Follow Your Creative Instincts: Experimental Poetry with Canisia Lubrin
In this interview with Tell Tell Poetry, Canisia Lubrin reminds us to “go with the imagination first.” She assures us that the dreaded writer’s block is just as real as Bigfoot or Santa Claus and encourages writers wherever they are starting from to trust those experimental instincts on the page: “it might not be the kind of logic that we tend to lean on and claim comprehension of, but it’s tethered to the imagination and what the imagination makes possible.”
Canisia Lubrin The Dyzgraphxst
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, editor, and professor. She teaches Creative Writing at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. Her work can be found in Poetry London, Brick, Poets.org, Globe & Mail, and many other venues. Lubrin was poetry editor at Humber Literary Review and serves as an advisor to Open Book. Her fiction appears in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was a finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Award, as well as the Journey Prize Anthology in 2019 and 2020. CBC named Lubrin to its list of 100 Canadian Authors to know, 6 Black Canadian Authors to Watch, 14 Canadian Poets to Watch in 2018, and 18 Canadian Women Authors to Watch in 2018. In 2020, the Writers’ Trust of Canada awarded Lubrin a Rising Stars prize. She is Poetry Editor with Canadian press, McClelland & Stewart. Lubrin was educated at York University and the University of Gwelph. Her books are augur (Gap Riot Press, 2017), finalist for the BpNichol Chapbook Award, Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017), named a CBC Best Book of the year, finalist for the Gerald Lampert and Pat Lowther award, and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster award, The Dyzgraphxst, named a 2020 best book by Quill & Quire, CBC, Winnipeg Free Press, Rebel Women in Lit, among others, and her debut fiction Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada. The Dyzgraphxst is currently on the longlist for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Lubrin was born in St. Lucia and now lives in Toronto, Canada.
Interview transcript
Layla Benitez-James:
Hey there, this is Layla Benitez-James with Tell Tell Poetry doing our first interview outside of the U.S. I’m here with Canisia Lubrin who is a writer, critic, editor, and professor. She teaches creative writing at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. Her work can be found in Poetry London, Brick, Poets.org, Globe & Mail and many, many other venues. Lubrin was poetry editor at Humber Literary Review and serves as an advisor to Open Book. Her fiction appears in The Unpublished City: an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was a finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Award as well as the Journey Prize Anthology in 2019 and 2020. CBC named the Lubrin to its list of 100 Canadian Authors to know, 6 Black Canadian Authors to Watch, 14 Canadian Poets to Watch in 2018, and 18 Canadian Women Authors to Watch in 2018. In 2020, the Writers’ Trust of Canada awarded Lubrin a rising stars prize and she is poetry editor with Canadian press McClelland & Stewart.
Lubrin was educated at York University and the University of Guelph. Her books are augur, which came out in 2017, and was a finalist for the BpNichol Chapbook Award. And Voodoo Hypothesis which I have here and is lovely. And that was named CBC best book of the year and was finalist for the Gerald Lampert and Pat Lowther award and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster award. And then, the book that we’re mainly going to be talking about today is The Dyzgraphxst which was named a 2020 best book by Quill & Quire, CBC Winnipeg Free Press, Rebel women and Lit among other places. Her debut fiction Code Noir is forthcoming from Knopf Canada and The Dyzgraphxst is currently on the long list for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Lubrin was born in St. Lucia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Canisia, thank you so much for joining us today.
Canisia Lubrin:
Layla, Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
Layla Benitez-James:
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book and I wanted to jump in with a kind of a big question about how you put it together on the whole. I really loved how it was divided into acts like a play. And each of those has a title like “Ain’t I the Ode?” “Ain’t I Too Late?” And the whole book itself is just called “a poem” and I’m wondering how the collection was organized and how it came to be, how it unfolded within that drama framework. And how did you arrive at those forms?
