The Mind's Motifs

Michael Prior discusses his preference for poetry books that are eclectic rather than conceptual:

I wouldn't exactly say I'm wary about books that begin as conceptual projects (there are so many excellent, conceptually focused or "project"-based books) but in general, I tend to prefer a collection’s eclectic approach, its arbitrary, temporal origins (a poet’s most engaging poems written during a given period). I like to see a mind’s motifs and predilections not only in conversation, but also in heated argument—and in my experience, this seems to happen more surprisingly when a poet hasn’t set out to write a “project,” but rather, when individual poems, written without pretense of future assembly, end up in restless dialogue. Of course, I’m being a little facile: the boundaries between collection and project are undeniably porous: where does one end and the other begin? I very well may have written a book that could be categorized as a project, but while drafting the poems in Model Disciple, I avoided thinking of the book that way because I was worried that a conscious conceptual focus might influence the sort of poems I was writing, or, ultimately, which poems made it into the book: I was afraid that if I were writing toward a set of thematic and theoretical end goals, I would distract myself from saying what I needed to, in the way I needed to.

Model Disciple, Late Victorians, Montreal Launch

Vincent Colistro

Lydia Perović

Michael Prior

Neil Smith, translator of The Goddess of Fireflies

Geneviève Pettersen

Michael Prior

Vincent Colistro, Carmine Starnino, Michael Prior

Talya Rubin, Derek Webster

Model Disciple, Late Victorians, Toronto Launch

Flash Interview #11—Michael Prior

Michael Prior's poems have appeared in many publications across North America and the UK. His prizes include The Walrus Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine's LitPop Award, Grain's Short Grain Contest, Magma Poetry's Editors' Prize and Vallum’s Poetry Prize. Prior currently resides in Ithaca, New York, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Cornell University. Model Disciple, his first book, was published this month by Vehicule Press.

Carmine Starnino: At one point in "Tashme"—the final poem in Model Disciple—your grandfather asks: "You aren't going / to put everything in the poem, are you?" Do you believe there are certain things that are better off not being included in poems?

Michael Prior: I do. I think a poem is, in an important sense, defined by its silences—whether or not something warrants being included or excluded depends entirely on the context of the individual poem, its configuration of speaker, reader, and writer. But I’m guessing, in particular, you mean to ask about the use of biographical details that when published might prove embarrassing or painful for the poet and others. With “Tashme,” a poem that has an undeniable familial resonance, I really struggled with what it meant to write about the road trip, while doing my best to be aware of my own narrativization of it, trying to resist the appropriations that might (and perhaps do) occur. So, the poem is filled with silences: there are misremembrances, there are miscommunications, there are things that can only be said by not being said. Ultimately, the poem elides certain moments and thoughts because they either seemed unhelpful to the poem as a whole, or I felt they might be too painful for my grandfather to encounter in print. His truths and his understandings obviously do not always align with mine and that’s an important thing to acknowledge. I wanted to write the best poem I could— for it to be emotionally raw and compelling—but I decided early on that even though “Tashme” moves through historical loss and hurt, it was going to be a poem primarily anchored by love. I made choices accordingly. It was the poem I could write when I wrote it: If I were to re-compose it now, or later, I’m not sure how it might differ in its omissions and inclusions.

CS: What are the challenges of writing in blank verse?

MP: There are many challenges, but also some great rewards. For a few of the poems in the book, including “Tashme,” the sort of meditativeness and movement that often occurs within blank verse felt especially important. As well, I was interested in the associative baggage that many of us bring to an inherited form and what can be done by working/playing with a form that calls attention to itself and its lineage so readily. Any devoted prosodist trying to scan the lines in “Tashme” will find they are often only ghosted by the iambic pulse, usually falling closer to something like syllabic metre—this is an intentional sort of internal tension that took a while to find my way to. While writing the poem, I began to think of its idiosyncratic “blank verse” as analogous to the curving highway which the speaker and his grandfather have to not only drive along, but also make frequent detours from, in order to find what they think they’re looking for. On a technical level, the poem went through many revisions, eventually being pared down from over twenty five pages to nineteen; it took a lot of re-reading and then forgetting other poems to find the headspace where I could write it.

CS: The book includes poems about cuttlefish, salmon and hermit crabs.  Are there animals you wish you had written about?

MP: Walruses, Quokkas, and Corgis!

Sunday Poem

TAMAGOTCHI 

Electric phoenix, temperamental pet:
Cradled by pockets, it would die unseen
While crosses and gravestones darkened the screen.
If you practiced, your love could be reset.

Shell of appetite, of family, of rest.
Its sheen wore off beneath your anxious touch:
Proof of a lie you later proved auspice,
When you wished for nights you might still reset.  

Mom said it’s not your fault, you did your best:
The same condolence with which she’d lament
The hamsters starved, the goldfish overfed.
You learned on your own what can’t be reset.

