The Best American Poetry

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 4 & Last)

For earlier installments of Greg Santos's interview with Canadian poet Jason Camlot, click here:

GS: Rob Allen was your teacher but also a colleague and a friend of yours.  The whole last part of The Debaucher was dedicated to him, as well as your poem “Bewildered” from Attention All Typewriters.  Could you talk about Allen’s influence on you and your work?

JC: Subtle, I suppose. He wasn’t an overbearing mentor in any way. I was his roommate while I was still an undergraduate and he seemed to have no qualms about that. He wasn’t much of a father figure, in that way.  But he was probably one of the first people just to treat me like a writer.  Like a peer.  Even though I wasn’t his peer by any means. But he treated me that way. That was worth an awful lot when I was young, that’s for sure.  In treating me as a peer that meant just allowing me to be around him and to watch him.  You hear rookie hockey players talk about what it’s like to be in the dressing room with veterans and seeing how they prepare for the game. . . I still don’t know what that means exactly but I can sort of understand by analogy. When I lived with Rob, watching him how he went about his day and when he read, when he wrote, when he thought, and so that was influential.  I like his writing a lot.  I suppose I was influenced by him more than I know because he worked well in short lyric forms and he was in certain ways a lyric poet but he also worked very well in long serial forms.  One of his teachers at Cornell was A.R. Ammons. He introduced me to Ammons as well in poems.  So I think he was a major influence in the way I approach poetry formally, as well.  Although, like I said, it was always a subtle influence because he never imposed anything on me.  He let me hang around his bookshelf and I would pull things off myself.  Occasionally he would give me a book but it was usually a Gilbert Sorrentino novel.  Who he just adored.  So, he was a great influence but in great part by being a great friend.

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 3)

For earlier installments of Greg Santos's interview with Canadian poet Jason Camlot, click here and here!

GS:  Do you have an audience in mind when you write your poetry?

JC:   I  think the presupposition of audience, which is a determining factor for any kind of poetry, is an interesting question to ask about poetry that’s written in English and Quebec. I taught a graduate course on English language poetry from Quebec last summer and we looked at this book by Carmine Starnino called With English Subtitles and the thing that I found interesting about the book was the vagueness, the strangeness of his presupposed audience. He seems to be talking to some imagined international audience of intellectuals. Or he addresses you very aggressively and idiomatically as though you grew up on the same street as him.  It’s all over the place in terms of the presupposed audience and I think that’s pretty typical of a lot of English language poetry written from here. Partly because there’s license to imagine any audience because there is in a sense no local audience for poetry, per se, I mean there is because there are a lot of students here and there are a lot of readings, so that is one audience. But in another sense I think it allows you to imagine yourself into all kinds of fictional or to presuppose all kinds of fictional audiences. The fact is in many ways my audience is David McGimpsey or the few poets that I actually share work with and that’s probably typical of poets anywhere.  In that sense it is an Anglo_Quebec audience because it’s David McGimpsey or it’s Todd Swift because those are poets I send my work to, so it’s the individuals who may get things that others wouldn’t because they’re from here.

GS: Who do you consider influential over your career as a poet?

JC:  It changes all the time. I’m always looking out for new poets. My colleague whose office is next door, Judith Herz, is always sending me the names of poets she’s just discovered so I really appreciate that. I think when I was young, poets who were important to me were songwriters. Bob Dylan was a huge influence as soon as I started writing songs, and the Beatles. As for poets who have been influential on the poetry I’ve actually published when I was an adult, I’d say, Elizabeth Bishop.  Zbigniew Herbert is a Polish poet who I’ve read and loved for quite a few years. A lot of Montreal poets, like Layton and Cohen, whom I discovered as soon as I left Montreal and started reading seriously. Peter Van Toorn, another local poet whom I read when I was quite young and really dug and loved. A.R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, a lot of Modern American poetry. There are others but those would be a few names that just popped to mind.