Canisia Lubrin:
So, the simplest way to put it is that the concept led to the form. The structure itself of a seven act play follows the form of the poem but the book itself started as a kind . . . I had been commissioned to write a few poems for three or four magazines and then when I revisited those poems, I saw that they had quite a lot in common thematically and in terms of their subject and the experiment in them was looking at how language is actually embodied and enacted. And so the question became for me, what is a self? How does the self perform its personhood given the history and the present that a black woman like myself is alive in? And I was reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and it clarified to me some things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Which, to realize that something is actually part of your sensibility and the way that you think about things is a great gift.
And so Christina’s idea of dysgraphia as being part of what she calls “the orthography of the wake” and to be in the wake post transatlantic slave trade is to exist, in her estimation, in a kind of dysgraphia. And she says it takes the form of a narrative of sort of criminality and pathology and that kind of stuff, attached to black people. And then those narratives’ sort of spread in the media in this sort of repetitive way. And so that sense of language for me as a thing that can enact these kinds of violences, because essentially when we talk about narrative, we’re talking about language and the materials of language being put to a particular use. And so, that became the kind of thematic and conceptual core.
And so the question for me became, if the self is like a series of pressurized performances with actual real-world consequences, what does that say about who we are as a species? What does it say about how language does its work? And for me I was really disinterested in the lyric I. And so I took the I, the concept of the I, ain’t I, I ain’t, I ain’t I and I split it seven ways but I’m addressing, or the speaker of the poem is addressing the self as the self, but also as a collective. Right? And so that is what happens. When I took the first person, I, and also use it as second person, I, and also use it as third person, I.
Layla Benitez-James:
Right, we have the opening where you have that written out . . .
Canisia Lubrin:
The dramatis personae.
Layla Benitez-James:
Yeah. That’s great.
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah. So, those sorts of things underpin the form of the book. So, how then do I make all of that concrete and not some sort of thought experiment. And so the central figure of the book became Jejune, who is sort of where all of the Is are refracted, but it’s also who the speaker of the poem is addressing throughout. And so, I borrowed from theater its techniques for making usually really combustive and expensive methods of dialogue and physical interaction work like a kind of singularity pulling the voice through, but it’s a book about interiority as well. And so I didn’t want it to be really self-conscious or self-indulgent and insular. And that’s when I came up with the seven acts of the play, to split the address so that I could look at the various sites of the speaker’s concerns. Right? Which is the self, the world and the world’s orders and what that does in terms of kinship.
And so that’s kind of how the book came together to gesture toward the nature of the imagination. When we sort of enter into conflict, into when we live in a world that’s leaving the detriments of climate, disaster, nationalism, intensified fascism. And so those things are sort of in the background and they formed this sort of scaffolding of the drama of the play. But the concerns, what’s at stake are for me, investigating the opportunities for transformation that we might hold in relation to one another in the world.
Layla Benitez-James:
Yeah. And it’s interesting to hear that there were separate poems written with separate venues in mind that all came together because there are some really different moments in the book, but it all comes together really well. But I’m thinking specifically about, you know, I mentioned in an email that poem “DREAM #41” that has that kind of parabola in it, and then your footnote poems and even just the detail of using different fonts. And I wonder if you have, not necessarily . . . I mean, kind of advice for poets who want to work on more experimental projects or invent their own forms, or how did those specific forms like the footnote and then creating a line that goes to the poem, how did those come together for you? Or was it more instinctual that those poems needed that form?
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah. I’m really just following my creative instincts. And I think for me, I’m hyper aware of the way that form operates in terms of what we like to think of as tradition in literature. And for me, one of the things that I just could not inhabit as a novice writer or as a writer who was learning in an institutional setting, a university and what have you, is the singular sound that the lyric I tended to make. And so that always seemed to be sort of bizarre and in a way, that created a great deal of discomfort for me, so I was never really able to just sit in it uncritically. And so I’m always trying to find a way to both be able to express the thing that I need to express and to give it an appropriate shape, form, structure that to me feels more organic to myself.