By Michael Prior, from Model Disciple (Signal Editions, 2016)

10 Most Popular Sunday Poems from 2015

1. "Armadillo" by Ben Ladouceur 
2. "The Book of Materials" by Jeff Latosik 
3. "Longings Brittle as the Crooked" by Chad Campbell
4. "This Little Piggy" by Katie Fewster-Yan
5. From "Arrondissements" by Daryl Hine
6. "Half" by Michael Prior
7. "Mermaid" by Alessandra Naccarato
8. "By Way of Explanation" by Raoul Fernandes
9. "The Wound" by Zachariah Wells  
10. "Aschenbach in Toronto" by Don Coles

 (Buildings in Winter by Martha Markowsky)

Good Measure

Michael Prior shares some thoughts on his upcoming poetry debut, Model Disciple:

When people ask me what Model Disciple is about, I always get a little uneasy. I wanted to make Model Disciple a collection of individual poems first and foremost, but a thematic framework for the book arose organically: as with most writers, I kept returning to the same subject matter. At the core of the collection are my maternal grandparents’ experiences as Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Like thousands of other Canadians of Japanese descent, they were forced into internment camps after Pearl Harbour, while their families’ properties and possessions were auctioned off to pay for their own internment.

Accordingly, the book often deals with issues of intergenerational memory, cultural inheritance, and my own experience of growing up half (“halves?” “halfed?”) and still not really knowing what that means. The collection has a lot to do with my troubled relationship to the writers I love and the implications of stealing from the traditionally privileged canon to express my own confused position. But of course, there are also VHS tapes, guinea pigs, Tamagotchis, Boromir, and Pat Morita thrown in for good measure.

Sunday Poem

HALF

I am all that is wrong with the Old World,
and half of what troubles the New.

I have not seen Spain or the Philippines,
Holland or Indonesia. In the other room,

my grandfather nods off in front
of Wheel of Fortune. I have seen his Japan

in photos—the last good suit he wore,
grey, tailored in Kyushu. Believe

Pat Sajak is a saviour: he divines new riches
like water hidden from a dowser’s

willow switch, trembling through
unfamiliar territories, proffered

like a makeshift cross. The same strange
faith should be proof enough

of my current crisis. There was a game
we once played. I’m in it now.

The wheel turns, strobes its starlight
across another centrifuge, that spinning globe,

a kid’s finger skimming its surface,
waiting for it to stop. This is where I’ll live.

by Michael Prior, from the Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist 2015

Sunday Poem

MERMAID 

On the black shore of Kiluea, her gills flower
and suck. A hollow forming beneath the body,
the body sinking with the tide. As if the land
wants to bury the evidence, wants to hide
the thing beneath itself, drag it under the blue.
Or at least split open the fin, give her a set of legs 

to die with. The order of things requires legs
to explain the clavicle, the bipedal spine, the flower
of her areola, shrivelling like delphiniums, blue
as the night, as the water, as the body
drying to wax. Death is so good at hiding
itself, the way a wave knocks you to land, 

how a current steals you from land.
She could have up and left, if she'd had the legs.
We can’t turn from a riptide, either. Can’t hide
when the ocean decides to own us. Death flowers
in the lung, in the pulmonary. That’s how it is with the body;
a favourite organ turns itself blue. 

At first it’s impartial, a blue
of hesitation, a hint of survival. Then the land
swallows itself dark, which is to say the body
admits it can’t walk back to the water, can’t grow legs
on demand. She is positioned like a cut flower,
photographed. Maybe she wants to hide, 

but no one wants this to be hidden.
Except the shore, the unsettled water, all that blue
shifting sand beneath body. The crowd flowers
around her, clicks and touches, while the land
tries to offer her back. Tries to fasten itself legs
to move her, to reclaim the body. 

This inexplicable body.
Long tail knotted into tail, hiding
itself as we hover in skirts, our legs
finned together. So hot we're bluing
at the seam, complaining about the land
that's offered her up like a flower. 

Some artist finned those legs together, forged us her body.
The way a man seeds flowers in rain, waiting for the hidden
to open its blue, for a reason to pause and turn awestruck to the land.

From The City Series: Vancouver (ed. Michael Prior, Frog Hollow, 2015) by Alessandra Naccarato

(Painting by Francesco.)

Camp Life

Michael Prior reflects on his grandparents' internment 74 years ago:

My maternal grandparents are Japanese Canadian. They also grew up near Vancouver. Their families owned adjacent strawberry farms in a small town, until they were forced into an internment camp for the last four years of the Second World War—a fate shared by 22,000 other people of “Japanese racial origins” who were held in various camps across the province. Their property and possessions were auctioned off to pay for their own internment. Still, my grandparents’ love for this country remains greater than almost any other people I know.

Sunday Poem

SWAN DIVE 

I was the more deceived.
-Ophelia, Hamlet, III.i

It’s hard to stay angry on a bed of water.
Harder yet to remain above the tide— 

hence the anchor, hence the dive.
For those of us who practice our Ophelia,

we creatures of conscience, let it be known
that I have keened the lake in colder 

seasons, seen the loves returned by acts
of ice. Olive bottles, agate necklaces

bought in beachfront shops for cheap.
I shall th' effect of this good lesson keep.

I rearrange my lost and found. That man
who was discovered rooting the bottom

three decades after his death: in his boat,
a fish still writhed the line. Hear me out. 

Even the swans’ necks don’t shape a heart
when they hunt beneath the dark.

From Swan Dive (Frog Hollow, 2015) by Michael Prior 

The Scarborough, Toronto Launch

Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista

Michael Lista

Carmine Starnino

Michael Lista

Matthew Tierney and (with his back to us) Peter Norman

Carmine Starnino and Nyla Matuk

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Carmine Starnino, Michael Lista, Jeff Latosik, Jason Guriel and Stevie Howell