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 2)

For part one of Greg Santos's interview with Canadian poet, click here -- and read some of Camlot's poems here and here:

GS: In your poem “The Death of Roland As Peanuts Panel” you’re referencing the French epic poem, Le Chanson de Roland, which from my understanding is one of the oldest major works in French literature and you juxtapose it with Charlie Brown.  It’s a very funny idea.  You have this balancing act between a comic and a work of literature.  Is there a line that divides popular culture and literature?

JC: There’s certainly a line for people who write about culture.  I think if you’ve ever read a review of a David McGimpsey book, you’re aware of that.  One way to re-sk your question is, which is better poetry?  Chanson de Roland or Peanuts?  I think you could have a pretty serious debate about that.  I don’t know if you’ve read Le Chanson de Roland but it’s a pretty ridiculous poem in a lot of ways.  There are historical reasons for that but it’s a very cartoonish poem and there are historical reasons for that as well.  The Debaucher is a lot about rhyme and humor and about death.  I think that the Peanuts and Chanson de Roland convergence was more about the death element of the book than anything else.  There are two sections about the death of Roland and I witnessed the death of my friend and former teacher, Rob Allen, the year that I was writing that book and in different ways I was thinking about the dearth of my vocabulary, formal poetic vocabulary, for somehow making sense or even just formalizing what I was witnessing.  I did turn to Le Chanson de Roland because it was a very formulaic representation of death so it seemed to me in certain ways consoling because there were obviously protocols at work in the way his death was being represented but at the same time it seemed empty and existentially cartoonish to me as Peanuts does.  I felt as alone as Charlie Brown in a panel while I was reading it.  The convergence there just had more to do with how much certain Shulz panels move me and seem to be about death in as or more interesting ways than Chanson de Roland but it seemed like a natural convergence of two rather flat paneled ways of formulaically representing death.  There are other attempts to represent death in that book so it seemed like one way among a series that I was experimenting with.

GS: In the last line of your poem “Summer Caravan” it reads “Please, Professor, let me get a laugh.”  How does humor play a role in your poetry and in contemporary poetry in general?

JC:            I’ll tell you first, in my own poetry it seems to me a part of a larger interest in tonal registers.  I write a lot of persona poetry and a lot of poems are really exploring either gradual or quick shifts between tonal registers.  Sometimes it’s a drier drollery.  Sometimes it’s more laugh_out_loud type humor but it seems part of this larger interest in the continuum of tonal registers that can be achieved poetically.  That’s what my real investment is.  Also, I find the absurdity of life is probably best expressed through humor and that’s something, I don’t know if I’m interested in, but something I just happen to believe in.

Greg Santos Interviews Jason Camlot (part 1)

I met with Jason Camlot [left] on the afternoon of March 17, 2009 in his office at Concordia University in Montreal. I had misplaced my voice-recorder that day but luckily had recently downloaded a voice-recording applet onto my phone. Camlot also had a professional recorder on hand, which he told me had been used to record some of his practice jam sessions and also for recording poetry readings. We ran both recorders at the same time, just in case, and sure enough one of them ran out of batteries midway through the interview. Many thanks to Jason for having the good sense to suggest we use both of them. –- Greg Santos

GS: Montreal poets like A.M. Klein, Earle Birney, Louis Dudek, P.K. Page, Irving Layton, and Leonard Cohen dominated much of the Canadian poetry scene between the 1920s and 1960s.  In his classic 1954 essay, “The Montreal Poets”, Louis Dudek wrote “we can see in their poetry a sense of place, of a real city that has an odd, ugly vitality of its own.”  How would you define a Montreal poet nowadays?

 Jason Camlot: There are a lot of different kinds of Montreal poets, as there have always has been.  I don’t think there is a single definition of a Montreal poet.  Some of them are here for a couple of years.  Some of them were born here and are here for their lives.  I suppose if I had to answer that question and I’ve obviously been engaged in trying to or trying not to answer that very question…more like what is an Anglo_Quebec poet…someone who’s positioned a little bit differently in relation to language and in relation to macro versus micro culture.

