Berg Bartlett

Sharon Berg Interviews Brian Bartlett

(Frontenac House, 2024)

Brian Bartlett

Sharon Berg: Brian, you first came to my attention as someone who backed the persistency of Alden Nowlan’s poetry in the Canadian consciousness. I’ve since found that as an editor you’ve supported all manner of authors doing what people refer to as ‘good’ poetry. While this brings to mind that old phrase “those that can’t... teach,” that isn’t the case for you. You seem to believe in both enjoying the empowerment of books and working toward producing empowering books of your own.

In The Astonishing Room, you’ve dramatized the magic young people often discover in books. You reveal those encounters in both early and aging readers, such as when Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry lays colour over black and white pages (“Bishop’s Hues”), or when a friend’s book brings him back to life after death (“A Dream of a Friend’s Book”). Can the wizardry in books simply help to detach us from the awful destructive realities surrounding us, including climate change, wealth-hoarding and deranged politicians? Or do you think it actually improves our ability to approach and solve these issues?

Brian Bartlett: Though my newest collection includes poems related to each other through parallel titles— “A Reader at Thirteen,” “A Reader at Twenty,” plus others for later ages—I’m glad you recognize that acts of reading appear in several other poems. The collection’s opener, “A Family, Reading,” tells the story of a mother and her children sharing a final book before their deaths. In that piece, set in 1912, the “wealth-hoarding” you cite is evident, in that the doomed family is confined to the ship’s third class. Yes, reading the fairy tale “comforts / a little,” but the poem has no illusions that the family will survive, even if love and the spell of words remain until the end.

Rather than overvaluing books as comforts, helping to “detach” us, we can find that they dizzy and overwhelm us (i.e., the staggering number of pages in “A Reader at Twenty,” Alvarez’s study of suicide in “A Reader at Sixty-Eight”) but, yes, they can also help us wrestle with uncomfortable or agonizing matters.

SB:      Your poems seem determined to suggest more than their words reveal. In fact, they remind me of the character I assumed Merlin was for Prince Arthur when I read books about them as a young person. Those books were both mentor and guide to a complex world that Arthur and I were slowly discovering. All of this lies like subtext beneath your theme of a poet recording observations as he ages. Some of the poems explore the world enthusiastically like Arthur; others offer cautions, like Merlin. Can readers explore your book with both enthusiasm and caution?

BB:    Thanks, Sharon, for the entertaining, enlightening Merlin/Arthur contrast. (That reminds me of a comment the publisher Goose Lane made in the back-cover description of my 2008 collection The Watchmaker’s Table: “Wrestling with words as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett….” That image pleasingly amused me: I couldn’t resist imagining a cartoon of a wrestling match between man and angel with identical faces.)

As for words suggesting more than they reveal, don’t we hope to find that in all poetry—all literary writing? The pairing of “enthusiasm and caution” might be compared to energy and restraint, or zest and irony, or expansiveness and concentration (or what A. R. Ammons called flow and shape). Yes, I’d hope readers experience wildness—in syntactical branching, rhythmical momentum, multiple-adjective experimenting, complicating asides, alliterative patterns and other sound echoes. In contrast are the powers of sparseness, understatement, apparent simplicity. I value collections with a wide variety of textures, and hope The Astonishing Room has that—from the elaborations of “A Dream of Speech” and “Revising the Will,” for instance, to the comparative economy of “To a Red Osier Dogwood in Winter” and “Two Rings on a Finger.” Collections can also benefit from having outliers; poems like “The Favourite Day” (in the voice of Sisyphus) and the somewhat metaphysical “Three Faces and a Great Absence” might help the collection from becoming too monochromatic.

Another duality exists in “New Year’s Eve Question,” a poem that begins with memories of mulling over “the heart and the mind.” Someone at the December 31st party, likely well into his cups, asks, “Would you call yourself Apollonian / or Dionysian?” When I choose that poem for public readings, there’s always at least one or two people in the audience who guffaw, and I find it hard to read the line without laughing. Maybe those respondents are, like the poem’s speaker, likely to answer, “it all depends,” and to be “easily pegged a Libra.” That of course suggests balance, and takes us back to your Arthur and Merlin.

SB:      As I read, following the chronology of your poems, you took me back to the astonishing room in the local library that I, myself, visited many times, as I was being introduced to books. Have you ever thought about the stack of books you’ve read during your lifetime being on someone else’s shelf or bedside table? How much does the library within ourselves speak to who we are as a person?

BB:     To answer your first question, no, I’ve never imagined all the books I’ve read forming a pile on another reader’s bedside table. Some table! Some stack! Some bedroom! But, to quote the ending of “A Reader at Twenty,” which you’ve just cited: “I embraced / the impossibility of drinking it all, / those billions and trillions of surrounding symbols.” Symbols, words, minds and hearts, other beings, are unknowable in their totality, but if readers at twenty (and much later) can’t embrace them all, they can at least embrace the thrilling impossibility that results from the vastnesses of past, present and future.

