The Tom Prime Interview

This conversation took place on December 29th, 2024. It has been lightly edited for clarity and to the interviewee’s satisfaction.

Revelation

It was May, I was sick of Toronto. 19. Living in a squat with some friends. Since winter was over, I decided to hitch to Algonquin Park for some solo camping. I packed up my torn blue hitchhiker’s backpack and hit the road.

I was trying to not smoke pot for three weeks, so I had no weed, but I brought a plastic container full of tobacco and a mickey of vodka. My backpack was full of pilfered food (about three days’ worth). By the time I got to the park it was late, so I drank a bit, smoked, fell asleep on the beach.

In the morning, I stole an aluminum boat, rowed across to somebody’s cottage. I read The Book of Revelation for the tripped-out imagery: And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow. Got bit by horseflies. I cooked a can of brown sugar baked beans with a propane stove. I was alone. It felt good. Nobody to please, to prove myself to. To protect from my farts. It poured steady for two nights before I headed back to the city, so I shivered in my sleeping bag while the rain leaked through the tent.

In the morning I found my matches destroyed. So I forced open the window of the cottage and climbed inside. A woman with the head of a dog stared at me; she wore a thick see-through shawl with embroidered white elephant patches. Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers. A Circe who had accidentally cursed herself; she lock-jawed into my unconscious.

There were two-fours of beer, liquors of every kind, cupboards full of many canned things (fish and soup), a stove, bunks with mattresses, dryness. Pine floors. But the witch stood before me like a voice in a dream barely perceptible, “There’s no place left.” I moved my tent down by the water, so it was farther from the cabin.

That night I couldn’t sleep. At three or four, I packed up, rowed away from the island. The morning was quiet, sky a scintillating green due to apoplectic solar winds. For a moment it felt end of world-y and I kinda was ok with that. All I could hear was my paddle dipping in and out of the water, a loon calling as if to nothing. The mother-shadow of trees, the old light of vibrating stars.

Tom Prime: Yeah.

Kevin Andrew Heslop: Love it.

[chuckles] Yeah.

Why did you choose that one? Tell me a bit about it.

First of all, that’s not how that poem appears in Mouthfuls of Space. I added a bit and edited it; this new edit is a part of my new novel and is where I get its title Dogs and Sorcerers from. That won’t be out for a long time. Well, I think it works if we’re going—‘Cause, ah—So, this is my initial style. It’s very kind of … I don’t know. I think I was writing poetry from the perspective that I was—It was just a thing that I was doing. It had nothing to do with me getting published or … I don’t know. I didn’t really think of writing as this thing that would be read, so it was just … It’s almost kind of like sentimental, in a way. It just comes from my experience in a very straightforward way. And obviously it’s been edited and all that but it’s very personal and introspective writing, right? So, yeah—Yeah, that, I think, you know—Going at writing in my twenties and into my early thirties, it was—Yeah, I just didn’t think of it as being—As my having a readership or something, or someone that I would be interacting with through my writing. You know what I mean? So it’s kind of romantic, or something?

Mm. Mm. Did you think of yourself as participating in a lineage?

Um. I think that I liked, you know, I liked some different writing, and I think I was inspired by Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver. But when I was writing this first book I didn’t think of myself as being part of any lineage because I didn’t think of my writing as being within the context of the publishing industry. I just wrote it because that’s what I did. I wasn’t thinking of myself within the literary world, you know what I mean?

Mm. Did you share it with anybody? Were you of the inclination at the time to share your work with others?

Actually, strangely enough, I barely ever showed anyone most of the writing until I submitted it because Gary [Barwin] suggested I do that.

Oh, really?

But especially—I wrote most of that book when I was working in factories. I would just basically work all day and come home at night and it was part of my practice. I would have this factory shift, and then I would be exhausted. Having breathed in all these noxious fumes, I don’t know if that helped with the writing of the poetry, but it was part of the practice: I would write a poem in a day, every day I worked. So it was almost like I thought of it like, This is the way that I can still feel like a human being after—I can still reflect on myself and be part of the earth and be this organic thing. I can do something that isn’t just destructive. Factory work is sort of disgusting and destructive, right?

Yeah.