And so it’s against a certain kind of assimilation, a certain kind of literary assimilation. And so I’m following those creative instincts and then they lead me to the experiment but in a sense, I think that all writing is fundamentally experimental because what we do when we enter something in the realm of writing, is that we are in search of something or in search of a particular kind of expression that puts pressure on what we already know and so that we can move past the obvious thing. Yeah? And so there’s always a degree of experimentation involved in that, but my own creative instincts sort of lead me to find a form that will hold the integrity of the content that I’m putting in into the work.
So, the poem with the sine wave or the parabola that you’re talking about, when I reach the end of the DREAM and RETURN Sequence, the Act Three that you’re referencing, the kind of call and response that was happening in it, for me, I . . . I’m not even sure how to state this in a way that will make a kind of coherent sense. I wanted a sense of hush, a sense of silence. So, that parabola is a sort of visual enactment of a kind of silence. But it’s not so much the absence of sound, it is the presence of a different kind of fullness of silence. It’s a different kind of filling that silent space with something else. So, it’s a kind of visual redaction for me.
In a sense, it’s like I have gone through this call and response which is really looking at how the self enacts desire and what desire does as a kind of knowledge. How our desires can become weaponized even against ourselves, much less against others. And so, the core of that drama for me to end it with a poem like that, that is a kind of warning, kind of no trespassing sign. That is being critical of itself by redaction. By saying maybe I will redact a few of those expressions in the warning but sonically, I’m referencing a river and visually I have the parabola which is in the shape of a kind of rivering through. So, it’s happening on a number of levels and I think maybe even the word river might’ve been redacted by that measure.
Layla Benitez-James:
Yeah, it’s in the end.
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah. So, the line actually goes through the river, “you who come for me take care to be caught in the sudden bend, the flung mouth, this river.” And so it’s a kind of physical, visual gesture of the thing that’s actually happening in the poem. Because for me, poems are not just about the language, it’s also about what’s happening beyond the language. What’s happening in the imagination that the language pushes open. So again, I’m just following my instincts and those instincts have to make their own kind of sense, right? It might not be the kind of logic that we tend to lean on and claim comprehension of, but it’s tethered to the imagination and what the imagination makes possible.
So, even with the footnotes, again, that’s also enacting something conceptual because on a conceptual level I’m looking again at black history as what it is to be a black woman alive in this moment in time and to be in oneself and to become confident in one’s personhood, when so much of our history have been made footnotes to the sort of grand dominant narratives that are out there even though our existence and everything that we’ve done and contributed is really fundamental to much of what we encounter in so-called modernity. And so for me the question was, okay, what if the footnote is not a place of minor engagement but what if the majority of the poem happens in the footnote?
Layla Benitez-James:
Right. Yeah. And I’ll hold up. I mean, I’ll link as well to some of these, but the weight of the poem is in a footnote, yeah.
Canisia Lubrin:
Exactly. Precisely so. And then, using the different fonts, the sort of errant stanzas that are written in a different font to simply suggest that there’s a multiplicity for both reading and engaging with visually what the poem is doing. So, if you read what is in the dominant font of the text which I think is center or something, if you read that alone, then you still have a full sense of the poem that you would have if you follow your eye being pulled toward the errant stanza that’s in a different font, the poem still works.
Layla Benitez-James:
Right.
Canisia Lubrin:
So, it doesn’t really matter where you put that stanza that’s written in a different font. You could put it first, you could put it second, you could put it third, you could read it last, and the poem still has its integrity. So again, this . . . For me, the things that are interesting are not necessarily interesting to the reader and they might not necessarily be obvious to the reader, but I opened the door. It’s an invitation to be hyperactive in the reading process and to have agency, right? I’m saying, “Reader, you can have agency in how you interact with this poem and you can make the thing what you make of it.” So, if four hundred people read The Dyzgraphxst they can come away with four hundred different poems and that’s okay.
Layla Benitez-James:
Yeah. And I guess that’s a good thing to think of for people who are coming to poetry a little bit earlier because I’ve gotten questions a lot about how experimental is too experimental or that kind of thing, not wanting to lose people. But I think grounding it in your instincts, that’s what people need to do. If they have a feeling something needs to take a certain shape, I think don’t be afraid to lose a reader because they’re just going to . . . You might be surprised yourself what a reader comes away with depending on what it is.
