an interview with John Barton

CV2: In addition to a successful career as a poet, you have worked for two of Canada’s most respected literary magazines—first at ARC for a number of years, and now you are the editor of The Malahat Review. How does your experience as a poet guide you in your publishing work? Do you find the responsibilities for both magazines similar or are they different?

JB: I do find working for the two magazines quite different. ARC is an independent journal where decisions could be made without feeling the need to justify them to higher authorities. I feel less autonomy at The Malahat Review, because of its connection to the University of Victoria, which is the publisher. However, having worked for the federal government in Ottawa for eighteen years, I understand how large bureaucracies work and am comfortable being inside yet another one. For example, as editor of The Malahat Review, I cannot act alone to hire a designer, but must go through the university’s Purchasing Services. In the federal government, as the production manager in the publishing divisions of two national museums, I worked closely with procurement officers for ten years. However, it’s been a bit of a shift, mentally, to work in a similar way within the literary magazine environment, which is really more like a micro-business. At ARC, I had been used to running things pretty much on my own, without the oversight of a parent body and its attendant institutional curiosity.

CV2: What does the editor of The Malahat Review do? What are your responsibilities? What kind of hours do you work?

JB: Normally, I work two days per week, but at certain times of year, especially when grants are due, I work five. I also have two part-time paid employees, an assistant editor, and a circulation assistant. I am responsible for all aspects of the magazine’s operations, including content development, production coordination, audience development and retention, marketing, financial management, and income recruitment. I have two reading boards—poetry and fiction—which are staffed by volunteers drawn from the Victoria writing community. I also have an advisory board, which I chair, that is filled with representatives from the university and from the larger local writing and book-industry community. I think my most important job is to develop and impart a vision for the magazine, to engage the support of others (readers and subscribers, magazine staff, reading and advisory board members, the university, funding agencies, the larger local and national writing community) in order to make it a reality.

CV2: How did you come to work with literary periodicals?

JB: My first position on a literary magazine was as poetry editor on WOT in the early 1980s, a tiny Victoria literary magazine founded by Dennis Reid. Today, it would be the equivalent of a zine. Also, in my last year of school, I was on the editorial board of From an Island, a literary magazine run by writing students at the University of Victoria. However, I usually trace the beginnings of my literary-magazine career to ARC. A year after I moved to Ottawa in 1986, I got in touch with Christopher Levenson, whom I had previously met in Victoria and who was the editor of ARC at that time. He was always looking for new people to bring on board, so he got me involved. I was initially responsible for maintaining the subscription list and sat on the editorial board for his last year as editor, and when Christopher stepped down, his position was divided in two. For two years the new co-editor positions were occupied by long-time board members John Bell and Mark Frutkin. When they resigned in 1990, they invited Nadine MacInnis and me to replace them. That’s probably when the die was cast—I lasted thirteen years as a co-editor. The 1990s were challenging years for literary periodicals because of government cutbacks to arts funding, cutbacks that coincided with their increasing expectations on how effectively money was to be spent. When I started at ARC it had a Canada Council grant of $1,800; we got the magazine’s grant up to around $18,000 by the time I left in 2003. Some of that increase simply kept pace with changes in the economy, but for ARC to survive, its operation had to grow in order to grow its funding. Through our efforts, unsolicited submissions also grew; I think they doubled over ten years and our circulation grew as well. When I started, the print run was about 600 copies and now it’s at 1,600. The magazine’s page count also grew. Everything I learned about publishing from my jobs at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology and at the National Gallery I was able to apply to ARC.

CV2: Your day job was working at the National Gallery and your evening job was ARC, so your graveyard shift was your own writing—how did you write?

