Interview with Marcus McCann (read original post with links here)
What inspired you to become a writer? At what age did you begin and what was your first published piece?
When I was a teenager, the Hamilton school board tolerated a little program run out of the back of the trunk of one of the English teachers, Meg Young. It was called the Student Literary Association; basically, it was a group of wayward, socially awkward teens who met twice a month in the basement of the Board of Ed building downtown. It was great. I met older teens who were also writers — Aidan Johnson, Marissa Achong, Julie with the monster Doc Martins, a guy named Nick who introduced us to the music of David Byrne… it was very important for me to have a network of young writers I could talk with. Anyway, I’m pretty sure my first published poetry was in the SLA’s annual anthology, circa 1997.
Partially thanks to the SLA, poetry became an obsession in my later teen years — when I was 17 or so, I gave up reading novels, because I thought that they couldn’t be art. Poetry, that was the one true art form. *Cough* My views have softened since then.
Could you tell us a bit about your writing process? Do you have a favourite place where you write? Do you need certain books/snacks/hats/animals/etc. with you? Do you prefer well-lit rooms with lots of windows, or darkness with ridiculous amounts of candles and incense? Are you a creature of routine (up at 6a.m., writing until noon when you break for a light lunch of arugula salad with a warm honey-dijon vinaigrette) or do you thrive on spontaneity and spend your writing time on the move from one greasy spoon to the next?
Before I get too caught up in my day – checking my Facebook and email, reading the news, what have you – I try to set aside at least two hours for reading and writing poetry, usually with my morning coffee. In my practice, I consider reading — reading deeply, trying to understand the mechanics of a poem, especially contemporary poetry — to be the same as writing. I try to save rewrites and fiddling with poems for after that.
What books are you reading right now and which authors do you love? What book have you read as an adult that you wish you had read when you were young?
Poetry books I’m reading right now: Robert Earl Stewart’s Campfire Radio Rhapsody and Craig Poile’s True Concessions.
Great books by contemporary Canadian poets, which I wish had been written when I was younger: Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht and Margaret Christakos’ Sooner. They’re both master classes in what a poem can be. Intimidating stuff. Oh, and Sina Queyras’ Expressway, which for me, is one of the few book-long poem projects that has resonated with me. Those three books are essential reading from the last 10 years.
And if you’re a gay guy writing about gay male experience, read Mark Doty. He’s the finest poet of the gay male experience writing today, probably. Or maybe Carl Philips is.
Do you find that being both a poet and a journalist is a complex experience? Do you feel the world exists dramatically differently through the lens of a poet vs. a journalist?
No more so, probably, than being a poet and a student, or a poet and an academic, or whatever. Poets have day jobs. That’s the reality. The essential question is one of, “when will I find the time?”
You published a large number of chapbooks before coming out with your first full-length poetry collection, Soft Where. Can you tell us a bit about your experience working with smaller independent presses and why you decided to focus on writing chapbooks?
How did it start? I went to dozens — literally dozens — of readings in Ottawa, some given by established poets, some given by emerging poets. I didn’t go to hock my own work; I went because I was interested in what poetry was being produced. Some of the readings I liked, some I didn’t. But I almost never, ever regretted going to readings.
I submitted poems to magazines — and got lots of rejections. At first, my acceptance rate was about 3 percent, meaning that for every 30 poems I sent out to magazines, one was accepted. It gradually improved. I took writing workshops — an early one with rob mclennan was especially helpful — and volunteered with a couple of local literary magazines, Bywords and the now defunct Yawp.
Out of that atmosphere of cross-pollination, my first chapbooks came to be. Heteroskpetical, with mclennan’s above/ground in 2007. Petty Illness Leaflet and the collaborative Basement Tapes with my own short-lived imprint, The Onion Union. The Tech/tonic Suite with Alberta’s Rubicon Press, which was the result of winning their annual chapbook contest. And Force Quit, from Toronto’s The Emergency Response Unit, thanks to connections I’d made in the small press world with Andrew Faulkner and, later, Leigh Nash.