Your second question is loaded! I like your phrasing “the library within ourselves.” Our personal history of reading says much about our affections and desires, our linguistic tastes, our needs for the narrative or the metaphorical, the specific or the generalized, the historical or the fantastic. There’s no such thing as a universal reader; we differ enormously in what we respond to, in what we enjoy and what we learn to need. A comprehensive list of our reading should at least provide clues to “who we are.”

SB:      Okay, if that was a loaded question, then I assume you’ll find this one loaded in its implications. Do you live in an urban or rural setting? Is there anything about the environment surrounding you that impacts your writing? Are there open spaces? Crowds of people? Please explain how your environment affects your writing.

BB:     My first two decades were spent in New Brunswick, mostly in Fredericton—then a place with a population of only 20,000, town-sized, but considered a city, with the presence of a provincial government and two universities—then I lived for 15 years in Montreal, lavishly stimulated by a city then of nearly 3,000,000 citizens. Since 1990, now for over half my life, I’ve been settled in Halifax/Kjipuktuk. In a sense, I’ve lived in three cities—large, small and medium-sized.

A few of poems from my Montreal years were rooted in details of urban life and lives, but even during that period I kept on using images and settings stemming from memories of (or return trips back to) New Brunswick. The Astonishing Room and several of the preceding collections provide many specifics based in both the city and spots in rural Nova Scotia. The ocean, shores and harbours are crucial to the poems in part because they tantalize and compel this poet’s sight, hearing, smell and touch. “Leaving the Island” describes a small piece of sea-surrounded land with a defunct lighthouse, and natural elements reclaiming the space. In “A Dream of a Border” Halifax’s harbour suddenly becomes New York’s, and a miraculous swimmer is refused entry—a turn that takes on more resonance in the Trump years?

In a different vein, the poems “The Happiness of Antique Shops” and “The Sadness of Antique Shops” wouldn’t exist without my many visits to labyrinthine Great Village Antiques, next to Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood house. One enjoyable aspect of writing those cataloguing poems was the mining of what I called in an earlier collection, for its section of found poems, the given. Sometimes the happenstantial and the serendipitous (to echo the poem “Dessert and Coincidence”) arise from unexpected encounters with birds, flowers or rocks, but the flotsam and jetsam of human endeavours just as easily generate language.

You speak of “open spaces.” One reason I’ve found Halifax/Kjipuktuk an hospitable, stirring environment for living and writing—besides its being where I met my wife and where our two children were born—is the ease of driving less than half an hour to walk in a dense forest, or along a beach listening to nothing but the ocean.

SB:      I can definitely relate to all of those points, Brian. To switch our focus somewhat, it’s my understanding that some authors find titles are difficult to come up with, though others seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for The Astonishing Room? I found that phrase echoed my own sense of uncovering wonders at the library as a child or adult.

BB:     Some of my earlier collections, such as Granite Erratics and The Afterlife of Trees, included poem titles that cried out to be book titles—but that’s not always the case. The Astonishing Room began as The Guestbook, but I soon felt that title was too reductive, so Guestbook and Kaleidoscope provided contrast and combined the text image with one of multi-coloured shiftings; and several poems in the collection include lists of colours. Frontenac House accepted the collection under that title, but both my editor and I had qualms about it. Soon I came up with another provisional title, Readers and Dreams, liking the assonance and the many poems that the title represented.

In its journal-published, differently-titled draft of a decade earlier, “The Reader at Twenty” had too distanced a beginning. When the manuscript was under the refining fires of revision, one day I changed the first line to “The astonishing room was like a heart’s chamber,” and immediately the title phrase leapt out at me. The editor (John Wall Barger) agreed it was more attractive than all the working titles. How grateful I was that Johnny had coaxed me to rethink the poem’s first lines, the impetus that led to a phrase touching on the sense of astonishment present elsewhere in the collection. (Incidentally, after choosing the rarely used word “astoundment” in one poem, I was briefly unconscious of its link to the book’s title.)

SB:      I am wondering if this is a book where poems seemed almost to fall onto the page, as if they were channelled, or did you need to put a lot of effort into finding its structure? Was there a laborious developmental process? If there’s a part of early drafts that was removed, does the removed section offer the starting-point for a different book?

BB:     The structuring didn’t emerge easily, so forgive me, Sharon, for giving a laborious answer.

Though my previous collections had all used titled sections, I tried The Guestbook first as a book without sections. Originally it included an excessively long haiku-and-senryu montage, and a sequence of micro prose-poems. Neither of them survived the editing process—but I took some comfort in the prose poems already having appeared as a chapbook, and in the haiku perhaps finding a home in a planned future collection of such montages.