JB: Yes—my relationship with own writing became more and more problematic, though initially, for many years, it wasn’t. The big change happened in 1995-96 when I left the library at the Canada Aviation Museum and started working in publishing at the Canada Science and Technology museum. At the same time, the demands of ARC started to grow—the realization that it had to grow in order to survive sunk in—so, as a consequence, I had less time for my own writing. Still, even before I left the Aviation Museum, I had started to look for ways to find extra time to write. Thanks to a grant from the City of Ottawa, I took a leave of absence in 1994, which took the form of a series of weeks staggered out over the fall of that year. And then again in 1999, I was able to take twelve months off from work when I received a Canada Council grant. Because I had saved a lot of money, matching every dollar of the grant with fifty cents, I could continue to live according to the means I was used to. I lived a pretty stripped-down life, as it was, in order to be debt-free and to be able to take time off from well- paid employment.

Also, by the mid-1990s, the nature of what I wanted to write had changed. I wanted to write more involved poems, which I couldn’t do in stolen five-minute stretches, during which I was supposed to collect my thoughts after (or during) a fast-paced, responsibility-laden workday. Time became more and more of a problem. So when the job at The Malahat Review was advertised in 2003, I felt a window open. I thought if I got the job at The Malahat Review, which is half time; and combined its salary with savings for a cushion, I’d probably be all right for a while—actually, I have calculated a worry-free stretch of three or four years. Any grant money I receive is also a big help, along with any writing-related income I receive through the year. Besides, I’d always wanted to move back west. By 2003, the desire to do so had been relegated to idle fantasy and was less a desperate need. When I first moved to Ontario in 1984, I hadn’t expected to stay long; then nineteen years passed. When you’re young, I don’t think you have a sense of how quickly time will accelerate. The life I led in Ottawa was a juggling act—work, writing, ARC, personal life—but, because of it, I’m highly disciplined and good at multi-tasking.

CV2: What kind of space do you need to actually sit down and work on your writing?

JB: When I was on leave in 1999-2000, I discovered the best time for me to write was during the afternoon, so immediately the conflict between a day job and writing was writ large because if regular working hours were the best ones for me to write in, returning to my government job was going a problem. I also found that though I am a night owl by nature, the will to write until three o’clock in the morning had gone out of me. This probably has something to do with aging.

When I am writing full-time, I structure my day so that first I read—usually reading associated with what I am writing—then I like to exercise, then write for three to seven hours, depending on how things go. Over the course of the week my energy usually dissipates, so I write less later in the week than I do earlier on. I find that I am very much inspired by what I have gleaned from my research.

The project I’m currently working on is about three figures, Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, and Lincoln Kirstein, from the New York art scene, which Cadmus and Kirstein were a part of throughout the twentieth century. Platt Lynes died of cancer in the 1950s. They were all gay, and I’m interested in their interaction as gay men within the arts intelligentsia of New York. Paul Cadmus was a painter, George Platt Lynes was a photographer, better known in his own lifetime as a fashion than an art photographer and portraitist, and Lincoln Kirstein founded the New York City Ballet and brought the Russian emigré choreographer, George Ballanchine, to America. They were loosely connected and moved in large and diverse circles. I’m also quite interested in how, as gay men and artists, they envisioned the male body.

Actually I feel rather intimidated by what I’m getting myself into. It’s going to be a great deal of work. I have a lot of reading to do to be in control of my subject. To do all that I need to for this project and work full-time would have been next to impossible. When I was off for three months in 2002 to start work on it, I would read every morning and write in the afternoons. I would get a good head of steam up and it was exhausting. At the end of the leave of absence, I was almost happy to be back at work. It was almost relaxing to be back at the National Gallery.

Writing is a very solitary thing, and there has to be some sort of a balance. That’s why I find writing in the afternoons works for me; I can go out with friends in the evenings and revitalize. Even writers are social creatures so they need that kind of connection.

As a gay writer, I very much live at the gay end of the universe. Gay sensibility is very much at the core of my writing.

CV2: Overtly gay writing often becomes, in a sense, ghettoized or sequestered in publications and issues of more general literary magazines that focus on an explicitly gay and lesbian audience. But you are well represented in the mainstream literary community—what has got you beyond being “special issue-ized,” given that your poetry often includes overtly gay themes and speaks openly and candidly about your own experience?

