Fellow fall issue #232 contributor Ambrose Albert talks with Jade Wallace about their poems, “Grape” and “Desert Fauna.”
AA: “Desert Fauna” ends on an em dash instead of a period, the punctuation an open paddock door instead of a closed one. Do you think that poems, like horses, do not belong to anyone?
JW: Oh I love that imagery—em dash as paddock gate. An em dash really does look like a little door ready to open doesn’t it? Honestly, I have to thank [TMR’s Editor] Iain Higgins for suggesting the em dash that closes out “Desert Fauna”; it wasn’t my idea but I’m now very attached to it. Haha.
As it happens, this poem had its start when someone said to me, quite casually, “Oh he’s not really interested in your poems, he just wants to fuck you.” Infuriating, obviously, though also banal. Hasn’t everyone who’s a woman—and everyone who’s been mistaken for a woman—heard versions of that before? So that ire was simmering in the back of my mind. At the same time, I was reading Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” because I spent the better part of ages eight to eighteen on a horse farm, and I miss the horses all the time, and they show up in my reading choices, and my poems, rather a lot. So naturally I constructed this scenario in which caring for horses is an allegory for writing poetry, at least on one level of interpretation.
Which brings us full circle, lassos us back to the hesitancy of that closing em dash. I don’t know who poems belong to. I suspect they wander, looking for hospitable habitats, and sometimes they stay with their writers, and others they reside with their readers, and still others they end up dead.
Read the rest of Jade Wallace's interview.
Paul Dhillon,
#232 cnf contributor
Past contributor Kate Burnham talks with fall issue #232 contributor Paul Dhillon about his cnf piece, “Five Lessons.”
KB: You create a wonderful sense of movement, of being carried forward, on the “current of inevitability, of death.” How do you see this movement—this pull between vitality and mortality—shaping the emotional landscape of your writing?
PD:
Losing my brother at such a young age has given me a complicated relationship to endings. I fear endings, but also understand there is beauty in the retrospect, looking back at moments you didn’t quite notice, how important and breathtaking they were. The tension between vitality and mortality, if anything, helps shock me back into being present so I can receive and cherish what life is happening in front of my eyes.
KB: “Five Lessons” reads as a meditation on time—how our perception of it evolves from childhood, when “summers felt like a lifetime,” to adulthood, where “life and time are fluid, just like water, filling up whatever it is channelled into.” How do you see the connection between water and time in your work?
PD: When I am in the water, especially the ocean, I connect to first diasporic Punjabi communities who arrived via ships across the Pacific Ocean. That the wave of this migration is linked to the one wave of the ocean, and its global connectedness. By being in water, I feel connected to the past, and the present simultaneously. Water in itself holds time. That something from these past journeys is echoing through me, if not in my body, definitely in my mind and heart as I write.
Read the rest of Paul Dhillon's interview.
