an interview with Laurie Block

CV2: You have a brand new book, Time Out of Mind, coming out from Oolichan Books in June. A big congratulations: it has been a few years since your first collection, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas, was published. What has been the biggest challenge in moving from your first published collection of poetry to the next?

Laurie Block: I remember when Foreign Graces was launched, I successfully contained my joy inside my anxiety, and when I woke up the next morning, I thought, “Is that all there is? What next? Do I have anything else to say?” I was depressed for weeks. But the real challenge of Time Out Of Mind wasn’t a lack of material. It was waiting for my mother to die before going public with the manuscript. I had to see her die. Not for considerations of propriety; she was already deep into oblivion, beyond mortification. I needed to complete the circle of caregiving, to walk her last mile. I’d felt conflicted about writing about her experience while she lived, yet I also knew that without stepping back into the shelter of words, I would not be able to endure the madness of the dementia ward—the moaning and calling out, the unbearable sadness that saturated my visits. Silence didn’t come easy, not for me, not for my mother. Yet even when she was in a vegetative state, I could not write her off. I still believe that, imprisoned within her, was the spark, the tunnel from where I began to where I stood, and I could not bury her alive.

CV2: Your first book grew out of your travels to South America, especially Chile. Over the years, what has led to your fascination with Latin America, and how does that experience inform your poetry now?

LB: Damsi Figueroa, a gifted young poet from Talcahuano, got municipal support and permission from the railway to publish a poem on the ties between the railroad tracks. A hundred lines, one word per line, painted in inverted order. Damsi imagined people standing and smoking between the cars, looking down and reading her poem as the train slowed down for the station at Hualqui. She was 19 or 20, she was a poet, she was listened to. Chile is the most poetry-positive environment I know. People across the demographic spectrum live and breathe poetry and recite it around the dinner table, at the workplace, on the street, in offices and farms. They regard their poets with as much pride as they do their sports stars. As readers, as audience they are active participants in the poetic process. They make comments, suggestions, argue, connect themselves to the language. You walk the streets where the illegal vendors are setting up blankets and books and you’ll hear them calling out in full voice the names of writers, in the imperative; the titles of their latest work. Imagine walking around downtown Winnipeg and hearing someone singing out “Read Di Brandt! Read Now You Care!”

Even before my book was out, I felt welcomed, respected, en casa (at home) as a writer in a way I do not feel in Canada. I continue to write from this understanding, that my work matters, that I will be read.

CV2: Foreign Graces is an intriguing collection. Were you translated, or did you write poems in one language and translate them into the other? Writing in two languages is a very ambitious undertaking, not to mention an unusual creative approach to a first collection. Why was it important to write Foreign Graces in this way? What was the bilingual process meant to capture—remember?

LB: Writing Foreign Graces began with an assignment I gave myself as I was learning the language: to write a poem, beginning in Spanish, only using English when I was stuck. The piece was “El Poema No Importa Sin Tus Manos” (“This Poem Doesn’t Matter Without Your Hands”). I knew immediately I was on to something. My voice shifted, took charge, grew both romantic and assertive. Images grew hotter, took risks, cracked me open. I think that way of seeing and saying still surfaces in the current book, in poems like “The Hat, Delicious, Pre-Nuptial.”

I loved the learning process. It required courage and nerve and strength. In Chile, I lived a continual adrenalin high: I felt stretched and resilient. Initiating relationships, dreaming, laughing and crying in Spanish, I experienced the same rush that a skydiver might access. I stepped out and fell into a new world. If the bilingual process captures any memory it is the child’s learning relationship through call and response, stepping into a new world, mapping it with wonder. Señora Fuentes, the octogenarian who drank my wine and lived downstairs on Castellón St., used to mutter to herself, “Habla como niño”—”He speaks like a child, a big child.”

It also helped shift my work from the confessional. This was intentional; I wanted my poetry to move out into the world, to listen to others’ stories, to behave with political (small-p) maturity, to be in the world. Along with the experience of Beckett and Conrad, intuition informed me that language is merely the vessel for poetry, and that poetry can survive estrangement from the mother tongue, mistakes in grammar, and difficulties with idiom. Indeed, this was my purpose, to build bridges across difference. As Robert Bringhurst says, “poetry also has to do with crossing borders and bearing precise loads.”

