Poetry Quebec: Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec?
Mary di Michele: I’m originally from Italy. My family immigrated to Canada in the mid-fifties and settled in Toronto. I came to Montreal first temporarily as writer-in-residence at Concordia, and then permanently when I was given a tenure track position in June of 1990.
PQ: When and how did you encounter your first Quebec poem?
MdiM: I don’t remember, I probably didn’t think of them as Quebec poems. There’s a strong sense of Quebec as place in many of Irving Layton’s poems, but they’re not the ones that get anthologized or taught. Layton’s “The Birth of Tragedy” may have been the first one but really I’m not sure. I don’t remember when I read my first French Quebec poem either, not in school, in French classes in Ontario we read literature from France, except for Gabrielle Roy novel’s Rue Deschambault as I recall.
PQ: When and how did you first become interested in poetry?
MdiM: I was about 8 years old and I picked up an anthology in the library, I fell under the spell of La Belle dame Sans Merci.
PQ: What is your working definition of a poem?
MdiM: A poem is a language structure written in verse, doesn’t sound very romantic does it? A haiku is a poem. A sonnet is a poem. Even free verse is written in lines and so recognizably a poem. Prose poems do muddy this easy definition however. The question I think about and struggle to define is what is poetry? Music and meaning working together? The clear expression of mixed emotions? If it takes the top of my head off I know it’s poetry? A language within a language? Economy, its fragrance? Many have offered definitions all can only be partial. It’s the elephant and we are the blind trying to describe it? I have more questions than answers. I do believe that it differs from prose in the quality of its attention to self and the world and in the way it uses language, struggling with it, wrestling with the angel.
PQ: Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details.
MdiM: Not much, coffee and morning light is what I prefer. I read a bit from something I admire, it acts as kindling to get me started.
PQ: What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other?
MdiM: It depends on the poem. Some come out of ‘nowhere’, the muse makes a free and mysterious gift of them, but most come out of observation and reading and research into the people, subjects that engage me.
PQ: Do you think that being a minority in Quebec (i.e. English-speaking) affects your writing? If so, how?
MdiM:I’ve always been in a minority as a writer, in Ontario too, I am an Italian-Canadian writer – my cultural roots are not one of those officially recognize as founding the nation.
PQ: Do you think that writing in English in Quebec is a political act? Why or why not?
MdiM: Well when Pasolini chose to write and publish his first poetry book in dialect (in Fascist Italy that was illegal) rather than Italian that was indeed a political act, it involved breaking the law and great risk. I do not think writing in English in Quebec is a political act for me but the “jazz police” may have a different point of view on it.
Moreover I don’t have comparable fluency in my other languages, Italian, Abruzzese, and French, so is it a choice then? Asked why he writes in English Yann Martel gave an aesthetic answer, “French is too flowery” for what he wants to do. I too prefer the relative economy of English, and its openness, the way it has taken in and continues to incorporate words from so many other languages makes it a very interesting medium for this poet.
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| Mary di Michele©DHFoto |
PQ: Why do you write?
MdiM: I began to write poetry because I fell in love with poetry and stories and so wanted to be part of it. Love imitates. I continue to write because writing is the only conversation you can have with both the living and dead.
PQ: Who is your audience?
MdiM: I don’t think about ‘audience’ per se but I do aim to engage in a conversation.
PQ: Do you think there is an audience, outside of friends or other poets, for poetry?
MdiM: Very small for most of us who are strictly book poets. But it’s huge when poetry is spoken (hip-hop, rap) or sung, I can’t sit on a bus without seeing someone listening to songs on their iPods – including me.
PQ: Does your day job impact on your writing? How?
MdiM: It means that most of my own writing is done during the summer; I do a lot of writing for students during the academic year, the equivalent of a novel every other year.
PQ: How many drafts (beer too) do you usually go through before you are satisfied/finished with a poem?
MdiM: Many, embarrassingly so, and never beer!
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?
MdiM:It depends on the book; the one I just completed was a project. Some books ‘grew’ to a point where I began to see connections between the poems that I was writing and so I could see how I might gather and shape them as a collection or book.
PQ: What is the toughest part of writing for you?
MdiM: The first draft is the toughest, particularly for something like a novel. I’m afraid that I will never be able to write again after each book.
PQ: What is your idea of a muse?
MdiM: Sometimes it feels as if it is an angel, terrible in its beauty and totally mysterious shaking me to my core. When I think about it rather than get visited by it I would say that the muse is like what Jung called the collective unconscious, it is the source of symbols, the deepest images, the dreams that we share; it is language itself, and it is in our DNA.
PQ: Do you have a favourite time and place to write?
MdiM: When I was young the time to write included the middle of the night! When I became a mother 28 years ago it was when the baby was sleeping and I managed to stay awake. Now it is early in the morning before the business of living takes over.
PQ: Do you like to travel? Is travel important to your writing? Explain.
MdiM: I don’t like to travel, and I must travel because it is important to my work is the sense of displacement when I do, it shakes things up in me, and of course for research – a physical sense of place is central to my imagining. I went to Lesbos when I was writing the Sappho poems. I hate airports, flying, getting about in an unfamiliar country, finding and staying in hotels or hostels…
PQ: Do you have a favourite Quebec poet? If yes who and why?
MdiM: If I have a favorite it is everybody’s favorite: Leonard Cohen.
PQ: Do you write about Quebec? If so, how and why? If not, why not?
MdiM: I have written poems set in Quebec, but I am not a writer really rooted in a particular place, I’m literally an immigrant and imaginatively an emigrant so my writing wanders the world, an example, even a poem set here, the prose poem, “Reading Wang Wei in a Montréal Snowstorm” from my last poetry collection, Debriefing the Rose does not stay put.
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?
MdiM: I have a bookshelf bed (the headrest) so I sleep surrounded by books; in fiction, I just finished reading Helen Humphrey’s novel, Wild Dogs, I am now reading Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, in poetry recently published books I like of poets living in Quebec are Sina Quyeras, Expressway, Peter Richardson’s Sympathy for the Couriers, among others. I’m also reading Jane Hirshfield’s translations, The Ink Dark Moon, of two Japanese women poets from the Heian period. In Japan there are major women writers in the classical period, but except for Sappho in Europe there’s nobody of comparable stature in our literature except in modern times, I guess we’re doing better than they are now. I am very interested in Asian poetry and belong to a renga writing group called Yoko’s Dogs, we are four dogs, including, Susan Gillis, also a Montreal poet, Jan Conn, of Quebec origin now living in the U.S.A. and Jane Munro a B.C. poet.
Poet, novelist and member of the renga group, Yoko’s Dogs, Mary di Michele is the author of ten books including a selected poems, Stranger in You, and the novel, Tenor of Love. She lives in Montreal where she teaches at Concordia University in the creative writing program.
