Breeding Dogs in Order to Keep Cats

An interview with poet, journalist, and editor Mark Abley
by Carmine Starnino 

MARK ABLEY GREW up in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. He studied literature at the University of Saskatchewan and, after winning a Rhodes Scholarship, at St. John’s College, Oxford. Winner of the National Newspaper Award for critical writing and a former contributing editor of both Saturday Night and Maclean's, Abley’s books include Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, shortlisted for both the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, and Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. The Tongues of Earth: New and Selected Poems is his fourth collection of poetry and his first in a decade.

CARMINE STARNINO
Let’s start at the end—or, more precisely, with the closing phrase that gives the selected its title. “The Tongues of Earth” is taken from a poem that, among other things, mulls the death of endangered languages and the existential cost of that loss. What’s the connection with poetry—your poetry? Are you hinting at the art’s ephemerality?

MARK ABLEY
The gist of the poem in question, “Glasburyon,” came to me when I realized that some great poets must have been entirely forgotten because they worked in a language that has vanished, or all but vanished. We know the English language has been tremendously enriched by Shakespeare, but we need to realize, too, that Shakespeare was lucky to have been born in a time and place where his language was wild and rich, rising and unconstrained. Fate dealt him an incredible hand. Yet if someone of Shakespeare’s gifts had grown up in the Caucasus or New Guinea, for instance, where every valley has a language of its own, who outside that valley would be the wiser?

That’s the idea behind the opening section of “Glasburyon.” Later I quote a few lines from a ballad in the Norn language, a descendant of Old Norse that survived until the early nineteenth century on the Orkney and Shetland islands off the north coast of Scotland. The lines are very haunting, I think, because they speak about cultural memory. Of course a culture can be forgotten in all sorts of ways, but the power of language gives oblivion a special resonance. Whoever composed that ballad (and in the oral tradition, it may have been recalled and revised and reimagined by many poets over the centuries) had faith in Norn. You don’t create a poem without having faith in a tongue.

STARNINO
Is that still true for you—having faith?

ABLEY
Of course. I adore the English language, but I’m deeply unhappy at how English and the other so-called major languages are erasing smaller languages around the world. I think “Glasburyon,” and perhaps on a larger scale the entire book, bears witness to a certain inner conflict on this score. I’ve studied the history of English, I know how fast the language changes, and I’m fully aware that in the unlikely event somebody a few centuries from now were to come across my poems, that person would find my words very hard to understand. Time always serves to erase. I suppose that as I get older, I’m becoming less interested in the celebrated shock of the new, and more engaged with the obscure shock of the old.

STARNINO
You organized Tongues of Earth thematically rather than going the chronological route. Why? What benefits did you see in a thematic ordering?

ABLEY
First, it allowed me to sort the poems into a quasi-musical structure that I enjoy. The four sections can be seen or heard as movements of a larger whole. But there’s an element of narcissism in my saying that, because I realize it’s not how a lot of people, including me, tend to read a book of poems. I usually browse and graze my way through a collection, instead of chomping dutifully from the start. If you listen to a Shostakovitch string quartet, let’s say, you listen to it through time, in time. But when you read a book of poems, you’re free to disregard whatever order the poet imposed on it.

The second reason, which may be stronger, is that by organizing the poems according to theme, I could avoid the dangers of a chronological arrangement. If the best poems in a Selected come from early in a career, the later work seems like a sad falling-off. But if the best poems appear late in a book, readers might wonder why they had to wade through so much mud before arriving at clear water in the end. By choosing the thematic approach, I could leave it carefully unclear which poems come from the past and which from the present.

STARNINO
But won’t it have been helpful to give readers a sense of your growth from book to book?

ABLEY
Do you think most readers are looking for that kind of help? I don’t. I think they’re looking for good poems that fit together—poems that rhyme with each other, so to speak, no matter when they were written.

STARNINO
Fair enough. The selected, however, draws on poems going back to the 1980s. When looking over the material again, what did you notice about your work that surprised you?

ABLEY
The extent to which many of the poems in my second book, and even a few in my third, were “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” That was T.S. Eliot’s comment on his own early work. And I agree: poems can often do the work of therapy. Of course, Eliot could grumble to magnificent effect. I couldn’t.

STARNINO
You’ve also revised a number of poems. Poets like Derek Mahon have come under fire for altering their early work, but you felt comfortable doing so. Why?

ABLEY
Why should I care if Derek Mahon has come under fire? I respect his choices, just as I respect the choices and admire the work of W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell. They were all inveterate revisers. As Valéry famously put it, “A poem is never finished, merely abandoned.”

The trouble is, as I found in looking back on my previous books, I often abandoned poems too early. I was satisfied enough, happy enough, and I didn’t always take the trouble to make every line, every image, every word, as sharp and resonant as it could be. I didn’t always make sure the music of a poem was in total harmony. If my friends told me a poem was finished, I was all too ready to believe them. Now I know better—I think.