            I went to parochial or private Jewish school.  I read the bible and studied it in Hebrew.  That’s probably the first poetry I actually read but didn’t really understand.  Which is a really nice way to encounter poetry.  It’s probably how everyone first encounters poetry.  You read something you don’t understand.  But also being exposed to it in high school in my North American literature class.  That’s how the course was described.  It wasn’t American.  It wasn’t Canadian literature.  It was my North American literature class.  Which consisted of American poetry but also especially of Canadian poetry so the first real poetry I read wasn’t Layton or Cohen but it was Earle Birney.  And I think Birney was the first poet that I’ve ever understood in nationalist terms or in the kinds of terms that you seem to be at least asking about.  But it just so happens that the guidance counselor at my high school, for example, was the daughter-in-law of A.M. Klein.  There were connections to other poets and I was exposed to them in different ways but it was only really when I left Montreal when I started thinking more about the kind of question you’re asking.

GS: You received your Masters in Boston and your PhD in Stanford.  What would you say are the differences between the poetry scene in those places and in Canada?

JC:            I was in the academic program at Boston University.  I could say more about California or San Francisco because I lived there for five years.  I actually sat in on a workshop with Simone Di Piero while I was there and so met some poets within the workshop like Nicole Krauss.  I was also involved in a poetry scene there, through music as well, with poets who I’m still sort of in touch with and whose work and activities as poets were completely separate from Stanford.  They weren’t Stegner Fellows, these people.  They were students.  Or not.  They were San Francisco dwellers.  One is Katie Degentesh.  Another is Eugene Ostashevsky.  We held readings and we did things but they were meant to have nothing to do with the university.

Greg Santos presents "Aphids" by Jason Camlot

Jason Camlot’s poem “Aphids” exemplifies his playfulness with language and his sharp wit. Every line is funny. Camlot takes well-known aphorisms, turns them on their head, and makes you think of habitual language in a new light. The decadent themes in the poem echo Oscar Wilde, a notorious debaucher and aphorist. I think of a line from the title poem of Camlot’s The Debaucher: “Débaucher is traditionally a verb./ It might have meant to un-bench/ (de-bauche) someone, that is, to disturb/ him in his work.” Here, Camlot unbenches aphorisms to make them flow in new directions.
-- Greg Santos

Aphids
The worst mistake in life or literature is to have the wrong feeling.
             – Louis Dudek

There are no real swans, only imaginary ones.
But imaginary swans still suffer.

Life is short and art long, unless you outlive yourself.
In that instance, you have your whole life to mourn in art.

Axioms are not axioms unless the letter x is available.
But for how long can we rely upon the letter x?

When you say, “I’m sorry,” I don’t want to look at you.
But then I can’t see if I still please you.

Absence makes the heart bleed profusely.
The heart loves to swim in blood and absinthe.

If I love you, I am not telling you.
If you ask, I will have to kill you.

Men and women are the only animals that blush.
And some fish sometimes deign to blush.

Aphids have piercing-sucking mouthparts called stylets.
See tiny Aphrodite in her sharp styletto heels.

Beware the man who abides by only one book.
But if he loses it, help him find his one book.

A cigarette is a perfect kind of love. Ashes are a perfect form of death.
An ashtray is like dying in a drained Motel 8 Jacuzzi.

Lies are only bad if they cause pain, truths are always good.
Truths can cause severe pain, but they are still right.

The superfluous can be most useful to someone.
Go to the superfluous store to find just what you need.

Aphorisms should be distinguished from axioms.
But who has the time, what with maxims and proverbs and whatnot?

The worst mistake in life or literature is to have the wrong feeling.
Come to me and I will tell you which of your feelings is wrong.