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah. And it’s also this sort of obsession with what the author intended. And if somehow you don’t have absolute access to the author’s intention, then somehow you’ve sort of missed out on something. No. I think that if the poem or the work is capacious enough and because of the nature of its capaciousness, you can find a way to enact whatever it is that your imagination needs, requires, offers to experience the poem. Because the other thing that people tend to either disregard or just don’t think about at all, is the fact that poems are experiential objects. You go to poems for a particular experience of language as well. That’s one of their functions but it’s more than that you see. And so go with the imagination first. That’s the kind of thing that I like to espouse. That sort of readerly relationship with poetry is go first with the imagination and then the rest will sort of figure itself out.
But the thing about experimentation is, for me, what I like to tell my students is if you have experimental impulses, the thing you have to do is to actually trust the unknown because really that’s what it is. You don’t really know what the outcome will be. You just have a certain impulse or a certain idea that then you follow. Right? And so trust the how. If you’re trying to figure out the what, and maybe the what is a little bit unclear, then the how keeps you tethered somehow to the thing and the how might then open up the what for you in these really cool and unexpected ways.
Layla Benitez-James:
And are there experiments that you push your students towards? Like before we started recording, you were saying that you don’t really experience writer’s block or you don’t think about it as writer’s block, but what do you go to when you mean to write? Or is it just like some impulses happening and that’s it? Or are there any kind of prompts or experiments that you go to when you’re trying to get something out?
Canisia Lubrin:
No, I don’t do prompts at all. And I just don’t think writer’s block is a thing. Right? I think it’s like Bigfoot or Santa Claus. It’s a seductive idea that sort of lets us off the hook for the fact that there’s also uncertainty involved in the writer’s life. And that uncertainty is fine. It’s okay. So for me, writing is just part of the rhythm of my life. I am never not writing in a sense, right? In a sense, almost everything you do as a writer, certainly the kind of writer that I am, will eventually lead me to the page. I don’t obsess about what that might be and this is why I don’t use prompts personally, but in my teaching, yes, of course I have to use prompts because it’s just one way of organizing the activity of writerly pedagogy. Yeah? And it’s a thing that sort of democratizes writing activities in the classroom. And so it makes sense in that context.
And usually when I teach poetry courses, I like to include a unit on poetic experimentalism or poetic experimentation. And really, I just look at different forms that sort of belong under the umbrella of experimental poetry and I encourage my students to become familiar with those things, the sort of process forms. Yeah? And so that is a different thing entirely, but personally I don’t use prompts and things like that. I am in the world. I pay attention to the world more than anything. Literally anything could set me writing. Right? It could be a conversation that I have with a friend, it could be me overhearing something somebody says, it could be certainly events that have happened that lead me to the work. So, my being in the world and paying attention to the world and being attentive and just living my everyday life, there are triggers everywhere.
Layla Benitez-James:
That’s a great way to think about it as triggers. And something that I loved that you talked about, the difference between writing Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. You talked about it and maybe this is a little bit like that kind of triggering but also getting it to the page as “tearing through a particular kind of darkness.” But the second book was a bit easier or more familiar. And what, I mean, could you compare what it took to get each different book to the page? Or were there different strategies you were using or was it just kind of like you were in a different time in your writing life?
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah. I don’t really . . . The thing about my writing is that my instincts dominate. So, I don’t have any formulas to offer anyone, I don’t have that kind of advice. I just, again, I’m available to the world and the world’s events and the materials of my living and that’s what I follow. But in terms of the actual process of writing the book, I just make myself available to whatever the book needs. I espouse this as get out of the way. Okay? I don’t obsess about how or why. For example, a professor was telling me recently that The Dyzgraphxst feels like a project book, like writers have this major project book that they tend to devote time to, and I never really thought about it that way at all. It just has that sort of essence and being where it’s doing something that’s really divergent.