STARNINO
You've always written on ecological issues—these poems can be found in section two and they comprise some of your best work. Yet I would hesitate to label you an eco-poet. Your concerns about the environment are often grounded in description rather than evangelism. In other words, you escape what, for me, are the worst tendencies of that movement: you capture the experience of the non-human world rather than write over it. How conscious are you of making sure your politics doesn’t harm the poetry?

ABLEY
Are you saying that an eco-poet has to be an evangelist? Are you saying that eco-poets fail to capture the experience of the non-human world? I dispute both suggestions. But I also don’t want to be defined by this or any other label. The majority of my poems have nothing to do with ecology, at least in the narrow sense of the word.

That said, I ruefully admit that in my previous collections, I wasn’t careful enough to keep my politics from damaging my poetry. I’ve written quite a few poems born from sheer despair about what we’re doing to the planet, and I’ve published several that should have stayed safely inside a locked drawer. I’m happy if you think that the ecological poems in The Tongues of Earth work well, and if they do, it’s surely because I found ways to turn my despair away from rhetoric and into poetry. That means I worked the poems into form, making use of form, allowing form to make use of me. It astonishes me how lazy many Canadian poets are in their disregard of form.

STARNINO
Can you give me an example from the book?

ABLEY
Sure. “Into Thin Air” is a poem about the Imperial Woodpecker, the largest woodpecker known to have existed anywhere on Earth – it was even bigger than the famous Ivory-Billed of the southern United States. The Imperial Woodpeckers made their home in the mountains of northern Mexico, where the last bird one almost certainly died at some point between 1960 and 1990. “Into Thin Air” is in three parts, each of them written in syllabics, with the lines going from sixteen syllables down to one. This gives each section a V shape on the page. Shaping the poem in this way meant that the experience of reading it, even of seeing it, evokes the fate of the species. I think it helped to keep in check my recurrent tendency toward easy lament. I had something I needed to evoke in each section, and the evoking had to be guided not by my feelings but by the form.

STARNINO
Speaking of form, the selected reveals an amazing range: indented stanzas, sonnets, tercets, pastoral, urban, free-verse, rhyme, first-person lyrics, historical poems. Do you think stylistic variety is important in a poet?

ABLEY
I don’t like to be bored by books of poetry, and I often am. When a poet finds a particular style and sticks to it doggedly, don’t the reader’s eyes and ears glaze over after a while? I’d rather be a Richard Thompson than a Pete Seeger. I’d rather be a Klee than a Gris. What matters to me is the mastery of whatever style is apt and necessary for each individual poem.

STARNINO
You write very well, and intimately, about family. I think here of your love poem, “Again”; the poem about your father’s illness, “Cancer”; the elegy for your mother, “Mother and Son”; your daughter’s birth, “Expecting.” What are your thoughts on including private details in poems? Any personal topics you would avoid?

ABLEY
Honestly, I struggle with the private details. I don’t feel entirely comfortable exposing the people I love—it’s much easier to expose myself. “Mother and Son” is a poem I wrote in the early ‘90s, a time of emotional turbulence. Some of my friends have heard me read it aloud. But I refused to publish the poem until a few years ago, when my mother was living in a nursing home and suffering from dementia, at which point I sent it to the TLS. This is its first appearance in a book. As long as there was any chance that my mother could see the poem in print, I wasn’t willing to risk hurting her.  

STARNINO
The book tracks many of your journeys around the globe. Irving Layton once claimed his trips replenished his stock of metaphors. Do you feel that way?

ABLEY
Of course. My brain lets my eyes see more freshly when I’m travelling. I reawaken to the strangeness of the world.

STARNINO
You lived in England for several years in the late 1970s and early '80s, first as a Rhodes Scholar, then a freelance writer, before moving to Montreal in 1983. Can you tell me a little of how CanLit looked to you then, fresh from a stint abroad?

ABLEY
I’m not sure I ever had a clear overview, and I’m not even sure how possible that is. Vancouver still seems to me pretty foreign as a literary centre, just as I’m sure Montreal is foreign to a lot of writers on the west coast. Whereas in Britain, even if many poets choose to live far away from London, the publishing scene is overwhelmingly concentrated in the capital. Canada’s different in that regard; we have an overwhelming amount of geography, so to speak, and Toronto doesn’t have the intellectual dominance of a London or a Paris. One thing that has changed since the early ‘80s is that back then, Canadian writing hadn’t really been discovered by the rest of the English-speaking world. I remember telling the very skeptical editor of the British magazine Literary Review about a terrific Canadian author by the name of Alice Munro. Nowadays there would be no skepticism about Canadian fiction writers. There might still be some skepticism about Canadian poets.

STARNINO
Where do you think that skepticism comes from? And what would it take to change it?