But it’s a means to an end, so I think that writing that book helped me get through the day to day of factory work, a lot of times. Yeah.

I mean, I love this idea of one’s poetics being informed by the fumes of—

Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, seriously, it was—‘Cause I worked in this plastic fence factory and it was … It was really gross. You’d walk in the building and there was this fog of plastic fumes. Oh. It was so gross. Yeah. But yeah, so maybe that was kind of—I don’t know—The response I got from that book was kind of annoying, actually. And that’s why I wrote Male Pregnancy in Reverse, because I wasn’t talking or trying to be like, Oh, this is my story about my crazy life as a homeless person. But it came out and people—It was shortlisted for that Gerald Lampert thing and then people read it and it was all very—All these sort of middle-class people responded in this really kind of … I mean, it was this white guilt thing or whatever. I mean, I’m white but this kind of middle-class guilt thing. Oh, you’ve come so far and whatever and now you’re—

Mm.

—I really wasn’t expecting that. Oh, now I’m the bastion of rags to riches. Well, not really rags to riches ‘cause I’m still poor but I’ve made some literary statement and shown myself regenerate or something. And I guess, for me, I don’t believe in those sort of classist ideas about how someone deserves respect because they’ve done something and now they’ve proven themselves to this class system that’s at a different level on the spectrum of the financial hierarchy.

Mm.

I just—I feel like it was just really weird for me and I kind of find that kind of really annoying, actually. ‘Cause I was just like, Man, I just fuckin’ wrote these poems because I was trying to get through the day at the factory, you know? I don’t know. Then it became this whole thing. It’s almost like the fetishizing of, Oh, this guy who’s had this rough life or something and now he’s an academic—I don’t know. I just find it really irritating because it’s just like, Well, it was my life. It’s not as though I didn’t enjoy aspects of being free and homeless and hitchhiking around, you know what I mean? For the most part, it was a whole lot better than living in a house with my dad screaming at me and throwing me around. Probably was more dangerous for me to have stayed there—might’ve done away with myself if I hadn’t gone out and lived wild. This whole idea of class as being a way of seeing the world—It just doesn’t really interest me. And so that’s why I wrote Male Pregnancy in Reverse—because I had people who it was like—They read Mouthfuls of Space and it was almost like they—And I write about my own sexual trauma and stuff from childhood in that book and I had people that it was almost like they got off on it. And I was like, God, this is not what I wanted from writing this book. It was degrading, right? So I wrote this Male Pregnancy, which is a complicated and ridiculous title, absurd, really, but it’s rooted in this Renaissance idea, this very sexist idea that the man could subdue the threat of female pregnancy by giving birth, without a woman’s involvement, to a literary work that would be born into the cosmos and would subordinate any threat from a woman’s reproductive faculties. Anyway, that came out in the 17—That idea was popular, sort of, in the 17th century. I think it was unconsciously expressed in a lot of the writers—I don’t know if it was like … A lot of scholarship kind of makes it sound like they intended that or something and it’s like, I don’t know if they intended it but the society was so utterly misogynistic that everything—All the literary works of the time, it just kind of bled into everything. Even in the women’s writing—It’s pretty sexist. But that is also because it’s a very religious, Christian, society. It’s very different. Anyway, I wrote Male Pregnancy because the title is, first of all, informed by 17th-century literature, because that’s what I’m doing for my PhD, but also to talk about how—Because I’m, whatever, English and Scottish—How these kinds of horrible concepts that are so utterly stupid if you think about them outside of the image of the metaphor—because that’s the best way to express something that is stupid as if it’s meaningful—these ideas like male pregnancy—these abusive ideas that subordinated women and people through class and through gender hierarchies, they all come out of the Renaissance—especially in the English—The way the English and the Scottish and the Brits and all that, they understand their lineage as being rooted in this hyper-masculine, classist, and abusive language that kind of just permeates the culture. Basically, Male Pregnancy in Reverse is a response to Mouthfuls of Space because it was like, some people who read it were responding to it in this way that felt to me like by reading the book they imagined they’d experienced my whatever lower-class existence and because of this, they praised me for transcending it by writing this literary statement in a way that worked to further cement their idea about how class is fixed in our society. It just reaffirmed all this nasty stupid bullshit for them.

