.
TC: Tell us the best thing you’ve read lately, or a poet/fiction writer you’re jealous of, or a story/short story collection you wish you wrote.
RC: I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me which totally blew me away. It broke my heart and left me feeling … more determined. It raised a ton of questions for me, about race, writing, politics, spirituality—I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.A friend recommended Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, partly because I also clean houses to make money, but also because she thought I would love it, and it was a wonderful discovery. I envy her way with language, her economy with words, her sense of humour, her observant eye. She never has issues ending where it needs to end. She gives you the essentials and then ends, without squeezing meaning out of things that are enough in themselves.
The experience of writing is very connected to landscape for me. The place that I’m in exerts a strong influence, particularly if it’s new.
TC: Because we are running various blog posts on music, we have a question on song lyrics. Did music lyrics have anything to do with the piece we’re publishing? Were any particular lyrics important to you in your development as a writer? Is there any recent lyricist you’ve been digging, and why? Is there any piece of writing, by you or someone else, that you would like to see turned into a song? Why
?RC: I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen’s last album, You Want it Darker; its combination of depth and simplicity hits me pretty powerfully. I’m a big fan of Montreal’s AroarA, who have put out albums inspired by the poet Alice Notley. Right now I’m reading Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, a book length poem a bit like Dante’s Inferno, except the protagonist is a woman who must descend into a subterranean world to defeat the Tyrant, a banal, smooth-talking man. The poem is written in spoken fragments, with everything in quotation marks, which gives it the effect of a hypnotic Greek chorus: ""one day, I awoke"" ""& found myself on"" ""a subway, endlessly.""/ ""I didn't know"" ""how I'd arrived there or"" ""who I was"" ""exactly."" The structure really lends itself to the voice; it would be wonderful as an experimental opera or as the source material for an album.
Rachel Crummey is a visual artist and writer based in Toronto. She has been an artist in residence with KulturKontakt Austria and the Salzburger Kunstverein, and has exhibited widely, most recently in London, Vienna, and Toronto. The Puritan is the first literary magazine to publish her poetry.