Both magazine publishing and chapbook publishing were ways of testing myself and my poems. If anyone bought all of my chapbooks up until that point, then Soft Where, my first full length collection, would have had very little new to offer them. Some pieces had been published at least twice by then, first in magazines, then in chapbooks, before they were published in Soft Where. I’ve had a couple of very lucky breaks in my writing life, but micropresses, chapbooks and literary magazines were — are — essential to my development as a poet.
Between Soft Where and my second book, The Hard Return (which is coming out next spring with Insomniac) I did two additional chapbooks, Town in a long day of leaving (above/ground) and The Glass Jaw (Bywords), which, among other things, shows that chapbooks aren’t just a stepping stone to full-length book publishing, but are an end in themselves.
As a writer, do you feel that being openly queer has had any direct or indirect impact on your writing career and your success?
Let me start by saying this: if you’re a young queer writer, you have a long and proud history of queer poetry to draw on. It is a rich font of material, as deep and broad a poetic folio as any in the history of humankind. And living in the 21st century, you have unprecedented access to it. Saphho. Constantin Cavafy. Edna St Vincent Millay. Gerald Manley Hopkins. Hart Crane. Elizabeth Bishop. Gertrude Stein. Rimbaud. Verlaine. WH Auden. Thom Gunn. Frank O’Hara. Allen Ginsberg. John Ashbery.
And that work continues today. Some of the most celebrated poets of the last decades in Canada — Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, John Barton, Margaret Christakos, Nathalie Stephens — are queer. And queer poets are poised to be the leading figures of the next generation: Jen Currin, Anna Swanson, Trish Salah, and so on. Distinctive Canadian queer voices? RM Vaughan. Sky Gilbert. Billeh Nickerson. We cover the gamut.
So if you’re worried that you can’t be gay and a poet, don’t be. If you’re worried that you can’t express your sexuality — in all its butt-fucking and pussy-licking specificity — don’t be. If you’re worried that you can’t express your gender(s), don’t be. There is a place for you in Canadian literature.
I’ve noticed that many writers have work that revolves around particular obsessions. Do you find you have specific topics, themes or issues that you keep coming back to as a writer? If so, how does this impact your writing process?
Yes! Technology. Urban space. Sexuality. Writing and textuality. Consumer and popular culture. I will probably circle around these themes over and over again, my whole life. I think the best thing to do is embrace it and push it to the limit.
If you’re always writing about, love, say, maybe you should ask yourself, “Have I written about this from every angle? From the point of view of the lover, the object of affection, the scorned lover, a person who is not in love, a person who is in love with two people? Have I tried talking about love using a sonnet, a cento, a glosa? Have I written a poem about romantic love, filial love, paternal love, agape? Have I examined lust?”
Describe your favourite meal the way you’d describe it in a poem. We’re curious!
Frosting like epoxy, caulking,
shaving cream we drew tidings on,
then ate. The greedy treat sparkled,
it came on springy, infringed.
Our portions were bricks and mortar.
Gastrics unglued us; we were glass-eyed,
weepy, docile. Sugar hormones
clung uneasily to duty.
We were woozy, our enamels burned.
Already gluttons, nodding
like loose buttons on a sock puppet,
mmm, good, yes. We licked the tips, sighed
and crashed like an Excel spreadsheet,
yeah, it was perfect, or close to,
or who cares if it was perfect.
Do you find you are impacted by place? Does an urban space provide you with a lot of material for your writing? Have you lived/traveled outside of Canada and have those places/spaces influenced your work?
Yes, in terms of urban space. I find a lot of poets who live in cities still resort to poems about birds and wheat fields. Why is that? I write poems about cell phones and puffy coats and apartment towers because for most Canadians, that’s more likely to be an image they can conjure in their heads, compared to a red-throated lorikeet or a creeping thistle, or whatever.
What was the best advice you’ve received as a writer and what advice would you give to young writers who are trying to get published?
Read way more poetry than you write. Read deeply. Read classic poetry. Read Canadian poetry. Read contemporary poetry. Read queer poetry. Read, read, read. Every library in the country is full of poetry books just waiting for you.
And write way more than you publish. I know writers for whom the business of writing — networking, trying to get published, self-promotion — has crowded out actual writing. They will never be great poets. Pour your attention into writing the best poems you can, and when you’re tired and bleary eyed, use those parts of the day for trying to get published.