Forget about the interpretive projections and bullshit. I don’t want to hear about that stuff because society’s dumb and people think they have opinions. I want to hear about what your interpretation of the work was.

That’s my point: I wrote Male Pregnancy in Reverse in response to how kind of gross—

Right.

—It was. The response was like, Why can’t you just see me as a human being? You have to put all this baggage—But I guess that’s the problem. That’s the way it is for a lot of … If you write from a different gender identification or racial minority, you always have to deal with that. And I think—

Right.

—That I—You know, so—

Yeah.

—I was homeless. I will always have to deal with people thinking about me within those terms. It was like, Okay, you’re going to get off on me getting abused as a child so I’m going to write the most disgusting, horrific thing, most repellent shit—

[laughing]

—That’s going to totally, well I hope, turn them off—And in a way it’s isolated me from some of the literati or whatever you want to call it, but I don’t really give a fuck because that just pissed me off. The whole thing was so yucky. I was like, Well, I can be pretty yucky too, so. And that was liberating for me because I was trying to reveal that there’s not any—There’s no coherence to these ideas about class.

Mm.

Yeah.

Love it.

And so I wrote that in response. Anyway. And I’m very proud of that book. A bunch of the poems got published in UCLA’s Lana Turner and that’s a great journal and I don’t know if it took off in Canada or not. I don’t really care, but it’s—It’s a privilege to be published at all. Anywhere.

No one deserves an audience.

Yeah, nobody deserves an audience. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I’m obviously—I love New Star. New Star’s so awesome. They’ll take big huge risks. They’ll publish really strange stuff. I love Anvil too. They published Mouthfuls and I think Mouthfuls was a bit edgy, so that was really nice of them.

So, something that I’m hearing then is that, when you had written that first book Mouthfuls of Space from a place of kind of innocence, almost a kind of purity, you were just being who you were and part of who you were was just someone who wrote poems and then—

Yeah.

—At the encouragement of a significant figure, somebody that you would come to collaborate with often, Gary Barwin, you submitted them for publication; the book was published; and then you realized that the book, when it entered the world, functioned as a kind of cube made of mirrors, such that you had all these projections and reflections of the sociohistorical, political, class-fetishizing consciousness of the society reflecting off of it—and then you wrote in response to the way that the book was received as a kind of mirror-covered cube to show the lack of coherence of the projections that were offered in response to that first book. In a way, the world had maybe stripped those first poems—although they can never be stripped—of their innocence, but the second book was a response to the culture that received the book, as opposed to coming from that same place—

Yeah, Male Pregnancy is definitely not innocent. Yeah. No, that’s a really good way of putting it. Second book is an attack on the projections.

Right.

It’s very intentional in that sense, right?

So, do you—I mean, I’d asked about lineage partly because I have my own projections about writers or canons that I associate with the techniques and the language, however consciously deployed, of that poem that we just looked at. But now I’m thinking about what you just said, how metaphor presumes a kind of meaning even though it can be completely nonsensical and incoherent—and that therefore it’s an effective tool to respond to a society that’s very largely insane. And, I mean, I’m thinking about Gonzo journalism in this context.

Yeah.

Is work that you’ve done with Gary, tending towards a kind of incoherence, actually a response to the incoherence of the, can I say, contemporary moment?