JB: When I first started to write, it wasn’t because I was gay and had a “gay message.” I started working and publishing in the mainstream because that was the world I was in. While lesbian writers receive a tremendous amount of support from the feminist community, there is no comparable support for gay men, at least in Canada—so I’ve often felt quite isolated. In Toronto—in Vancouver—there appears to be a strong sense of community among gay writers, but I never felt part of a writing or artistic community like that—there may well be such a community in Ottawa, but I never became part of it—or even found it. My motivation has been to claim a place within the wider writing world for myself as a writer, no matter how small or large that place may be. Perhaps when I first started writing from a gay perspective, it was a way to convince my self of its validity as an aesthetic. Publishing in the mainstream was a way to convince the general reader as well.

I feel that I read to comprehend a writer’s sensibility. I read for a number of reasons—I read to learn something new, I read for pleasure, I read for emotional engagement. I read sensibilities, and what I never understand is why readers shy away from particular kinds of experience. They shun them or recoil from them, and I expect people to read me as a sensibility and the fact that I write about the gay experience should not be off-putting or intimidating.

There’s one particular experience I remember that illustrates what I mean. There is a reading in Ottawa, Wilde About Sappho—it started off as an annual event to raise awareness of gay writing and money for scholarships in gay studies at universities across Canada; now it is the largest annual event the National Library of Canada hosts, after the Governor General’s Literary Awards gala. I went with a friend of mine—I have read at two of these events and I have attended them all—who is straight. She has often felt her “otherness” as a woman, but she’d never before felt otherness on the basis of her sexual orientation. She felt isolated in a room of gay men and lesbians. I think it’s very instructive for people to have that kind of experience in order to feel their difference and uniqueness. Experiencing where one’s own limits are is important; you learn the difference of where you are (gay or straight) in comparison to someone else’s—that what exists outside your own experience isn’t always a dangerous place.

It is my objective to say that my experience is as legitimate as anyone else’s, but having published overtly gay work for over fifteen years, I am probably a little more cynical about how well I have been heard. I’m not convinced that people can read without prejudice anymore. I am not excluding myself in this. I’m afraid I’ve become a bit of a—my term—”heterophobe.” At least I acknowledge it. My experience has unfortunately been that no matter how tolerant people think they are, when push comes to shove, the tolerance they are so proud of is too often merely skin-deep. I have low expectations of most people’s ability to read with empathy, whereas before I was quite navïe and thought that because people were readers, they would be open to experience—even vicarious experience—automatically. I will allow that I don’t always read with the empathy I expect of others. Maybe I’m just not as interested in reading about privileged domestic situations or about raising kids, but for some readers that’s their whole life. I have less expectation they will be reading me.
I think it is really important for editors to be able to read beyond their own tastes and beyond their own sensibilities; otherwise they’ll end up leaving far too much out. My role as an editor is to create a place for reader experience and reader pleasure, pleasure that involves meeting the challenge any particular piece of writing presents. My job, then, is to publish what I perceive to be the most interesting, most exciting, most thought-provoking poems and stories I can find, irrespective of their take on the world. And those poems and stories may be outside my personal taste, my personal experience—but I believe it is important to read across sensibilities (though I often fail), and that is how I approach the editing of a magazine. I think it allows me to be more open to writing by other generations, by other cultures, by other gender experiences. I believe this is how to create a magazine that engages with the so-called general reader. Readership is not necessarily composed of like minds; no one should feel that they should like everything they read in any given issue of a magazine. However, it must be acknowledged that what does not appeal to one reader will appeal to another. Being able to read across sensibilities ensures editors might choose a range of material that will appeal to the plurality of reading sensibilities that combine to create the “general reader.”

When I am reviewing submissions for publication, I have to ask myself, what alarms are going off? Am I reacting negatively to this material because I am experiencing some kind of aesthetic hesitation to the material or because the subject matter is uninteresting to me? I ask myself questions of this nature and if the final answer is that the work is good stuff regardless, I’m more likely to advocate for it and put it in the magazine.

CV2: Do you apply the same type of process to your own writing?