Jason Camlot, from The Debaucher, 2008

Greg Santos presents a Poem by Jason Camlot

Born and raised in the town of Mont Royal, a suburb just north of Montreal, Jason Camlot grew up in the Montreal Anglo-Jewish community, where his father was a furrier manufacturer.  Jason started playing music when he was young. He received an MA from Boston University, a PhD from Stanford, and is chair of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series. -- Greg Santos

Mouse Memorial

I live with mice inside a monument of mice.
They have lived here since before the First Crusade.
I have been here since I learned to talk.
The mice are proud
and one day I will be a mouse, too –
small, blind and unimportant.
I admire their irreverent creeping, timid squeaks, tiny
ebony nests where the young lie like peanuts.
I admire their precious breath
and fast-beating hearts.
The monument itself is in the fragile bones
of those mice who are still alive.
As human castles lose their walls,
as tinted towers rise and fall,
this scuttling monument endures below,
passed on from mouse parent to mouse child.
My big, awkward bones
are my impediment to being memorial.
Still, already I am unimportant, and I am blind.
Is it hubris to hope one day I will be small?

-- Jason Camlot [from The Debaucher, 2008]

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (Part 3 of 3)

Read parts 1 and 2 of this interview here and here.

Greg Santos: You are the poetry editor of Nthposition, an award-winning online magazine.  How has the internet affected your writing?

Todd Swift: The Internet – which can be very instrumental – is over-rated.  It’s good for exposing poets to each other, and building links and communities.  But, for every warm and fuzzy thing about it, there are the jerks who snipe and gripe, and just try and bring things down.  This is a wider problem with this generation.  There are few people willing to build platforms of celebration and community.  It’s almost always about an atomized negation.

    I feel that until the “inner circle” of poet-critics pays proper attention to the Internet, it will continue to be something of a ghetto. I do think that when this decade is studied, academics will read and reconsider sites like Nthposition (which is already archived in the British Library) but from my experience of academia, research tends to focus on a narrow few.

GS: You are an avid supporter and promoter of poetry, both online and in print. What is your hope for the future of the art?

TS: I hope poetry moves away from the commercial model, and that it becomes less celebrity-obsessed. Selfishly, I hope that I begin to get more recognition, even a prize – paradoxically, of course. I need some “cultural capital” to energize my batteries from continuing to support and encourage others. I have been down lately, seeing my New and Selected come out to very few reviews.

GS: How do you see the state of poetry today?

TS:  I feel poetry is more or less dominated by a few larger presses, a few larger prizes, and is less and less robust.  There is a lot of poetry, but I feel that 98% of poets and poetry will never get a fair shake, or a chance to reach beyond their small moment.  What’s lacking is a disinterested circle of critics, as for instance films have, who can discover indie projects and champion new visions, and cut through the hype. I feel that most of what is received as canonical now is made so simply from the prestige of publication by a large press. I feel that poets spend a lot of time debating about poetics, when they should be asking more questions about the means of production.

GS: What part does spirituality play in your poetry?

TS:   I converted to Anglicanism at the age of 18.  25 years later, I was at church on Good Friday in England the other day. But in between, there has been a lot of doubt and struggle with faith.  I resist atheism as too simple. I have enjoyed reading about other religions. However, Christian theology is very fascinating to me. Christ was an exemplary figure; then again, so is Obama.  Many of my poems explore the tension between the secular and divine perspectives. I try to play faith off of sexuality.  The body is not entirely explained by religion, and desire seems to exceed the needs of love. I believe in yearning towards a utopian horizon, where asking about the existence of God potentially brings her into being.

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (Part 2 of 3)

Read Part 1 of this interview here.

Greg Santos: How have friendships, including those within the Montreal scene, been important to you in your literary career?