Yeah, or it’s almost a neo-romantic moment in Can[adian]Lit[erature]. Because I feel like Modernism—It’s almost like … CanLit is also about confessionalism in this way that—I mean, confessionalism that comes out of the 70s, that style of—Which I think is—I mean it—It was kind of like a rejection of the hyper intellectualism of Modernism and the super self-reflexive and cynical post-modernism. In a way, confessionalism is kind of neo-romanticism. But I see CanLit as less like … I think, with confessionalism in the 70s, there was still an insistence on attempting to express some form of truth, which I don’t even know if that’s even possible; it is kind of naïve. But at least they would reveal these horrible truths about themselves, the writers. Nowadays we don’t—I think a lot of times people say, Oh, we live in—What do you call it? CanLit confessionalism? It’s like, Yeah, but they don’t confess anything. They don’t admit anything about themselves that suggests that they’re complex people. It’s just, I’m a saint in this evil, capitalist world. I mean, I get it. You’re trying to make your protest statement. But it’s not honest, is all I’m saying. It’s not a viable worldview because it doesn’t integrate all of the horrible aspects of the writer that confessionalism was at least trying to integrate. But the 70s stuff always came off as pretty horrible and sexist. So, I guess for me, I wasn’t thinking that Mouthfuls would be published. And then I read it within the context of more successful middle-class writing from my CanLit contemporaries, and it was kind of like, Oh, so this is what people are writing right now, but they write like that consciously and in CanLit you have book after book that kind of sounds like Al Purdy sanded down or something, you know? What I mean? So that it’s not threatening or whatever. I think being non-threatening to the status-quo and kinda repeating the same old Butlerian tropes from the 90s, you know reaffirming the same old things, while ignoring, you know real horrifying tragic problems in Canada like homelessness, that’s CanLit.

Mm.

So I guess I just feel like CanLit is like neo-romanticism but then it’s also more kind of smoothed out like an Instagram profile or something. Confessionalism is not the correct term to describe it because there is so much of a focus on the binary: poet as martyr/victim and capitalist world as enemy/abuser. I mean, if you bought a pair of sneakers at Wal-Mart, if you pay your taxes, if you pay for Netflix, have a bank account, you are fucking part of the problem, so really everyone, and this includes me, is a part of the problem.

[Laughs] I can’t tell you how impossibly bored I am by talking about the classification of contemporary Canadian poetry. I feel like we have to do better, Tom. We only have so much time alive.

[Laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, my point is that I wanted to do something really different, right?

Mm.

I can send you—I also wanted to make a response to how uncomfortable I was with the success or whatever—if you call it success—I don’t know if you can be successful as a poet. But I guess the praise I got for that book, it was so loaded with all this kind of gross class stuff. Anyway, we could go over a poem in this book, if you like?

Let’s do it. Send it to me.

…

I’m diggin’ this, by the way.

Yeah. I’m having fun too.

Good.

Alright. Because I don’t want to be too disgusting for the—To be too … For the … For the interview [chuckles]. Um. Okay. Well, I mean—

Consider yourself uncensored.

Um. Well, okay. Uh. Okay. So what are you doing for the rest of the day?

At 1:30 your time I’m going to attempt to direct a film shoot in a different city in Brazil—

Oh my—

—From where I am. For a friend of mine.

How are you going to do that?

Well, I already sent the shooting schedule to the cinematographer and I’ve written a bunch of copy and primed the collaborators and then I’ll just keep a running Zoom open and be in dialogue with everyone there with my Google translate at the ready because the crew’s Portuguese-speaking [laughs].

Oh, okay. That sounds—

—So we’ll see—

Fun.

—Well it’s—

—But you can’t—But what do they speak? Is it Spanish, or?

Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese.

Oh, Portuguese. Can you speak any?

Sim, eu falo um pouco du portuguêse, mas so um pouco porque sou um idiota canadense. Which means—

Oh, that’s pretty good.

—Yes, I speak a little Portuguese but only a little because I’m an idiot from Canada. Which is my refrain as I travel: regardless of where I am, the first thing that I learn is the word idiot so that I can point at myself and convey mutual understanding and be like, I get it. I’m an idiot. Can you read this poem for me?

Okay, yeah. So this is … Yeah. This was the—Came out on—in—One of the UCLA—One of the issues from Lana Turner. And it’s a cut-up of my own writing with stuff from the Faerie Queen Book One. Which is actually a really fucked-up book. It’s really disturbing, in a way. Which is surprising. I mean, probably because nobody has read it [laughs] because it’s not fun to read. You hear the title Faerie Queen and you think, Oh, this is going to be really nice, you know? And it’s like gaaaaah.

[chuckles]

It’s pretty brutal. So, “Book Eight: The Canto of Immutability.”

