Bill Cooper is an academic with a Ph.D. in cognitive science from MIT, currently president emeritus at the University of Richmond. He began writing haiku in 2009 and publishes in leading haiku journals. He has published nine haiku collections and served for five years as one of the founding editors of Juxtapositions: A Journal of Research and Scholarship in Haiku. Two of his books were shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards and one received an Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards. His latest book, rounded by the sea, is published by Red Moon Press.
What draws me to the writer: A review of his book at Haiku Canada Review put him on my radar. I know only that until I finish reading his book, apart from this interview. Like Michael Dennis’ Today’s Book of Poetry, this interview has widened my appreciation for how many amazing writers there are.
About the book: rounded by the sea invites the reader to vicariously travel through his evocative observations of nature by water, land, and air. Peppered with musical interludes and a dose of baseball, this book delivers emotional impact taking the reader from a smile of amusement to a sigh of poignancy from poem to poem. These meticulously written haiku ring with clarity. Throughout this collection the poet takes notice of what is almost missed as he observes the sea, land, and air. These haiku will both surprise and encourage.
Questions:
PP: Forgive my ignorance, but how and how long ago did you find haiku?
BC: I began writing haiku in 2009, stimulated by the writings of Stephen Addiss. As editor of the journal South by Southeast, Steve regularly sent me copies of the latest issue, which I enjoyed. Haj Ross, a mentor at MIT, introduced me to the form in 1975, but I could scarcely imagine writing haiku back then. Some years later, Haj gave me the haiku book Markings by Dag Hammarskjold, another early influence. After spending so many years writing research articles and books, by 2009 I was primed to try my hand at brevity.
PP: What have been a highlight moment or two from the journey?
BC: Highlights for me include meeting fellow haiku poets at Haiku North America conferences.
On rare occasions, I also manage to write a haiku I like: sax riff blackening redfish with the spices at hand
PP: Do you do dailies or write as the mood strikes?
BC: I read and take notes on haiku almost daily.
PP: How did you proceed towards a book? Did you seek to publish as many of the 120 in advance as practical first, or look for themes to guide the selection?
BC: I do not set out to write a haiku book. I love haiku journals first and foremost, submitting and getting feedback from editors. I compile a running list of published haiku, then begin the process of looking for groupings that might work thematically in a book. Some of my books follow the seasons. With rounded by the sea, the themes of child, water, land, and air (including music) emerged. I enjoy reading and writing haiku because, at their best, haiku convey the freshness of life.
Gary Barwin is the author of 27 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime),The Fabulous Op (with Gregory Betts) and forthcoming, Portal (visual poems.) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long listed for Canada Reads. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com
What draws me to the writer: Gary is a delight as a human and as a performer. If you get the chance to see him live, grab it, whether his music or his writing. His writing is flexible. He doesn’t typecast himself into a mood and syntax. His mind is alert and curious, compassionate, reflecting and respectful. It goes to dark places but does not cache the reader there as pemmican. It brings back context.
I don’t even know how many of his books I have. This one will go to the buy list as well.
Book: The Most Charming Creatures: Poems by Gary Barwin (ECW, Sep 20 2022)
Just as in times past we had no sensation and were not troubled
when we were the rain coming from all sides around the family car
and we on impact shook hard with tumult
trembled and quivered around Dad’s jokes and Mother’s breezy compromises
and no one knew which of us would win empire
and rule over family
just so, when we no longer are, when brother is gone from family
— those parts whose whole is our being —
nothing can happen, be sure of it, nothing can happen to us then
for then we shall not be, and nothing can make us feel
not if brother dissolves into rain, and from rain to puddle
and puddle to small rivulets which stream into the drain and darkness
But then this water, here where I kayak
here in this river, this lake
here under this flock of wintering & unmovable geese
here on its way to the rising salt sea
About the book:
With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and “turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything,” they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch.”
A follow-up to the award-winning author’s acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin’s examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the “most charming creatures” of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) “the most charming creatures,” but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: “it’s a miracle that we’ve survived / it’s a miracle that we’ve survived at all.”
Questions:
PP: I’m curious about how your visual art and your writing play. Do you go into one mode, one form, or one idea, shunted towards words or image?
GB: I write in a variety of forms, and create visual art, music, video, all in various combinations. Truly, I don’t know that I feel a distinction between the media or how I work in them. I find myself making in one or the other, or a mix of them. Sometimes, it is about a certain initial impulse with material or process. Sometimes, one thing naturally develops into another. I think that each medium is just another dimension of the others. Of course, each one offers certain opportunities, has certain affordances, certain particular materials (sound, visuals, movement, etc.) but they don’t feel that different to me when working with them. Is mowing the lawn that different than making a sandwich? It is about process, about a balance of technique with material, it is locating oneself in the work, seeing what the materials suggest. Though last time I tried to eat a lawn, I got a swing set caught between my teeth.
PP: What do you consume that keeps play alive for you? What’s the secret to staying so alert?
GB: One of the things that keeps play alive, that helps me feel the possibility of exploration, of being open and also transcending my own self-imposed limitations is error. By making mistakes, but not trying too hard not to, and by being open to what they might suggest, I’m often shown another way to proceed, to consider something that I might not have. Another practice is collaboration. I continually collaborate with a wide range of writers and creative artists. Through this engagement, I can’t hold on to my preconceptions, or my ownership of work and processes, but instead have the opportunity to follow this new process, these other ways of conceiving of the work and the creative process. Of trusting the writing itself and the collaboration. I do try to work on craft and at getting better, to be able to do more things and do them better, but at the same time, I make a point of trying new approaches, of learning about other ways of writing and other approaches. I try to pay attention to what interesting writing is happening or has happened. I try to watch with three eyes and clap hands with one.
