“To Promote Statements that Don’t Have an End”: In Conversation with Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral (M&S 1998), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, Land to Light On (M&S 1997), winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award, thirsty (M&S 2002), finalist for the Griffin Prize and Trillium Book Award and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry, Inventory (M&S 2006), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award, and Ossuaries (M&S 2010). Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here (Vintage 1996), which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon (Vintage 2000). Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone (Vintage 1998) and A Map to the Door of No Return (Vintage 2002). What We All Long For (Vintage) was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.” In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph (from McClelland.com’s Author Spotlight). The following interview took place on June 29^th, 2010 in Dionne Brand’s garden (which is organized much like a Brand collection, and with birds chirping).   E Martin Nolan: Let’s start with Ossuaries: I’m wondering if my review in the last issue of The Puritan missed something. Does it become environmental? The heroine, Yasmine, claims that she can’t believe in anything but the Earth. Dionne Brand: I think [the earth] is all that’s fairly trustworthy [laughs]. Yasmine certainly does not believe in people anymore, even herself. Well, what is steady except the earth? EMN: The line is “the only thing that amazes her now is the Earth.” So when you say she’s lost faith in humans, would you say that includes ideology? DB: I don’t think she’s lost faith in the ideas she embraced, she’s sad about the failure of those ideas to become action or to be born. But, she’s constantly aware of what we all are always constantly aware of: the ability, the steady ability of the Planet to bring itself back. I don’t think she’s naïve about environmental disaster, she’s not someone who would be naïve about that, about how people act on the Earth. But there is a kind of amazement at the natural world, like wow, how does that keep going as Human Beings commit all kinds of acts of tyranny. How does that all just keep going? It’s the smallest of wonders—it’s not a big wonder but it always repays itself. EMN: I notice now, it says “the only thing that amazes her is the Earth.” Doesn’t exactly mean the same thing as that she believes in it. DB: Exactly, it arrives as itself. I don’t think the Earth fools you or misleads you, it simply is. EMN: Would you say that that’s a form of ambivalence she recognizes in the Earth? DB: Hmmmm, ambivalence. No, clarity. That it simply is, and I think we don’t know anything about it and that it is to its credit that we can only do damage to it. I was reading about how we have no idea about the extent or volume of the universe. Here, we make up certain theories about the Earth. Let’s say what exists is 100 percent and we probably know something like 6 percent of it. So we extrapolate and we might be extrapolating from the wrong angle. EMN: So we work from a probably false certainty rather than an uncertainty that doesn’t presume? DB: Yeah. It seems incredible to me that we would make statements with such a miniscule knowledge. Perhaps it’s that our brains need some certainty. EMN: Getting back to Yasmine. She has given up on some certainties, not to say they are wrong, but she’s not working towards them and has reached some level of detachment from them at the end. So my question is: is she free, is she a successful navigator of the labyrinth, or is she trapped in some kind of eternal emancipation? DB: Is she free or is she trapped? I guess, it’s her existential moment, or my existential sense, that yeah she’s trapped and yeah she’s free. She trapped in the body, as we all are, but she’s free to do anything. There’s that moment in the book, in the 70s, where they’re escaping in the car and they each stop at a certain city that happens to be named after ancient cities somewhere else. And she might as well be walking into one of those ancient cities because all that is behind them is impossible and they were living impossibly anyway. But all that is ahead can be created, can be made up. So they walk into an old city, or a city to be made again, but they walk into it with new consciousness, perhaps. Or maybe they will forget in that old city the new things they do know, or the impossibility of the past. So she can walk into any place, really. But at times she is weighed down, freighted, by that impossibility. So in some ways parts of the text are about that freighting, how bodies are freighted by these signs and how to get rid of that weight. So there’s lots of exits in the book. One of the motifs of the book is these bone chambers where one can, hopefully, lose that freight—or be trapped by that freight. Or, just observe it. EMN: So there’s a simultaneous heaviness and lightness, just as there’s a simultaneous freedom and entrapment. DB: I think so for her. Trapped in the now, but then not. EMN: Is it in the slippage, or transitional phases that we find her then? DB: