“What a Dark, Black World We Live in, and How Funny is That?”: An Interview with Louise Carson
Louise Carson has recently published in Carousel, EVENT, and The Literary Review of Canada, with work upcoming in Descant and The Antigonish Review. One of her poems has been selected for The Best Canadian Poetry 2013. Her books include Rope: A Tale Told in Prose and Verse (Broken Rules Press, 2011) and Mermaid Road (BRP, 2013). She lives near Montreal.
Interviewer’s Note: In the spring of 2013, I attended a livewords reading in Toronto’s Danforth. After the set break, an unassuming woman in a sundress got on the stage. For better or worse, her appearance and demeanor suggested a pleasant, but not all that surprising, reading was to follow. Then she stole the show. I can only describe her reading as bizarrely homey. It was comforting, funny, but also rich and dark—in the way “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is, but with the surprise of something new. She read from the opening of her book Rope, the opening lines of which immediately captured the audience: “His mother was poor, unknown and a thief. She was pregnant but they hanged her anyway.” This is the mother of Rope’s protagonist, Deasil Widdy. “As she twisted, she moaned and jerked, as some do: it took time to choke, the fresh withy wrapped round her neck. Poor man’s rope, the widdy,” Carson writes. Then, “the child slipped out.”
The hangman wonders why she didn’t “plead her belly,” because that would have pardoned her. “Maybe she thought it was kinder to take it with her,” someone form the crowd replies. But the child is fine, or as fine as it can be: “the hangman wrapped the child in its mother’s shawl and walked it three times around the hanging body. Three times sunwise to wish away the darkness of its birth.” “Deasil” means “turn to the right,” or “following the apparent direction of the sun.” So the opening concludes: “they called the boy Deasil Widdy, as he had been carried clockwise around the hangman’s noose.”
This short book, subtitled “A Tale Told in Prose and Verse,” follows Deasil through his childhood and into adulthood. He eventually becomes the hangman himself, as well as a master rope maker. Rope vaguely reminded me of Anne Carson’s narrative work, and that’s why I’ve paired the two Carsons in this issue. One is, you might say, too well known, while the other is hardly known at all. Yet both have produced engrossing, historically based narratives featuring sympathetic, oddball lead characters and a strange mix of charm, tragedy and an uncanny connection between the distant past and the present.
At livewords, as Carson read the book’s second poem, “His Mother Wakes between the Lime Pit and Heaven,” she sung the chorus:
You asked me if I loved you, You said you didn’t care, I said love’s there above you, The blue dust in your hair, The blue dust in your hair.
Her voice was striking, and the effect was haunting (turns out she’s a trained singer). The person with whom I attended the reading was watching Twin Peaks at the time and was reminded of that show. It was, indeed, straight out of a David Lynch film—heavily nostalgic, but creepy as hell, and complete with a red curtain behind the stage. I was hooked. It took some time to track down Louise Carson, and Rope, but I eventually did. The interview below is the result.
But before the interview began, Ms. Carson and I were chatting, and we got into some interesting territory. This conversation was not recorded. She mentioned that she tried to avoid prosiness in both her reading and writing. I asked her, given that she mixes poetry and prose, what makes poetry poetry, and she said rhythm. “It's like a horse,” she said, before imitating the sound of a horse trotting, nodding her head to the rhythm, then switching to a cantor and asking, “have you ridden horses?” I told her cantering on a horse was one of the greatest feelings I’ve had—because it’s like flying—and she continued by explaining the link between the rhythm of a horse’s gait and the rhythm we crave in poetry. At this point I had to stop her from shedding these jewels before the interview began, and I turned on the recorder.
E Martin Nolan: Based on what I could find on the Internet, you started writing later in life. Can you tell me about how you started, and what led to that?
Louise Carson: Sure. I used to write when I was young. Then I decided to pick, and asked myself, “what am I going to be?” I picked music, so I focused all of my intelligence on that and put writing aside. When I lived in Toronto, I got a little bit of writing work here or there. There was an old magazine called This Magazine.
EMN: It’s still around.
LC: Great. I worked for This when it was just starting. I wrote things like concert reviews. Not classical—which is part of my training—but Cowboy Junkies and Blue Rodeo when they were just starting out. Those kinds of groups. That was fun, but they didn’t pay me anything, so I went back to another love of mine, which is horticulture. I did landscape architecture at Ryerson, night school, just to change out of music. There’s always the life, to starve at something, but then you go, “gee, I’d like to make like two hundred dollars a week. Is that asking too much? Just so I can (kind of) live in Toronto?
Then when I turned forty, I had my daughter, and I moved back to Hudson [Quebec], or St. Lazare (right next to it), and did the music teacher thing, which I still do. And all along: keeping journals and writing fragments of poems, but never really forming anything, never completing something.
EMN: So it was always there.