So that’s so utterly horrific and cold and—But I wanted to disgust you know those same folks who’d kinda expressed erotic fixation on the bits about me getting sexually assaulted as a child—I also wanted to express the other side of trauma; the dementing aspect. What it does to a person when they grow up. And in CanLit you sure as fuck are never gonna see anyone do that. This is not the kind of pat-on-the-back poor-me poetry that I think Mouthfuls and Cemetery for Holes got into. This is, I am irreconcilably fucked up by our culture that permits this kind of abuse by burying it on the street corners. You know, I bet 95% of homeless people were sexually abused as children. That was certainly my experience talking to people when I was out there living under a bridge. And the disgust I got from fans about these poems, ugh…it was like that attitude, that’s the problem with the world. You want a victim, but you don’t want a full person with all the fucked up problems that come with one.

I know how the middle class treats the homeless, so having these fetishistic responses from these same people who’d at the low end of the spectrum sneer at me to at the upper end, literally physically or sexually assault me. I mean, there was this guy who read my book and whatever he thought it was necessary to tell me, or that I’d think it was funny, that him and his friends, all drunk, shat on a homeless kid who was too fucked up to move. Like that’s just one example, not going to go on about it. But people are really shitty, and you know politeness and niceties and propriety, all that works to insulate the middle class from the real problems of the world because the world is fucking horrifying and disgusting and no amount of trigger warnings are going to save anyone from it. I just feel this culture of, oh you can be a victim, but don’t tell us how you really feel, because we don’t want to really understand. We just want sentiment. You know, the middle class, these ideas, they make me puke. It’s a way of shutting down voices that don’t correspond to really simplistic and stupid images people have cultivated in their minds about how they view the world. It’s problematic that you feel that way. Hahaha. Problematic that you feel something. Fucking Christ.

Right.

I was like, Read that and try to get off on that [chuckles].

“Allow me to return the cringe.”

And I think I was so naïve and so innocent that I thought I could just publish this book and expect some sort of classless, empathetic response free of any of the complicated garbage that our society is constructed on, so …

Complicated garbage that our society is constructed on is a beautiful phrase, Tom. I dig that. Makes me think of plastic fences, my friend.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That’s—That other thing—There was a lot of stuff about plastic fences in the first book, this allegory or metaphor that is easily understood. And I guess that I was really uncomfortable with all these metaphors, you know? So anyway, a lot of this book, Male Pregnancy in Reverse, is intertextual. I even take phrases from Mouthfuls of Space and kind of mutilate them and put them into the Male Pregnancy in Reverse book as a response.

Mm.

I think post-release I developed a real sense of cynicism about my first book. Male Pregnancy is obviously off-putting to a lot of people but I also thought it was really good for my mental health and empowering for me—

Nice.

—Because I resented the whole response. I didn’t want to keep going down that path of being sad-sack, emo, homeless guy, you know? This whole idealized vision of the lower-class or something. You know what I mean? It’s Dickensian vomit.

Yeah, for sure. And yet Dior wants to offer you a tux so you can go and collect the award and you’ll come in a limo. It’d be like—

I wish. Well then I’d sell out if they did that.

[Laughs]

That’d be great.

That’s so great. Tom’s like, The cringe didn’t come with enough cash.

[Laughs] Oh, yeah. If there was a real payback. I mean, sure.

What’s the number? What’s the threshold beyond which you’ll sell?

Well, I’d take a million dollars.

Okay.

I don’t think poetry—Maybe Billy Collins probably makes a million bucks. Do you think?

No question. I think that he’s a guy that’ll sign a four-book deal with Penguin and they’ll give him a million-four up front for it.

Yeah.

And then there’s Rupi Kaur and I think—

She makes a ton.

Yeah. There’s a lot of people extracting really significant dough via social media.

Yeah, but that’s not really—In my opinion that’s not really—It’s like poetry is the means to the end but it’s like you’re just an Instagram guru, with the poetry thing as how you prop yourself up on the Instagram pedestal. I mean, you have the book of platitude poetry people probably won’t buy, but then there’s other things you can do as an Instagram guru that makes money—Unless you’re Rupi Kaur. But she does the Amazon Prime movies and stuff and she has some—I saw—Did you see that? Where she had some Amazon Prime—Yeah, like that’s going to make a lot of money. You use the poetry to get yourself in the position where you make a lot of money through the avenue of social media. The poetry doesn’t really matter. And the poetry definitely should not be saying anything real because the middle class can’t stand anything that isn’t polite and sentimental slop. It’s got to insulate them from the wasteland they have profited off through their investments.