You know, I don’t think so. I don’t think she considers slippage at all. She’s resigned to loss. She’s resigned to losing. She doesn’t mind being part of that vast, unknown universe. In fact, that’s better than the known spaces, right, where everything is named. She doesn’t, any longer, feel the need to exist in time because time only exists in this baggage, this freighted body. So she’s not interested in existing even in what may be called slippage. She’s not interested in existing in the world, in the narratives of the world. EMN: So Slippage is just another thing that’s she’s gotten over. It no longer matters if it’s Coltrane or Miles Davis? DB: [Laughs] Maybe not, maybe not. Most likely it’s still Coltrane, cause that’s the track she’s on, that’s the trajectory. Because Miles is interested in story and she’s not interested in story, or shape. She’s more interested in non-story, ultra-story, not in a place where story is a word or has any meaning. EMN: But not the whole time, right? I ask because I’m interested in this issue of engagement. Although Ossuaries arrives at a point beyond story, or engagement, there is still a lot of engagement happening here, earlier. Also, even when it’s done there’s an idea of the world that has been presented, a realistic looking at the world. DB: Where? EMN: Well, there are the “as of yet unarmed moons,” and the political struggle she’s engaged in at some point—which as you said she doesn’t lose faith in but finds impossible to attain—so they do still exist even if she’s not involved with them. So, is Ossuaries an engagement poem or a non-engagement poem? Does it work through engagement and come out the other side? DB: I don’t think it works through engagement. It retells a certain moment of engagement, then it suggests something else. It does that fairly early on in the life of Yasmine. But as we meet Yasmine, there’s no longer any engagement. She lives underground. She lives in other people’s passports, in other people’s rooms, with other people’s keys. She observes from a kind of doubled and tripled space already. So she’s no longer engaged in that way. For a moment, she’s rethinking, “how did that happen” and what are the things she believed and how? In one part she says that people were once her hope but no longer are. So we meet her way after that and she is recollecting that, or some narrator is recollecting that. But, I don’t think she has a way of engaging anymore because there is not merely death, but there are actually bones, of her existence and of the culture she has come from. And the culture that she comes from doesn’t know that it’s boney, but she observes it as bones. So she’s kind of post…that [engagement]. EMN: Would you say that Inventory is similar in that it is not itself involved in engagement but is looking at engagement? DB: I’d say it’s more situated in engagement than Ossuaries. In Inventory, there is at least some attempt to redeem some parts of the freighted body, if you will, an attempt to recover some other self. But Ossuaries isn’t interested in that anymore. EMN: In both cases I’m interested in the use of characters. Does that allow you to, in some way, be outside of this engagement and deepen the understanding of engagement because you look at what is engaged as well as how? DB: To a degree. But you know there are a couple voices or narrators, an intertwining of narrators in Ossuaries. It’s not just Yasmine all the way, and it isn’t the other voice all the way either…there are certain synergies between the two, or so, narrators…so it’s Yasmine and some consciousness and a movement toward a unified voice but still keeping a kind of magnetic—mis-attraction between the two. The other voice is both very old and ancient, but very new. It’s way in, way out toward Pluto, but then not. EMN: Omniscient? DB: But not unengaged, so not omniscient really. In fact, it’s very in there. It says, “I tried love.” It does work, but it’s disembodied. This voice is as far away as you can throw an object into space, or as far away as Coltrane can throw a note, or Ornette Coleman, as far away as that object can arrive. There is a twoness, this disembodied doubleness. Isn’t it funny how hard it is to explain, because the thing is the thing, the poem is the poem. I can’t describe the poem because the poem describes itself and as soon as I describe it loses—consciousness. Anyway, that’s as much as I can do—to the extent that you can say that, let’s say, Ornette Colman’s Science Fiction is lyric, when it’s not. As soon as you say it’s lyric, it’s not, because you’re trying to hold it down. EMN: So, labeling your work as “engaged” or somehow aligned with an ideology or worldview, would that be trying to hold it down, to view it too narrowly? DB: Yeah, OK—we can say those things because we want to take hold and move from there. But that’s mere hypothesis, that we can take a hold of it at all. Then the hypothesis becomes the fact, the story. We have to be conscious that we’re only making hypotheses. EMN: Where do you draw the line between activism—or politics—and poetry? DB: I consider myself someone who thinks about how we live and how we relate to each other, what that might mean. I’m just thinking