LC: It’s always there. It’s like, “Oh, that looks like a poem,” and I’d write a few lines and it would go in the journal. Then it’s onwards, with real life, so to speak—practical life. Then when I turned fifty, my mother died. And I don’t know about you, but when your significant elders die, you’re left going, “Oh, it’s me next. I’m now the generation that—I’m now going to age and my child will see me die.” And you go, “If not now, when?”—in terms of creating something, leaving something behind. So that’s what happened: when I turned fifty, it just—it switched on. It wasn’t an ambition thing that switched on, it was just that poetry started to come. About six months after my mother’s death, I had my grief-stricken period. Then poetry started to come. It’s a cliché, but it was like a gift, this outpouring of energy. I had read enough, practiced writing enough in my life that I could crank it out. So finally I was able to finish things. Then I said, “I know there are lots of literary magazines in Canada, so why don’t I start sending stuff out?” I did that, and now six years later I’ve got a poem coming out in the Best Canadian Poetry 2013. I just found out.
EMN: Congratulations.
LC: I’m very chuffed about that. That’s a little, teensy-tiny piece of literary immortality. I’m pleased.
EMN: What poem?
LC: It’s called “Plastic Bucket.” It’s from Prairie Fire’s “Boreality” issue.
EMN: So your early poems: were they eulogizing your mother, or related, or were they unrelated?
LC: The first poems to come out were A: juvenile and B: joyous. It was a reaction—a reaction to death. She died in fall, and in the spring I started to write poems. I won’t say they were spring poems, but they were springing out of me, and they were joyous and they were … playing with language. All that summer that was happening, an uplifting kind of a thing. Then there’s a change: they got darker. I guess it’s psychology starting to work. You start to record, and things come up. I’ve written about that in an essay called “In Solitude,” which is about how writers, especially poets, need solitude. It’s great to write in a community of writers, but I’m so grateful that my daughter is out from 7–3, at school, and I have no other distractions. I have that time to spend a whole day thinking or writing, getting ready to write—doing any of those things a writer has to do that take so much time. The metaphor I use is winter, because I write way more and better in the winter. In the summer, because I live in the country, I have to really turn off from all the beautiful stuff happening outside. But in the winter I can lock in for months to a really good regime of writing. Where I live, you can cross-country ski, but that’s it. The Canadian winter is conducive for writers.
EMN: Turning to music, did you say you were classically trained?
LC: Yes, and in jazz piano.
EMN: How much have you performed?
LC: When I moved here, to Toronto, I tried to be a classical singer. I got church jobs—I sang at the Church of the Redeemer, at Bloor and Avenue Road, for four years as the soloist, and at other churches, for odd jobs. Or armature choirs, when they’d hire professional singers to lead a section. So I did that, and I peaked when I was hired to sing in the extra chorus of the Canadian Opera Company. We’re talking the late 1980s, and again, I couldn’t live on what I was making on classical singing—and I was single; I didn’t have any financial support. I had to do something else.
EMN: I’m interested in [the music] because when I saw you read at livewords, you sung part of Rope. Given that you got into poetry later on, did your musical training play into that? How does it affect your writing?
LC: We talked already [before the recorder was on] about rhythm, and musicality, and sounding the vowel. As a singer, you have to love the vowels. If I’m gonna sing the words I’m speaking, I’m not going to pronounce the words the way I’m doing it right here. If I’m singing—[Louise sings the previous sentence, and it indeed sounds different, especially the vowels]—I’m going to shape my mouth differently; I’m going to—umm—love those vowels in my mouth and then push those out. That’s what singers do. When I read, I’m trying to do that too, and I’m also trying to do that when I write. I’ll read aloud what I’ve written, and I’ll go, “Does this have some rhythm, does this have some beauty of tone to me?” Sometimes I’ll go through a draft of a poem and I’ll circle all the vowels that seem to be repeating.
My very old dog—I had to have her put to sleep a week or two ago, so a few days after that I started to write an elegy for her. It’s not a great poem—I won’t bore you with it—but once I looked at it and read it out loud, I went, “Oh look, I’m saying, ‘ou-oh-ou-oh’ all the way through the poem.” I use the word “you” about ten times because it’s addressed to the poor old dead dog, and then after “ou” there comes an open vowel: “oh,” like in “yellow.” So basically, I’m crooning. I self-analyzed my poem afterwards, which is a useful exercise even for a not-great poem. You see other poems—like a poem where I’m really pissed off, a feminist poem or a poem where I’m angry at one of my relatives, which happens—and there’s a lot ‘r’s’ in there. In fact I have one poem just called “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” because I noticed that almost every word has an ‘r’ in it. I’m growling all the way through this poem. So the sound is important. That’s not something that I put on—that just comes out.
