Flash Interview #4: Christopher Wiseman

Christopher Wiseman’s poetry, short fiction, reviews and critical writings have been published and broadcast extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. He has won two Province of Alberta Poetry Awards, the Poetry Prize from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, and an Alberta Achievement Award for Excellence in the literary arts. He lives in Calgary.

For his tenth collection, 36 Cornelian Avenue, Christopher Wiseman returns to his wartime childhood in England and revisits the streets, shore, and woods that belonged to the resort town of Scarborough where, his father away fighting, he and his mother lived. Part novel, part memoir, part passionate recollection, 36 Cornelian Avenue presents these townspeople, often in their own words

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Carmine Starnino: There’s lots of sex in 36 Cornelian Avenue. Were you aware of this when writing the book?

Christopher Wiseman: Very sharp observation. Open the book anywhere and you’ll find steamy content: a boy and girl pulling down their underwear and touching each other intimately; the teenage ecstasies of two couples in a dark room in the attic of one girl who went on to run her own sexual lingerie store; people singing filthy songs about bums and testicles; the special silk panties worn by local women; the frantically consummated encounter on a front lawn by an air raid warden and a woman among exploding bullets. This could be one of the randiest Canadian poetry books since Irving Layton’s Lovers and Lesser Men. Luckily there are a few minor distractions—like death, terror, destruction, hunger, and fear—to give the reader some relief from the overwhelming carnality which, in the words of one reader, kept her turning the pages far more quickly than she had anticipated (and says she badly wants a sequel).


CS: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your formalism?

CW: Easy. That people insist on calling what I do “formalism.” The most misunderstood aspect, in other words, is that in my ten full-length collections more poems are in free-verse than in form, and, although 36 Cornelian Avenue has metrical and rhymed poems, it's written in a casual and quite conversational style as seemed to befit the childrens’ experiences of the war and what happened. The greatest joy for me is the tension between a poem's formal structure and the colloquial language you can use inside that poem. This new book is the least formal of my last three books because it demanded to be and because there’s so much sex in it.


CS: There seems to be some settling of scores in 36 Cornelian Avenue. Is there a place in poetry for cursing as well as commemoration?

CW: I have written poems from all kinds of emotional places—exhilaration, depression, gratitude—but never once, except in some very early political poems, out of a deep-seated anger. It’s not the same as a curse, but when I looked back on my schooling during the second world war, I realized that I was getting very angry at the subject, the people, the circumstances I was writing about. I, and many others, because of the shortage of good teachers off to war, had to suffer deep humiliations, physical and emotional cruelties, which today would be called clear child-abuse and seen those teachers not only fired but probably in court. I lived in genuine terror of school — I describe the horrors in “Lessons of War." It was my great joy, about 8 years ago, when I re-visited the old school building where I had often been beaten by the nuns with ebony rulers (I was a non-Catholic interloper and Catholics weren’t beaten), and watched a Bobcat going in and out the front door, and the sound of demolition inside as they turned that place into flats. Teachers left scars far worse than Hitler’s Luftwaffe on me, and, as I wrote, I genuinely felt a lifetime’s load of anger start to dissipate. And other teachers, too, who bullied or under-rated me – I get some serious and some comic revenge, a settling of scores, which I didn’t know ran quite that deeply inside me.

CS: Can you give us a few lines from a new poem your working on?

CW:

Such palenesses together, different fabrics
Mingling in a subtle palette of pale –
Thin floaty skirt, dark white it looked to me,
Falling softly over pale stockings
Of not quite the same colour – pale beige? –
Or, I was certain, feel, and the light behind you
Clearly showed, as you looked around for your wrap,
That your panties were white, or pale, not showing
Through the skirt, and then there was, memory,
The sweet white of your thigh above the stocking’s
Slightly darker top, which I had a three
Second glimpse of as I held the car door
And your legs followed the skirt as you settled in,
And your pale shoes, such high-heeled elegance.

(Sexy metrics – sextrics?)

Don Coles blogs! Part 2

[Don Coles is the author of ten books of poetry and the novel Doctor Bloom's Story. He won the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1993 for Forests of the Medieval World and the Trillium prize in 2000 for Kurgan. Formerly a professor at York University, he lives in Toronto. Periodically we'll post an entry by Coles taken from his 2007 book of essays and reviews, Dropped Glove in Regent Street: An Autobiography by Other Means ]

Final Firenze memory, for me the most intimate. I had been strolling about the town that morning and had ended up on the crenellated roof-deck of the Palazzo Vecchio,the old City Hall, overlooking the town. Standing there I’d fallen into conversation with an American of about my age; he was newly arrived, I was a veritable fount of information regarding what lay below us. We decided to lunch together and I led the way to the Trattoria Camillo, a family-run place on Via Santo Spirito, very near my rooms on the via de’ Bardi. I’d been there a few times without anything noteworthy having taken place, just good food at a price a grantee like me could afford.