through some ideas in my work, ideas I think might be interesting or important for social and political relations among people and how those relate. EMN: How do you separate something, say, that might fit naturally in a polemical tract from what might work in a poetic work? DB: I think that’s a false distinction. I think poetry is a philosophical process, you know, a way of thinking about the world. I can’t account for how other people address what poetry is, but I think it’s a philosophical mode for thinking through how one lives in the world and ones relation to other human beings in the world. The word polemic has only become much maligned in the recent past, it used to be a great word. Philosophers used to be known as polemicists. EMN: Would you agree that a lot of poets seem not to want to make those kinds of arguments? DB: Not the ones I like [laughs]. I think all do. I might be more explicit about it. But whatever I read, I’m reading the world. I do think a lot of people shy away from that, because somehow they think its tainted to talk about the world, I don’t know. I don’t understand that, I think it’s crazy. But there’s such a range of writing, journalist’s write about the world, people who write copy for ads write about the world … Now, poetry. This is another mode of writing about the world and in this mode I’m trying to capture the world in its simultaneity. I’m trying to use instruments that I love: the instrument of sound, of the intellect, of the line. I’m using these things to do that talking. Somebody else might do it differently. If I look at that corner that sky, I’m interested in looking at the blue and the green and the y that goes across it, and the texture of that leaf, it think that’s important. I think to linger on that moment is as crucial as lingering on any other moment. EMN: So poetry is a way of understanding the world. DB: Or teasing it out, listing it. Or just attending to it. But attending to it with certain instruments, the mind, metaphor, sound, meter. EMN: You write in a few modes, non-fiction, fiction, poetry, etc. Are there specific advantages, for you, in writing in different modes? DB: Sure. But ultimately I’m much more satisfied with this one. EMN: Poetry. DB: Yes, because it opens up more meaning. It allows for more meaning and less certainty, though more clarity. Less certainty, more clarity. It’s more open ended. It doesn’t conclude on the matters that it attends to, but elaborates those matters. So I’m more inclined to think of it as a broader instrument, it has more possibilities. EMN: So writing prose, you’re more chained to certainty. DB: [laughs] Sometimes, but maybe not the kind of prose I write. EMN: Let’s turn to Jazz and it’s similarities to poetry for second. Do you find similarities between the two? DB: Sure, but there’s also Jazz that’s more like narrative fiction as opposed to jazz like poetry. And there’s also poetry that’s narrative. But the Jazz I like is less narrative and more multi-focused, more multi-vocal, with more harmolodic modulation, as Ornette Coleman describes. EMN: One of Ralph Ellison’s points about jazz was that it was worked in a democratic society because it mirrored the kind of flexibility that such a society needs. Given that jazz and poetry have that similarity and that the world has grown in some ways more complex since Ellison’s day, does the world now need more poetry? DB: Don’t know. Hmm. That’s complicated—Of course, ‘need,’ it’s such an interesting word, need. I’m disinclined to make a prescription for it because sometimes I only observe poetry as a very small thing. I don’t want to think of it in economic terms, in terms of capital. We’re all thinking in terms of market and capital, right? So, I’m not sure about “need.” Maybe it’s not, maybe we need water [laughs]. EMN: Okay, so if not need, then is it a natural inevitable development that as the world grows more, however you want to put it, open, smaller, interconnected, complex, for more poetry to emerge to engage that? DB: Even that is problematic. That notion of the world opening, where is that situated? That notion is situated in a kind of capital analysis of markets opening, right? I mean, that’s what’s generated this idea of the world opening. People are talking about it in terms of “the Chinese market is opening,” and immigrants are coming from Africa and Asia to the West, the anthropophagic or the anthropoemic. It’s in that context that we find the language of “the world opening,” so I’m not sure. Opening from what perspective is the question. I suppose then that the world can be open to predation or poetry. The beauty of poetry is that everybody has it, thank goodness, everybody has it. Every culture has its way of speaking and thinking through their relations to the earth, each other, themselves, other communities, etc. and what that might mean. And the origins of people or what they do not know, everyone has a language or a way of speaking that constitutes the beautiful. So it’s a very connective thing, because everyone has it without even having to use it or having to transmit it. Yes, without having to use it, or sell it, or buy it. It’s one of those things, as Adrienne Rich put it, it’s