Charting the Disorderly
The process of writing the prose poems felt very much like charting the disorderly…trying to map the illogical
without any expectation of arriving at any final destination:
Catherine Graham Interviews the 2019 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize Winner Eve Joseph
Eve Joseph's two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin, was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. The book was named one of the Top 100 picks of the year by the Globe and Mail.
Eve Joseph. Quarrels. Anvil Press. $18.00, 96 pp., ISBN: 9781772141191
Catherine Graham: Congratulations on winning the 2019 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize for your third collection Quarrels (Anvil Press), a book of prose poems. What is it about the form that intrigues you?
Eve Joseph: I can’t separate the writing of these poems from the home I grew up in. My mother had what Seamus Heaney wonderfully described as “a capacity for enchantment.” She was, shall we say, ‘generous’ with her interpretation of what was truth and what was fiction. The film Big Fish catches something of the spirit of what it was like to grow up with a woman whose stories were larger than life because they had to be. The literal stories of her life were filled with loss; the ones she embellished, and believed, were full of serendipity and portent. Anything could happen in our home and it often did. It was a way station for draft dodgers, sailors, schizophrenics, artists, old communists and, over the years, dozens of stray dogs. And so, when I found the prose poem form, with its surreal gaze on the world, it felt deeply familiar and exciting to me. I love the dissonance inherent in the form: between the ordered, square boxes of text and the wild, uncultivated gardens they hold.
CG: Each of the book’s three parts begins with a quote that beautifully holds, connects, and amplifies each section. ‘Custodian of griefs and wonders’ is from Seamus Heaney’s description of Michael Longley’s poetry. In Toronto we chatted about this quote and how reading Longley’s 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize winning book The Stairwell inspired you, particularly the poems about the loss of Longley’s twin brother. Can you tell us more about how that impacted the third section?
EJ: The Stairwell was one of those books that came along at exactly the right time although I have no recollection of how it came into my possession. The third section of Quarrels is an elegy to my late father. I had gone to San Francisco, along with my siblings (from three different mothers), to be with him when he decided to discontinue dialysis. The poems come out of the ten day period we were together before he died. When I read Longley’s poems, I was struck by how he addressed his brother directly and by how unsentimental and deeply compassionate the poems were. I thought they were brave poems and I reread them many times as if they were a template – a way into something I had not yet found a way to express. One of the marvels of poetry to me is how poets, the living and the dead, accompany each other. How we find each other even when we’re not looking.
CG: Your prose poems work like sparks, generating light as they progress, round moving explosions. What was the process like when writing them? Did patterns in composition emerge? Habits you had to watch? I notice they are similar in length, for example. They never cross the middle of the page. Lovely boxes all lined up. Was that intentional?
EJ: I was very aware of not wanting to write narratives. I played with parataxis – placing dissimilar images and fragments side by side to see what little explosions might occur. The idea that meaning and emotion could be created not by content but by relationship, or proximity of images to one another, deeply intrigued me. When I was stuck, or it felt as if the images weren’t playing off each other, I would sometimes rewrite a piece as a ghazal and force myself to think associatively. In some ways, the two forms are very close in spirit. I had to track the movement of the mind and trust that there was a logic in how one thought followed another. In the introduction to his book of ghazals, the late John Thompson wrote that the form allowed the imagination to move by its own nature. The process of writing the prose poems felt very much like charting the disorderly…trying to map the illogical without any expectation of arriving at any final destination.
The poems in the first section – the more “surreal” poems – average around eleven lines. It was the length that I felt allowed for the kind of tension I was trying to achieve. There is more variability in line length in both the second and third sections.
CG: Part Two was inspired by the photographs of Diane Arbus. Tell us about your fascination with her work and how these ekphrastic prose poems came about.
EJ: A few years ago, Patrick and I went to a retrospective of Diane Arbus’s early works at the Met Breuer in New York. I had written a couple of pieces based on her photographs, but nothing prepared me for what it was like to stand in a gallery where each piece resembled a perfect prose poem. I scribbled notes – first impressions – in front of many of the pieces. I was struck, and still am, by the intimacy, vulnerability, and strangeness of her work. And perhaps, more importantly, by the humanity and dignity with which she portrayed the marginalized.
CG: You’ve written in several forms now: poetry (The Secret Signature of Things, The Startled Heart), prose (In the Slender Margins) and prose poetry (Quarrels). What do you gain and lose from writing prose poems as opposed to poems?
EJ: Charles Simic says his prose poems come from the place where the impulses for prose and poetry collide. Something new is formed out of this collision, something that is neither prose nor verse. It’s not that anything is lost or gained in working with the form; rather, there is something completely new created. For me, at this point in my writing life, it is the form that allows me to access thought and emotion. It ‘marries’ the longer line of thought with the spare impulse of poetry.
CG: Are there certain prose poem writers that you admire or perhaps had an impact on this book?
EJ: I was ‘introduced’ to the form years ago through the writings of the early French poets – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Aloysius Bertrand. These poets led me to Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain and from there I immersed myself in the writings of Charles Simic, David Keplinger, Nin Andrews, and Carsten René Nielsen. I would leaf through books of my favourite poets and look for the telltale blocks of prose. I found poems by Tranströmer, Borges, Amichai, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and many others that fueled my obsession with the form.
CG: What were some Griffin highlights for you during your time in Toronto?
EJ: Hearing the other nominees read from their work and hearing Catricia Hiebert, Poetry in Voice winner, recite a poem. What remains with me is what it was like to be immersed in poetry during the time we were there. To have experienced the world through the eyes of poetry and to have been surrounded by those who are passionate about it. What a joy that was.
CG: What’s next for Eve Joseph?
EJ: Whenever I finish something it always feels as if it’s the last thing I’ll write….as if I’ve written myself out. Often, new work starts as an agitation, a dark stirring inside. I am not done with the prose poem…I’m still trying to nail down the form. I guess you could say I am obsessed.
Catherine Graham is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction. Among her six poetry collections The Celery Forest was shortlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, named a CBC Best Book of the Year and appears on their Ultimate Canadian Poetry List. Michael Longley praised it as “a work of great fortitude and invention, full of jewel-like moments and dark gnomic utterance.” Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and CAA Award for Poetry and her debut novel Quarry won an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for fiction, “The Very Best!” Book Awards for Best Fiction and was a finalist for the Fred Kerner Book Award and Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction. She received an Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and was also winner of the Toronto International Festival of Authors Poetry NOW competition. While living in Northern Ireland, Graham completed an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies around the world and she’s appeared on CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers. Æther: an out-of-body lyric will appear in 2020 with Wolsak and Wynn, Buckrider Books. Visit her at www.catherinegraham.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @catgrahampoet.