this interview was conducted over email from December 2015 to January 2016
Dale Smith has published essays, reviews, and criticism, including Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (University of Alabama, 2012), and is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform, 2014). Originally from Texas, he now lives in Toronto, Ontario, where he is a professor of rhetoric and modern and contemporary poetics at Ryerson University. He edits the newsletter Slow Poetry in America with Hoa Nguyen and Michael Cavuto. For subscription information please see: https://slowpoetryinamerica.wordpress.com/slow-poetry-in-america-newsletter/
rob:
How did the pamphlet newsletter Slow Poetry in America begin?
Dale:
Michael Cavuto, our co-editor, enthusiastically suggested the idea of publishing a newsletter a year or so back. He was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, but he came from Philadelphia. We had begun hanging out and talking about poetry, jazz, and philosophy. Hoa would make terrific meals and there always would be plenty of wine and conversation. Mike and others associated with the Trinity Review at Trinity College also hosted readings that we attended. The youthful energy was welcome. Anyway, the newsletter was his suggestion. I think of it as a kind of way to maintain a conversation about the world through the attentions of poets. We don’t really have an aesthetic or polemic agenda, unlike a lot of the communally-focused cri-de-coeurs demanding influence in what we see as a dubiously articulated “poetry world.” For me, the question returns to asking who we are how we are where we are? What can poetry do to enliven understanding?
rob:
How do you feel the series, so far, is accomplishing that?
Dale:
Our first three publications in 2015 were written by poets whose work address aspects of a various and variously expansive reality of perspectives that are not easily categorized by literary antecedent. We look to our peers and elders, friends and unknowns, whose writing does not maybe fit neatly into established poetry categories. We don’t support a closed coterie and we don’t acknowledge a single literary lineage. Instead, we turn to voices, improvised stances, composed and decomposing poetic accomplishments, that take seriously not only an art, but variously arranged ways of living, or of understanding the terms and costs of living in the global commons of our ruins (ruins insofar as traditional institutional hierarchies no longer serve common needs, but coerce, often, a terminal infrastructure that despises human adventure). Ultimately, I think that the answer to your question is in the work itself, and in the time and space that we’ve dedicated to each poet, so that their work—if the reader is as patient as the newsletter is—can resound and be heard over and over again, opening up to new and urgent meaning with each iteration. In the case of SPiA, patience and urgency are not mutually exclusive, but are requirements of one another.
rob:
Does that mean work, so far, is solicited? Between three editors, how is the work selected? Does it come from a series of conversations between the three of you creating a list of authors to approach?
Dale:
Yeah, we just talk about it, see who we know who might have work to share. I think in the issues so far there is a commitment to both sharing new writing by contemporary writers and an archival interest that seeks to remind our readership of a wider, more extensive context for poetry than only the immediate, contemporary domain of attention.
rob:
What made you pick the form of the pamphlet/newsletter over any other particular form? Say, utilizing online publication or through larger, multiple-author publications?
Dale:
Print was essential. We wanted to create something that could travel through the mail. We took the accordion format from the late Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadside Series, a newsletter he published from Maine in a similar format. There’s something about receiving news via print that is so satisfying. Kim Dorman, the first poet we published in the series, sends a monthly newsletter—Gleanings. And I’m also so happy to receive that in the mail. It feels less disposable and invites my attention differently than online reading.
rob:
I’m curious as to how this new series relates, if at all, to the work you and Hoa have done via Skanky Possum. I know you haven’t produced anything through such in a while, but didn’t know the status of such. Does this mean the press is officially dead?
Dale:
Well, nothing’s official re: Skanky Possum. SPiA seems like a showing of where we’re at now given what we can do materially, and it lets us discover poetry and share it with others. But SPiA and Skanky Possum are related, through different material formats, to a means of sharing the work of people we admire. We also want to complicate what poetry means. What it looks like, how it moves across a page into a reader’s eyes and somehow into the lives of others. That’s been there from the start. In its way SPiA, like Skanky Possum, imagines a community that moves through different areas, public and private, as a way to see what’s going on at a given moment in writing.
rob:
Has your publishing approach or scope shifted now that you’re living in Canada, and engaging with the writing and publishing of a foreign country? You’ve been living in Toronto for some time now, but I noticed, for example, that the first three authors through SPiA are American. Is there an element of SPiA of introducing work by those you admire into an entirely new geographic community?
Dale:
The international complexities of living in Canada as an American are always on my (our) mind(s). There will most definitely be Canadian authors in the future (I can’t say just yet who we’ve lined up). And yes, one goal is to bring work both directions over that delicate narrative border of national identity. We are alert to work framed and sounded within various cultural and national contexts. Within those complex contexts that give shape to current territorial stakes, I think we all (SPiA editors) seek adventure and excitement, not coterie measures, as we select new writing across geographic realities. I’m thinking too not only of the north-south border, but of a more fluid east-west spatial confluence for poetry that should always be under consideration. In the current global mass of interconnection and division we also want to keep in mind racial and sexual and gendered realities that require ongoing attention.
rob:
How does the work you’ve been doing with SPiA relate to, if at all, the work you’ve been doing with White Wall Review? And, after years of working on publications you’ve been involved with from the very beginning, how does it feel to be running a journal with such a long history prior to your involvement?
Dale:
White Wall Review is entering its 40th season and is edited by an occasionally-changing editorial board. We also include a lot of student input from undergraduates in our BA English program as well as editorial assistants who are pursuing degrees in our Literatures of Modernity MA. As an American, working on WWR has been a real learning experience, and I’ve tried to help shape the journal by joining international voices from Canada, the US, Cuba, and Europe. I think our current editors—Thomas Heise, Julia Fawcett, Sarah Henstra, and Dennis Denisoff—are all interested in building an international presence, too.
With SPiA, similarly, we’re committed to new writing from a variety of perspectives and nationalities. Frankly, poetry matters to me more than nationalities. I think it’s important to acknowledge geographic realities of writers by supporting those authors who are remote from national centers. But I’m also aware that in our current high-speed communicative realities, it’s important now more than ever to circulate writing from a variety of locations. I’m interested in what regional writers have to say, and it’s important to hear that work in other national and international contexts. I encountered this in Texas, too, where regional writing is locally influential. I guess as an editor I try to acknowledge the realities writers face and try to think of ways to shape an audience for a wide-range of works. I’m interested in possibilities in poetry—not in defining what it should be.
rob:
I’m curious as to how the newsletter Slow Poetry in America relates, if at all, to your Cuneiform title. Is this simply an umbrella title, under which a variety of different projects exist? And if so, what is the overarching idea, and might there be further projects that emerge?
Dale:
Well, Michael Cavuto’s enthusiasm for Slow Poetry in America as a title helped shape the newsletter. And in other contexts, I think the term slow poetry has come to take on not so much a sense of formal or aesthetic innovation but an understanding of the value at stake in new writing. An altered sense of perception to what poetry does seems at stake—how we determine generous terms of community and meaning from within creative structures that potentially move us far out into new realities, knowledge, and experience. There’s no formal practice at stake, but a willingness to acknowledge and direct stances or attitudes toward poetry as an enlivening source to encounter the world through.
rob:
With three issues under your belt so far, what has been the response?
Dale:
We have a growing subscribers list and there’s a Facebook page with numerous likes and posts. We sell-out of every run. I’m scrambling now to get issue three out to our Canadian subscribers. Anyway, people seem to really dig it!
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories,(Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review(ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics(ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices atrobmclennan.blogspot.com