Sandra Alland is a writer, multi-media artist, bookseller, and activist. Her work has been published and presented in Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, Spain, Scotland, and the United States. In 2002-03, Sandra was one of ten Canadians selected for a photography-literature exchange with Mexico. Publishing and performing highlights include bafterc, This Magazine, Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, and Sluts (Arsenal Pulp), Radiant Danse uv Being: A Poetic Portrait of Bill Bissett (blewointment), Lexiconjury, Toronto WordStage, Kat Biscuits, and the Mayworks performance installation "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (with Anna Camilleri and Karen Augustine). Sandra's press, sandraslittlebookshop, has produced four chapbooks, including the acclaimed, trilingual, multi-authored Broken Telephone/teléfono roto/au téléphone. Sandra was curator of the literary components of Artists Against War: One Big Know, The Salvador Allende Arts Festival for Peace, Artscape's Queen West Art Crawl, and Toronto's first ever Silent Slam (a live, projected-writing competition). Proof of a Tongue, her first full-length collection of poetry, was published in 2004 by McGilligan Books.
Dani Couture interviewed Sandra Alland in March 2006.
I recently heard you read work from a new project that you're working on. Can you describe the project?
Blissful Times is a book of poetry. It starts with a poem I created out of text from the play Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. The rest of the book is 50 "poetic translations" of that poem, mainly from English to English. My main ways of translating are: using poetic constraints, such as alphabetizing the words in the poem or rhyming each word; replacing each word in the poem with a word from a specialty dictionary (e.g. Dictionary of Clichés); filtering the poem through my personal experiences, the weather or world events; and moving the poem into different media like dance or music. There are many ways to say the same thing, even more ways of interpreting. The piece I chose by Beckett speaks about the difficulties of communication between people, and that's something I always try to dig into in my work. What's been especially interesting is to trace both Beckett's and my presence in the poems, even in the more abstract, rule-based ones. There's also a constant tension between hope and failure, which I think speaks to our world today. I love that line by Beckett, something like "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better." But you don't have to know any of this about Blissful Times to read it. You can just read the poems. It may sound terribly convoluted and academic, but it's not. It's just a bunch of poems about the desire to be understood.
How long have you been hosting CKLN's "In Other Words? Have you enjoyed the experience?
This month was my second year anniversary at CKLN! I adore radio, especially live community radio. There's no editing, so it goes directly to the audience (though I sometimes suspect I might only have four listeners). I especially enjoy conducting interviews. It's something I realized I'm quite good at, partly because as an artist I'm hyper-aware of what it's like to be interviewed and (mis)quoted. I also love playing recordings of everything from sound poetry to rap. I'm a genre whore.
I know that you work at This Ain't The Rosedale Library, a bookstore in downtown Toronto. The staff at This Ain't often identify their top book picks with a "top pick" paper tucked into the book. What are your most recent top picks?
I'm going to mix my most recent Top Ten list with my upcoming list:
Consensual Genocide by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (poetry, TSAR)
People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia (fiction, McSweeney's)
Art on Black by d'bi.young (poetry, Women's Press)
The Hanging of Angélique by Afua Cooper (history, Harper Collins)
Je Nathanael by Nathalie Stephens (poetry, BookThug)
Fake ID by Mariko Tamaki (personal essays, Women's Press)
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs by Juliana Spahr (poetry, University of California Press)
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (fiction, I finally got to it and it kicks the movie's ass, buy it used)
The Facts of Winter by Paul LaFarge (fiction, McSweeney's)
That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation edited by Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore (essays, Soft Skull)
Do you think that politics have a place in poetry?
Without politics I would have no poetry worth reading. Unless you're a monk or nun, to be apolitical is to be asleep to the world and yourself. And even if you've dedicated your life to worship, there usually comes a time when you're called to speak for or against your fellow humans, often with life or death consequences. Unless you have incredible privilege, politics are hard to avoid. But it's a common misconception that political art is always preachy or didactic. Often it's quite complex, subtle, and even hilarious.
What do you think is the largest obstacle facing working poets today?
Poverty and burnout, compounded by the inability to get published, especially if you're female, trans, disabled, queer and/or of colour. For Canada specifically, also see: Chapters-Indigo, The Globe and Mail, crumbling school systems, lack of government funding, Stephen Harper.
Do you plan to organize another Silent Slam this year? For those not familiar with the Silent Sam, would you please describe it?
No (see previous answer re: burnout etc.). Silent Slam was an event I created with Adrienne Giroux of Meniscus. There were two laptops on tables facing each other in the centre of the room. Writers had to write live in front of an audience, and their words were projected on the walls. They were given phrases they had to incorporate or music and visual art they had to somehow reference in the poems (this was partially to prevent cheating). There were eight writers in total, and three separate rounds of 10 minutes each. Judges scored each poem, and writers were eliminated after each round. One writer emerged "victorious": the lovely and talented Beatriz Hausner.
I was honestly quite surprised at the calibre of the poems people wrote under such pressure. And the audience was completely enthralled, myself included. It was amazing to see how different writers created: some people wrote stream of consciousness and then went back to edit, some composed each line very carefully (editing as they went), some had fascinating typing styles. But the poems were so good we ended up producing a chapbook.
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