Second-hand Albums

Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?

I’m not sure about this, but a catalytic moment may have been when Robert Kroetsch appeared in my tenth grade class, elbow patches on his sports coat and all, to read from Seed Catalogue. This was when it first occurred to me that it might be possible to become a poet. Shortly after that I discovered the poetry of John Newlove and Al Purdy and I thought it marvellous that they spoke on the page in voices that weren’t obviously artificial or literary.

How/where do you find inspiration today?

I find inspiration in lots of things. Sometimes you read someone else’s poem and think, That’s really good. Sometimes you overhear someone say something that strikes you as deeply felt, idiosyncratic, or incisive. Sometimes it’s silly games, like taking rock music lyrics and making up substitute lyrics for the songs. And, of course, a major literary inspiration is the incomparably beautiful Arabic of the Qur’an.

Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful?

I haven’t written a lot of ekphrastic poems, but I’ve been interested lately in the paintings of Peter Breughel the Elder, and had a chance to look at the originals in Vienna and Prague. In some of his work, you can see the whole society he lived on the canvas. (“Children’s Games,” “The Battle between Carnival and Lent.”) I’m suggesting that if you look closely at works of art and think about how the various elements come together in them, you may find a similar process happening in your poems. It’s useful to read interviews with other poets, and the Paris Review interviews are good examples. I find it useful to keep in touch with the poetry of the past, but you can’t always lug your library around with you, so websites like https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca or https://poets.org are helpful for at least a Greatest Hits by well-known poets. Anthologies allow you to sample a wide variety of work before buying collections by individuals.

As a published writer, what are your tips or words of motivation for the aspiring poet?

It’s a long game. Prepare yourself to be disappointed some, and to be disappointed by yourself some. Learn to appreciate different approaches to poetry, and widen that appreciation by reading poets from other cultures and places. Another language is always useful, because it gives you flexibility of mind, a vantage point from which you can see your own language more clearly. Above all, persist, but allow for fallow periods when you let your experiences swirl and settle in you. Enthusiasm is necessary—when you don’t feel it, do something else.

What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?

“Inspired” is probably the wrong word, but the impetus for “Second-hand Albums” was a certain melancholy feeling I get when I look through second-hand or charity shops. The albums are particularly sad, because they are recorded and produced in the assumption that they represent the absolute coolest sense of style imaginable—they are artifacts of the self-consciously hip. Decades on, of course, this sense of confidence is absurd. Very few artistic artifacts are venerated for a long time, yet there’s something touching that so many have tried and have wound up in discard bins.

What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?

This is a fairly formal poem, especially for me. There’s obviously a lot of assonance, consonance, and various types of rhyme going on in it, and I paid attention to how I could use other sound-effects to draw the attention away from the rhymes so they didn’t clang—reserving the full end rhymes for certain junctures. I always pay attention to metre, and in this poem, I didn’t want the pentametre to be too regular, so I extended a few lines to break the pattern.

How did your writing process unfold around this poem? How did you write, edit, and refine it?

This is one of the poems that carried me away with it because of its zany insistence on chiming sounds and flagrant fashions, so I think I wrote the first draught straight through, daring myself to come up with even more outré lines as I went, and then the process became one of toning or tamping it down. For instance, replacing “whose loosy-goosiness surpasses jazz’s” with “whose cool looseness surpasses jazz” because the former was overdoing it. The stanza that gave me the most trouble was the last one, and I rewrote it several times. The current version is shorter than what I started with, simpler. I had to get rid of a superfluous metaphor about “air-locking yourself off from obsolescence”.

What did you find particularly challenging in writing this poem?

I don’t usually think very much about fashion, so I had to try hard to come up with adequate language to describe the outfits that musical groups wear on their album covers. I guess, too, though the poem is not terribly serious, that a balance had to be struck between frankly acknowledging the dated egotism of these performers but not too harshly mocking them—after all, everything fades and diminishes.