CV2: Both of your collections reference memory. Other than writing poetry in English and Spanish, how do these two books differ in the way they articulate the importance of memory? How might the two be similar? What is the importance of remembrance in your work? What role does memory play as inspiration?

LB: Without memory, there can be no relationship. Without memory to reference, we become mere filters. Confined to what we perceive, abandoned in the present, sensations pass through us and leave nothing behind. Without memory, we cannot connect to our history, and end up back where we began, making claims on foreign land (Where are the buffalo gone? How do you spell “Vietnam”?). Without memory, the only currency is muscle and savvy and money. Without memory, we build Wal-Mart on holy ground. Without memory, every loving touch is triage. This is where poetry comes in, to rescue memory, to stop the bleeding.

My friend Carmen got kicked out of school, and eventually had to leave the country, for transcribing oral poetry and organizing a poetry conference. No kidding: poetry. In the Latino context of torture and disappearance, of the terror in the night, it is memory of a better time that make the present tenable, the future possible; it is memory of injustice that makes peace real. Where memory is alive and kicking, poetry becomes dangerous, volatile, a merciless white-hot light to those who argue for silence and sleep. During the years of repression, it was not only artists and thinkers or the million exiliados who told the stories that kept memory alive. Students, teachers, plumbers, anyone who could carry a placard, hand out flyers, spray-paint walls, and demonstrate in the face of bullets and tear gas and water cannons became guardians of personal and collective histories. Memory became the integrating force, the spine on which the body politic reincorporated. Today, the new president, Señora Bachilet, emerges from the shadows of the concentration camp.

“Distintas moscas pero la misma mierda”—”Different flies, but the same old shit” (Chilean graffiti). Time Out Of Mind looks at memory and language from a distinctly Western perspective. It is a map of both disintegration and persistence in a North American context where, in most cases, the oppression we experience is planted within, and where we have the time and resources to address them. The wounds of childhood, of relationship, of the soul. Becoming whole presupposes more than individual memory, more than disparate, disconnected stories. As a species, we will be known by how we treat the vulnerable ones in our midst: the old, the young, the infirm. Without memory of our own helplessness, our own displaced or poorly met needs, how can we fortify the weak and give them voice, nourish the poor and give them strength, comfort the despised and oppressed and honour their pain? If there is a similarity between the two books, it is in dislocation, whether social, political, cognitive, or spiritual. This is what I’m trying to accomplish: memory as connective tissue that binds birth and death on the same continuum, that feeds art and relationship while calling out for love, that makes living and dying more than sufficient.

CV2: In Time Out Of Mind, you observe the breakdown of your mother’s memory and consciousness as her health disintegrates. What about your mother’s situation prompted you to explore her decline and passing poetically? Why was it important to do that? And what did you take away from the experience of writing this material?

LB: I had to write this down, for the release and the blessing my mother was not able to give me. It was a long, ugly dying, a relentless crescendo of losses; for my mother, for myself. The last four years confined to bed, vegetative, incontinent, semi-paralyzed. She gave no sign of recognition to my voice, my face, my name, my smell. She didn’t even look at me (and to this moment I don’t know if this was a signal, if she was trying to tell me something with her detachment). I couldn’t stand it, the visits on the ward; the smells of urine and disinfectant, the howling and clutching of old women asking to be rescued by any passing shadow. The only way to carry on to the end was to step back, to create a safe haven in words. I began to record the marvellous and crazy things she called out (while still verbal):

Take the black taxi.
This is the palace of nothing.
You mean you’ll wear my pants?

She actually said these things. I took them as metaphor, escaping the damaged synapses and the holes in consciousness; her attempt to make sense out of madness. If there is poetry, there must also be a soul. And the same goes for me. So I turned to metaphor for meaning—for comfort, as well. I made poems about the process of loss of memory, consciousness, identity. I connected stories from her past life, some of them mine, some of them flashes of the time before, to the disassociations that were colonizing her mind.

It was almost kinky, the disintegration of language. I observed it and made notes, as if it were a horrific traffic accident and I a voyeur, fascinated, repelled by the carnage but also deeply aroused. Ashamed as well, ashamed of the arousal, of using my mother’s suffering for my relief, for my art. Ashamed of my detachment, when I ought to be feeling love and compassion. Ashamed for wanting her dead.