But, the darkness that I was signaling to in Voodoo Hypothesis is located again in that subject. It was a subject about the sort of subjugation of black people, the continuing subjugation of black people, how history has a presence and how history actually shapes the present. And I’m looking at all of these systems that enable and perpetuate violence against black people. So, that is dark. The subject matter is dark. Right? In this case, in the case of The Dyzgraphxst, I’m still looking at blackness in its historical and contemporaneous context but the materials for me were more philosophical and located in an intimacy that was not as heavy. Right? And so that conceptually is just different. The book is working in a different register than Voodoo Hypothesis, but certainly I can see seeds of The Dyzgraphxst in Voodoo Hypothesis.
Layla Benitez-James:
Yeah. The two works are speaking to each other for sure. Yeah.
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah.
Layla Benitez-James:
And then in terms of getting your work out into the world, like submitting books or submitting poems, you mentioned that you were commissioned to write poems in several places. What is your approach to sending out your work? Is it also instinctual? Because I know a lot of people try to describe it sometimes when you’re writing to a particular editor, sometimes you’ll describe a little bit what your project is. And so I’m wondering if you . . . Are you just sending out work without description are you framing it in a certain light?
Canisia Lubrin:
Well, I mean, I don’t know. I think each . . . So, this is what I tell my students, because again, I think this sense of literary citizenship where one has to publish in journals and magazines and all that. I think that while yes, sure, that could be a way for one to get one’s work out there and to establish a certain sort of relation to a readership, et cetera. I also think that that’s one of the ways that inequalities are sort of reified in a literary ecosystem that has so many barriers for people who might be doing work that, that prevailing architecture might not necessarily welcome. So, I think each magazine and each journal has its own sort of requisitions, its own policies and such.
So, what I always say is make sure you read about the magazine that you’re pitching to or that you’re submitting to. Look at their submissions guidelines and follow that. And then of course I share do’s and don’ts when you’re putting together a cover letter and that kind of stuff, certainly one page, keep it to a page. You don’t need to send a five page letter. You gesture to why you think your work is a fit for the magazine, et cetera. And so there’s no one answer. It really depends on the magazine. It depends on what they ask you to do in submitting and of course with your own sort of agency, you can speak to your work in about one or two sentences.
I don’t send work out to journals. In the very beginning I did, because again, that is what one is expected to do and my work was rejected for four years straight, and then I just stopped. I just stopped sending work out. And then just before Voodoo Hypothesis was accepted for publication as a manuscript, and that is an unconventional story as well, we don’t have the time for it. But it was just… I was having a conversation with an editor who became my editor for Voodoo Hypothesis, Paul Vermeersch. And then he said, “Why don’t you send me something?” And that’s how I ended up sending Voodoo Hypothesis out. Truly. But just before that I had like two poems accepted in a journal, the very last batch of poems that I sent out. I had two acceptances and another acceptance in a different magazine and then one more acceptance somewhere else.
So, I went from four years straight of rejections to four acceptances within a two month period. And so for me, it’s sitting with the integrity of the work and keeping my head in those pages and engaging my imagination and my instincts for creating with language. And that’s sort of where I’ve stayed. And so when Voodoo Hypothesis came out, then suddenly I was getting requests from all over. “Oh, send us work. Send us work.” Even from the same journals who were rejecting the exact same things that I sent out, and then they eventually accepted. It’s kind of that kind of thing.
And so again, when The Dyzgraphxst came out last year that sort of found a much bigger range of reception, I think, than Voodoo Hypothesis had in a comparable space of time. And so I got like a deluge of requests all over again. So, that seems to be the thing and I have written a ton of . . . A ton for me because I have a million things to do. And so even five requests will seem like a ton, but I’ve had requests that have come my way and I’ve written and sent work out by requests. So, I’m not really engaged in sending work out to journals as I did in the beginning trying to publish work.
Layla Benitez-James:
That’s great though. I mean, I think that’s an inspiring story to have persevered through four years and now you don’t have to engage with submitting stuff. You just have to see what you have to say no to and yes to. Which is good.