the least commoditized art. EMN: So Poetry has no obligation? DB: Yes. I think that’s its beauty, it has none, it has no obligation whatsoever. It can do everything or it can do nothing. I prefer it do something or other. EMN: So poetry doesn’t have to be reactive to global conditions. Why do you choose to leave it open to addressing those kinds of issues? Yasmine, for instance, is a globalized citizen. DB: Yeah, but Yasmine’s not a poet, I’m the poet. EMN: She just finds herself in a book of poems. DB: [laughs] Yes, she arrives, on a train. And she goes by plane into a poem and she drives through a bunch of small towns into a book of poetry. She walks into a meeting and into a book of poetry. EMN: But then she can also leave it. DB: And maybe she doesn’t care about being in the book of poetry, either. EMN: I don’t think she would. DB: No, [laughs] in fact I think she would find the poet completely useless. She might agree with some of the voices in there about the ossification of the world but she might think the poet a little reactionary for thinking the world ossified. But to get back to your question, I think poetry does react to world conditions, even inadvertently, simply because of the kind of material that it is. It is like a metal or other substance which is affected by heat or light or other elements. That’s different from having an obligation to react. EMN: Have you noticed a shift in your poetic approach in reaction to the world’s shifts? DB: I would say there’s a shift in approach, because one doesn’t want to sit in no time, as if nothing is happening around one. EMN: I see a similarity between No Language is Neutral and No Land to Light On, both stylistically and with the use of the ‘I’. Then also with Inventory and Ossuaries, the characters differ a bit but are similar, along with the style. Thirsty seems to be its own beast. Or is it just an evolution over time? DB: You know, I don’t see too much of that. I see Inventory as much hotter than Ossuaries. Ossuaries is colder. EMN: Those are both globalization poems, in a globalizing world, where No Language is Neutral and No Land to Light On are more colonial. Or am I looking for too much certainty? DB: Possibly. I see them, I see all my work, as moving to the next moment, the next place, the next thing that I want to think about and moving beyond them. Also, using different kinds of clinical tools to shape them, doing different movements with the line, discovering different vocalities, or texture, sight. I’m playing with the texture of a word, the sound of a word against another, that’s what interests me. So in Ossuaries, I’m trying to slow down, to cool off, but at the same time, clatter. To do something else with metaphor, something that isn’t straight lyric but is anti-lyric at the same time it is lyric. To put totally different objects together which break lyric but contain lyric. Suggests lyric, but is like, what? That shakes up sound. EMN: So it’s probably too complex to map the trajectory from one book to the next. It’s more like what happens in the world happens at the same time as your mind changes and what comes out comes out. DB: Yeah, but there’s, hopefully, a steady consciousness that takes on these events, that takes on years, that takes on moments. There’s some life, some being, trying to confront, ascertain, investigate, whatever, so there’s some consciousness going through it. EMN: Agency? DB: Yes, we can fool ourselves, sure, agency. But there’s some steady consciousness floating through this firmament, this air, that can reverse itself and can move on a different trajectory all together but is collecting substance along the way. I was just going over an old book of mine ... and it’s significant, I thought, reading through it, oh my god, I still use that. So I’m working and reworking something that strikes me about the world. EMN: Now you sound a bit like you’re talking about Yasmine, the individual, but she’s almost anonymous. There, but not. How close do you consider yourself to be to your characters, to Yasmine, to the watcher in Inventory. DB: To Yasmine, pretty far. She’s a woman of action, I’m not. She’s done something, she’s discovered her own violence. To the narrator in Inventory, maybe a little closer, but still quite far because she’s pretty hard on herself and what’s around. I’m interested in them. For Yasmine, I read over Ulrike Meinhof’s letters and papers. I’ve always been interested in that kind of woman, that was politically engaged in the late 60s, 70s, how they became woman of action. EMN: So these are way more external characters rather than extensions or hyperboles of you? DB: Oh yeah, are you kidding? EMN: It seems a lot of people would and have assumed a closer connection, but that must be based on some fallacy. DB: Totally. I mean, I want to understand that kind of person, who one day steps into the world. I’m fascinated by that person, but I’m not that type of person, who steps into motion. Especially when that person is a woman, given the world that we live in and the restrictive lives available to women. Even if we think that the feminist moment is passed, that it’s not still a question, but it is still a question, in so many arguments in the world. Woman are so commoditized, everywhere, everywhere, on every square inch of the world. So, how does that woman emerge, that takes action? And action in defense of her own freedoms, of her own sense of being a legitimate human being? EMN: That sounds 19^th century to me, that the poet is not—then it would be a man of action—but that the poet writes about the man or woman of action, which leads me to think of some similarities I’ve found in your work to Whitman. Particularly, I’m thinking of Inventory, the “atomic openings in my chest/ to hold the wounded.” In this age where this attitude can said to be bolder than usual, is there a sense of sacrifice on your part in taking this approach? DB: I don’t think so. It was Muriel Rukeyser who said it is not sacrifice, it is choice. EMN: But if it’s a harder choice, a more difficulty topic to tackle, is there sacrifice there? DB: No. All the choices I have made have been toward my own sense of liberation. EMN: You would have been dissatisfied if you hadn’t made those choices then? DB: Yes, I would have sunk and rot. EMN: For Inventory, you must have done what your character did, tally up all those deaths from the Iraq War, and that’s not exactly watching soccer. DB: No, it’s not [laughs], but I also get to do that too. I’m not the woman in Inventory, or the parts of me that are in Inventory also watch soccer. The woman in Inventory couldn’t go to bed. The woman in Inventory had to sit through the events, the apocalypse, the crisis. Not only sit through it, but list it, write it. That was a choice on my part, not a sacrifice. If the woman in Inventory had gone to bed, she wouldn’t have made the list and something would have been erased. She couldn’t live with that. She wouldn’t have a happy life if she did. To see is to be. There is not unhappiness is seeing. There can’t be too much that you know, that would be the woman in Inventory. As to me, to some extent—there can’ t be too much that I know. That I do not know that something exists does not make me any richer. EMN: And knowing that it exists doesn’t make you any— DB: Poorer. EMN: Yasmine is the one who sacrifices. DB: What does she sacrifice? EMN: Or is it that she attempts to? DB: I think she would like to have sacrificed something greater. EMN: Is that what she realizes? DB: She comes to think she was involved with an idea that was too small, that wasn’t sufficient. EMN: At the time she thought it was the biggest thing? DB: And it was in a way, for her, the biggest thing she could’ve entered, given her biography, her small biography. So when she entered it, she thought it was great. But there were encumbrances along the way, including gender and—bullshit, right, and small bad decisions that one shouldn’t be punished or killed for, but the small decisions. She wishes she could’ve been involved in something that was longer lasting, that didn’t have pettiness around it. EMN: So, we’re dancing around this paradox—I guess the only thing you can do with a paradox—that by reducing the amount of certainty she accepts, she gets something bigger that cannot ever really be approached, but only inhabited. DB: Right. She is like a Jazz musician who wants only to blow out of their time but becomes captured in their time. We hear them after, you hear Bird play Ornithology and say, wow, what year is it that he’s playing in? Its statements sound present and current. Its statements sound as if they are responding to the world we are living in currently. When you think that it’s 1946, you think, “that’s absurd.” Think of this artist reaching out of his time, composing small moments of sound, and somehow these compositions—whether this is the intention or not—they speak a speech made up of more than what can be contained in that particular historical or cultural moment. So Yasmine thinks that is the speech she should have been making, and there are parts of her speech which propel themselves to that point. But she is trapped in that particular historical or cultural moment. It’s like any poet, you’re not writing for some small domestic moment, that’s a grocery list, that’s not a poem. You’re writing beyond. You’re hoping this collection of adjective, verbs—you’re hoping this collection of words amount to a new element. So she’s hoping that the collection of her acts at the moment might result in a new thing, which maybe they don’t because there are all sorts of levers, encumbrances, which weigh on her, which freight her to the historical moment, even as she’s aware of that. EMN: We’ve been talking about addressing the world as a poet. Let’s take another perspective on that, from your position as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Have you been enjoying that? DB: Oh yeah, that’s totally sublime. First of all, what luck that we live in a city that acknowledges poetry. That’s pretty heavy, and speaks to the fact that a city isn’t just a set of baldly administrative strategies, that it might be a set of cultural strategies, or philosophical strategies. EMN: We’ve talked about the role of the poet in the public, as someone discerning the world. How does that role change when you become poet laureate? DB: I guess, in my case, I