an interview with Mark Abley(excerpt)

Mark Abley: I moved to Montreal in 1983. A year or two later, if I remember correctly, I arranged a reading for Anne at The Double Hook, an all-Canadian bookstore in Lower Westmount. She stayed with my wife and me for a couple of nights. And at some point during that visit, I recall her standing in our apartment and asking me, out of the blue, if I would be her literary executor. I was delighted and flattered and said “yes” at once, not having any idea of the difficulties I would eventually face.

My main duty is to prepare Anne’s unpublished work for publication. When Earth Leaps Up (Brick books, 2006) is the first book-length result. If all goes well, it won’t be the only one. I’m now slowly working on a follow-up book that will include writing in many genres—Anne was fearless about words, and willing to try her hand at almost anything. I would also love to see a “Selected Poems” published in the UK, where she grew up. But that’s very speculative. Literary executors also perform more mundane duties­—sending unpublished poems out to magazines, for instance, and granting permission to editors wanting to reprint poems for anthologies, and dealing with theatre directors who are interested in producing plays. Anne finished only one original play, Z, but she helped translate several plays from Catalan. Both Z and the Catalan plays have been produced since her death.

SC: Had you known Anne prior to her Montreal reading? What was your relationship?

MA: I met her in the fall of 1971, when she was 49 and I was only sixteen. Thanks to a mutual friend, Nancy Senior, I was invited to attend one of the workshops that Anne informally led at the time—it had the dull name “Saskatoon Poetry Group.” One meeting was enough: I knew where my future lay. Not that Anne was the only strong voice in the group. Terry and Caroline Heath were also members, for instance, and they both had a major influence on me. But Anne and I quickly developed a friendship that transcended the obvious differences in age, sex, life experience and so on. I needed a mentor, and perhaps at that point in her life, she needed a protegé.

Four years later I left Saskatoon, never to return except on occasional visits. But the friendship survived. It may have been much more important for me than for Anne.

SC: How did your background prepare you to be Anne’s literary executor?

MA: I have a couple of university degrees in English, so I’ve read widely in the great literature of the past. I also spent years reviewing far too many books of Canadian literature, and for a time I was the book-review editor of the Montreal Gazette. In my brief inglorious months as a graduate student, I took a course in paleography—the deciphering of handwriting, that is. This proved to be very useful when Anne’s revision took the form of a scribble. Above all, I’d read almost all of her published work, and I felt I had an intuitive grasp of what she was up to. Not always, but often.

SC: What, if any, are the challenges you encounter by living in a different province than Anne lived in, and was known to write in?

MA: The work would be much easier if I lived within a few hours’ drive of Regina, because in the early 1990s Anne donated a lot of materials to the University of Regina. I paid one visit there, and found the archivists wonderfully helpful, but in darker moments I wonder what I missed. Living as I do in Montreal, I’ve also been pretty bad at keeping in touch with some of Anne’s Saskatchewan friends. It would have been easier to find out certain things if I still lived on the Prairies.

So, you’re right, distance can pose problems. But time poses even more. Back when Anne popped the question, I was a young poet and freelance writer, unburdened by a full-time job or children or a mortgage. She knew I loved her work, so I must have seemed a pretty shrewd choice. By 1999, when she died, I still loved her writing. But I also had a demanding full-time job, two children and a big fat mortgage. I couldn’t drop everything and devote myself to her papers. Not being affiliated to any university, I’ve also been unable to recruit graduate students for some of the work, and I have not benefited from any research grants, either. To put it bluntly, time spent on Anne’s writing is time not spent on my own. Finding time to do the editing work has been my biggest challenge by far.

SC: You are an accomplished writer in your own right, and you dedicated your most recent poetry collection, The Silver Palace Restaurant (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), to Anne Szumigalski’s memory. How did Anne influence you as a young writer? How does her work continue to influence the poetry you write?

MA: She helped me discover the joy of language. And unless a poet feels that joy, and can transmit it to others, his or her work will be profoundly deficient. I grew up in a time when most English-language poets had turned their backs on traditional form. I don’t believe it ever occurred to me that I should learn to wrestle with sonnets and villanelles and ballads—I regret this now. But in the 1970s the ideal–—perhaps especially among a lot of prairie writers—was to be plain-spoken, unpretentious, down to earth. Anne didn’t despise or satirize that ideal. But she showed me its limitations. Not that she wrote sonnets or villanelles herself! Even so, her poetic language often had a quality of transcendence about it. She began her second book with these lines: “the Celt within / who likes to stand up and sing / ecstatic and undulating songs / is the one who opens my mouth …”

So I guess a short way to answer this question would be to say that Anne taught me to hear and honour the Celt within myself. And she continues to do that.

Besides which, and I don’t want this to sound cloyingly wholesome, she had enormous integrity. She was powerful enough as a human being, not only as a poet, that she had little interest in playing literary games or conducting literary feuds. When she praised a writer, it was never at the expense of someone else. She believed in a community of poets and she did not, at least in my memory, do things with ulterior motives. All this is a daunting legacy, and I do not always live up to it well.

SC: Your poem, “In Saskatoon the Ghosts,” pays homage to Anne and others. How did this poem come into being?

MA: About the time that Anne died, an old friend of mine from Saskatoon by the name of Greg Wirick lost his battle with AIDS. I was thinking about the two of them, and about Caroline Heath, who had died at a bitterly early age from breast cancer, and I realized that my younger self—the teenager who had become their friend—didn’t exist anymore. Who am I now? What relationship does this “I” have to the boy who was shaped and sharpened by Saskatoon, yet who left the place as soon as he could? Is my younger self also a kind of ghost? That’s what the poem tries to explore.

SC: How did this manuscript for When Earth Leaps Up come into being? Did you have to cull the archives for material? Did the manuscript exist as a complete draft already?

MA: Shortly after Anne’s death, when I was in Saskatoon for the funeral, I found a number of diskettes beside her computer. One of them was labelled Poems, and it contained 22 new pieces of work. So although this wasn’t enough for a complete manuscript, it formed a very good basis—the frame of a collection, let’s say. It seemed clear that Anne wanted these poems to be published: they weren’t anything she was trying to hide. The other 18 pieces came from various sources: typescripts and manuscripts in her home; the University of Regina archives; two late, small books that Hagios Press in Saskatoon had published; and a few other published sources of greater or lesser obscurity.

I guess I could have decided to publish nothing. That would have been a legitimate option. But I never seriously considered it. If silence is what Anne had wanted, she wouldn’t have needed a literary executor—or she would have left some kind of note indicating as much. I don’t recall Anne’s family asking me outright to embark on the project, though I think they must have expected it. And I expected it of myself.

SC: What were some of the challenges you faced in readying this manuscript for publication?

MA: Apart from the issue of finding time to do the job well, the main difficulty was that some of the poems exist in different versions. The typescripts don’t always match the diskettes. Something that was published in one place may have been revised a couple of years later. And even though Anne had made a concerted attempt to tidy up her files, the effort was, let’s say, incomplete. She almost never dated her work, which didn’t help matters. Several times I thought I’d made a great discovery, only to find that the poem had been included, in a somewhat different form, in one of her earlier books.