Todd Swift is a poet, anthologist, and Oxfam GB Poet In Residence since 2004. He is poetry editor of online magazine Nthposition. He is Contributing Editor for Vallum. His popular blog is Eyewear. Poems of his have recently appeared in Agenda, The London Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, The Manhattan Review, and Matrix. His latest poetry collection is Rue du Regard. He reviews regularly for Books In Canada. He is a Core Tutor with The Poetry School, London, UK. He recently edited the 74-minute audio CD Life Lines: Poets For Oxfam. Poems of his have appeared in several recent anthologies, such as Open Field and The New Canon. He edited the 2005 special issue of New American Writing, "The New Canadian Poetry".
Alex Boyd interviewed Todd Swift in May 2006.
You've lived abroad since 1997, first in Budapest, then Paris, and now in London. What has this done to your perspective on Canadian poetry?
Being an expatriate poet has meant a sense of dislocation, but also granted a different perspective, to me, as a Canadian writer. I am struck by how little interest the British have in Canada, and Canadian poetry - it is a kind of one-way street, where we know who "they" are but they rarely read our work. This is why anthologies like Sina Queyras' Open Field, or Carmine Starnino's The New Canon, are vital - they literally introduce what Canadian poets sound like, into the mainstream of English-language poetry, which is, for the most part, American, British and Irish. This is the reason why I gladly arranged to edit an anthology of 20th century Canadian verse for one of the UK's leading poetry publishers, Carcanet. It's also the reason why I edited a special section on "New Canadian Poets" for New American Writing in 2005. I want to share the best Canadian writing with new audiences.
Three very general things strike me about 21st century Canadian poetry. One is that the best poetry Canadians have ever written is actually being produced now, mainly by people born since 1955 - so it's a very thrilling time to be a part of the process of creating the strongest wave yet of Canadian poets. When one reads many of our modernist heroes, and icons of the 50s and 60s, what is disconcerting is how few truly achieved poems there are, in their individual oeuvres; what's inspiring is that we have so many that still deserve to be ingrained in to the wider English world's canon. However, very few Canadian poets have managed to get their voices, their words, their tone - ours - in to this wider dialogue; the one, for instance, that a poet like Armitage has with Muldoon; Szirtes with Auden; that Stammers has with O'Hara.
The second thing is how various and contrary so much Canadian poetry is - how it rarely attends completely to the traditions that converge around it, but slips and lolls on its own turf, like a willful creature - Canadian poetry is at home with itself; this leads to all the creativity and inter-Canadian debate and ferment, but also a certain insularity, which is perhaps keeping readers from beyond our borders out. The third thing is how the reputations that loom so large to Canadians, at home, recede to far less imposing ones with the advantage of some distance, with the exception, say, of international figures like Atwood and Carson.
Some of your poem titles immediately place the reader in a context ("A Good Person in Snow," "I Go To a Game with my Vigorous Father" "Woman At a Station"), and even some of your book titles could be said to work that way. How important is geography to your work?
I never thought of myself as a "Group of Seven" style poet, one inspired by icebergs and trees, but a sense of place has in fact been one of the germinal elements in my poetry. This was partially triggered by my move from home, from Canada, almost a decade ago. Suddenly, finding myself in a very alien Budapest, my small home town of St-Lambert (on Montreal's South Shore), seemed richer, more resonant. It became a symbol, as well as a source of desire. I often revisit St-Lambert in my mind, the St. Lawrence Seaway, our full-blown Canadian seasons.
My new collection (still unpublished, with the working title of Winter Winter Tennis) is replete with blizzards and extreme weather conditions. In terms of geography, I wanted to be a Geographer when I grew up. I scored the highest on the Quebec provincial leaving exam in geography when I was in Grade 11. I loved terminal moraines. What's odd is that there isn't more geographic detail in my writing; yet. But I am a very visual person, and I also like to establish settings for my poems - so many of them emerge out of a sense of mood, but a mood determined by being somewhere in particular - on a snowy street, in a smoky café, alone in a strange, dusty town in Mittle-Europa. I am often seduced by places. I sometimes have an uncanny sense of having been somewhere before - or worse, wanting to unpack my bags and stay there forever.
Your Notes in "Rue Du Regard" describe much thought going into the "ongoing debate between the 'accessible' and the 'innovative' (or Mainstream and Postmodern as some say in the UK) in contemporary poetics." One poem in Rue Du Regard had E.E. Cummings fluidity, even as others in the same collection were more reserved. How would you describe your approach to experimentation?
I am curiously eclectic in my tastes. I have always been very open to a dialectical welcoming of opposites, in all art and entertainment. I like popular culture; I also enjoy difficult modernist works. I think this is an everyday North American postmodern sensibility - certainly readers of David McGimpsey wouldn't blink twice at such a statement. In Britain, shifts in tone and diction are more gravely considered, at least in poetry. Can you imagine Seamus Heaney writing a poem about James Bond or Daffy Duck? And yet, surely, these things too have impinged on his experience. The idea is, I think, to resist the marketplace's blandishments, and restrain the urge to let the whole wide world in to every poem, while never ruling out the possibility that anything might just get in to it.