try to spread that argument, or infuse the public realm with that suggestion. EMN: That poetry discerns the world? DB: That it can. That the only strategies to discern the world aren’t…like this morning, the garbage truck came. That’s a way of discerning the world. Those guys toss that up there and it’s gone. They have a view of the world that’s interesting. The teacher’s in that school over there have a view of the world. Some business guy has a view of the world. But there’s not a balance of these views. EMN: Explain that. DB: There isn’t a balance in that the guy tossing the garbage isn’t given credit for discerning the world in a particular way, right, or we don’t elevate that kind of knowledge. Same with the teacher. The kind of world we live in now elevates certain knowledge as discerning the world. And so, you walk down any street and what are you bombarded by? Mostly, knowledge of commodity. This will make you fresh, this will make you happy, this will make you—whatever. And behind all of those statements—which are a kind of poetry—behind them is commercialism, capital. That dominates our public space, more and more. I’m not saying anything deeply politically charged by saying that, that’s for real. That’s what our public space is full of—or, fuller than it is of the view of the guy tossing the garbage on a Tuesday morning, or the view of the teacher. So that’s what dominates our public discourse and I think poetry offers a counter to that discourse. The guy throwing the garbage, we might want to investigate him. What part of the world is he seeing, what are people throwing away? So what I’ll try to do as Poet Laureate is to intervene in that public discourse, to promote statements that don’t have an end, like, it won’t make you happy. EMN: The language of consumerism is a closed narrative. DB: Totally. EMN: That brings us back to the idea that instead of closing, poetry opens. DB: Exactly. EMN: How difficult is it to get that message across when people are so bombarded by closed messages? Even, say, activist language, that might be anti-consumerism, is closed. DB: And has its own difficulty in piercing that discourse too. It’s true, activist language has its own slogans, which don’t pierce. EMN: So is it that that kind of activist language is battling one utilitarian force with another, whereas poetry battles that utilitarian, closed language with something that’s open. DB: Yes, I mean, I’m hoping. So I have a couple projects. The fundamental project is to put poetry into the public space. I’m working with the Public Library, to put Canadian verses on the sidewalk in front of libraries. There are things that need to be worked out, but I think that’ll be interesting for people, to enter into an open-ended conversation with four lines of poetry as they walk along. EMN: Who else is involved? DB: I put a small literary committee together. We meet every month or so and try to figure out how to get poetry into the public space. Like Dundas Square, it’s so full of that language of commodity. Why can’t one of those things that’s running across the screens, for example, be a line of poetry that means nothing? [laughs] Right? They’re trying to make that space into a kind of Time Square. I was just in Times Square this weekend and, my god, it’s awful, just dreadful. You look at it, one, Times Square can light a small country and it just bombards you with every dreadful trope of commodity—or commoditizing—in our society, every commoditized object, including people. And we aspire to that, all over the world. So, I’m thinking just a small intervention, not a major one, we don’t want to take over the world, just a small breakage that poetry might represent. EMN: Let’s talk about how well poetry has been making that small breakage. My feeling is that it’s in a position that is somewhat similar to that of jazz. That is, it’s vibrant, but the idea of it in the public mind is not so. DB: You know, I have a funny feeling that it is. I can only tell from the places I’ve read, readings I hear about, classes I’ve taught. It seems vibrant to me. EMN: How about in the public mind? DB: OK, I think precisely because the public space has been taken over by the insistence of commodity, the room for anything else is limited, small, smaller all the time. But I also think that every moment presents its opposite. EMN: Dominance might work against itself? DB: Yeah, it might fall from its own weight. Mind you, it’s incredibly compelling, because it’s not just in the public space, it’s also invaded the private space, or what’s called the private—those spaces are very aggressive spaces for a whole range of people—but it’s taken over intimate spaces too: the television, the computer. Even as, in some cases, the computer democratizes something. But what the computer democratizes is commodity, what the television democratizes is commodity, it doesn’t democratize a whole range of other things, not really. So, even that small space, in your house, there’s five hundred channels, you can troll the web and find anything. But most of that anything is something that you buy. It’s information too, certainly, but it’s cut through all the time with something that you buy. So, even