That is the key thing. Learning to live out death, to accept the full ticket, to write (or read) the last chapter. Good grief—this is what the second section of my book attempts. I began to volunteer with Hospice and Palliative Care. I was a companion, hung out with my clients as they died. I worked as a storyteller/poet in [Winnipeg’s] St. Boniface Hospital among the geriatric patients, the acute and terminally ill: mostly old women I learned from, women who saw and honoured and met death head on. Getting beyond the fear was the breakthrough here, and for that, an intense spiritual connection was the common element, an apprehension of a generative force from which the beauty and the terror flowed. Also someone to witness, to acknowledge their lives down to the last day, to receive their stories. I began to write elegies; not merely the expression of personal grief and pain but an account of loss, an image of absence; pictures of what went missing from the world (and my life) with a person’s death.

CV2: The word “confessional” is often used to describe the modern movement of poetry toward a more explicitly personal focus. Would you describe your poetry as confessional? Why or why not? And why has the personal perspective of poetic memory become so popular, and at the same time so suspiciously regarded?

LB: I don’t think of my book as confessional. I’m telling the story of my mother, and I suppose that makes it my story too, but with a step or two back, the detachment I described that both saved me and perhaps cut me off from the full experience. So in focusing on her past and the process of disintegration of language, identity, memory, I am trying to move beyond the confessional to what makes living and dying tolerable. Even in the humour and the love poetry of the last section of Time Out Of Mind, my intention is to vote for relationship in all its indispensable manifestations, for love as the vital force in expanding consciousness and preserving memory.

But maybe I protest too much—could be I have the same suspicious take on confessional poetry. After all, who do we think we are to go spouting off about ourselves? This voice abounds, hovering at my shoulder, telling me it’s nothing but self-indulgent navel-gazing, with limited application and shelf-life—based on a puritan attitude that going inside is unseemly and unproductive, the sin of pride. I don’t buy this on the level of craft; the personal nature of the landscape mapped is not as important as the connections made. Neruda’s autobiography was called Confieso que he Vivido (“I Confess That I Have Lived”). Still, for me, somewhere deep down it’s not enough. I want to write beyond the limitations of my experience; I want to expand the range of my voice. That’s what Foreign Graces was about. And that’s why I blunder over the borders of belief, cognition, and relationship in my new book.

CV2: Lorca said, “My whole childhood was centred on the village. Shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Total simplicity. . . .I have a huge store of childhood recollections in which I can hear the people speaking. This is poetic memory, and I trust it implicitly.” How would you describe poetic memory, and where does it come from in you?

LB: Poetic memory is Zen-like, more about being than doing. I remember to brush my teeth and lower the seat on the toilet (mostly). I remember to take my pills and plug in the car. This is how I get by. Lorca’s loving recollection has to do with going back to re-inhabit the soil of becoming, to carry forward the intuitive knowing, the certainties, the doubts and the burdens resident in the shape of eyes, the meaning of milk, the smell of rice and wind. Call it shamanic memory: travelling between two (or more) worlds, it grows not out of individual experience, but from a connected structure of communal, collective, racial, regional, inter-species, archetypal, geographic, and linguistic experiences that precede, accompany, and outstrip my own. My memories of being a Jew (and a secular one, at that) go back to Russia, where I’ve never been; include the earthy gutturals of Yiddish, which I can barely speak; call on Maimonides and the charlatans and chicken coops of the shtetl; tip a yarmulke to Marx and an eyebrow to Groucho; give a nod to Rothschild and Chagall; mirror my thick-fingered, broad-chested, bandy-legged peasant’s body type, more appropriate for heaving bags of coal then verses. This is the labour of poetry. To go not beyond, but through the particular into the deep well, the clear water.

CV2: To quote Goethe, “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.” You have done a lot of teaching over the years; what is it about getting someone to enter a poem which offers far more wisdom that the specific knowledge or memory of “things”? And how can the wisdom of poetry open the mind to a better understanding of the self as it contributes to the poet’s ability to produce progressively stronger writing?

LB: As for me, I need the catalogue of names, the rows of objects, the inventory of the medicine cabinet that contain the choices I made, the distress I’ve known, the healing I pursued. As a teacher/mentor/editor, I lead the learner into their own work on the assumption that what they have to say matters. I give them the most committed, respectful reading I can, I chart the trajectory of images, the points of disturbance and illumination. Mostly I do this by intuition. As a reader, a listener, I feel it physically first, in the chakra at the solar plexus. An explosion, a thump. Recognition, authenticity, resonance. Sound bouncing back, I feel it in my breath as it moves towards the breathing of each line. I feel it in my eyes as they cease to travel around the room but look out from the heart of the poem into my own heart. I am captured: taken. This is where I begin as a teacher. Respect, honesty, and affirmation, you can’t do much better than that.