So, too, my approach to mainstream and avant-garde practices. I love the music, the wit, and the form, that one finds in much traditional lyric poetry, from Hardy to Larkin to Dunn. However, I also find myself listening to how language shapes being and self, in the work of Ashbery, and W.S. Graham, and Bernstein and Riley. My own interest is in fusing various elements and strategies of poetry. I want my poems to be artifacts that enact the pleasure of reading/writing processes, but that also engage with "real world" moments, themes, concerns. I like high rhetoric, and don't believe poems need to always keep both feet on the ground. I want to resist the urge to go all Dada, though. I wanted Rue du Regard, with its two sections (London and Paris) to mirror each other, and to contrast the traditions of Larbaud and younger Eliot with more traditional English poetry. That is why there are so many tonal and thematic shifts. I feel it was quite a violent, transitional book, which is why its two main sub-texts are recovery from a car accident, and violence in film; a third would have to be the war in Iraq.
You are in the Canadian anthology "The New Canon," edited by Carmine Starnino, who suggests in his introduction (if I paraphrase him correctly) that so called "traditional" poets are experimental, though experimenting with innovative, potent ways to communicate a message. Would you agree it isn't as bipolar as some would suggest? Is it absurd to see debate in a marginalized art form, or a necessary part of the process?
I think Carmine is alert to how exciting, unique and challenging much so-called mainstream Canadian poetry is. He's right. By the standards of British publishing, almost all the younger Canadian poets would be considered too "way out" for all but the more marginal presses, if only because Canadians really are diverging, and establishing their own vocal textures; Canadians, after all, see the world other than American /British, and such a vantage is going to sound bigger, wilder, and less reserved. Given how much vibrant linguistic energy is being invested into very good poems by younger contemporaries in Canada, it's silly to have them fight each other over labels like mainstream or experimental. Obviously, Christian Bök's work has become a sort of acid test for constrained, astounding textual achievement - but I found writing far more startling in The New Canon, by, say Joe Denham, or David O'Meara. Bruce Taylor's language is as awkwardly-complex and impressive as many "language poets". These labels need to be retired like jerseys; they're part of the history, but no longer of the game's rough and tumble. The ultimate face-off needs to be not with our sister poets, but the words, and form, and ultimately, the Tradition, itself. Then again, Carmine didn't catch all the best poets - he still underrates some innovative practice that I personally find valuable to include in one's inner storehouse, one's bag of poetic tricks - poets Sina got in to her anthology, like Lisa Robertson.
Given that poetry is a relatively beleaguered genre, it is arguably counterproductive to have so many internecine squabbles. You know, I recently had dinner with a very good innovative poet in Britain, and she said I was so controversial in the UK because I was the only person who tries (over here) to bridge the two camps - the divide is Grand Canyon wide. It has gotten so bad, they no longer hear each other's linguistic felicities. That's the strength of both of the recent Canadian anthologies I discuss above - they are broad church enough to reveal and revel in the tensions and differences, without ever completely silencing the "other" side. As poets we need to return more to an ideal of paying attention, and of respecting what others have to say, regardless of what form or manner they might adopt; so long as something strange, intelligent and engaged with authentic affect is being tried.
You do readings and lectures, maintain a website and a blog, write reviews, have had your work translated into many languages, and have lived in various countries. Is it simply a fact of modern life that any poet must keep dancing to have an impact?
I like that idea: keep dancing. As for having an impact - on what?
My new favourite slogan is "the people who read poetry, don't". You know, we've been trying so hard to win a mass audience for poetry, we've forgotten who that audience might be. They might be cretins. Frankly, poetry doesn't resonate with most readers for a reason: they don't want Art with their burger. They don't want to change their life; nor does poetry set their pulse racing.
Poetry isn't for everyone. That being said, I think poets need to try, within reason, to keep up with ways to reach the largest possible potential audience of reasonably intelligent, sensitive, and cultured people who, if they had a good poem presented in a less threatening or elitist way, might appreciate it. Blogs and pod casts, CDs and poetry videos, slams, websites like yours, the whole range of tactics, are just ways of disseminating poems that talented, intelligent younger people might connect with. They don't - or shouldn't - alter the central relationship the poet has with the poem itself, though.
As for fame - that cruel, elusive girlfriend who kissed so many of the others and for "you and me" reserves a chaste goodbye on the doorstep - best leave that to the machinations of others. The politics involved are staggering.
I do think, still, younger poets need to constantly question the systems that deliver their more-famous icons to them as unquestionable masters. Seize the means of delivery more - and I think that's happening, or has recently happened, in Canada. I mean, the poets, the editors, the reviewers, that really set the blood boiling, or the heart racing now, like Babstock, Bök, Bolster, and so on - they're mostly under-50. It really is a revolution in taste we're shaping even as we speak.
In 2003 you were editorial coordinator for Poets Against the War. What was the response to the book?
Massive. The e-book I edited, hosted at www.nthposition.com by Val Stevenson, "100 Poets Against The War" was downloaded over 250,000 times, and launched in about 12 cities over a week, from Toronto, to Berlin, to Oxford to Washington, DC. I was interviewed by The Guardian, and featured on CNN, the BBC, The Times. The poets who contributed work were very brave.
They did a good job under a tight schedule. People forget, before "grannies" against the war, it was the poets. It's safe to complain now, when almost no one thinks the war in Iraq has gone well - but back then, before it had even begun - the poets were prescient. That consensus quickly collapsed, but it shows what a community can achieve, when it sets aside its differences, from time to time.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading