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Canneries & Constellations: Camille Lendor interviews Hamish Ballantyne

Like corn and history, “Boomtimes” uses errantry to explore the interconnectedness of capitalism, B.C. locales, landscapes, geopolitics, Indigenous populations, languages, and histories of labour exploitation (or, as you aptly put it, “evisceration”). When you began writing this piece, topically, where did you begin?

I got pretty curious about salmon canneries as an early instance of industrial resource extraction on the pacific coast. And I was thinking about many people I know from work in tent encampments, how intimately some of their experiences were tied up with the fortunes of resource extraction. And the poem is also about the vehicles of those histories: local newspapers, archives, tourist brochures, self-published memoirs that I pick up in bookstores or diners, on the ferry, etc.

What’s fascinating about this poem is how it has many threads you weave to make a cohesive whole, particularly via your use of patterns—the circularity of callbacks (blue, Agassiz, corn), the satisfying crescendo/decrescendo in lists (“threat, feast, annihilation” and “Fraser, Skeena, Nass rivers”), and the haunting juxtaposition of natural landscapes with market terminology. Could you speak about how movement and patterns operate in this piece? Are the patterns consequences of intuition or revision?

I don’t really have a coherent thesis or narrative, so the poem emerged as a constellation of stuttered themes/images, recurring in changing, partial forms. I learned these patterns from music, in large part: techno, folk, classical, etc., where themes are constantly resurfacing in disguise, echoing each other, calling back, and in literature I learned it from writers like Wilson Harris, Borges, Walter Benjamin, Bernadette Mayer, Gogol, Marosa di Giorgio. And perhaps most of all from the late, great, insatiable Paul Dutton who taught me that vast acres of potential open up through repetition and recurrence, even or especially at the level of a single word or phoneme.

Why use the prose poem as the vehicle for this long poem? What is it about the prose poem’s form (or anti-form) that led you to use it for “Boomtimes”?

I wrote this at the tail end of writing a book of poems, also called “Boomtimes.” I was getting the sense that some of the thoughts I was trying to work through were getting drowned out in the text and wanted to state them a bit more explicitly. I was also reading two really good books, Mei-mei Bersenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses and Etel Adnan’s Journey to Mount Tamalpais around the time I wrote it and was enjoying writing within the phrasing of the sentence.

This poem is enveloped in and obsessed with blue. Is it safe to assume blue is your favourite colour, or is its presence in the poem more because of the piece’s atmosphere?

It’s true! I don’t know how that happened. My best guess is that tarps, huitlacoche, and the ocean happened to be blue. I picked up on that, and leaned into it.

What advice would you give to writers who want to write a long poem but don’t know where to start?

I don’t know. This one kept expanding as I took the brakes off some of my usual writing tendencies. If I write about things that I’m obsessed with,then I have a lot to say. I guess people should write about what they’re obsessed with. And maybe deleting the notion of “starting” is helpful, or of order in general.

Someone once framed writing as running to me. When it comes to your writing practice, are you more of a sprinter (writing occasionally in bursts), marathoner (writing daily/sustaining a consistent practice), or both?

Probably more of a sprinter. But I try to read and write as much as possible, even if it’s just a few words or a thought, and then I have material to call on when I start a longer project.

 

 

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