The other point where music is very important comes from the idea of daily practice. As a musician, and certainly as a music student, if you don’t practice, you sink, because they’re expecting a very huge improvement from the time you enroll until you graduate. They expect you to go from wherever you are to concert level—if you’re in the right program. That means practicing nine hours a day. That’s three hours in the morning—not voice, of course, or you’d shred it—but piano: I’d practise in the morning, afternoon, and after supper, apart from regular school work. You get good really fast when you do that, so I used that: when I started doing poetry I went, “Okay, you’re fifty, you’re gonna do this really hard for the next five years and see what happens.” So I took that kind of approach: get up, grab coffee, sit on the sofa, pick up paper, pen, and stare out the window. And not move unless I had to, until around lunch time. Put everything else on hold—and you’d be amazed by what kind of good subconscious stuff is in there. When you’re just looking out the window at the leaves, or whatever, a lot will come out.
EMN: Music must affect the way you prepare for a reading as well.
LC: I read what I’m gonna read. I practice it, which I think a lot of poets don’t do, and it’s unfortunate, because they get up there and they’re “um-ing” and “ah-ing” and—I hate that: when a poet gets up and the first thing I hear out of their mouth is “ahhh, ummmm.” It’s like: “No, it’s a performance, it’s a performance. Don’t just think your words have some intrinsic value. You have to sell them. It’s a commercial world, and even in primitive tribes the storytellers were the storytellers because they were the ones who were the best at telling a story. It wasn’t necessarily because they had all the stories. They were good at it, and they made them come alive, so everyone else could get that “ohh” cathartic thing happening. So it’s like: work, for god’s sake, when you’re up there as a poet reading—give something. That’s from being a musician, the idea that if you’re too laid back, it doesn’t go out, it just stays right here. You’ve gotta push it out there, whether it’s your voice coming from your body, or instrument, or your words.
The inverse of that is: if you lean really close to the mic, [whispering] and speak in a really quiet voice, you can get their attention, too. But then you have to change it up a little bit. There are all sorts of little stage tricks for getting the attention of the audience. Just waiting, too, is good, just waiting.
[pause]
EMN: Silence?
LC: Yes. If they’re chattering, just wait. Look around the room and just wait—imposing your personality on the room is the fun part of reading or performing. That’s the ego-boost the performer gets.
EMN: You’ve also written about how joining a community allowed you to take that step from casual to serious writing. Can you tell us a little about Twigs and Leaves and also the Greenwood poets?
LC: I’ll start in chronological order. Greenwood came to pass because there’s something called Storyfest, in Hudson, which is a fundraiser for the Greenwood house, now called the Greenwood Centre for the Living History. It’s a nice old house, about 300 years old, right on the Lake of Two Mountains. It’s great place to have poetry events, or any kind of event. Storyfest is a literature festival, and most of the people who come through are big name people, like Margaret Trudeau, who came through last year and read from her book. Jane Urquhart came through—a poet but much better known as a novelist. It’s very Canadian in content. We just had Nancy Richler. At one of these events someone had the bright idea that they’d have an open poetry event. Just an invitation: if there were any poets who lived in the area, they could come. This was the very first year I’d been writing. I’d been writing for about eight months and I went, “Right, there are other poets.” So I went to that, and met the other people, and we so enjoyed the afternoon that we decided to meet again, at the Greenwood house, and they let us meet there, and they still let us meet there. That’s where I met Jon [Torell]. He turned me on to all the American poets, the current ones. Franz Wright, but so many more—like W.S. Merwin. If I could every write something like that, like “For a Coming Extinction”—amazing. He has so many poems that make me think, if I’d only written one like that I’d be happy.
So, that’s the Greenwood Poets. One of the poets who was in that group, Sandra Stephenson, administers the site Poets Against War.
EMN: I’ve read your poem there.
LC: That was written in the first couple months that I was writing—a very simple poem, very prosy, with shorty lines. Sandra was one of the first people to ask for a poem, and she knew of these people at The Twigs Café, in St. Anne de Bellevue (about half-way between where I live and Montreal). Once a month they have a spoken word event there called Twigs and Leaves. You can do whatever you want. It’s not as rigid as some other events.
EMN: Is this one of those small towns, like Woodstock-type places, where there’s a lot of creative people away from the city?
LC: In St. Anne de Bellevue? I’d say there’s a lot of that there. There’s also a core English community that’s been there for a long time, like certain villages and towns in Quebec that are more English than French—Hudson is one—and St. Anne’s is another.
But Twigs is an awesome little place. That’s where I found my publishers. Erika White, one of the owners of this little publishing group, Broken Rules Press, she’s the MC at Twigs and Leaves’ spoken word events.
EMN: I could find very little about Broken Rules Press. They don’t even have a Blogspot site or anything.
LC: I try to get them to do more of that. But they are very clear that they do not want to be a distributor at all. They put the books in a few bookstores in Montreal, to a book fair twice a year or so in Ottawa, and one in Montreal, and that’s about it. It’s up to the authors to get their work out there.
EMN: Tell me about how Rope came along. Did Broken Rules approach you or did you approach them?
