
On Language and the Spaces In-Between: A Conversation with Colleen Coco Collins
Colleen Coco Collins is devoted to language. A disciple, perhaps, if that word—gnarled into history’s enormous and spread out roots—applies. She would find the precise word in any case, and is forgiving if these aren’t because dialogue is important to Collins, too. Listening is as crucial to language as reading. From her home in rural Nova Scotia, Collins brightly and thoughtfully tells me language offers respite and transformation, saying, “It appears as one thing but it suggests many things.” An appropriate offering in a conversation about her debut poetry collection, Sorry About the Fire.
The multidisciplinary artist’s debut poetry collection is moving, sparse, and, at times, sharp. Collins’s poems contain space and give it—saying more with less, while giving glimpses into many different cultures, experiences, and ideas. These dispatches, as she calls them, offer the reader insight into her world of dreams, heat, loss, the “below,” and the land around her. They ask us if we can notice this life with her.
SATF contains multiple cultural references, including Indigenous and Celtic, but Greek mythology is prevalent throughout the collection: the ultimate Western reference point in storytelling. The collection is named in part from Prometheus's infamous theft of fire from the gods to mortals, defying, as she calls them, the then gatekeepers. How applicable now in our contemporary world.
Visions and dreams appear throughout SATF, and seem as important as waking life. In “Bawaajaigan,” a poem named after the Anishinaabe word for dreams, Collins writes, “The people are the throb of the earth.” A verse I can’t unsee or unhear—both dreamy and crucially alive. To live is to dream, is it not?
Talking to Collins about this collection, language, and expectations of an artist appearing to continually debut felt like a throb, hot, heated—a distinctive aliveness we’re lucky to witness.
Sarah MacDonald: When I read your work, and while I was doing research, I couldn't help noticing your precise observations in your work and life. Do you remember the first time you started noticing the world around you?
Colleen Coco Collins: Yes, I do have a first memory. On my first birthday party, my parents—I remember there were other kids coming over. We were at the front door and my mother had this kind of box, maybe a box that one would have had cards in or something—like, Hallmark cards—and she had something in it attached to strings. These were being offered up for the kids who came. I guess there was an othering of myself and the kids there to sort of pull these strings and see what was revealed, what they were privy to in terms of a tree or a toy or a message. In her thoughtfulness about these, she had overlooked me. I remember this sense arising out of frustration that I didn't get to pull the string, and I remember the distance between myself and the end of the string. I mean, it can be a construction, but it feels like this very visceral memory, and I'm located in it.
Sarah MacDonald: My follow-up is if you think that this observance is necessary for being a poet and an artist. I wonder, more broadly, how it speaks to people getting bogged down with the idea of being present. Observing is such a crucial way of being present. Even as our brains are a little bit hectic, we still notice. I wonder if you feel that that's necessary for your work.
Colleen Coco Collins: Oh, that's a great question, and so beautifully put. You know, I do have autism. So I think the macro/micro thing is something I admire in other minds. This ability to describe something beyond comprehension in terms of scale by metaphor. Metaphor has its limitations but I think it's applicable in terms of being able to manage thought in a way and feel out edges of possibility—and declining that there are edges. The micro and macro, the relationship and spectrum between those things. I also think, certainly Indigenous culture, when I spoke with an elder, it's the idea that we move backward through time sometimes, or that the present is not a fixed state, of course. I mean, if you get philosophical, it's always a new present, right?
SM: We get very stuck on not making something abstract and letting it be. I noticed the spaces in your work in this collection and I wonder how important it is to not define something.
CCC: Well, I think, to speak with fidelity about the human experience, about wending through, I think is to speak of an abstract experience. We spend half of our lives sleeping and dreaming. There are a lot of nebulae afoot in a sense. And to speak precisely is to speak abstractly in a sense and to speak sincerely. I think part of that is also these caesura, these lacuna, these spaces in-between these margins, which are so rife. We find out that nothing has infinitesimal existences.
SM: There are dreams and visions throughout this collection. How much do you pay attention to your dreams? How influenced are you by what's happening while you're sleeping?
CCC: There’s so much baggage attached to the idea of the dream world. It can get a little hokey in a sense but it's also got legs—ancient legs. The algorithm of the mind happens during dreaming, right? It's sorting and resorting, and particularly language. What happens is language gets sorted and the literal becomes abstract or fantastical in the dream. I find that reverberates a lot through my dreams. I've begun charting my dreams vocally—voice memos when I wake up in a hypnotic state. I think it certainly informs my work. I have poems— “Bawaajigan”— direct, dream-like situations where I find myself feeling like I'm in another time.
I think dreams can be tethered to cellular experiences, perhaps, to mimetic, in terms of the original meaning of the meme. Right? It's a cultural memory the way a gene is a biological, physiological memory. In songwriting, as well, because I guess much like being precise about the abstract, dreams inform in a similar way. They are precise abstractions and distillations of what has come to be during the days before me, maybe even the days to come.
SM: I'd love to learn about your poetic voice and how you found that. You have such a lushness with language. How did you find your poetic voice and do you find it different from any other of your creative roles in your life?
