Dionne Brand and Souvankham Thammavongsa in Conversation: An Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation, which will be published by Nightwood Editions in late November 2018. The book will feature conversations between 22 of Canada’s top modern poets.

Souvankham Thammavongsa: What are you still learning about yourself as a writer?

Dionne Brand: Words I heard as a child suddenly have their true significance. The way my grandmother pronounced “lentil” in French patois, then the word “mamaguy” which was from the Spanish “mamagallista,” meaning a teaser, joker or flatterer in our case. No remarks were ever made in my house about their origins—they were spoken seamlessly with English. They were in the language of the house. So I am learning now in another meaning. Childhood remains a mystery. Has it happened to you that you suddenly understand a word decades later?

Thammavongsa: Yes. We would get a lot of words wrong from English but we did not know they were wrong among ourselves. It is just how we said them, together, as a family. The way we got them wrong had a deepening to the language that, for me, would not have been there had we gotten them right. One word is knife. I was taught to pronounce the first letter because it is the first, it is there. I understand why, the reasoning behind it. My experience of that word means so much to me. It’s just a letter, but what we got wrong about it is a story about how we lived. I’m also learning that I can’t do things.

Brand: What things?

Thammavongsa: I can’t show a reader in a visible way that what they are reading comes from a lot of work they can’t see because there is so little on the page. That’s the thing about minimalism. I can’t show. I can only show this in feeling which is something we can’t see. I want the writing to feel like standing on the other side of a dam, the part where you don’t feel the water but it is there, behind the wall, humming. It’s the architecture and structural engineering that is keeping that water back. The end result looks minimal, but I had to create the water, had to put it there, build the dam—all of it—in order for that standing there to have meaning. When I’m writing about the small, something I found, or light, I am also writing about the other; that is to say, the big, what I lost, the dark … but it is the reader who must bring these in with them to enter the work. A maximalist can see all of this. Though we call what we do different things, we see each other. Is this your experience?

Brand: Well, what we are calling maximalism here is for me compression of meaning and concentration of sound. I try to apply maximum pressure to the page by clasping words together in an unusual architecture or with an unusual speed, or by producing unusual sound. It requires, as with minimalism, attention to clarity. I am trying to be as clear as possible as each examined word is added. Every single word in the line matters and has a precise function—none can be merely administrative or casual or excessive.

Thammavongsa: I think what I mean to say is that minimalism or maximalism is something that happens somewhere else. For the writer, the thinking and the writing require the same sets of decisions. As a reader, what are you still learning about yourself?

Brand: I notice now how I read. The pleasures are different. Now I read for structure, so the shape of the work is what gives me pleasure. Or the insight it accumulates. I am interested in the architecture of the work: what it borrows from, what it leaves unchanged from the past, how it breaks embedded narrative or not, how lazy or agile the poet. A dear friend poet asked me, a long time ago, “D, does the world need that line?” And it took me aback and then made me laugh and then made me measure each line of poetry I wrote against this question. Such a simple question and such a difficult one—bracing and settling.

Thammavongsa: And unsettling. I’m learning that I haven’t read enough. And what I love or pay attention to sometimes is not important to anyone but me. I’m not generous with what I read. I can love what I read but I realize I can be an angry reader. Sometimes I don’t understand why someone published something, why it exists in the world. I want to be more generous that it has managed to exist. I understand that I’m not. And I know I can’t pretend. We always take note of a beautiful poem. I think we learn to be better writers when we understand what makes a bad one. What’s a thing about a bad poem you learned from?

Brand: Fundamentally I respect every poem attempted. It is a sign of such faith in what cannot be lived, understood or communicated. So even bad poems, or weak poems, I appreciate. I don’t like a pretentious poem though, a poem that announces a link to European traditions expecting a casual reference or clumsy and obsequious invocation of Keats or Shelley or ancient Greece to do the work of actual poetry making. A good poem collects or tries to collect all the difficulty of living, all the tension of being in that moment into one sound or one image and elicits a feeling that the poet and the reader have not had before. Or more radically, that the world has not had before. What’s a beautiful poem for you and what’s a bad poem?

Thammavongsa: All poems are bad, or at least they begin that way. But something happens to one and it isn’t anymore. I don’t know what that is, that thing that changes it. I recognize it when it’s beautiful. And I don’t know why it’s beautiful. It’s not something I can explain. What’s more important, talent or hard work?

Brand: Hard work, meaning hard reading. What do you think?

Thammavongsa: Hard work. I think anyone can have talent. When I was starting out, I was around many talented poets, poets more talented than me but I am still here. This question became really important to me this year because I taught creative writing for the first time. I thought I knew. I had many talented students and there was one who was hopeless. But they showed up every single day and did not flinch when I told them the hard work they needed to do. The hopeless student had a longer way to come than all the others because this student had no talent. But this student put in hard work and understood they may never get to the level that those talented students were at, but they put in the work anyway. When the year was over, two of the most talented students didn’t hand anything in. They were talented, after all. Why bother? The best mark went to the student who I thought didn’t have talent. Showing up, even when you know you might not have it, is more than talent. That’s a middle finger. I had only admiration and awe for that student. I learned, when you write, someone somewhere is always going to tell you you are not good. Another writer or someone you love or your own self will do that. It takes hard work to not believe that. And talent too. What’s something nobody asks you?

Brand: They never ask about the shape of the poems. So strange, because I am always working with a shape, a method. They say, “she works in the long poem”—well what the heck is that except length? But inside this “long poem,” what else? Each step? The lines, the enjambment, et cetera.

Thammavongsa: A shape feels like a minimal concern but is not. Shape is movement, your tinkers and your knots and turns, your fun, how you sustain or build or break sound. How you go. Like dancing. None of that can happen if you haven’t a shape or method. It’s everything, everything! They never ask me if my poem about the snow is true. It does not matter if it is true. People want to know if poems about my family are true even though being true is not a matter. I use the chance to talk about my family and memories but what I’m actually doing is talking about craft and how the truth is in that.

Excerpted from “The Voice Asking: Dionne Brand and Souvankham Thammavongsa” in What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation. Order your copy right here.