Poetry Quebec: Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec?
Susan Gillis: I grew up in Halifax, moved to the west coast in my late teens to go to school — and to follow Rilke’s directive in Archaic Torso of Apollo, “you must change your life.” I came to Quebec (Montreal) years later for the same reasons.
PQ: When and how did you encounter your 1st Quebec poem?
SG: No idea. Regionalism hasn’t been a driving force in my reading.
PQ: When and how did you first become interested in poetry?
SG: I count a number of firsts, if that’s allowed; the poetry of childhood, of teenage angst, of young adult optimism, of invention and reinvention, of….etc. But each time, at least as far as I remember, it was through hearing: the hearing of something jolted the explorer-me awake.
PQ: What is your working definition of a poem?
I suppose I am ready to call the stuff gathering in my notebook, or head, or wherever, a “poem” when its language charges up — when it acquires a cohering or loud or persisting sort of energy, the specific qualities of which I can’t define in a singular consistent way, since it’s different each time.
SG: Sometimes the charge occurs quite suddenly after a seemingly endless spate of boringness, like a frog leaping out of a murky swamp I’ve been poling through. (Not that swamps are boring—not at all; it’s more the murk I was thinking of.) Other times it happens slowly, as a gradual accrual, almost without my quite realizing it.
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| Susan Gillis ©Poetry Quebec |
Always I do the emerging writing in rough draft in my notebook (and by that I mean an actual hard-bound sheaf of paper) until this energy comes—and sometimes longer than that. If I commit it to typescript before this stage, it usually fizzles, or dead-ends, or otherwise just gives out. Once I type it, I’m ready to call it poem, however unfinished it is. (Then I’ll revise both in the typed file and on paper copies of it, which can get terribly confusing, so I’ve adapted a little system for that, but that’s not part of this question.)
So, a working definition of a poem? Stuff I type because it won’t stay in the notebook anymore.
PQ: Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details.
SG: I write in the mornings—at least, I start then. If I don’t get started pretty much first thing, I tend not to be able to get started in a focused way all day. That said, I sometimes putter around, moving sort of sideways around writing, until the moment of the poem arrives and I go to my notebook. I find a routine helpful as long as it’s flexible—sometimes breaking the routine creates good writing space.
PQ: What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other?
SG: I’ve probably approached poetry in all these ways. Often I find the urge to speak comes from a combination of factors: sounds I’ve heard take shape in words that emerge from things I’d been thinking about…. I don’t often set out to write “about” a particular event or observation, but it will turn up in a poem eventually.
PQ: Do you think that being a minority in Quebec (ie. English-speaking) affects your writing? If so, how?
SG: Probably. I don’t really think about it.
PQ: Do you think that writing in English in Quebec is a political act? Why or why not?
SG: Living in English in Quebec is a political act.
PQ: Why do you write?
SG: Because I can’t not. I’ve tried. It’s harder than quitting smoking, which is hard, but do-able.
I don’t mean to be facile with this question, but it seems so tied up with how I exist in the world. It’s how I understand things.
PQ: Do you think there is an audience, outside of friends or other poets, for poetry?
SG: Yes, a small one.
PQ: Does your day job impact on your writing? How?
SG: Yes, by affecting my mental and emotional resources. It’s mixed: as a teacher, I’m sharing and discovering with students. That’s inspiring. But evaluating their work creates shrinkage in my brain. That’s not inspiring. It’s exhausting. My challenge is to spread my energy in a balanced way.
PQ: How many drafts (beer too) do you usually go through before you are satisfied/finished with a poem?
SG: That depends on the poem. Usually several, in several different stages. Generally I do a lot of writing around an idea before I begin thinking of it as a poem. Once it resolves, becomes clearer and more cohesive, I type and print it. The drafts that follow the first typescript usually consist of fairly minor changes, not large structural or conceptual shifts. Though that happens too—particularly with poems I’ve let sit for awhile, that I feel are underdeveloped. I love doing those major revisions—it’s so satisfying.
PQ: Do you write with the intention of “growing a manuscript” or do you work on individual poems that are later collected into a book?
SG: After I “finish” a book, when I’m at the beginning of something again, I don’t usually have a clear sense of what I’m really writing about. I find it useful then to choose a subject to explore. But soon that subject becomes more like a trap than an avenue. Then I shift modes: the process becomes one of just working on poems and seeing where they go, if they go—that’s disorienting and disquieting, and often quite uncomfortable. The feeling that I have no idea what I’m doing or why can be very challenging, but it seems necessary to go all the way through it.
PQ: What is the toughest part of writing for you?
SG: The phase I refer to in the previous question. That, and not writing.
PQ: Do you have a favourite time and place to write?
SG: I’m not too tied to particulars in that regard, but generally mornings. I’m a notebook writer—nothing goes to the computer till it has fairly clear viability in handwriting.
PQ: Do you like to travel? Is travel important to your writing? Explain.
SG: Now that flying has become so difficult, I’m reluctant to travel as much as I used to. But it has been very important, for its power to disrupt and disturb assumptions. I have two homes—the place I live during the school year and the place I live during the breaks, and having these two places means I’m never completely settled. So the valuable disruptive aspect of travel is sort of present in my life, and the valuable stability of home is also there.
PQ: Do you write about Quebec? If so, how and why? If not, why not?
SG: I have, in a sense, in that I’ve written about Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie’s fabulous experiment on the bank of the river, and I’ve written a fair bit about the river itself, particularly the Lachine Rapids. But the poems aren’t so much “about” these things as located on or in them.
PQ: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once declared, "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation."
We agree, but P.Q. does want to know who are you in bed with. Literally. What poets are you reading these days? What book(s) are you sharing your bed with? Are you a monogamist or a polygamist reader?
SG: Louise Glück; Camille Paglia, Paul Muldoon and others on poetry; contemporary Japanese poets in translation; War and Peace; several little magazines; several recent Canadian books; Neruda…the stacks shift and change frequently. I read around a lot.
Susan Gillis has lived on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada, and now calls Montreal home. Her second book, Volta published by Signature Editions, won the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry in 2003.