LC: I wrote it in 2010 and sent it out to a couple of publishers. A couple didn’t answer at all and a couple said, “no thank you,” and one said, “I think it’s good, but it’s not the type of thing we publish.” I was a newbie. I had only been writing for, say, three years, and had no feel for the publishing industry. I would google publishers that publish poetry and see what there was. I was moaning to Erika about that, because I had read Rope in its entirety over that winter. People had been looking forward to it, had been interested in how it [would] turn out. It was fun, like some old-fashioned Victorian thing. I told Erika, I thought it was just this weird little hybrid piece that no one would want to publish, and she said, “We’d be interested in publishing it.” It came out that September.
EMN: How many did they make?
LC: They make about twenty at a time. I think we’re up to about a hundred, hundred and ten now. And that’s from me buying them and selling them.
EMN: I had to email you to get a copy, because they don’t have an email address.
LC: I’m not bothered by the small circulation. I’m thinking that when the next one comes out, because I’m not technologically savvy, I’ll ask my teenage daughter to make me a cheap site, so at least if you google my name, or “poet Louise Carson,” something comes up with my email in it so that I can get Rope or Mermaid’s Road to people. I tried to follow your path—how did he find me?—and it was quite difficult.
EMN: I don’t know what blog I found it on. Looked like maybe it was translated from French or something—the writing was very strange. Then at the bottom, it said, “If you want a copy of Rope, here’s the e-mail.”
LC: That was me, again, going to that paper to suggest a story about Rope. It’s okay. It’s fun.
EMN: Let’s talk about how Rope came along. In Montreal Serai, you say that it came from looking up the etymology of “deasil” and “widdy.” Why were you looking those words up?
LC: There’s a story in my family. My mother’s mother used to sit in the kitchen after supper and read the dictionary. I always loved that story. She was a visual artist—although as a mother in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, she didn’t ever paint or anything—but she had studied at L’Ecole des Beaux-Artes de Montreal. The idea of this artistic person reading the dictionary—I thought it was amazing and stultifying at the same time. I always hoped she was also doing little sketches and hiding them in drawers, that she got some outlet.
So I like to read the dictionary in her honour, if you will. And if I have to look up a word, I get distracted. I’ll look up “anteater” to see if it’s one word, hyphenated, whatever, and I’ll see “antimony,” then I’ll read on—I love the etymology of words. I find that doing this opens a whole other pathway into the word. Everyone knows that “cancer” is named after Cancer the crab. As soon as you start thinking about “cancer,” the disease, as a crab, it nips you, nips you, nips you. I’ve written a cancer poem, using the ancient Greek—Roman?—“chanker,” which comes from that old, old word we use for canker sores. It’s the same root. Then you think, “For thousands of years, people have thought of this disease as this little insect creature who lives in the sea and will pinch you if step on it or if you catch it.”
So one day, I see “deasil” at the top of the page. It’s not spelled like “diesel,” the oil. It comes from the German word for “sun.” That’s beautiful, because we think of “diesel” as black; it’s oil and it comes from the Earth, but the sun—just change the spelling a little. Then “widdy,” I don’t know—I knew [the main character] was going to be a hangman. I had the huge dictionary in the library, the monster, and I was looking up the withies, because I wanted his halters, or whatever he uses, to be homemade. It’s just the train of thought: he’s using homemade rope, which he makes from withies, which is an English word for “willow,” a corruption of “willow,” which leads to “withy,” which led to “widdy,” which is a low-Scots version of “withy,” and I thought, “That’s gonna be his last name.” He’s named for the tool of his trade, his adopted father’s trade.
EMN: So the concept for the book came before the words.
LC: Somehow.
EMN: Were you already interested in that general area of history?
LC: I love history, especially northern European—because of my Scottish, English and Irish background. It’s interesting: it’s much more fluid than we think. We’re taught, “this is the history of Scotland, and this is the history of Norway,” and we’re not taught that plenty of times in history they’ve totally intersected, and blended, because of the use of ships. There was no history of Norway or Scotland; it was all just people on ships. And not just warriors. Other people could get on a ship and move, too. And the Norwegians all spoke this fractured tongue—what we think of as Old Norse—but the people in Scotland could probably understand that pretty well because of the frequent contact. And it wasn’t all war; there was a lot of trade, too. There’s a whole other way to look at the history of that area. As soon as you have islands and ships it becomes much more fluid.
So, in the next book [Rope’s sequel], it’s going to be the in-between part. Or, after [Deasil Widdy] leaves Sithford and moves on, there’s twenty years in there that I have to address. That’s why I’m going to Scotland this summer: I’ve written about these places, but now I have to make them more real to myself, and understand the geography. Because he has to follow where the rope is [at the end of Rope], so I think he might be pressed into the British Navy for a time.
EMN: I was wondering about that, because we leave Deasil Widdy and he’s still there, in Sithford, but he’s dreaming. So do we get more of him in Mermaid Road? Because there is a mermaid in Rope.
