Showing posts with label Aaron Tucker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aaron Tucker. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 April 2018

Aaron Tucker : part five


What are you working on?

I’m launching my first novel Y (https://chbooks.com/Books/Y/Y) in the spring of 2018 and so I’ve been occupied with that. But I’ve been really fortunate to move around the world a fair bit over the last two years with a woman I love dearly and see incredible art object after incredible art object, so I’ve been writing a long poem, about half way done (I think) about that. There is a through line of birds and I recently discovered Olivier Messiaen’s long piano piece “Catalogue d'Oiseaux” and so I have been playing it on repeat as I move through it, from Porto to Berlin to Toronto, back and forth. It is so different than my last book, Irresponsible Mediums (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/irresponsible-mediums-the-chess-games-of-marcel-duchamp-by-aaron-tucker/) which is a computer generated collection that translates the chess games of Marcel Duchamp into poems – this poem I’m actually writing!

Thursday, 5 April 2018

Aaron Tucker : part four


What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

As I write at the beginning of March, spring launches are fast approaching and so I’m thrilled to be reading a number of works: Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces (http://invisiblepublishing.com/product/surfaces/), Shannon Webb Campell’s Who Took My Sister? (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/who-took-my-sister-by-shannon-webb-campbell/),  Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (https://chbooks.com/Books/A/Anatomic), David Brock’s Ten-Headed Alien (https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/collections/all/products/ten-headed-alien), Susan Zelazo’s Lances All Alike (https://chbooks.com/Books/L/Lances-All-Alike), Dani Couture’s Listen Before Transmit (https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/collections/all/products/listen-before-transmit),  Cameron Anstee’s Book of Annotations (http://invisiblepublishing.com/product/book-of-annotations/) and Shannon McGuire’s Zip’s File (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/zips-file-a-romance-of-silence-by-shannon-maguire/).

In terms of recently read, I loved Billy Ray-Belcourt’s This Wound is a World (https://www.frontenachouse.com/dd-product/this-wound-is-a-world/) and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (https://www.oceanvuong.com/books). They are two young poets that absolutely blow me away with their work. Beyond this, one of my favourite things is going to Knife Fork Books in Kensignton Market, Toronto, and asking Kirby to pull out a book or two for me – the store is amazing and he always has the best taste!

Thursday, 29 March 2018

Aaron Tucker : part three


How does a poem begin?

For me, poems (and writing in general) begins in reading. I find the poems of mine that I like the most are in response to other texts; those texts are not always poems but include essays, novels, short stories, newspaper articles, Facebook posts. I would attach to this fine art: paintings, sculpture, installations. Other people’s ideas and arguments are always the most stimulating for me and then I am trying to write in conversation with those exciting ideas, add something to what they are writing and acknowledge where my thoughts came from. I am always aware that my writing exists in dense networks of other writing and I try to utilize those networks as best I can.

Thursday, 22 March 2018

Aaron Tucker : part two


What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

For me, poetry is about density and compression and, as a form, I think the its greatest accomplishments have to do with moving away from the woolly excess of prose and the sentence as a unit of thought towards the line as the structural unit, and within the line, an ungrammatical freedom that owes far less to immediate semantic sense. Personally, I am drawn to poetry because it has a great deal of tolerance for juxtaposition and repetition: poetry fuses words together, then evolves those fusings by grafting them to the other components of other lines, stanzas, poems. It’s not to say that this can’t be done in prose, but I think it is more difficult and not as innate to the form.   

Thursday, 15 March 2018

Aaron Tucker : part one


Aaron Tucker [photo credit: Julia Polyck-O’Neill] is the author of the forthcoming novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).

His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com).

Currently, he is an uninvited guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teaching creative and academic writing. More at aarontucker.ca.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I was introduced to poetry with The Cremation of Sam McGee in elementary school, which I loved and was givenfairly traditional texts in high school – I remember being given some Robert Frost poems and then the obligatory Shakespeare;

The first poem I remember being enthralled by was “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Sylvia Plath. Growing up in Lavington, a small community in the interior of B.C., I was struck by the poem’s frustration with banality, the yearning for the extraordinary that would be willing to make itself known. I also remember, during this time, taking Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler out of the Vernon Public Library. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I chose the book, but, looking back, it really shaped how I think about the scale of poetry – I tend to love working on larger scale works, multiple pages, poems that interlock and echo each other. This was further bolstered by the Canadian poetry class with Stephen Scobie I took during my University of Victoria undergrad: his passion and experience with Canadian poetry constructed a reading practice that sits deep in the core of me; too, it was the first class where I read bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Phyllis Webb, Gerry Shikatani, among others.

It terms of actually writing, the biggest initial influence was John Lent at Okanagan College and his creative writing classes there. Not only is John an incredible poet, but his generosity and intelligence in responding and mentoring taught me so much about writing and engaging in writing communities.