More Rabbits, More Water, More Ghosts, More Rocks and Things in the Sky: An Interview with James Lindsay
October 30, 2023
“Reading and writing can be like a good conversation with yourself, one that can change you by letting you ‘say’ things and explore them in a way that ‘silence’ prevents. It’s a way of getting to know yourself without learning anything you didn’t already know.” – James Lindsay
Ben Robinson interviews james lindsay about his new collection of poetry.
James Lindsay is the author of the poetry collections Our Inland Sea and Double Self-Portrait and the chapbooks Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!, Labour Day and The Lake, a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. He lives in Toronto where he works in publishing. Photo credit: Alex Tran.
James Lindsay. Only Insistence. icehouse poetry, $19.95, 80 pp., ISBN: 9781773103044
Ben Robinson: Hey James. Writing to you from the other side of the lake here. Congratulations on the publication of Only Insistence, a book that feels full of tension, friction, and searching.
First off, you wrote online that this book arrived “in a series of anxious blasts” and I’m wondering how that process might have been different from your earlier books. Did you expect this book or was it a surprise?
James Lindsay: Overall, I wrote this book quickly. The first poem I started, “Labour Day,” was written the spring after my kid was born. I had been anxiously struggling to find time to write and suddenly had some opportunities to travel for work. For me, airplanes and airports are excellent places to write. You have this time in a very boring space with few distractions, so those poems began while flying or waiting to fly. I was also reading a lot of poets who wrote about dates or dated their poems, poets like John Wieners, Bernadette Mayer, and Joshua Beckman. Beckman in particular, in his lecture “The Lives of the Poems,” talks about his own work as a kind of haiku practice, though it is not haiku: an everyday practice that examines the world around you. “Labour Day” became a way for me to write again by looking at every day as something worthy of an occasional poem.
The rest of the book was written mostly in the opening days of the pandemic. I know many other writers and artists struggled to be creative in this time, but there was something about the uncertainty of everything that drove me. I read a book around then called Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night by Cody-Rose Clevidence where they were thinking a bit about when ancient civilizations ended. There’s always a poet who hangs around to write about how it felt at the end, not to try and fix things, but describe them as they were. We had such little information at the beginning of the pandemic, I knew I couldn’t address the hows and whys about what was happening, but I could try and depict how it felt, at least for me. And it was sad and very melancholic to be someone who loves living in a city and surrounded by people to suddenly have everything go so still and quiet like that.
BR: I hadn’t thought of Mayer when reading the book, but of course she is there. Perhaps no better model for writing with children in the mix.
Your mention of Clevidence reminds me of a quote from Valzhyna Mort: “I think that nothing is insignificant. In fact, a poet is a little bit like a detective who comes to a scene after the historians have left. The historians have left the scene, and this rogue detective poet comes and walks and should find whatever was left unobserved and unnoticed.”
Here it seems like you got to the scene before the historians left, but you’re certainly picking up on the unobserved and unnoticed. I can feel the presence of the pandemic, particularly in the title poem(s). I have to say, I find so much writing about the virus pretty unbearable, but you manage another way that captures some of the psychic experience of it all rather than the cliched images we were eventually inundated with. Were you consciously avoiding the Covid cliches or perhaps they weren’t established yet? What was the experience of editing these pieces once you knew more of the hows and whys?
JL: There wasn’t much information at the beginning, and there weren’t many cliches yet. But I was aware that there was a lot of misinformation, and in general many people were making these huge statements that were trying to explain everything away. For me it was an unsure time and I wanted to avoid using any language that wasn’t coming from my experience. Then as I was editing I wanted to try and make sure it was vague enough that it could also be relatable, just the shadow of what those early days were like for me, so a reader might recognize something in it for themselves.
BR: Certainly a shadowy time.
Though your epigraph says “there is no such thing as repetition,” I’m wondering about its presence in the book, a repetition that seems less like reinforcement and more like revision. There’s so much revision in the first poem, “Amongst the Narcissuses,” your worrying of the opening lines and images, that it feels like the poem may crumble before it actually begins. We’ve already mentioned those “anxious blasts” and these poems feel full of evasion, happenstance association; they feel “unbridled” and almost unintended, like the titular “insistence” was not yours, but coming from without. Can you talk about fighting the poem and the difficulty of intention?
JL: That’s a good poem for an example of having to fight it. I began “Amongst the Narcissuses” wanting to write about memory in a way that mimicked memory’s fractured way of storytelling. I had two difficult childhood memories I wanted to mine as a way of exploring the process of remembering, so the content was there, but the form was a mess. Up until that point in my writing all my poems had been lyrical and kind of boxy with lines of around the same length and equal stanzas. Inspired by Clevidence, I wanted to write something longer, that took its time finding its themes, but my usual tactics weren’t working. Around this time I read Kimberly Alidio’s once teeth bones coral, where she takes her minimal poems and just spreads the language across pages until they become long poems. This really became a touchstone for me and showed me a new way to space and break my lines. What I was going for with the looser form and multiple false starts was to show the way our memories are constantly starting and stopping before we complete the stories we tell ourselves, memories. Over and over they start, changing every time, struggling to complete or make meaning of themselves. Once I had the form down, I was able to observe how my mind struggled to make sense of these experiences and how little there was to go on. How much it resisted trying to recall.