Well, let me invoke a phrase from the canon here: Raid kills bugs dead. Our friend Lew Welch, this phrase was attributed to. Beat poet, maybe wrote it in the fifties. I’ve heard it said cynically that all of the poets are in marketing. And I was thinking the other day—

[Chuckles]

—In an uncharacteristically despondent melancholy that the only two artforms that have ever been produced by the United States of America are the Blues and the television commercials—and social media is their offspring.

Oh, that’s pretty good. Yeah.

I’ve been thinking about marketing lately as the skin of an onion. It exists to surround the goods and bounce light, attracting the eye. But social media seems to invite binge onion-skin eating. I spoke with a publicist this morning about how to engage in a way that feels like it can retain some sense of integrity while appreciating that, in the same way that your first book of poems entered the world and then was saturated by gross projections, as soon as you enter the world one is defiled by it, in a way.

Yeah. I like that. The fall.

I just dropped in the chat a couple of lines from Kobayashi Issa which bears on my thinking about social media, which is: writing shit / about new snow for the rich / is not art.

Yeah, that’s true.

Ultimately any content that is produced on social media benefits the shareholders of the corporations that are advertising on it. You’re essentially directing people’s attention towards content that is layered with advertisements that are carefully designed to extract their capital and addict them to the platform that they’re engaging with.

Absolutely. Yes, nice haircuts and shiny politician teeth espousing their love for the TSLGBTQIA* community while simultaneously paying for the incendiaries that burn up homeless kids in the melted plastic of their tents. But I’m the bad boy because I wrote a poem.

And I think it’s a generative subject because of the way that you described the transition from your first book, and the response to it, to your second book. You described the process of writing as a natural extension of who you are and now writing in a way that’s very intentionally in dialogue with a culture that interpreted your book in a certain way. And I think all of this is a piece with, What does it mean to be a poet? What does it mean to be a contemporary poet? How does one retain one’s sense of integrity until and unless someone offers you a million dollars, in which case, Give me the Dior tux. Get me to the gala.

Yeah, I think that was why I wrote the book, to retain my integrity as an artist. I was not going to take part in insulating the readership of my book. A lot of people, even supportive people, responded to in such a complicated and almost fetishistic manner—how far I’ve come—so I responded with the real cynicism that I felt after integrating their responses into my being. And I think Male Pregnancy is the most genuine response possible.

Mm.

And in a way it’s as genuine as the first book—it’s just like a puke; it’s like a purge of my—I took in all this weird, uncomfortable crap and I puked it back out at them.

[Laughing] That’s—

I mean I took a really long time writing that book—years and years and years, so it’s not like it’s puke. It’s punk rock. It’s disgusting and wilfully crass and …

Intentionally revulsive.

Yeah. Like when you listen to—I don’t really like listening to the Sex Pistols. I’m not really into them. But when you listen to them, it’s like they want you to turn it off. It’s like a dare: if you can get through this—And then Lydon doesn’t even care if you listen to it, which is kind of cool, too. I guess he was responding to the Hippie movement, the sixties, that had a real evil underbelly, you know? And I think that’s what punk was, kids of the hippie movement. Their parents were all washed up and you get all the ideology of the hippies but nothing genuine behind it. The punk movement was a response to that; and I think my book is kind of a response to that idealized, innocent, romantic artist unaffected by the complex social dynamics, just existing within a repressive, capitalistic environment where they’re subordinate and paid like $10 an hour or something. So, that was the only thing I feel I could have done to retain my integrity as an artist. And if it alienated me in other ways, it’s opened up doors that I would never have had access to if I had kept writing Mouthfuls of Space. I’ve met a bunch of other people who are really into my new book and would hate this old book and so. So, in the end it’s all good. It was also chosen as one of the top four genre-defying books to be released in 2023. It was also awarded in a similar way to Mouthfuls of Space. So it’s not like it didn’t receive a positive response. But I do know that fans of my first book were kind of disgusted by my second book, so I got a new readership. And you know what, at the end of the day, I have to do what’s good for me not for them. And I think I would’ve been lying to myself if I played the homeless sad sack card to appease them.