CV2: You are a storyteller and a playwright as well as a poet. All of these genres have evolved from traditional oral forms, so what does the voice remember that the page does not, and how does this tradition intensify the memory of the poem? How do you remember better—out loud, or quietly on the page? How do your other artistic activities contribute to the process of writing poetry?

LB: My initial reaction is to skip this question. It’s something I haven’t really figured out, why I keep these different forms in their own discrete boxes. It has to do with where the power lies. As a performer of stories, a reader of poetry, I can seduce, enchant, charm an audience. If they lose interest or drift off, I can often win them back with an image or a laugh, with the intensity of my own belief in what I’m presenting. On the page, the reader has more control, time, and leisure to love or leave the text, to put me down. As the writer, I’m helpless. Intellectual property or not, making it public not only completes the writing process, it is the surrender of authority.

CV2: In Time Out Of Mind, you have a section called “We Chemists of Grief.” This implies that we make our own grief. What do you mean by this, and what does poetry offer that so many turn to it in difficult times as a means to come to terms with painful events in our lives?

LB: We have so little public experience in sorrow, in regret. So sure, we doctor our grief the same way we try to contain our joy or preserve our health. We experiment with it, drug it, swallow it, go numb, become addicted. Like memory, grief is only viable out loud and in relationship. You can only acknowledge an absence that speaks to you; you can only mourn the loss that lives. This section is about the grieving and the healing implicit when it is separated from the possibility of a cure; when death is welcomed in full consciousness into the circle of life. To die, as much as grief or birth or growth, requires witness, someone to hear the stories, to take the remembered life and give it back, restored to beauty, returned to voice. With some of these poems—”Next Year Country,” “She Rises Without Fear,” “A Bowlful,” “Mrs. Neilsen’s Dance,” “Hospital Blues”—I was doing just that, witnessing, recording, giving back what had weight and depth and texture in their lives. In some of the cases, I was able to give them the poem before they died.

CV2: Related to the previous question: Good poetry is not just about getting the feelings out, nor is it solely about the process of recollection. What are the attributes of a poem that sticks in your memory?

LB: It appears obvious, having thought about the relation between witness and companionship, memory and dying, that a “good” poem—whatever that is—is not just moving or passionate or beautiful or true, but also inclusive. Metaphor is the door, the crack that can open to us; imagery is the common perceptual ground we walk on. More than anything, a poem that works takes the reader home and embeds them in a spiritual, physical, and emotional context. What works for you may not work for me. And that’s why we need so many poems, my friend.

CV2: In your poem “The Goods,” you write: “The world continues to worry no matter / what you sell or give away the material universe / perseveres.” I found this piece interesting because we often talk about the memory that objects contain, but when we let them go, they cease to have that value for the next person. What was the inspiration behind this poem and the process of writing it?

LB: “The Goods” began with an image, a waking dream. I saw furniture draped with empty sheets in a house full of windows, white walls splashed in sunlight. They were like ghosts. Sleeping, sentient forms that remembered the shape and heat and voices of familiar but absent bodies; that occupied rooms, time, lives; that waited for the scene to begin. It was only a slide-step to appreciate the material world as something we all need to deal with before we can grieve or even die successfully. This is what people do in extremis: we grab hold of something, anything, and so initiate the flowering of grief, just as this poem begins this aspect of my book. Whatever our attitude to things, whether aesthete or ascetic, hunger or surfeit, indulgence or denial, everyone has to deal with what they have and what the dead leave in their tracks. This goes for memories too, rooted as they are in sensation. No matter how far we travel from our past or how thoroughly we cover our ghosts, both dying and grieving demand not just a count or a naming of objects (with the emotional charge concealed under sheets), they ask for an account. They require being present in the ceremonies of taking leave; they require sitting through the night.

CV2: So what is on the creative horizon for Laurie Block, now that your second collection is done? More poetry? Another trip to South America?

LB: Another book and poetry, of course, always poetry. I’m working on short fiction right now, with some success and much confusion. Prose is as challenging a language to learn as Spanish. And si, I will return to Chile, and other places south, when time and pesos permit. And I’d better learn French.