Sheryda Warrener (00:00):

I think with a poem, you always want to have something at stake that you just are not going to be able to answer, but you keep trying to get at it in this way, in that way, in this way and that way. When I do finally find that form, it’s almost this huge relief like crying—so excited.

Like, oh my gosh—that was a struggle! Why? I’m the only one in my own way.

Claire Tacon (00:18):

You’re listening to Parallel Careers where writers who also teach to the big ideas and practical tips that they take into the classroom.

Sheryda Warrener (00:36):

My name is Sheryda Warrener. I’m a poet and I teach in the School of Creative Writing at UBC. I teach undergrad lectures, undergrad seminars and workshops, and I teach graduate workshops. After I graduated from the BFA program at U Vic, I applied to work in Japan, teaching English. It was a real like coming of age time. It was in my early twenties. It was the first time I had really traveled. And the only time I had ever lived somewhere totally independently like this. And it was my first experience with a culture other than a North American culture.

So through Japanese poetry and through living in Japan, I learned to pay attention. I had this really wonderful student once where I told her that I wrote poems and she was like, “Hmm, that must be nice. It would be lovely to be able to spend time writing poems.”

There was this idea for her that if you’re going to learn something, you had better master it. This was her experience with art and art making or any kind of craft that you would take time to develop your sensibility. And that was so humbling that like I was like, but I’ve written some poems. And I was like, Oh no, I haven’t. I haven’t yet written any poems. You’re right. You’re right.

And I think it’s beautiful to be walking down the street in a Japanese city and there’s space for ritual or for ritualized experiences. And if you’re paying a heightened enough attention, there’s always things to notice that are so surprising. It’s like that repetition. Like you’re going to the grocery store and you’re just want to pick up some rice and some eggplant and some chicken for dinner. And then you take the wrong turn and you end up on a little bridge, like a little trestle bridge and suddenly you’re in nature and you didn’t even realize it was there.

Like it’s just full of those moments where you’re taken aback and you really are reminded where you are in the world. You’re really situated in that moment. So I think that is in my work still all the time, the way that I attend, uh, this heightened form of observational detail, getting it all down, taking note of it is a huge part of who I am as a writer.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the verbs that poets that I admire use to describe poems. So one of my favorite poets, Mary Ruefle says a poem is an experience. And there’s lots of poets who have also described it or defined it in this way. So a poem is not just a description of an experience. It is an experience. And so all these verbs started to kind of show up in these podcasts that I was listening to these conversations with writers.

I was listening to. Like a poem isn’t just read, it’s activated. And a metaphor isn’t just two words, put side-by-side, it’s an exchange of energy. So I was thinking about, you know, where does this energy of words or of language come from? I think it really comes from our sensory experiences in the world. So it’s super important for me to build a material or a sensory experience into learning when I’m in the, when I’m in the classroom or also get students outside of the classroom.

So I do do a lot of field trips. I do ask students to go on self-directed field trips. I asked students to visit art galleries or museums. Within those experiences, they don’t even realize that they are having an experience and then they’re translating that experience into language. They’re taking notes, they’re gathering material or sensory information, and it really anchors them or roots them in the world. And I think that’s what poems do—they anchor us or they root us in the world. They share an experience of this kind of humanity or this life that we have.

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[I look into the faces of women coming now toward me]

 

 

I look into the faces of women coming now toward me up the sidewalk in citrus tones, crushed velvet.

Put myself in their way as they brush past.

Desire a material time turns outside-in.

White flowers whorl on vines like sheets through dryer portholes.

I drift through propped doors.

It’s strongly suggested by the handmade sign in the changeroom that the fine mesh bag be pulled over my head to safeguard the blouse from the makeup I’m not wearing.

In the mirror, a young tree wrapped in burlap in winter against the backdrop of the velvet curtain.

I think I’m smaller than I actually am.

When I remove the gauzey layer, it’s spring again and I’ve doubled in age.

At the apothecary, I let the consultant test samples.

Day’s touchlessness reversed.

She rinses me under lukewarm water, makes a tidy package with the towel.

Unwraps the gift of my own hand.

 

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Sheryda Warrener:

In my hybrid forms class that I teach, I asked the students to design their own field trips in small groups. The hybrid forms class came directly out of my experience working with kids in Sweden and in Japan, because when I was faced with those five-year-olds—particularly in Stockholm—where they were like, I can’t sit through another circle time with you, lady. I was like, okay, I got to do something. And so our school that I was working within had this idea that we would play around and learn about community. And I thought, well, what does community mean to these children? And I thought, well, why not ask them? So we started to do field trips in and around the vicinity of the school. So I asked the nearby bakery where I bought a lot of cinnamon buns and I had a rapport. I asked them if I could come with these kids and show them the back end of bakery and how everything works within the bakery.

And they were very happy to have us as long as we did not dip our hands into the dough vat. And the children were able to ask questions about this bakery that was, you know, near their school. And then we went to the grocery store and someone said, where does the money go? And then we went to the library and we had a conversation with the librarian. So we started to just ask the question, what is community? And through that inquiry, we learned so much more. It just made so much that is invisible to us visible. And so that is really where the idea for the hybrid forms class came from, that maybe all of us could gather around a question about form. And so really, I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know the answer to what is form, but I want to make it as possible for students to imagine what form might be.