LC: No, it’s got nothing to do with that. Mermaid came out of a different inspiration for a story idea. There was a little girl who had Sirenomelia, which is the technical name for a very rare birth defect where your legs don’t form. They’re either there but fused together, or they’re not formed and you have a stump. She was on Oprah a couple of years ago, and I didn’t watch it, but I saw the news when that little girl died. She was on Oprah when she was about ten, then at about twelve she died. But she looked like a healthy, tough little girl, apart from her legs—there was nothing wrong with her brain. So I thought I’d like to write something about her, but I never did, then the idea came later: what if a perfect mermaid was born to human parents? You’re not gonna find that in fairy tales—I researched this—you’ll never find that. I think that a lot of fairy tales come out of birth defects, like Gigantism. Cyclopism is also a known birth defect—not usually in the centre of the forehead—that’s some artist taking it to the next degree, as it’s much more dramatic than just having one eye and an empty socket. And Sirenomelia is a real birth defect. Most people who have it die. There’s only like two people who have it left alive in the world, who are living with it. She was the third. It’s a terrible and awful thing. I thought: let’s turn it on its head and let’s say, “It’s a normal, healthy girl. She’s just got a tail.”
She’s the ultimate outsider: she’s a monster, but she’s really just a healthy creature that we’re not understanding. What that would do to her family life, and if her family would support her, and what would happen to her as she became an adolescent and a young woman. It’s a metaphor, of course, [laughs] for any woman’s travel through the world. Everyone feels that he or she’s different, or an outsider. Few of us feel like we’re 100% the same, or accepted. You always have that feeling of separateness, or maybe that’s just me.
EMN: She shares some characteristics with Deasil, then.
LC: She’s someone special, in the true meaning of the word: different.
EMN: But unexpectedly so. Deasil is a hangman, but he’s very nice, sensitive.
LC: It’s about obsession, too. He’s got a rope fetish—or is it a hair fetish? We’re not quite sure. How is that going to pan out as he gets older? Does he get a hold of it? I don’t know; I’ll have to write it out. (It gets worse before it gets better.)
EMN: To return to Rope: did you do a lot of research for this book?
LC: Once I got his name, the research became easy. I had to find my cutoff point for hangings. I wanted it to be historically accurate, within a certain timeframe at least, about hangings—of witches specifically because I knew he would be involved in that. The year 1722 was the last that they hanged witches or burned witches at the stake in Scotland. So that was my cutoff point. That gave me my entrance point for the history; I knew I had to look at the first 25 years of the 18th-century. He’s young, so I had him born around 1700. Now for the next one, I have to look into the Royal Navy. I’m going to a place where they had a big base in the 1700s; I’m going to Dundee to see if there’s anything left there. I have to get a feel for the estuary and the geography of the land. If he’s going to be there, then he’s probably going to have to escape the Navy and hide somewhere. I could do it with the Internet; I could fake it a little bit, but I’ve always wanted to go to Scotland.
EMN: I’m interested in the way time is working here, especially with Anne Carson in mind, who messes with anachronism a lot. Were you trying to write this in the way he would think about it? Because it does seem that way sometimes, but then at others it’s a more modern voice. What was your strategy with his voice, or the witches’ and others?
LC: I wasn’t gonna try to fake any type of vernacular or accent from early 1700s Scots. I wasn’t going to try to do a Robbie Burns kind of thing. I had to write in my own voice.
I guess I had my agendas. My main agenda is honesty, and it’s feminism. I’m trying to be honest about how people react and act toward each other, but I also have that feminist axe to grind: what a pity, what a pity that we couldn’t have opened up our minds a few centuries earlier than we have. And still there are places where they’re still doing terrible things to women. If you’re different, or you want to be different, or you express a different view, we’re going to execute you, one way or another. If you want to get an education, we’ll put a bomb in your school. Not naming any specific countries, but you know what I’m talking about. I’m not “anti-” any country or religion, but I’m “anti-” a mindset that says some of us are more equal than others because of what’s in our pants.
So I let the washerwoman [Deasil’s de-facto mother figure] be the pivotal figure who moves the drama to the conclusion for him, at least in a dream—whether that’s a dream or reality, I let the reader decide. But she is his touchstone. The first poem is the story of his mother’s death, so you can see right away that she didn’t feel like she belonged, like she could make the right deal in her society that would get her somewhere. She was one of those victims who got used, someone got her to steal or—she just seems like the victim type, and that was the end of her. Gone, and she was probably 16 or something, she was just a young woman.
EMN: These public hangings were entertainment.
LC: That’s where Hackle and Scutch come in. They get off on it. It’s TV and it’s hockey and all those good things.
EMN: But they’re also nice to Deasil.
LC: You think they’re nice to him? I’m [not sure.] They’re even less [respected] than him. He has a function. They’re just ditch diggers.