We took our places and ordered our antipasti. Waiting for it to arrive I suddenly remembered I didn’t have a lot of lire in my wallet; I took the wallet from my back pocket and had a surreptitious look. Right, merde, I had barely enough to pay for what I’d just ordered. Not a good discovery, sitting there with somebody I hardly knew, not good at all, but so far I could cover it. I was sure nobody had noticed any of this, people had been walking about and the place was busy. Antipasti gone, the signora arrived to take our next orders. My companion ordered a pasta and a glass of red wine, I said I was fine, not hungry, a carafe of water, nothing more, grazie. I half-thought the signora gave me a second look, but I wasn’t sure and I didn’t keep thinking it.

She left, was back again in minutes with not one but two plates of pasta and two glasses of chianti. I shook my head, said I’d ordered neither of these, she seemed too busy to listen and went off. I pondered this but after she’d gone determinedly past our table a couple of times without looking, I ate my pasta and enjoyed my wine. The pasta would soon have cooled past its best, after all. The American then ordered a salad, I declined, two salads arrived. By then I had given up. Lunch ended with two desserts, I don’t remember what these were, chocolate cake was what I normally liked and still do like along with red wine; and due cappuccini. We’d finished. I asked for our bills, they arrived. I got a quick look at his, it was in order, everything he’d had was listed. My bill was for that initial antipasti. Nothing more than that, nothing after that.

The signora, in passing, gave me a quick look when we were paying the grandmother who presided over the till. She didn’t wink, but she looked. It was a placid, friendly, everyday sort of look. The American had noticed nothing. I think he and I shook hands and parted as we left and
didn’t meet again.

I went back to Camillo’s a few days later and left a tip which covered my share of that meal. The signora may have noticed this, may not. My guess is that she did but there was no way of knowing. I have no memory of nodding or smiling or giving her a small bow or a meaningful, as they say, glance. I can remember none of those things but maybe one or two of them took place, impossible to confirm or deny that now. Camillo’s still exists but it’s gone gourmet, it caters to the monied classes and has a half-dozen waiters in white livery. The family has clearly exited the premises, I hope with their pockets stuffed. I hope that the signora, who can hardly still be of this world, had as calmly assured and sharp-eyed and generous (and perhaps, trusting) a series of days until her days ended.

(from A Dropped Glove in Regent Street: An Autobiography by Other Means by Don Coles, 2007)

New Year Surprise

Hidden on craiglist is a hilarious series of anonymous entries on and about Montreal. It begins with a long open letter to the city (and, really, a lovely piece of writing).

Dear Montreal,

Go ahead, and jab me in the subway with your hardback novel, and then make a tutting noise at me for being in your way.

Go ahead and walk with two friends, six inches between each of you, on the same sidewalk, and roll two pairs of eyes if not all three when I walk up in the opposite direction, breaking your stride.

I love you, and you can’t stop that.

Read the rest of the letter here.

Magic mountain

[NEIGHBOURHOOD CHRONICLES 3]

It’s a little-known Montreal fact that situated on Mount Royal’s western flank, is a series of very small waterfalls (emanating from the many underground streams that honeycomb the mountain) that is part of the most unique power source in North America. By 1964 Jean Lesage’s Liberal government had nationalized all of Quebec’s privately-owned electrical companies (when René Lévesque was minister of natural resources). All, except for this pocket-sized subterranean hydro-electric station that generates enough electricity from Mount Royal’s underground streams to provide the power needs for a few city-owned buildings in the park proper, and a half-dozen houses adjacent to the mountain.

Steinmetz goes Underground

On his blog Underground Book Club Michael Bryson discusses Esplanade editor Andrew Steinmetz's genre-bending new book

"Eva's Three Penny Theatre doesn't explore redemption. It is a better book because it avoids this Christian, post-Freudiean cliche. Television talk shows may "make good TV" by providing simple solutions, but literature serves itself best when it avoids this commercial imperative. Steinmetz's exploration of his family's history, and the way he has chosen to frame those stories, reveals a depth of humanity that would have failed to come through if he'd sought the simple theme."

BMD (Books of Mass Destruction)

Here's an interesting list: ten books that screwed up the world. (If we're compiling one for Canlit, Atwood's Survival would rank at the top, closely followed by Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces.)

Remembering Outram cont'd

Memorial University's Digital Archives Initiative has put together a fabulous digital exhibition of publications (like the delectable broadside above) by The Gauntlet Press, the joint publishing venture of the late Richard Outram and his wife artist Barbara Howard. The site is a wonder cabinet crammed with curios and goodies, including a delightful 2002 recording of a CBC "Sunday Edition" interview between Outram and Michael Enright.

And here, in case you missed it, is a nice review of Outram's posthumous poetry collection, South of North.