Biblioasis Press“There were ‘birds’ whose purpose was to record
the movements of the masses, to repeat
working-class conversation verbatim.”
— from Joshua Trotter’s “Continuation of the History of Utopia”
Joshua Trotter’s debut, All This Could Be Yours, slipped quietly into (better) bookstores earlier this year and quickly became something of a totem among the poetry-reading public. A small number of people seem to like it a great deal. I’m among them. The Montreal poet’s eclectic, unformulaic approach to form has resulted in a book of language games and sci-fi–flavoured experimental riffs that stick around in the reader’s mind, both propelled by sound and sustained by content.
Trotter and I exchanged emails about the book and his creative process. That correspondence is shared below.
Jacob McArthur Mooney Thanks for doing this, Joshua. What’s most striking about All This Could Be Yours, at least in terms of content, is its diversity of interests. You really take from across the culture, and from science and the social sciences. At the same time, the poems possess a sort of self-containment as individuals, giving the book a real “collection” feel. Despite a handful of recurring motifs and characters, the book’s unity comes from disunity: it’s a book of poems, rather than the less specific “book of poetry.” How do you feel about unity in the context of a book of poems, as it relates to the assumed necessity (especially with a first book) of a singular voice?
Joshua Trotter I spent a lot of time attempting to coerce the book into coherence — in terms of style, in terms of content, in terms of voice — and I found I could not force it to happen. At least, not without damaging the poems. So, as it says on the cover, it’s a book of poems, rather than poetry. The poems are self-contained organisms, I hope. The book is their exoskeleton. It took me awhile to be okay with that. I have long been a fan of books with a distinct, consistent tone. Recurring images, morals, themes, grammatical forms, even words. It is a wonderful feeling to buckle yourself into such a Volvo, to let it carry you from page to page in comfort and relative safety. Yet, as I read more, as I get older, I’m becoming more interested in books that jump from place to place. Books that go off-road, scratching the paint, dragging the muffler — books that are willing to drive without insurance, perhaps a little drunk.
I have the feeling that my next book (if there is a next book) will have to carry more voices than the first. We use this term, voice, but to be honest, I’m not sure what it means. I know the creative writing adage about “finding one’s voice” — like finding an oil deposit or a missing dog — but to be honest, I have found that I have many voices. They tell me contradictory things. If there are other people like me — and I assume, statistically, that there are — the adage would serve us better by telling us to choose a voice, rather than find one. But then, I’m not very good at making choices.
Jacob McArthur Mooney That “self-contained organisms” line is great, and quite accurate. Some of the most memorable poems in the book take a couple of lines to suggest, or define, their specific ontologies, the rules they play by as they investigate their space, and then let that experiment play out for the rest of the lines. “Tailors of the Sea” teaches the reader a pattern, repeats it, and then moves on. “The Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea” has a specific worldview, and a specific syntax, that makes it unique from the rest of the book’s poems. What this reminds me of is that much-hated-on expression, “thought experiment.” I think of these poems as thought experiments, and would hold them up as a defense of the term. What could be better, more efficient, flexible, and imaginative, than a considered experiment of thought? Is it an expression you’re comfortable with to describe your methods? Do you have an alternative?
Joshua Trotter Because I usually begin with words, rather than thoughts, I’m inclined to characterize the poems as word experiments, rather than thought experiments. But I suppose it amounts to the same thing. (Do thoughts come before words, words before thoughts, or are thoughts and words inextricably entwined? It depends on which cognitive theorists you tend to believe.)
Many of the poems set up miniature worlds, pocket universes, in which a little scene or drama is allowed to unfold. The drama follows local physical laws and customs — the drama is, in fact, a product of the local laws and customs. In this way, these poems are science fiction stories without much science.
I’m inclined to agree with Stevens’ assertion that “All poetry is experimental poetry.” What poem isn’t a thought/word experiment? Moreover, if we humans really are separate, subjective beings, what method of communication (besides, perhaps, involuntary noises and gestures) is not an experiment?
Jacob McArthur Mooney That Stevens line is an important one for me too, even moreso as a reader than a writer. All poets should be experimenters, what else are we doing all day?
I want to get back to that language/thought dimension a bit, because it arrives at one of the nagging concerns I have about both my own work and the work of people experimenting with similar ingredients. Take this line from your “Tailors of the Sea”: “shattered windows wintering as weathered flocks.” There are a lot of lines in All This Could Be Yours that benefit from a similarly unbalanced marriage of sound and idea. Obviously, the W alliteration is the key musical driver here. But there are others, such as the repeated win- syllable and the framing S sounds. The idea itself happens somewhere between winter and weather and again between weather and windows.
It’s the kind of line that’s fun to read, and the kind of line I’d be eager to incorporate as a writer. I’m concerned in my work when the prosodic element of the line happens on a relatively deep, pre-musical level, and the idea of the line itself relies on something more shallow and apparent. This is me being a bit of a bastard, but at the very least, it’s the kind of unbalanced relationship I’d want a line (and, by extension, its poet) to be aware of, to interrogate. I wonder if I’m alone in this concern. Do you think about this at all? Is what I’m asking about even answerable?