ABLEY
I’m not sure. But sometimes I wonder if the inner rhythms of British and North American English have diverged so far that readers on another continent have trouble “hearing” a poet’s voice in its full resonance. The colloquial lexicon is becoming more and more different, too. Here’s a pair of lines by a very good poet from northern England, Tony Harrison: “say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath, / now National Trust, a place where they got tin…” My parents were British, and I’ve lived in England, so those lines mean something to me. But do they mean a thing to most Canadians? And here’s the opening of Al Purdy’s “My ’48 Pontiac:” “All winter long it wouldn’t start / standing in the yard covered with snow / I’d go out at 10 below zero and coax…” Do lines like that speak to British readers?

STARNINO
One of the poets you’ve championed is Anne Szumigalski, who died in 1999. Can you talk a little about your relationship with her?

ABLEY
When I met Anne, she was almost 50 and I was 16. She was the unofficial leader of a poetry group that met every second Wednesday evening in the homes of different people around Saskatoon. For the next few years, until I left for Oxford, she was a terrific mentor—wise, funny, helpful, and utterly devoted to poetry. I’ve never known anyone who could be so profoundly down-to-earth while also having her head so high in the clouds. Eventually, when I’d settled in Montreal, she asked me to be her literary executor, and I was proud and happy to agree—having no idea, of course, of the amount of work that would be involved. Anne died in 1999, and over the next decade I edited her last manuscript for Brick Books, a selected poems for Signature, and a book of her uncollected poems and prose for Coteau. Now the work is done.

STARNINO
What were your influences when you first started out? And who do you read now for pleasure and inspiration?

ABLEY
When I started out, my influences were an unholy brew of Anne Szumigalski, Robert Lowell, Rainer Maria Rilke and T.S. Eliot, with a dash of Ted Hughes thrown in for discomfort. Today I’m more likely to find pleasure and inspiration in new prose than in new poetry. I have a low tolerance for mediocre poetry, and there’s a hell of a lot of it about. Of course there are a few living poets I admire and enjoy reading, but I’m not going to mention any names. Among those who are no longer living, the two who give me the greatest pleasure and most constant inspiration are Seamus Heaney and Elizabeth Bishop.

STARNINO
You’ve worked as a journalist, magazine writer and editor—what Robert Graves once described as breeding dogs in order to keep cats. How has the dog-breeding influenced your poetry?

ABLEY
That’s a wonderful line—I’d never heard it before. The short answer would be, it’s the only thing that keeps a woof over my head.

The longer answer is that acquiring and editing scholarly non-fiction for McGill-Queen’s University Press, which is how I earn much of my living these days, has done nothing for my imagination or my poetry. The best part about the job is that it has put me in touch with a few good writers and many good people, including my colleagues at the press. But there’s nothing poetic about it.

The relationship between the journalism and the poetry is more complex. On the positive side, to make a career in journalism requires anyone to write clearly and succinctly, and to have an intuitive sense for what an audience can be expected to understand. I think this can be useful training for poets—far more useful, I would argue, than knowing how to flourish inside the academy. Being a feature writer for newspapers and magazines also gave me the chance to travel, to meet some extraordinary men and women, and to keep my mind constantly alert. I wrote a non-fiction book about threatened languages, Spoken Here, that emerged directly out of my work as a journalist; and of all the things I’ve done in my life, Spoken Here is one of the few I look back on with tremendous pride.

On the negative side, writing journalism for so many years drained away a lot of energy that could have gone into poetry. It may have made me too ready to sacrifice complexity for the sake of being accessible, too unwilling to take enough risks. And I’m convinced, too, that it has harmed my reputation. To say, “I’m a poet, and I teach creative writing at such-and-such a university” is instantly respectable. Boring, predictable, but respectable. To say “I’m a poet, and I work as a journalist for the Montreal Gazette” is somehow disreputable. Why is that, Carmine?

STARNINO
I may be the wrong person to ask. I’m happy not to have ended up in a university full-time. My own sense is that journalism brought a grit and trenchancy to your poetry that might otherwise have been missing. Do you feel the success of your non-fiction hurt the reception of your poetry—kept it in the shadows?

ABLEY
I think it fostered a mistaken sense that I was a prose writer who merely dabbled in poetry. It may have encouraged some people to think, “Abley already has a voice in non-fiction, why does he need one in poetry, too?” But what has hurt my reputation more, I think, is that I’ve never bothered to do the sorts of things that many poets do on the side. I don’t blog about poetry. I don’t edit poetry for a journal or a publishing house. I haven’t reviewed poetry for many years. I don’t teach creative writing at universities or colleges or summer schools. I’ve never published a collection of poems with the same publisher twice. I don’t adhere to any particular clique.  

My hope for The Tongues of Earth is a very simple one: that people will actually read the book. That’s all I ask for—a fair chance.

 

CARMINE STARNINO is Partisan's Senior Contributing Editor. His most recent book is Lazy Bastardism (2012). 

MARK ABLEY is the author, most recently, of The Tongues of Earth, which will be launched in Montreal on Saturday, April 25, 2 pm, at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival (Hotel 10, corner of Sherbrooke and St. Laurent) and on Wednesday, May 6 at The Word bookstore (469 Milton Street).