JB: I often wonder what I screen out as potential material. Because I had so little time for writing when I worked full-time for the federal government, I wanted to make sure that what I chose to write about was worthy of my attention. Sometimes I wondered what ideas flitted by ungrasped. Also, as a gay writer, I find myself mediating between readers who might understand and those who might not. I realize that I am not necessarily working within a world of open, like minds. When I approach my material, I always ask, “What is my level of embarrassment and how is it influencing the way I have chosen to write about it? Am I embarrassed because of what it is about, because it makes me feel vulnerable and exposed? Or am I embarrassed because it is badly written? Will it embarrass me because readers will find it tepid and sloppily expressed?” A good example is “This Land Is Our Land,” which I have been fine-tuning off and on for at least ten years. I even withdrew it from publication; it was supposed to have appeared in Prairie Fire’s Flaming Prairies issue in 2002. Would readers see it as merely frivolous, which it is, without also appreciating its serious, ideological claims for citizenship? Would they find it too obvious, too explicit, and therefore dismiss it as a lapse in judgement?
Vulnerability and embarrassment are two of the greatest considerations I bring to how I write a poem. When I think about audience—writing is also about the reader’s experience—I pay attention to how I lead the reader through the poem and what levels of discomfort I am willing to have them experience. If I feel vulnerable about the subject matter, it is a good indication that I am getting somewhere important; embarrassment pertains to style: if I feel embarrassed, I know that I have more work to do. However, distinguishing embarrassment from vulnerability can sometimes be tricky, which may explain why “This Land Is Our land” took such a long time making it into print.

Today I am less inclined to put up with the reader’s squeamishness. Still, I want—and prefer—to write in a way that disarms. I want to break down the reader’s complacency. But, that said, I’m very also concerned with craft, because if it falls apart, the reader is going to stop being interested and can no longer be provoked.

……….

CV2: The poems that follow this interview are primarily about the paintings of Paul Cadmus. In reading them, I felt that I was experiencing the events behind the paintings, a particular way of viewing the world, one that focusses on the raw physicality of the figures, distinctly male, provocative and erotic, although there is little explicit sexual subject matter. Is this a particularly homosexual perspective?—and what part of that perspective is unique to Paul Cadmus’s work?

JB: I am still familiarizing myself with Cadmus’s “perspective,” as I slowly read more and more about him. There is no book-length biography, though several art books that focus on his career and his aesthetics have been published over the last thirty years. I recently tracked down a PhD thesis that is likely the most in-depth study yet done of his life and work, though it was written in the late ‘70s. I have yet to read it—and I am somewhat nervous to, as I am sure it will cause me to revise the thirty poems I have written thus far in his voice.

I am very hesitant to say that I know what his perspective is or what makes it unique, especially in terms of his sexual orientation—especially as we are from different generations, and his would seldom have used “gay” as a label to describe himself. Still, based a close study of the canvasses, at least as presented in reproduction in the catalogues and interpreted in their accompanying essays, I would say Cadmus placed emphasis on the male body as a vessel for or figure of beauty.

On one level, “Neoclassic Triptych” examines how Cadmus saw the male form as a legitimate subject for the artist, seen through the frame of the formal art-making tradition he valued. It is easy for me to assume that he had an ideological motivation for doing so. However, based on what I do know about him, I can say that he was very much a humanist and that his work is an expression of his humanism. He was very interested in seeing his work as an artist connecting back to the traditions of representational western art—Ingres was one of his heroes—and it is very striking how frequently many of the allusions in his work reference works by gay artists or artists assumed to be gay, including Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. He also made allusions to the works of gay writers and musicians, including Cavafy, Forster, Gide, and the Venezuelan-born composer, Reynaldo Hahn. He was a proficient pianist and very book-oriented, as Book Buff (the painting) so wittily suggests. To me, he took great pains to see himself in a continuous tradition of homoerotic artmaking, and to see such artmaking as something noble.

As to whether the poems present a particular homosexual perspective, I can only say with certainty that they represent something of my own attitude as a gay man. I believe in being frank and real while at the same time imbuing what I write with a sensuousness that is both allusive and elusive—to walk the line between suggestion and explicitness.