EMN: They’re a kind of outcast band.
LC: I see them as comic relief.
EMN: And at least somewhat sympathetic. But coming back, it’s totally in there when you mention it, but it’s almost like you assume the oppression of women from this era.
LC: Of course.
EMN: What is Deasil’s role in all that? I guess he doesn’t put any morality on what he does, or if there is morality it’s that he wants to do his job well.
LC: Exactly.
EMN: Which is better for the condemned [Deasil has little patience for hangmen who fail to instantly kill their subjects, allowing them to suffer more than necessary, or to escape: “Sloppy work I call it. I am good at my job./ It’s the turn that does it. The twist.”]
LC: He ties it to his own survival. If he does his job well, he’ll probably survive. That’s what his little brain is probably thinking. He doesn’t drink like the guy before him [his adopted father]. He’s pretty straight and sober and does his job and makes his rope.
EMN: He’s got an interesting set of replacement parents. The banshee woman, if she is a banshee, and the hangman who hanged his mother. Both are nice enough to him, but not very caring. They’re outcasts themselves.
LC: Even to be suspected to be a banshee—is she really one, or just a washerwoman who happened to be washing some bloody sheets [which is why she is suspected]—we don’t know. But she has the power, if she is a banshee, to make that person die. But as a woman in those days, even if she’s just suspected of being a banshee, it was really bad. She’s managed to survive by staying away from everybody else in the village. She’s hoping they don’t appear in the middle of the night with torches to drag her off after they decide she is a witch.
EMN: How did the form of the book come about—the mix of formal poems, some more modern lyrics, some prose.
LC: When I was writing it, it just seemed they would fit at certain points. Some I wrote for the book, like “Deasil Widdy,” in which I describe the methodology of how to make the rope in a poem. I could do it efficiently in a short little poem, by breaking it down into these little steps.
[tab10][“willows by the river[/tab10]
[tab15]cut[/tab15]
[tab10]and stripped[/tab10]
[tab10]pounded[/tab10]
[tab15]on rocks[/tab15]
[tab10]split[/tab10]
[tab10]soaked in the river[/tab10]
[tab15]till soft[/tab15]
[tab10]dried by the fire[/tab10]
[tab10]then plaited for the hangman’s noose.”][/tab10]
It seemed pretty straight forward, like people could use that poem to make their own rope.
EMN: And in his rope making, Deasil is an artist.
LC: A craftsman, anyway. His rope was used for other things, not just for his own use. People back then, those poor people, they didn’t have metal. If they wanted to latch a door, they would use a piece of rope. Maybe if you had a castle or an inn and you needed to lock something, but these people had nothing, anyway.
EMN: What does his rope-making craft do for him? Does it give him solace, or does it outcast him more because he treats it as this private practice?
LC: It sets him aside, it gives him an existence apart from the hangings, which I don’t think he really likes.
EMN: He tries to make the hangings into artistic things.
[“As the stool is pulled away it’s turned deasil so the body swings to the right first. Things must be done to the right. The sun says so and the shadows agree.”]
LC: And he expresses that he really doesn’t like to dispatch women, because he knows that his mother was hanged. That twists him. He could get super twisted from this. I couldn’t see that I could make an ending if I let him become super twisted. I had to get him out of there. He’s proud—and when I get him into the Navy, he’s going to know about rope, he’s gonna understand how to maintain it, he’s gonna be good to them. He knows about knots. They’ll take him, and they’ll be surprised. He’s not some yokel. He knows about rope, which is what runs the Navy. With no rope, there’s no Navy. It’s gonna be fun.
EMN: Who knew rope could be such a fruitful vehicle?
LC: There’s one ropeyard left, in England. One actual functioning ropeyard, where they make rope by hand. It’s made in these really long sheds because they have to twist the strands one way, then they have to take those and twist them back the other way, so to make a long piece of rope by hand, you need a really long building. It’s called a ropewalk, and I may put that in [the next book]. Rope is very interesting.
EMN: We were discussing before the difference between prose and poetry. For you what makes something either or, if a verse can be prosy and prose can be lyrical?
LC: I think you have to go to music, and you have to talk about rhythm and beauty of language. Here’s an example: [LC’s] “Plastic Bucket.” What a horrible, awful title. But it’s a beautiful poem, if I can say so myself. So: Plas-tic Buck-et. Nothing beautiful in those two words. Nothing I can do with that. But behind my house in the woods, where I walk often, there’s a great big plastic bucket left by the owner, who drives through on his tractor when he cuts his wood for the winter for his wood stove. I hardly ever meet him. The poem is about why you would leave that ugly plastic bucket in your beautiful woods. So that’s an example of using two ugly words as the title, but in the poem I’m describing the beauty of the woods, and how I get to go into his woods. I steal from him everyday. I steal blue jay cries, coyote hunger, poetic things. It’s not my land but I go in there.