Todd Swift: I have often co-edited anthologies, and collaborated with friends on projects – Martin Penny, Thor Bishopric, Tom Walsh, Jason Camlot, etc.  Friendship is the unspoken grease of the poetry wheel – almost everything that gets done in poetry is because of love or friendship.  After all, who else do we write to and for?  I miss my friends, and have fewer over here [in London], where I tend to be more isolated.

GS: I’ve spoken to three other poets based in or from Montreal: Jason Camlot, Jon Paul Fiorentino, and David McGimpsey.  What do you have in common with each other?

TS: I think we are all children of A.M. Klein and Cohen – interested in humor, stylishness, joie de vivre, French culture, eroticism, play, and internationalism.  Montreal never felt small or limited. We were all part of a great tradition.  We still are.  I think Montreal poetry of the last 75 years is as impressive as that of New York, London, any city.  It just doesn’t get a fair press.  Ironically, even the Montreal Gazette has a provincial attitude to its own native sons.

GS: The Montréal poets I’m interviewing often incorporate popular culture into their poems.  In “Vocal Range”, you write that there are “Many mentions of popular figures, movies, and TV – / Getting overmuch of the world crammed into crawl / Spaces under text, sometimes on top of it – / How much hipness can any master muster, then use?”   Yet you often reference popular figures, popular culture, and films in your poems.  What is the difference between the “hipness” mentioned here and that of the poems that you write?

TS: That’s me being ironic – and debating with my own style, questioning it.  I was also thinking through how I relate to the work of poets like David Trinidad, Alex Porco, and of course, David McGimpsey.  I think there is a wide spectrum: on the one hand, dull poems by Andrew Motion about swallows in the evening, and then again poems by McGimpsey about, say, Bart Simpson.  Both seem to me to be equally artificial and legitimate positions, one based on Wordsworth, the other drawing on Ginsberg, and Ashbery.  The problem for me is: where does the poet locate himself or herself in the world, in relation to the media, but also, nature – even as mediated?  Poets from the romantic English Line exclude as much as they include, whereas the O’Hara school tends to bring everything into the poem.  That tension, between excess and austerity, is where poems occur.

GS: Do you prefer writing as yourself or from the point of view of a persona?

TS: I have always written in personae – in fact, many of my “lyric I” poems are enactments of speaking voices, or positions that are not my own, but ironic, or dramatic, explorations of style or psychology.  This is why I find it annoying when critics speak of “finding a voice”.  I have always been interested in a polyphonic approach.

GS: I’ve noticed that your poetry not only uses polyphony, but also creates a sort of “multimedia” effect.  You’ve even said that you see “poetry in terms of cinema”.

TS: I love film. Film and pop songs have shaped my work as much as literary texts have. Eisenstein saw cinematic montage as being poetic.  Vachel Lindsay was a poet who valued cinema early on.  So did Crane and Fearing.  As a screenwriter, I learned some tricks of the trade, and I suppose I have brought them to bear of my poetry, albeit subtly – in terms of editing, scene-setting, etc.  Poetry is not just linguistic, but imagistic. I was quite influenced by the Imagists. I often compose poems that have strong visual effects in them. That being said, I resist narrative per se. I see that as more a novelistic device (plot). I have an uneasy relationship to prose, as I think it is over-rated. Like Poe, I think poetry is the most exciting art form.

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (Part 1 of 3)

Interview with Todd Swift [by Greg Santos]

"I think Montreal poetry of the last 75 years is as impressive as that of New York, London, any city,," says Canadian poet Todd Swift.  "It just doesn't get a fair press. Ironically, even the Montreal Gazette has a provincial attitude to its own native sons." Since Swift lives in London, England, and I shuttle between New York and New Haven, we conducted the interview by e-mail. Our internet correspondence was a fitting one considering Swift is an enthusiastic blogger and promoter of poetry through Nthposition, the award-winning web journal, where he is its poetry editor.-- GS

GS: You were born in Montreal and raised in the city of St. Lambert, Quebec.  Even though you currently live in London, England, do you consider yourself a Montreal poet?