CCC: It’s different from other media that I work in. Poetry does make exquisite space for space. I think that's really what is glorious about working in poems in a way that exists in other places. It can be weight and orchestration, visual work, of course, in rhythm. The large Venn diagram between music and visual art—poems, over the others, have suggestions of space. I've always loved languages of all forms like rhythmic language, codes like Morse code, even non-human languages. Words. Etymology. The package of words. How a word can splay out. It's like a trunk. It spreads out. It appears as one thing but it suggests many things.
SM: Did you have a central idea when you wrote these poems or a vision for this collection in mind?
CCC: I think not so much as a collection, although there was a tug at the sleeve of each to the other. It’s the idea of dispatch. I live quite rurally. These poems became dispatches and exercises in biometrics to see: does this hold up with the outside world? What is my experience like? A kind of communication, like a wet finger in the wind, taking readings but also dispatching readings. And it began with Shelley, with Prometheus Unbound. What sets things alight and whether that's mine or not? Prometheus stealing it from gatekeepers with power and spreading it around made a lot of sense. Then it began to coalesce. But it wasn't in the book before.
I live quite rurally. These poems became dispatches and exercises in biometrics to see: does this hold up with the outside world? What is my experience like?
SM: I read Sorry About the Fire as an apology for intensity. I wonder if that resonates with you at all. It’s almost like apologizing for being angry or being intense or having such intensity in a world that may not necessarily know what to do with it.
CCC: Yes, that's a very moving observation. A kind of apology for intensity does figure for being flinty, you know, for sparking moments. Sometimes I think of it as a note left. I think of it as having at different times various greater or lesser depths of profundity or truthfulness in terms of an apology.
SM: Can you speak to these Greek mythological references in the collection? There's such a ubiquitousness of Greek mythologies in our world. Why do you lean into them and what do those stories mean to you?
CCC: The frame for stories of Western culture is, in some ways, mainstream culture. Greek tragedy abounds in terms of contemporary culture. We see it on TV all the time, or I guess on streaming. It's like the micro/macro, right? There are many relational conversations between mythologies of many cultures. And I think being someone who is a confluence of cultures maybe observes those similarities. There are differences of interpretation. There are differences of distillation of the morality of the tale. And these arise at different times to the tale. They can mean so many things to so many different people at many different times. I think it's the tri-fold or quadra-fold gift of language to communicate many things at once and to say it in a contemporary way.
In the poem “Hem,” Cassandra foretold the Trojan horse at the gates and saw that it was filled with combatants—to use language of the contemporary world. But she was not to be believed. That horror of not being heard is very real and very applicable, and visceral in the experience of people in Palestine today who are shouting into their cellular phones, if you will, and not being heard.
SM: What do you think this collection will say to somebody who's engaging with your work for the first time?
CCC: I am interested in making an offering of vulnerable stories in exchange for their ear stories, so to speak. This idea of dispatches and reciprocity. But is this for you? So I'm seeking a place to ask a question. It's about me and about them at once. What is your experience of this brief flame of a so brief candle?
I did encounter early on Chekhov's [idea of the] role of the artist is to ask questions. And I take that very seriously. There are other roles that are possible as well but I think asking a question is so quiet and bold at once. It's a question mark in a hand.
SM: Because it is your debut collection, it doesn't mean you are new to artistry or writing or performing. There's this continuous sense of debut, especially if you're a multi-disciplinary artist and you venture into different spaces. Do you feel limited by that at all? That it feels like you're continuously beginning?
CCC: One of the things that I love both about poetry, and about music, too, is that it makes me new again. It shows me new ways of hearing. I do love that. Whether people see me continually as a novice, I don't know if I love that. It’s not a great way of describing it. “I was so much older then I'm younger than that now,” as Bob Dylan says. The older I get, the more ground I recognize as existing to move over. In a sense, I am always a new descriptor of what I am experiencing. But I appreciate that I'm not totally new at conception in terms of expression or rhythm.
SM: I see a lot of poetry online—on Instagram accounts. People take snippets potentially out of context. And I wonder, as a poet—and as somebody who's writing something much longer than what can fit in a slide on Instagram—how do you feel about that? Those stanzas and verses are out of context, and we keep reposting and sharing them, and seeing ourselves in them. I wonder how that influences you as a reader and also you as a writer of poems.
CCC: What is it like as someone who kind of seeks precision and works to be precise in language? Yes, I can see that there is frustration. There are devices being used which feel like undercutting what I might be on the surface saying, and there may come something at the end of the poem which turns the whole poem on its head and says, in fact, I've been saying the opposite of what I'm saying. These nuances can be lost. But it's also like a reinvention.
This is why I think poetry continues to be important because it teaches us the many ways language can be used, how it can be armed, and how it can be disarming. The more we know about these ways, the more we can understand the veracity of this asserted bit that may be watered down or might be misapplied. It’s like an endless footnote.
This is why I think poetry continues to be important because it teaches us the many ways language can be used, how it can be armed, and how it can be disarming.