Some of the more meaningful experiences that my students have had? I asked the students actually to design their own experiences. And one of the small groups took us to Home Hardware and we wandered the aisles of Home Hardware. And we collected like little paint samples and little tile samples. And we played around with these materials and we wrote in the outdoor furniture section. We all grabbed a chair, sat under one of the big umbrellas. And we all just sat there and kind of tried to look at form as it exists in the world. So how Home Hardware has all these forms inside of it, and could some of these forms be borrowed for writing? That’s really our main focus.

I spend a lot of time at the beginning of every class contextualizing in some way each other’s preoccupations and desires, needs, experiences. So for example, one of the things I did this semester is I had I paired up students and I had them share a story about a lost childhood object.

And this is a really lovely assignment from the Art of the Art Assignment book (*correction: Lost Childhood Object prompt is from You Are An Artist by Sarah Urist Green). They shared in pairs a lost childhood object, and without writing anything down, they just had to kind of remember the details of these objects. And then they had to use materials from around their home to recreate these objects for each other. So there was this lovely, inherent story about their childhood and their childhood experience, but then there was also this process of making that brought them, I think, closer to one another. So I built in a lot of those kinds of prompts so that we can actually experience connection later in the term, that is a little bit more, uh, risky.

 

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Excerpt from Floating is Everything

Accustomed to the kayutka

(size of a phonebox, tethered

sleeping bag, fold-out

 

desk, my own private

porthole) I prefer the cramped space

between radiator and kitchen table,

 

rely on my place here, a stake-out

over apartment rooves, scaffolding, wires.

Across the way, two men shunt

 

shoulders of ice and snow

down to the walkway below

with a wallop. My senses

 

disabled, I tune in

to the dishes drying, suspended

in their rack. Winter stew

 

like licking a battery. My hollow

shoes in the front hall smuggle

in a darkness. I kick them

 

out of sight. Eavesdrop on

the furniture: Ottoman, what do you have

to say for yourself? Dark by 15:04,

 

the city’s a giant

pinball game, moon a captive

ball in the playfield, and I haven’t

 

a single shot to take. I feel

my internal organs shrinking by .0008%,

bone density disintegrate under constant

 

strike of gravity. Decrease in plasma

volume, calcification of soft tissue,

disruption of taste.

 

Muscle atrophy. I maintain,

from a professional standpoint, humans

are more than capable of withstanding

 

unearthly pressures. I’m living

proof. I could have stayed a million

more days and a million more days

 

were never possible. Even

the sugar bowl here at my elbow

laughs and laughs.

 

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Sheryda Warrener:

When I work with students, I don’t think I use the word persona, but I do use the word speaker. In my second book, I wrote a long poem and it took on the persona of a cosmonaut, a Russian cosmonaut and a male Russian cosmonaut. I think mainly what I was trying to do there, through that persona, was to see what the world was like through the eyes of someone who had left the Earth and had come back. So, I mean, I love shifts in perspective, but imagine that like, just imagine for a minute that you have been away from the earth for an extended period of time and then you get back here. Like, boom! Everything must be so elevated and vivid and alive. So that excited me. And, I was listening to a podcast the other day with George Saunders talking about process and he was saying, you know, one of the things that I want to make sure that I do in future books is write a little bit about the joy of living in this world right now.

I want, I don’t know if I’ve done that in my writing, he said. And I feel the same way. Like I care about the joy that I feel living this life. And so the persona gave me access to joy and delight because of this huge shift in perspective and, and proximity to living. When I think about delight, I think about delight as fueled by a kind, by our own mortality, like by loss and sadness and deep understanding that we’re not here for a long time, just for a good time, you know? If we’re lucky, if we’re lucky. So I feel like on the coin flip side of this, of delight, is this sadness or this deep sense that ah, it’s impermanent. And I think that’s what I wanted to show with that particular person.

I tried right away to separate the actual human being that that speaker in “Long Distance” is built on to the speaker that I was creating because really that speaker was also me. So it didn’t really have anything to do with this historical figure. It’s like writing a poem about a headline in a newspaper. You take that as your inspiration, but then you use it as a kind of jumping off point to explore and imagine new things that you might not have, had you not seen that headline. It was the same about this historical figure. He, he was someone that I was interested in up to a point and then, you know, that’s all I needed to get going and imagine from there. I also think that, that male figure in that poem is of course my dad too. And so I was writing a poem about a bit of a distance from my dad and his own experience in life. So I think there are these moments of deep intimacy and interiority, I tried to imagine because I wasn’t quite privy to it.

So I, I think it’s one of my preoccupations, one of my obsessions to ride that line between the intimate and the public.

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[Sky chart, apertif glass, plaster head, tempera, cork ball, metal rods, brad nails, painted glass]

 

 

Sky chart, apertif glass, plaster head, tempera, cork ball, metal rods, brad nails, painted glass. 

