Month: December 2023

Finding the Form with William Ross

Our family, a Caucasian father, a Chinese mother and two mixed-race children, is fortunate to take part in the annual holidays and celebrations of two cultures. For example, we enjoy two different New Year celebrations. One occurs on the last day of December and the first day of January according to the Gregorian calendar. The other is based on the lunisolar calendar with New Year falling on the second new moon after the winter solstice. The Chinese New Year festivities last sixteen days with prescribed customs and traditional foods associated with each day. There is enormous richness in the stories and customs associated with the twelve-year zodiac cycle of the lunar New Year.

Photo by Jiachen Lin on Unsplash

     2022 was the Year of the Tiger. At the beginning of every year there is speculation about how the character of the presiding zodiac animal will influence the unfolding of days ahead. That was where the poem began, wondering how the ferocious tiger might affect 2022. I liked the idea of subverting the image of ferocity and focussing on what the tiger often does, staying hidden in the tall grass, staring out at what might be happening in the distance.

     I’m a visual thinker, and often have to draw a picture of something in order to better understand it, or just to explore the structure and relationship of its parts. One of the early images that came to mind was a gigantic, cogged wheel rotating and clicking into place in the sky.

     After I have let a first draft pour out, I often do some research to verify facts in the setting of the poem. Unexpected details that come out of research can add richness to the lyrical voice, allowing the reader to absorb the poem in more vivid ways. In this case, having experienced Chinese New Year for over four decades, many of the details and customs were already familiar to me, but there was still a need to comb through, looking for the images that would work together to tell the story.

     I had no pre-determined idea of how the poem would end, and it wasn’t until many drafts on, when I was musing about the difference in character of the tiger and the animal for the following year, the rabbit, that the poem found its ending.

William Ross is a Canadian writer and visual artist living in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Bluepepper, Humana Obscura, New Note Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, Topical Poetry, Heavy Feather Review,*82 Review, and Alluvium. Recent work is forthcoming in Bindweed Magazine and Anti-Heroin Chic.

Header photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

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Of pantsers, plotters, and being of use

I want to be a plotter. Oh, how I want to be a plotter. In the way I want my car to stay clean or to keep my spice drawer organized, I want to be a plotter. Each time I start a new project, I delude myself with an outline and visions of stepwise arguments, character development, of writing with the end in mind.

But — and this is not an insouciant gesture toward having some rare and untameable intelligence — I just can’t do it. I am constitutionally someone who writes — and lives — by the seat of her pants. I am constitutionally a pantser. I changed my major three times in undergrad, was miffed when I was told I couldn’t do a double-major in two different faculties, started my career in science, followed my curiosity over to journalism, then came around another hairpin curve into medicine. The first books I published were novels, followed by nonfiction, then poetry, with a radio play and a few short films thrown in there.

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What can look like fickleness, or deficits in attention, or collecting careers (my c.v. is a disaster), has, in fact, been me trying to be a decent generalist. Remember back when it was okay to be a generalist? When I was growing up, my family owned the only general store in a very small town. My parents worked hard to have a good selection of most things a person might need for daily life, to spare them a drive into the city: milk, meat, fruit, dry goods, ice cream, nails, paint, a few gifts and greeting cards, and the occasional snowmobile. They took pride not in showiness, but in being useful.

Usefulness can be a slippery concept. The pursuit of usefulness led me from journalism to medical school. The kind of journalism to which I was assigned had stopped feeling important, and I was itching to contribute something. Surely medicine would be something? Two decades later I know I’ve been useful to some people sometimes, but art is as essential to a good life — as useful— as is medical care. My heart has not for one second stopped questioning the choice to leave behind writing as my daily bread or stopped wanting the freedom to be in the field and to go on adventures. Being a generalist, straddling arts and science, working across genres, has been my way of keeping my boots by the door.

Photo by Anna Mircea on Unsplash

In only a few of these things I have written have I known exactly what I wanted to say, or even how I wanted to say them, until I was partway into the writing. Sometimes I try to write something as fiction, but it finds a truer form in poetry. Sometimes life allows only episodic writing. Poems can start with a single image and be drafted quickly to capture a moment; my favourite moments of revision reshape first drafts into something unexpected, something under the surface that wasn’t immediately apparent when pen first touched paper. The essay that appears in this issue of The New Quarterly was like that. Initially just a bunch of journal entries collected over multiple trips to Antarctica, interspersed with quotes from books I happened to be reading, the many parts became an existential journey to find everything waiting at the centre of nothing. I didn’t know that’s what I was going to write, and the only writing I could do at the time, while busy working, was to collect images and scenes in what became something of a logbook. I kept the useful bits. Everything else was a hand up along the way.  

Photo by Derek Oyen on Unsplash

So while I chase the illusion of personal and creative control, in truth I live for surprise. I write until something lights up in my mind or on the page, often scrapping what I started and chasing down the thing that has just visited me. I try to live like that, too: by plunging in and working my way out, pantsing. In my worst moments, I make a garbled mess of things. In my best, I can stumbled on separate images or ideas and make one hold up a mirror to the other, creating a new conversation. In this time of wars old and new, maybe conversation is the most useful thing there is.

Monica Kidd’s most recent book, Chance Encounters with Wild Animals (Gaspereau Press, 2019), was short-listed for the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. She works as a family doctor, a freelance journalist, and is doing an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction at University of King’s College.

Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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What’s John Adames Reading?

The death of Louise Glück this year and her winning the Nobel Prize prompted me to reread two volumes of her poetry – The Wild Iris and The Seven Ages – that I had purchased many years ago from the famous City Lights Books in San Francisco.  One of my favorite poems from The Seven Ages is “Radium.”  In this poem radium metaphorically refers to the world of work outside of the home and the choices we all face in this context.  In the background, but skillfully not mentioned in the poem, are Madame Curie and her discovery of radium. Glück’s memories of her own anxieties as a young girl and her mother who did not pursue a career are both chilling and transcendent in the poem’s concluding stanza:

Time was passing. Time was carrying us

faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory,

and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.

My mother stirred the soup.  The onions,

by a miracle, became part of the potatoes.

I am also reading Simon Armitage’s A Vertical Art: on Poetry, based on his public lectures at Oxford.  I am enjoying his insights into various poets and so far I am particularly interested in  his comments on how Philip Larkin (one of my favourites) often ends his poems:

Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies – those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness.

Finally, I feel that almost any poet will certainly be intrigued by the book’s coda: “Nighty-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry.”

In addition to a career as a professional musician, John Adames received a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and has taught courses in literature, music, writing and rhetoric at various universities and col- leges in Canada. He has published in First of the Month and, most recently, in First Literary Review-East.

Header photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

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