My goal, aside from writing good poems, is to write a poetic novel. Through composed, beautiful language all the way through. I think I’m getting there. This next Deasil book, I think, will be closer to fiction, to a novel. Mermaid Road is getting close to that, because as I work more in prose, I notice that it’s not that different than the little poem I’ve stuck at the end of the sections in Rope. Someone once said that poetry fine-tunes a language. Puts an edge on it. If you can become a good poet, it helps you write good prose because you get rid of all the extra stuff you don’t need.
EMN: On rhythm: you were discussing before the interview how that links up with horses.
LC: Yes, the rhythm of the gait. As a musician—do you have a music background yourself?
EMN: Kind of. I love music, and it affects my writing. I went to school with a bunch of music students—jazz studies. I saw the way that they practiced everyday, how important shedding was.
LC: When I teach kids piano, I teach them the difference between 2/4 and 3/4. For example, I’ll get them up and I’ll say, “I’m going to play this piece in 2/4 and I want you to walk around the room in time to the music.” And they do it. Then I switch to 3/4 and say, “Now walk around the room in 3/4.” They can’t do it, because 3/4 is a dance rhythm. [LC counts off a 3/4 rhythm]. That’s when you start to get into the gaits. It doesn’t have to be horse gaits—it can be human gaits. Everyone can trot, or jog-trot—tot-tot-tot—those are eighth notes. You can do that with words. You can do it with silences between words, too. I’m always conscious of the beat in between, say, a phrase and the next phrase. To use silence is really important. Again, this comes back to the discipline of being a musician, not being sloppy. It’s like, “I’m being very clear: I’m going to read this way, or I’ll read it this way [beat, beat],” and I’ll count those two beats in between before I finish the sentence. Being mindful of that is useful.
EMN: On that note, I’ve always wondered: is it just an attention to those elements, an attention to language as a physical thing, and not just as a way of getting an idea across?
LC: An attention, yes. And I don’t want to go into any extremes—I don’t want to be a sound POET-T-T-T-T-T, and start doing THEEES, and accompanying it with strange gestures; I’m not going there—but I want to marry the content to really good presentation, so that hopefully the readers, when they read something silently to themselves in their heads, some of that comes through—if I’ve been clever about how I put it down on the page. I’m talking line breaks, or pushing margins over. That should be extremely purposeful. That’s something I’ve worked on with Jon [Torell] for a long time: how it looks on the page. Franz Wright doesn’t bother with that; Jean Valentine says it’s all about that, all about where she’s putting the words: this much space between those two words, then jog that line there and—if you account for her use of space when you read her stuff you get an insight. She’s a fairly oblique poet, fairly difficult. But it’s not random. Do you know Kay Ryan’s work?
EMN: A bit.
LC: Excellent poet, and she’s the queen of the short, two-or-three-word line, and it seems like it’s a sentence broken down—in that fake way you were talking about?
EMN: People say that about Anne Carson.
LC: And I’m sure some poets are guilty of that. They’re not thinking. But in Kay Ryan’s case, it gives you the rhythm of the poem. You read the poem and you understand why she put those two words there, or those three syllables (it’s more of a syllabic thing).
EMN: Do you understand that as being similar to a breath in music?
LC: In a poem, a breath is either the end of a long line, or a double stanza break.
EMN: But on a short line, would you breath? Or what does that line break do, rhythmically?
LC: If I haven’t read it before, I don’t like to read a poem out loud. If it’s someone else’s poem, I’m going to practice and see where it takes me. If it’s by a good poet, that should give me some clues: how they laid the poem out on the page. But there’s plenty of so-called good poets who are not mindful of how it looks on the page, or the rhythm. Then you have to guess, and it’s not consistent. That’s a hard thing. It’s like, “how can you put a comma here, and not a comma here?” And if I read through that, and it doesn’t sound right—it’s like they implied a comma here. Being careful, like you said: bringing your attention to it.
EMN: So it becomes an intuitive thing, as opposed to “every line break is like this.” Moving on, Mermaid Road is going to lean more toward poetic prose.
LC: Yes, and most of the poems in it—one of them is a sonnet that I made into a paragraph, so the poetic reader will go, “I’m getting the rhythm of a sonnet from this.” If they check, and count their syllables, they’ll see that it is a sonnet. What I’m trying to do is trick the reader into reading poetry whether they know it or not. A lot of the people I know say they don’t like poetry, or they say, “Why are you writing poetry?” They don’t get it, and they’ll say to you: “Poetry’s wonderful, but I don’t get it.” And they look away. So I’ll sneak it into my next book. I think we’ll put a list at the end that says, “The poems in this book can be found on …” and then the pages and the names of the poems.
EMN: You’re going for something subversive.
LC: It’s me taking this format [from Rope], and trying to be subtler.
EMN: Mermaid Road is set in the modern day?