Joshua Trotter I think about it often. So you’re not being a bastard, Jacob. Or, if you are, then I’m a bastard too. Every time I attempt to work on a poem, I find myself fighting hand-to-hand with the sound/sense problem.
I assume that most poets assemble a kind of internal United Nations that manages relations between sounds, images and ideas. Sometimes the borders get a little porous. Sometimes relations sour. That’s when the UN gets tough, implementing economic sanctions and/or no-fly zones.
The thing is, my personal UN is biased. What delights me most, in writing and in reading, is the interplay between sounds. Images are secondary. Ideas, if there are any ideas, almost always come last. Often, they come as a result of the sound, or in spite of the sound. This, I’m sure, can be frustrating to readers. Especially since, in the case of this book, the ratio of sound to sense varies from poem to poem.
That line from “Tailors of the Sea” is a good example. The line compares “shattered windows” to “weathered flocks.” An awkward metaphor, not totally apt, but when returned to its natural habitat, it begins to gain a semblance of sense:
…Windows of locked
opportunity, winnowing the stones we throw.
Shattered windows wintering as weathered flocks
at off-track betting windows, ground windows
As I see it, the windows have been broken by “stones we throw.” The broken windows result in shards on the ground. These “ground windows” are likened to “weathered flocks.” It’s not rocket science. It’s more like alchemy. The logic of the poem travels back and forth along a network of images and sounds, transmuting what it can. The line alone cannot live for long beyond its context.
So, yes, I think about it. But my thoughts are almost always overridden by the pleasure I receive from interactions between sounds. What about you, how do you deal with the sound/sense problem? In what way is your UN biased?
Jacob McArthur Mooney Hmm. I’m struggling here with competing urges. One part of me wants to reject the question, saying that it’s fruitless and limiting and essentialist to want to rank those three things. The other part of me thinks that the exercise still sounds like a lot of fun.
I’d like to suggest an alternate analogy though, one that sees the three as ingredients of variable intensity, and not things that supplant each other. How about a colour metaphor? If idea, image, and sound are analogous to red, green, and yellow, then they can be fashioned into any colour of the rainbow, yes? To that end, I’d have to put my work out there as containing, in order of most to least, intense hues, ideas, sounds, and images.
Ideas because I don’t think someone with a conceptual bent to their work can answer any differently. It’s unsexy to lead with ideas, but for myself at least, it’s true. Sound is probably catching up lately, though, and it carries with it the same worries you’ve just described. Image is definitely last.
Dennis Lee, in his cadence essay, talks about the idea of sound leading sense. I remember being quite flummoxed by that idea when I first read it. It’s not a revolutionary idea, of course, but I remember it as revolutionary in its confidence, in the guiltless honesty with which it was expressed.
This brings me to the logical follow-up question. You seem to get a lot out of your uncertainties, the hand-to-hand combats that go into the writing of each poem. Do you have similarly generative certainties? In other words: what works? What works for sure?
Joshua Trotter Nothing works for sure. Every poem feels like a first poem. Every poem enters my airspace by a different vector. What works one morning, likely won’t work the next. Maybe that’s the only certainty. It certainly doesn’t get any easier.
The same can be said about discussions like this. Every statement I make about poetry, my own poetry in particular, I find I can just as easily say the opposite. For instance: I said that ideas are ranked low by my UN. Which is true — but it’s also completely false. Because you’re right: metaphor and analogy generate — and are generated by — ideas. And on a macro level, every poem is a participant in an ecosystem of ideas. To write a poem one must have an idea of what differentiates a “poem” from a blog post, or from the text on the back of a box of Shreddies. Even sound, I suppose, could be considered an idea. Especially in poetry, and especially when writing or reading silently. In which case, the poem’s sounds are occurring as ideas, yes?
Jacob McArthur Mooney Sure. This is the kind of line of questioning that often brings poets (blissfully, naively) into the realm of the amateur linguist. Not that there isn’t room there for amateurs, of course, and some respect needs to be paid to the folk knowledge that one picks up over a few decades of obsessions.
I want to take your comments about uncertainty out of your description of inspiration and into editing and revision. Is it easy for you, then, to read something as if it was new, or is this process made more difficult by all that unpredictable new-ness? Are you a happy self-editor?
Joshua Trotter Because the editing/revision process takes place over months and years, the voice that wrote the poem is often not the voice that revises it. This can be a difficulty, but in some cases, I think it’s helpful. If an image or a metaphor or a stupid pun remains a contender after multiple rounds with multiple voices, then it must have some kind of internal strength. There must be something worthwhile about it.
So yes, I’m a happy self-editor. But not only a self-editor. I’ve worked for quite a few years with a group of people that I have grown to trust. So much so, that I feel a poem is not complete until I run it by them. Collectively, they can see and do things that I cannot.
One problem with this multiuser editing process is that a poem is rarely finished. If one of my voices deems the poem complete, another voice may not. They often disagree. Which is why I’m thankful that these poems have been rounded up into a book. The book corrals the poems, however arbitrarily. It gives me time to tend to other livestock.
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