Well, something that’s been on my mind a lot lately is the lotus flower, which transmutes the muck of the swamp of our lives into balance and light and symmetry. And I feel like that’s what you did: you absorbed the muck of the response to your first book and then made a lotus flower out of it.

Yeah. It’s like a lotus flower made out of scrap metal or something, but yeah.

Right. It’s dripping with something, too.

Yeah. Yeah. But I like that. And I think that’s the duty of an artist. Even in a world where, statistically speaking, only 42% of people read a book last year—

Oh, let’s not go there. Let’s not go there. I have things to do today [laughs].

So I think that the duty of the writer is to try to be as genuine as possible to themselves because what the fuck does it matter anymore?

Mm.

If we get our books published and read and two hundred copies go out. Maybe more than that. Max 1000 copies are printed and that’s it. They’re gone. There’s millions of people in the world and they’re not going to read it, so. So who are you writing for? And it should be for yourself. Unless you’re making a lot of money. Then do it—

[Laughing]

—If you have the opportunity to make money off of writing, then sell out. But if you write poetry, just remember—who are you trying to impress?—just do you. Do what you do.

Tom’s like, Sell out but don’t sell out for pennies.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t understand that. People are like, Oh, well I will write this way. But why don’t you just do what you want?

Love it.

Unless—Obviously I would love to make movies. And then you have a real audience and then you have to worry about stuff like that. I think that film is the absolutely most effective way of expressing, to a large audience, ideas that are meaningful. And in those cases, you really have to think about your audience because there’s a lot of money behind it, but also, you have an opportunity to speak to so many more people. I wish I was in film because I love movies but I’m not, so.

Well maybe we’ll collaborate at some point.

Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah.

Well, I have it on good authority that—speaking of CanLit: and this is precisely the extent to which I’m willing to talk about whatever that word signifies—there’s a requirement of a minimum 500 books printed in one’s print run in order for the book to be eligible for major prizes. And yet, books of poetry, on average, sell I think 300 copies against that 500 copy minimum.

Wow. That’s brutal.

Well, you’re anticipating pulping two fifths of a print run in order to try to win prizes, because that’s the only way to accrue esteem and money as a poet or as a publisher to improve the likelihood of your grant applications the subsequent year. And so CanLit is not a building designed enduringly, perhaps because of what you just described—readership.

So your readership becomes the jury for the grant prizes. Hahaha. That’s—That’s brutal. I did not know—That makes me have so much more respect—I mean I already had so much respect for these publishing houses, but now … Wow.

If you’re going to start a press in CanLit, make sure you have access to a vacant garage.

I mean, publishing with Gary though, he helps sell our books. My solo books do not sell as well as our books together.

Well, this is the last question that I’ll have time to ask you. I want to ask you about intertextuality in the context of the poem that you just shared from your second book—I think the word that you had used was mutilated. But this brings up the question of the author. This is the question that I want to address to you: in one sentence, how do you think about the author? What does the author mean to you? And what does it mean to be writing in dialogue with others—contemporaneously, as in the case of Gary—or across time, as in the case with your second book in dialogue with The Faerie Queen.

I think if you can … I think it’s a lot less complicated if you can just be a writer and you’re not really concerned with lineage or the history of literature. Read the books you like to read; read the poetry you like to read; have a dead-end job that’s not related to academia. And you’re just kind of doing it in the spirit of this sort of innocent way that gives you meaning. I think that’s sort of ideal. That helps you live your life, you know? That helps you get through, day to day. I think once you get into the more complicated engagement with a literary lineage and you see yourself as being read, that changes what kind of author you are.

Mm.

But if you get to that point as an author, you have to engage with that in a way that is honest like before you had any publications, you know? But it’s going to be different. You’ll have to grapple with the readership and those ideas; and I think that people who write poetry are very sensitive and not super concerned about fame or an audience or anything like that. They’re just doing it because it’s natural to them—and because there’s not really any financial benefit to writing poetry, for the most part. So if you can hold on to the innocence, then I think that’s wonderful. But if you can’t, then you have to engage with the whole ugliness of the world and the readership and all of that. And that’s cool too. It’s just complicated.