TS: I consider myself an Anglo-Quebec poet, but more than that, a cosmopolitan poet.  I deeply regret the way that poetry reception gets shaped and controlled by national interests, often for marketing and other commercial reasons.  I see the English language as one wide field for play.

GS: You’ve also lived in Budapest, Hungary and Paris, France.  How does place inform your writing?

TS: Well, I have always felt displaced.  Being an Anglophone in Montreal was like being an American in Paris.  I grew up loving tales of the exotic and foreign – Maugham, even Orwell.  And of course Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  I always wanted to be an expatriate.  I found Canadian media and culture often smug and confining.  I longed to engage with the “wide world”.  So, places are always the somewhere I wanted to be – or where I want to be away from.

GS: Your newest collection of poetry, Seaway: New and Selected Poems, has an interesting cover photo of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  What is the significance of this photo and of the choice to title your collection Seaway?

TS:  My good friend, Etienne Gilfillan, is a London magazine designer who is also from St. Lambert.  When I mentioned the title, he researched and found this amazing retro picture.  It captures my sense of the Montreal Gothic – to coin a phrase – neo-romantic, retro, nostalgic, yet also ironic, even cool.  How Leonard Cohen dresses, for example.  The title was selected to place my work in a natural time and place that was also shaped by artifice – that is, the Seaway project is one of those massive manmade transformations that really captures the adventure of Canada –  Canada as a fusion of nature and construction.

       More to the point, as a kid, I’d see these ships go past, from what I imagined as Russia, and Peru – I lived by a sort of North American Panama Canal.  It fed into the dream of travel mentioned above.  I wanted to capture that in the title of my book – how my poetry is deeply grounded in childhood, local fantasy and wonderment, but is very adult and international, too.

GS: What are some of the differences between the various poetry scenes you’ve encountered in your travels?

TS: What strikes me about the American scene is how open it is, to difference and to others.  Yes, there are poetry wars, but I was always able to talk to various slam, or Language, or new formalist poets, with some sense of mutual respect.  In Europe, poetry is far more marginalized than in the English-speaking world – in France, poetry is really an elite cult.  What has shocked me about the UK is how much of a tight ship it is – it’s really controlled by about five or six more or less rigid and often arrogant “gate-keepers” who basically despise the experimental wing of modernism; then again, the avant-gardists in the UK are mostly humorless, and follow a strict Marxist line as laid down by Adorno (no pop culture). Postmodernism, in the UK, is a dirty word for most poets.  I miss the bonhomie of the Montreal scene.

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (II)

Todd Swift often writes persona poems, for example, as Emperor Hirohito or as a girl who has frozen to death, and in this case, as a wedding photographer.  This poem spoke to me as a representation of the lonely act of writing poetry.  Swift once said that he sometimes sees “poetry in terms of cinema.”  This poem is like film in motion.  Knowing about his background as a screenwriter, I can’t help but notice the cinematic qualities of this piece.  I believe the images at the end are what make the poem, with its leaps and cuts into seemingly disconnected images that build on the original image of the lonely photographer.

-- Greg Santos

The Wedding Photographer

It is a private, lonely thing
To do, gathering new pictures
Of delight. I take photographs

That build their album, the looking
Backwards, developing beauty:
Their standing, happy, just married

After the light has altered them.
No one sees me on my own bed
Later, rehearsing a vision

In which a white dress lifts then falls
With the sequencing of seasons,
Just and ordered in what happens

To bodies that love, are desired,
As fire, that takes a forest down
As dogs will a stag, cannot know

The king inlaid, uncovering
Vows future-arrowed, as cut skin
Shows the purple all wear within.

-- Todd Swift

Editor's note:  Greg Santos was born and raised in Montreal, Canada.  He lives in New Haven, CT.  You can follow Moondoggy's Pad, his blog about poetry, literature, and pop culture, here.