the private space is colonized by commodity, so it’s a difficult thing to pierce through. But in my experiences, in classes, public readings and so on, there’s a sense of being fed up with that. EMN: A backlash? DB: I wouldn’t go so far, god knows, I wouldn’t go so far. But then, that’s the voice of Inventory: I wouldn’t go so far. But I have a kind of faith in the demise of it, of it falling on its own weight. EMN: Or the ability of the individual to get past it? DB: Maybe, maybe. I don’t sound as cynical as I am, but maybe. Also, poetry isn’t the only thing that intervenes in that space, people’s political action intervenes in that space. Take the people protesting the G20, they were trying to enter that space. Poetry isn’t the first thing you think of that does intervene in that way, but it does. And I don’t think it’s just contemporary poetry, any poetry that we read intervenes in that discourse. EMN: So you are not worried that poetry is so secluded that there’s only a few people who care about it? DB: But who are those people that care about it? I really think a lot of people care about it. I just went to a school at Jane-Finch [in Toronto]. God knows, I don’t like to go to schools, what am I going to say to a ten year old? But it was the most delightful class, and they are so stunningly bright. We wrote a poem on the board, they loved it. I think if you just asked people on the street, do you like poetry, what poem do you like, you’ll get one. Bet you. EMN: Back now to the insider poetry world. You teach in a creative writing program. What do you think a MA or MFA in creative writing should do for a writer? DB: Give you space. To read and to write. When I think of my early years as a writer, what I needed most was time, space to think it through. That’s what it offers: space to produce the work. EMN: You think of it more as a guiding space than instructional. Is there a danger in treating it as instructional. DB: In our case, at Guelph, first of all it’s graduate, so you’ve been through the undergraduate instructions. Second of all, there’s a process of getting in. So, while it is in some ways instructional, it is based on some sense of the possibility of the work done so far. I think what the MFA lets you do is read a lot, which you don’t get at the undergraduate level as much in terms of the range you can go into. EMN: Well, that’s the common criticism. As I heard someone say recently, MFAs have created a lot of competent writers but no more great writers. DB: Here’s my materialist critique of MFAs, in general, or Universities, in general. There’s a way in which universities have been commercialized, if you will, to produce students. I know there’s been a proliferation of MFAs in the United States, for example, or the writing colony thing, the object being to get a bunch of students in and turn them out. That can happen, you can get some kind of competence where everyone is writing in the same way, listening for the same sound. That’s the challenge of MFA programs, not to do that. To use what you’ve got there, to guide through what you’re going to do, not some particular tube that you’re going to sluice everyone through and create competence and not creativity. EMN: I think that covers that. Moving on, finishing up. Is Toronto a character in your work? DB: On a personal note, I grew up in Toronto, I came to adulthood in Toronto. It certainly figures in my novels, and it might in my poetry … EMN: I’m thinking of Thirsty. DB: It’s definitely a character in Thirsty. It’s multi-vocality is evident in Thirsty, or it tries to speak of that multi-vocality. It’s a fabulous city; there’s a lot available to experience in it. I was just down on College Street, watching the World Cup. My friend and I have been doing the World Cup for years, and I notice it’s a whole younger crowd doing the World Cup. So we went to one bar, and we’re for Portugal, and we notice everyone has one a red shirt [for Spain]. At halftime one of them has the car on the street, blasting hip-hop. The bars are packed, there’s nowhere to sit. So we end up at a bakery, not as full, and we sat there with this whole other crew of people, mostly Portuguese supporters, but incredible cultural difference, African-Canadians, Italians, who are now supporting the Portuguese, so, there’s so much to know. I’m always fascinated by how some people get together, like how did they figure each other out? There’s so much to learn, to tease out. EMN: I get the sense that what some, myself at times included, find at least a bit overwhelming about the city, you find to be fascinating. DB: Yeah. EMN: An endless source? DB: Yeah. EMN: To close, I’m still stuck on this sense that poets shy away from the big, obvious issues. DB: I don’t get it; didn’t it work for Yeats, the big questions, or Ginsberg? It’s telling that this reluctance, or retreat, appears at the same time as the advance, or triumph of consumerist speech. I had a teacher who used to ask me, “Does the world need this line?” That’s my measure. I’m not writing for anyone alive now. I’m writing for there [pointing forward] and there [pointing back]. I’m writing for poetry. Do you think Coltrane ever played, or cared for any critic?