BR: More to the point about resistance and insistence, about difficult memories, the third poem, “The Lake,” has this repeating phrase, “I don’t know how to (address this) talk (/) about (/) my biological father.” Alongside these explicitly acknowledged silences, you also have tender and direct addresses to your wife and son in “Labour Day.” Can you talk about finding your way into the subject matter and the difficulty of writing about family?
JL: One of the things I wanted to do when writing this book was to challenge myself to address the personal more directly. I’ve really wanted to write about myself and family in my past books, but I always went about it by writing around it. That’s essentially what I’m doing in “The Lake,” but for the first time I fully embraced my evasion and made it what I was really thinking about as I was writing, writing about something by purposely avoiding it. This was also my first collection entirely written as a parent, so family was on my mind. I’m really attracted to the domestic in poetry and think men should approach it more. Poetry can tell us a lot about the experience of human relationships and the parent-child is such an important one, both on the personal level, but also the political, and I find it hard to ignore as I get older and fatherhood becomes more important to me.
BR: Representations of fatherhood in contemporary poetry are pretty rare. Did you have any models for your explorations? Who are the parent poets that you return to?
JL: There aren’t many! There are lots of great examples of poets writing about motherhood—Bernadette Mayer, again, in Midwinter Day, Dorothea Lasky and Jaime Forsythe were all big for me. But I think it was Sons by Dale Smith that showed how I could write about being a father. It was originally published as a chapbook by KFB and included in his last collection, Flying Red Horse, as well. It’s a very calm, minimalist sequence of observations about his kids. There’s a strong sense of wanting to care for and protect them from the future. There was also a sensitivity and self-awareness that I loved and became the tone I tried to use, one that didn’t have all the answers but was willing to talk about it. I also adored the simple form he used and cribbed it for some of my own sequences.
BR: We mentioned the familial elements of “Labour Day” above, but work is also very present in the poem. In the acknowledgements, you thank your employer, Coach House Books, and the collection was printed at Coach House as well. How does your labour make it into the poems? What has working in publishing done to your poetry?
JL: I’m very lucky to get to work with books and authors for a living. Even before I worked in publishing, I was a bookseller, on and off, for about 15 years. It’s all I know! But it’s also been my education. I don’t have a university degree so working in the industry was a chance for me to be exposed to a lot of different books and people who wanted to talk about those books. I mostly learned to read and write poetry through osmosis, just being around books, having the chance to check them out, and listening to discussions around them. Moving from bookselling to book publicity was another great chance to get to be exposed to really great authors and books, and, by working with them, a chance to learn from them.
BR: In the spirit of learning, I wonder if you might say a bit about what your editor Jim Johnstone brought to the collection? What did the book look like before he got his hands on it and what do you think you might carry forward from your work together?
JL: I had previously worked with Jim on my chapbook, Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!, and really like how he was able to help shape those poems. I originally showed Jim this manuscript as a friend, I had been working on it for a while and was at that point where I couldn’t tell if it was good or not. Jim thought it was good and in fact ready to be submitted. When we worked together this time around it was less about shaping the poems and more about my language choices, he helped reel in the overall tone by asking me to justify some of my wording. But mostly I owe Jim for helping me see the worth in my own writing.
BR: A good one to have around, that Jim. Can you speak to some of that process of shaping the overall book? Are there different considerations around continuity/cohesion when you’re working with a smaller number of poems? How much of the repetition/continuity was a conscious concern? How many rabbits were added after the fact?
JL: Ha! When I was writing “Labour Day” a warren of rabbits moved into my neighbourhood in Toronto and we’d see them all the time. They made their way into the poem and stayed for the rest of the book. As I was writing and realizing that this was going to be a collection of long poems I began playing with them a lot, moving them around and seeing how they interacted. I wanted to open with “Amongst the Narcissuses,” which has a looser structure compared to most of the book. But it felt like a sore thumb, so I composed “Insistence: Appendix” in the same style as a conclusion, to bookend and balance. That poem is composed of images and themes I saw repeating themselves. I tried to create an emotional weight that builds towards the end, but in a way that felt like each poem passed the reader to the next, like a relay race. Once I was more aware of what I was trying to do with the images, unconsciously, I was able to go back and lean into the repetition I was noticing: more rabbits, more water, more ghosts, more rocks and things in the sky.
BR: Lastly, I get the sense that this book was hardwon. I sense the struggle to maintain or find a worldview sufficient for the intensity of the times: early fatherhood, pandemic, “new fascist affection.” I don’t want to over-identify you with the speaker, but can you talk about the emotional process of writing this collection, what you learned through or alongside the writing?
JL: I don’t know if I learn like that from writing poetry, not in a way that I can describe what I’ve learned. Reading and writing poetry for me feels more like an experience, one that’s hard to say what’s been taken away. It makes me think of some of the best conversations I’ve had, the really great ones I remember, and I don’t necessarily remember what I learned from them. I can remember some of the information about the other person that came up, sure, but what I really recall from it is the energy and how it made me feel to be in sync with another person. I talk to myself, too, if no one’s around and I’m trying to think through something, but it’s never as satisfying as doing it with someone else. Reading and writing can be like a good conversation with yourself, one that can change you by letting you “say” things and explore them in a way that “silence” prevents. It’s a way of getting to know yourself without learning anything you didn’t already know.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.