Canisia Lubrin:
Well, I don’t know if it’s really saying what I have . . . Choosing to say yes or no, but yeah, certainly there’s always that, but it’s just for me, I just want to write books and I focus on one book at a time. That’s it. And so I don’t really feel drawn to sending work out in that particular kind of way. So maybe for example, I have a book of short stories coming out with Knopf Canada. The K is not silent. And I’m working on those, and I’ve been asked by a few places to submit stories and then they’ve published them and several of them have been nominated for prizes and stuff like that. But that’s not really what I’m focused on. I’m focused on the wholeness of the work, and I’m putting all of my energies in there. And I just trust that when the book comes out that it’ll find some kind of resonance with folks.
And so I think I just have a different relationship to publishing than most people, but I certainly encourage my students and other emerging writers to do what feels right for them. And journals, that’s one way. Certainly that’s one way to do it. But yeah, it’s not a regular part of my practice.
Layla Benitez-James:
And then, we’re coming close on time, but are there any favorite poets that you’d like to recommend that people don’t read enough? Especially because I think a lot of people in the Tell Tell Poetry community certainly are mainly US-based. Are there people that you would recommend that you absolutely love? I know Dionne Brand is one that we’ve talked about, but who else are you reading that you love?
Canisia Lubrin:
So I’m reading a few books right now. Vievee Francis is phenomenal, certainly pick up some Vievee Francis. Although, I don’t really . . . The framing of people don’t read enough of . . . or people should read X, Y, or Z, that framing is always troublesome for me mainly because I just don’t view poetry in this sort of transactional broadly applicable way. Honestly, what you need to do is read broadly enough that hopefully you find a poem or you find a poet whose work you fall in love with, whose work gives you all of the nutritive and imaginative and powerful sense of the world that kind of makes you want to be a better person. That makes you hyper aware of the goodness even though the sort of complexity of the world we have means that we have to pay attention to the fullness of things. And those things are not always easy, right? There’s a lot of difficulty out there but I think poetry has a particular way of enriching us beyond the sort of terrors and the brutalities that are out there.
And so certainly Vievee Francis has been fabulous for me. I’m reading her Forest Primeval almost done right now. Aracelis Girmay wrote The Black Maria.
Layla Benitez-James:
Yeah, great book.
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah, that would be fabulous. Souvankham Thammavongsa is a wonderful poet, wonderful Canadian poet who writes just fabulous minimalist poetry. Just the most startling insights with the fewest engagements with words there. That’s just really fabulous. Safiya Sinclair is a poet sister. Natalie Diaz is a poet sister. Nicole Sealey is a poet sister. Reading M. NourbeSe Philip is always a good idea.
Layla Benitez-James:
Her work really came to mind when I was reading your books. Definitely.
Canisia Lubrin:
Okay. Yeah that’s always a great idea to pick up some NourbeSe. Vladimir Lucien, Sounding Ground, I think is a really special, fabulous book. It just made a sound that I hadn’t seen before in Caribbean poetry. And so Sounding Ground, I think is a really fabulous text. So many, so many. But those are the ones that I’m sitting with right now because I’m planning a course.
Layla Benitez-James:
Oh, lovely. That’s a great list. That’s many really good names.
Canisia Lubrin:
Yeah. And yeah. Oh man, so many but I’m blanking out on several right now. I mean, just yesterday I was with Noor Naga’s Washes, Prays and it’s also a lovely debut book. Check that out. Yeah. So, what I could do is send you, maybe email you a list of some other ones.
Layla Benitez-James:
Oh, yeah. That would be lovely. And we’ll include some links for sure. I love sharing a wide range of works as well.
Canisia Lubrin:
Phoebe Wang. Phoebe Wang’s Admission Requirements is wonderful.
Layla Benitez-James:
Okay, great. Well, Canisia thank you so much for being with us today and I’m really excited to check out your short stories as well. Thank you.
Canisia Lubrin:
Thank you. I appreciate it. Good chatting.
Canisia Lubrin’s book list
Check out Canisia’s book recommendations here. Happy reading!
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