PP: Has the pandemic changed the tone or expression of your creativity?
GB: One thing that the pandemic changed for me was the amount of collaboration that I was doing. At this time when I felt a need for connection, for presence, for being out in the world, I ended up collaborating widely with many different people in many different places. I completed three collaborative books, several chapbooks, made many videos, created music, and wrote several manuscripts with people that I knew well but also with some that I didn’t. I also found that I made more of my own solo work. I felt need to make something positive, to have agency, to speak to the world and my position in it. As for the tone, I made more experimental work as well as work that was more directly emotional. It’s a really great question. I’ll be interested in looking back on these times and see how it changed things generally in the arts.
Canadian Independent Bookstore Day (CIBD) is the annual day when readers, writers, illustrators, publishers, and other industry supporters come together to celebrate indie bookstores across Canada. By joining the celebration, you are advocating for independent businesses, supporting a flourishing bookselling community, and investing in Canadian culture.
Psst, Ottawa, Singing Pebble, Octopus, World of Maps, Perfect Books and with a foot in the door for next year, The Spaniel’s Tale, being opened by Cole Davidson in August at 2075 Balharrie Ave.
Stuart Ross is the author of 20 books of fiction, poetry, and essays. He received the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize, the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2010 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. His work has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Estonian, Slovenian and Russian. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario.
What draws me to the writer: His reputation as an editor drew me to his editing service close to 15 years ago. His comments were helpful and validating. His writing manages to be plain, comic and depressed yet leaves with complicated emotions and feeling transported. His vigorous poems in readings own a room, or in recent times, own a zoom. If you haven’t got, 70 Kippers: The Dagmar Poems by Michael Dennis and Stuart Ross (Proper Tales Press, 2020) get that too.
Book: The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW, April 5, 2022) is also available on Audible and set at 2hrs and 14 minutes long. Incidentally ECW has all kinds of their books on audio at their site.
the book of grief and hamburgers by Stuart Ross.
Bookdescription: A hybrid essay/memoir exploring loss and grief, and trying to figure out what both of those are and what they might mean.
A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss.
Written during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the sudden death of his brother left him the last living member of his family and as a catastrophic diagnosis meant anticipating the death of his closest friend, this meditation on mortality — a kind of literary shiva — is Ross’s most personal book to date. More than a catalogue of losses, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers is a moving act of resistance against self-annihilation and a desperate attempt to embrace all that was good in his relationships with those most dear to him.
Sample:
from the book of grief and hamburgers by Stuart Ross.
PP: What was your aim with the book: SR: I rarely write for catharsis or therapy, but my main purpose in writing that book was to find a way to cope with what I was experiencing. I’d decide later if it was a book that could be published for an audience beyond me.
PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book? SR: I wouldn’t say I had favourite moments. It was a very sad process to write it. Maybe what brought me great pleasure was seeing the cover art that Angie Quick created for it. I gave her very non-specific instructions, and she did brilliant work.
Ignatius Fay is an invertebrate paleontologist and poet. He writes haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun, tanka prose and various other related genres. He is Regional Coordinator for the Ontario Region, in which role he has edited and laid-out three anthologies of poems by Ontario members. He is the editor of the monthly newsletter for the Haiku Society of America, serves on their executive and has been the layout artist for several of their publications. In addition, he is the founding editor of Tandem: The Rengay Journal. He has won a few awards and published a few collections of poetry, his most recent being After The Storm, a collection of illustrated haibun and tanka prose. Ignatius lives in Sudbury, Ontario
What draws me to the writer: I often admire the poet’s writing as they come across my radar online in journals, such as I posted recently at Instagram. We’ve never met but his work
Every weekend, at eight in the morning, she is here puttering in my flower garden. Before her, the garden didn’t exist. That area of my yard was just a weedy patch I kept under some control by mowing. I didn’t ask her. I don’t even know her, really. She just showed up one day and started putting in a garden. When I asked why, she said she loved to garden and had run out of room at home. It hurt her to see a space like mine lying barren.
she hurries down the sidewalk pulling a small cart piled high with tools, a hose and fertilizer
Her garden, three doors down, is the showpiece of the neighbourhood. Even now, ours is a nodding hello relationship, smiles sprinkled with rare idle talk about the weather.
She has certainly beautified my life. And I have told her as much. One day I’ll ask her name.
back bent kneeling among the flowers weeding her son’s old hockey shin guards protect arthritic knees
P.P.: What was the genesis of your book? I.F.: I have been writing haiku and senryu for more than thirty years. Over that time, I was exposed to tanka, haibun and tanka prose, all of which I write regularly. One genre I find particularly interesting and fun to produce is haiga – haiku with an illustration – which has been around for many year. Fairly recently, the genre was expanded to taiga – tanka with an illustration. With this book, I take the concept of illustrated poem one step farther – haibun and tanka prose with an illustration – which I named haiga prose and taiga prose respectively.
With this concept, I approached Ray J. Belcourt, an accomplished photographer and friend with whom I have collaborated several times. He took many photos, then I chose the ones that best suited my poetry. Only the caterpillar photo was not taken by him; my daughter took that one in her garden. I used graphics software to manipulate and enhance the photos, then laid out the book for publication.
PP: What was or will be your favourite moment(s) in making this book? I.F.: All of the stories recorded in these poems are special to me. They are parts of who I am, my very essence. I have no clear-cut favourite in that sense. The best part of producing After The Storm was the writing of the poetry. In each instance, I was reliving and trapping a fragment of my life on paper where anyone could see them. And I am particulaly gratified when I hear that one of these pieces has touched someone in some way.