LC: Yes. Maybe a tiny bit retro. Maybe the ’60s or ’70s, but I haven’t really pinned that down. Basically, the little girl grows up, and the parents are told she has to go to school. The parents say, “We’re teaching her at home,” and they say, “She has to go to school.” And the parents say, “Well, she can’t speak, so how’s she gonna do at school? She’ll have to go to a special school, and we don’t want [that] because she’s fine as she is.” They’re always struggling with the bureaucracy, and at some point they just go, “Let’s just get out of here,” and they sell the house and they take her in a trailer and disappear from their town.
Then the rest of her life starts. There’s a lot of pressure from the medical community to alter her, and they’re like, “But she works. She can swim, that’s all. She’s better in the water than she is on land. There’s nothing wrong with her.” Whereas, most people with that birth defect have faulty digestive systems … there are problems with the spine … but this mermaid’s great. She’s got a perfect spine that perfectly joins to her fishtail and so the parents say, “No, she’s healthy and well and we’re not going to have her altered, just so she can go to your damn school and not speak.” That’s another thing, not with Sirenomelia, but with Mermaidism: usually mermaids can’t speak. They can sing, but they don’t speak. So she sings.
EMN: I really think you would like Autobiography of Red. I think Geryon and Deasil would get along.
LC: I’ll get a hold of it.
EMN: But Mermaid Road is based on a germ of truth.
LC: Yes, in that there’s a true birth defect. And: is this the base for the myths about mermaids? I also get into seal-people, too, people who change into seals, because she manages to swim across the Atlantic Ocean to Scotland, and then she drifts down into the Mediterranean, and she runs into the lost Atlantis, and is disappointed, because it’s just ruins, like Greece is. I try to debunk some myths. I have her bring up the dead body of Ulysses, as if the myth had gone terribly wrong and he was still tied to the mast, as though that didn’t work for him. The sirens are in there, too. They use [the mermaid] to get Ulysses; then they rip him to shreds.
EMN: One more question about Rope: was the story of Deasil’s mother giving birth while being hanged based on anything, like the historical record?
LC: After I wrote that, somebody told me they had seen that in a movie. Gross. But no. I was looking at the etiquette, and laws, of being hanged in the 16th and 17th centuries. If a woman said she was pregnant, you had to wait a few months and see if she had her period before you could hang her. So of course all the women scheduled to be hanged said, “I’m pregnant”—because maybe they could escape or something. But this girl was ignorant, and didn’t know to do that. And didn’t know that she was pregnant, didn’t know she could say that. Just probably thought she was getting fat.
EMN: His creation story, then, sets his tone: how could you not be someone like that [detached, strange, private], with that kind of start?
LC: Yeah. How’s he holding it together? He is.
EMN: He’s pretty Zen. Very observational, even-tempered.
LC: He does his crafts at night. He’s got his rope, his weaving, his therapy.
EMN: There’s weirdness here. I love the first lines—[“His mother was poor, unknown and a thief. She was pregnant but they hanged her anyway.”]—which is weird to say because it’s really sad and dark. But it also draws you in. It disarms you somehow, because there’s a sense of humour here, and a lyricism.
LC: Everything I needed to learn [came from] Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In 1967, I was ten, and they started to come on North American television, and I was like, “This is how I want to live my life. I want to be like these guys.” They are so smart; they know so much about English literature and history. Those were two things that they knew about, because they were reading wherever they were (Oxford or Cambridge or something). That’s where they get Life of Brian, or History of the World: Part I. All this ridiculous stuff that’s all based on what they actually know about history and British culture. I love that—and it’s so bent.
EMN: And not incapable of darkness.
LC: It’s totally dark. That’s my idea: what a dark, black world we live in, and how funny is that? But we aspire to beauty.
EMN: Finally, I want to ask about the poems in this issue of The Puritan. Compared to those in Rope, they’re more fluid, more associative. Is this a recent change?
LC: “The Gift” is a few years old. I was trying to write an associative poem, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t say it was an exercise, but I was trying to free associate. The starting off point was pulling carrots out of the ground; then thinking about that. Then it turned into this whole biographical poem. I guess I found the right space to let that come in. Each section is a section of life: childhood, adolescence, marriage, divorce, childbirth, then where I am now, which is back where I was: pulling the carrots out of the ground.
“The Sunset Bank” is part of a huge project that I wrote. I have a poem for every month. I really like the July one though. The January and February ones came out shorter, colder. I wasn’t able to associate as well in the winter. You’re colder, and tighter. But in July, all the images came, and with the heat, and the birds and the foliage—it just worked. There’s something about the seasons that affects how loose or tight my mind is. In a perfect world, I’d sit in my house all winter and write novels, but from May to October, I’d write my poetry.
“The Key” was from an image that happened in a dream. And it was my eye. And it didn’t hurt. But I realized what it’s about. It’s obvious if you have a sense of metaphor. I like “Strange,” too, because it’s about—everything. It’s about everything.