I’m layered in like light. 

Or heavier, glue. 

Tinted blue film on loop, blue silk skirt belonging now to the chlorinated lambent glow. 

Projector overhead sighs through its gills. 

The desire to last finds a material place in the loop the artist makes. 

A rose, a pattern of roses. 

Part of the resounding dark, I play out my role as any good actor would. 

To the average passerby, I look alive. 

When I turn to go, the face pinned inside the spliced frame flashes across my chest, spectral trace. 

I sweep my arms out in front of me, searching.

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Sheryda Warrener:

I have a new manuscript that I’m working on and it’s three long poems. And then these little interstices, which are monostitch poems. Kind of like prose poems, but broken into single lines. And it is right now, seemingly coming together as a kind of exploration or interrogation of the self through visual art. There’s this lovely quote from Cole Swensen that is, you know, not writing about art, but finding ways to live with it. And I think that I love living with art around me. It’s one of the delights of my life to experience art by made by other people. I think for one, it was a way to get away from the autobiographical piece. So I got sort of tired of writing about myself and I was having these wonderful encounters with art that were really having a huge impact on me in so many ways.

For one, I was looking at art as a practice and a process and it was, it does, and it continues to feed my practice and process. For another, I’m looking at these extraordinary works and I’m thinking about the people who made them. And I’m thinking about myself as a maker and it’s trying to see myself in that a little bit. There’s this moment in the poem, in my first book, Hard Feelings where the speaker encounters a Georgia O’Keeffe painting and she has had this whole experience trying to get to see Georgia O’Keeffe’s work and it’s just failed and failed and failed. But then she sees this beautiful painting “My Last Door,” and she’s able to get close enough to the painting that she sees, that the frame even the frame has had, has been painted.

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So there’s this expression that O’Keeffe’s work went beyond the frame. It was always, it was her whole life. And I just loved that so much. And it spoke to me about process and how these things just encompass us and our love for making things. How we’re drawn to it and how we couldn’t not do it. We just couldn’t.

I think I also think it is, of course, one of those things that’s impossible. You can’t, you can’t possibly describe that experience, but you can try to get some of that unsayable element down.

Finding my footing in the, in the 200 person classroom took a lot of work. It took a lot of time trying to make that same intimate experience that I have with 12 people. How can I do that in this big space with these people who are sort of like, some of them are into it and some of them are just not, and that’s totally fine.

They’re just kind of like, well, what is this? Okay, I’ll give it a shot. So it’s really, for me, about trying to anticipate what might be relevant to them, bringing in poems that are exciting and, and use a similar language that they might in their lives. And it is also kind of getting at these, I wouldn’t want to say universal, but these potential for connection across all of us. So ideas about attention, ideas about connection, how we connect with one another through poetry, how we attend to the world through poetry, these kinds of ideas can be shared across a lot of human beings. So I think that’s how I try to build in as much intimacy as possible. One of the sort of main goals for me in that course is to get them to sort of situate their poems in a time and space in a very particular moment, and there can be a lot of resistance to that.

You know, like, Oh no, but poems are ambiguous and you don’t know where the speaker is and everything. And I love that, but I also think it’s worth, it’s worth trying to, to anchor your poem in a specific moment. So usually I will do that by, uh, getting us outside and, and writing in observation with nature or something like that. But we didn’t get to do that this year.

Through my friend, Claire Battershill, actually, I discovered this really wonderful website called Window Swap. People send in short recordings of a view out a window and there’s sound as well. So you could be in Bali, you could be in Spain, you could be in Australia, you could be in Mexico and with a click of a button, you see a new view out of a window. I think poems are like that. Poems are made up of a back and forth between windows.

So I opened up Window Swap in Zoom and shared it with the class. And I would get them in timed increments to write about exactly what they were seeing. Describe it in the most specific and sensory detail they could. So I would open up Windows Swap, we’d be in Bulgaria and it would be snowing. And there’d be a shuh shuh—you could hear the snow falling. I would try to get them to write all of those observations down. And then I would have them switch to their interior spaces. So it could be a desire, a want, a secret, something emotional that’s happening as they’re looking. To write that down as well, and to alternate between these physical truths and these emotional truths that they’re experiencing here. I think that prompt works on so many levels, but for us in the Zoom room that day, we were connected by this experience of travel in a time where we aren’t able—you know, some of my students can’t leave their homes, right? They’re stuck in their, in their spaces. So it was one of those wonderful moments where we were gathered around something. And it, it did seem to elevate the material for the students. They started to get a sense of what a poem can be made of and how those visual or sensory observations anchored the poem in a time and place making it possible for them then to associate outwards from there or in inside themselves.

You’ve been listening to Parallel Careers, which is produced by myself, Claire Tacon in partnership with The New Quarterly literary magazine. Erin MacIndoe-Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Financial and in-kind support was provided by the The Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University and the Government of Canada. The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com

Visit tnq.ca/parallel for more information on Sheryda’s work, including her most recent collection Floating Is Everything. There, you can also listen to outtakes from this episode and check out more teaching and writing tips. Thanks for listening.