Then it was apparent the book’s order could seem confusing, its material too miscellaneous (though as a reader I savour kaleidoscopic books, and experience some tightly-woven collections as too thematically narrow). Early on the “reader poems” and the “dream poems” were scattered throughout the book; I was influenced by examples like Heaney’s The Haw Lantern, which distributes poems whose titles use the format “From the Frontier of…” and “From the Republic of….” At one point I reformatted the collection with all the “reader poems” together, and likewise with all the “dream poems,” but that experiment failed; thus, the ultimate decision, to entitle the book’s first section “Readers and Dreams” and alternate those two types of poems through the first dozen or so pages.

Soon the nature of the other three sections fell into place: section 2, the poems of youth and family, with the poet as student, son, brother, father; 3, poems centered on images of water and trees, birds and insects and trees; and 4, mostly poems delving into history, communities, neighbourhoods, strangers. Finally it felt like the varied collection had a backbone, despite its multiple tones, styles and stanzaic forms.

SB:      All authors discover that a number of their readers can be nosey. It’s said that the cost of celebrity is dealing with the fan’s desire to know how much of a work is invented, how much autobiographical. What are your thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity?

BB:     That curiosity is understandable and all-too-human, but irrelevant to the words on the page, in that as readers we mostly don’t know nearly enough about a writer’s life to tell what is and isn’t fictional. Even in poems that cite family members by name, I don’t hesitate to change small details or tweak chronology from the “realities” of the given. Besides recording, poets abridge and synthesize. “New Year’s Eve Party,” for example, blends memories from different years, creating a new whole.

SB:      Many authors say a writer never feels they’re finished with their work. Some say they’ll always wish they could adjust and tweak their published writing. Do you feel that way about The Astonishing Room?

BB:     Characteristically, in the past few months I’ve already adjusted a few lines in the book. In light of Wanting the Day: Selected Poems (2003)—drawn from my five collections preceding it, with many lines in many poems rephrased or slimmed down or fleshed out—some pages of The Astonishing Room will undergo changes if I publish another selected volume before kicking the bucket. We owe it to the poems (and to our readers) not to consider every published phrase or line sacrosanct. Still, some poets have genuine reasons for remaining faithful to aged poems rather than imposing later choices on them; poets’ wariness of what they’d experience as tampering should be respected. Let’s accept different attitudes to post-publication editing.

SB:      I’m certainly fine with the attitude of different strokes for different folks. It seems very Canadian in today’s light on what’s happening below our border, after all. What would you say is a key point in The Astonishing Room that shouldn’t be lost if it’s ever converted to another medium or language?

BB:     Any poem adapted from one language into another is bound to be a different poem, a cousin to the original. But the relationship is there. In any recasting of my poems in another language, I’d hope key characteristics of the English wordings would be maintained: varied diction and syntax, flexible lines and stanzas, humour and pathos, sounds and rhythms echoing sense, and many other pleasures of the text (to pluralize Barthes’ The Pleasure…).

SB:      Finally, how does this book fit in the stream of your work? Is there a fundamental difference between The Astonishing Room and your prior writing?

BB:     My previous collections each included poems from a much shorter span of time. Between 1989 and 2001, it worked out that I had a new collection out every four years. In radical contrast, The Astonishing Room derives mostly from a period of sixteen years. A major reason for that change is that between 2012 and 2021 I wrote three prose books of nature writing, along with much of All Manner of Tackle: Living with Poetry, more than a decade’s worth of prose about poetry.

In the newest collection, one central difference is how much the poems turn to aging, mortality, sickness, death and memory. That might sound a little grim—but I trust that the book is also celebratory, full of fascinations, eager to ponder unique dreams, tell affecting stories and express love.

SB:      Oh, I don’t think you have any worry that readers will be in want of celebratory moments in this book. Thank you, Brian, for answering these questions with such candor about your process. This was an enlightening interview.

Brian Bartlett has published sixteen collections and chapbooks of poetry, three volumes of nature writing, and a gathering of his prose on poetry. His most recent books are The Astonishing Room and Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal. He has also edited many selections of poets’ works, a compilation of prose about Don McKay, an anthology of poems about childhood, and Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems. Bartlett’s honours have included The Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry, two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes, and a short-listing for the 2025 Al and Eurithe Poetry Prize. Since 1990 he has lived in Halifax/Kjipuktuk. For many years he has kept a daily journal.

Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She taught in Ontario after studying to become a teacher with a focus on First Nations Education: B.A./Laurentian U.; B.Ed/U of T; M.Ed/York U; and D.Ed/UBC. She received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U and is an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, releasing chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. Her poetry appears as full books with Borealis, Coach House, and Cyberwit, and she has four chapbooks with BPR Press. Sharon’s short fiction is with Porcupine’s Quill, and her nonfiction appears with BPR Press. Her writing appears across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Chile, England, Wales, Netherlands, Germany, Siberia, Romania, India, Persia, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.