Sharon Berg Interviews Maureen Hynes
Sharon Berg: I’ve been looking forward to doing this interview, Maureen, so thank you for agreeing to it. I found there’s a species of joy that links poems in the first section of Take the Compass unexpectedly. It awakens the reader to a vision of life as a journey through the cosmos, rather than a simple walk on Earth’s plane. It also speaks to the journey we humans are meant to engage in through language, which has at its heart communication with others, whoever or whatever they may be. In fact, while it suggests our human journey is not without its pains and sorrows in addition to cautionary tales, it revels in discovery of the true reason we undertake this journey in the first place. Therefore, these poems set up our reception of the book as a whole. Please offer a comment on the ordering and organizing the poems. Did the book’s design come to you unbidden, in the way poems often arrive, as if they are channeled? Or was the organization of this book a difficult process?
Maureen Hynes: I am so heartened to read your phrase, “a species of joy” that you see as linking the poems in the collection’s opening section, “before nightfall.” In fact, the theme of journeys was a surprise to me when I started to assemble the rough pile of poems into a manuscript. That discovery helped me choose a title and do some initial organizing. But I must also credit a wonderfully generous poet and colleague, John Reibetanz, for discerning the sections and the sub-themes in the manuscript. I’d read at least a dozen articles on how to order a poetry manuscript, but really what I think is needed is another reader, someone with an “eagle eye” to scan the whole territory. I can do that task for other poets, but for some reason, I just couldn’t summon that skill for my own work, though I tried various methods including spreading the poems out on the floor and moving them around into what I hoped were coherent piles. It was really John’s clarity that helped me achieve a final order—and this is part of what you recognize as the journey “we humans are meant to engage in through language.” SB: You, like many, have gathered a series of poems that experience human isolation and grief through the pandemic in Take the Compass. There are sensitive pieces expressing sadness, yet overall, I’m impressed you offer an effervescent hope for better endings than those predicted by so many others. The poems reach outward, to uplift the spirit. Does this perception describe your inner goal for this book? Does your ability to write poetry that expresses endurance through the thick and thin of human experiences surprise you? Please comment. MH: Well, as a matter of fact, it does surprise me that you find a vein of “effervescent hope” in these poems! It makes me wonder about how I characterize myself as someone who looks at the bleak and frightening and destructive aspects of life on this planet, and who definitely feels some despair (I am writing these responses as we enter the second month of the bombardment of Gaza and the West Bank). As I wrote the poems or as I tried to assemble them into a manuscript form, I didn’t feel an “inner goal” to uplift readers; perhaps my poems show some hopefulness as a trait that I aspire to, that I try to reach. Most, probably all, of the poems were written during the pandemic (which, I hasten to say, is NOT over), and I feared that topic would weigh the collection down, and the poems would be predictable plaints that would be soon outdated. In the end, I don’t think that fear was warranted. You ask if my inner goal was to “uplift the spirit of others.” No, not explicitly—to me, a collection is like a polyhedron that you can hold and turn around in your hands—each face with a different aspect of the contemporary moment. So it’s appropriate to address the grief and losses the pandemic has wrought, as well as the laughter and lightness and beauty around us. In the poem about the song, “Bella Ciao” I write, “Yes, I understand life’s a rough ascent / an icy path, sometimes a precipice to hang from.// I apprehend the perils and paralysis. Still, the melody’s / sweet ferocity filtered through…” Perhaps the poems are a search for that hopefulness. SB: Every book takes a stance in the midst of the social and political concerns of its day. How do you describe the position of this book and its area of concern in today’s world? MH: When I experience something like sighting a swastika painted on a fire hydrant after a lovely walk beside Toronto’s Don River, or visiting the sculpture outside the Stonewall pub in New York, or reading Lorine Niedecker’s poem about the woman who left her baby in a forest during the Spanish Civil War—these images and experiences strike a deep chord: they haunt me. Fascism, war, racism, homophobia are topics I can’t ignore; in fact, I feel compelled to address them, especially as they appear to be gaining ascendancy in the world. The challenges in writing about issues like these is to avoid preachiness, a tone of self-righteousness, but equally—not to shy away from including them in my work. SB: Can you offer an idea of the literary surrounds for this work? As in, what books were you most impressed with reading while you worked on it. And what live performances, if any, did you attend that you feel influenced the book you produced? MH: At the back of Take the Compass, there is a long list of poets whose work has inspired my own poems as responses: C.D. Wright, Lorine Niedecker, Ann Carson, Brenda Hillman, Robin Blaser, Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan. So—mostly women poets, though not exclusively. I often read collections by poets such as these in group sessions with other poets—a reading method I find instructive and inspiring and generative. This is a very effective model that I first encountered in Hoa Nguyen’s Toronto poetry workshops, and since then, I’m grateful to have a group of other poets to continue sharing in-depth readings of collections we choose, and to respond to the work we read. It is a practice that’s highly effective for me—and we have a lot of fun and deepen our friendships this way, too. SB: Something that often interests readers is knowing how much of a certain work has been invented by an author and how much is autobiographical. Would you care to share your approach/thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity? MH: Yes, I wonder about that, too, when I’m reading poems, especially those written in the first person—did that really happen to you? Some collections are openly biographical, like Roger Reeves’s Best Barbarian, but I think most poets, including me, mix moments—or decades—of our actual lives into our poetry. In some of my poems, I compare my own experience with that of another poet’s, as in the poem about the coming of spring “the invisibles” where I respond to Brenda Hillman’s “Poem for a National Seashore: ix”. In others, like the prose poem “Fitful” I recount the factual—and striking—details of my night in a hospital sleep lab. And some seemingly autobiographical poems, like “Uncountables” which begins, “When the young woman asked me, “How much?” / I answered, “Four” are complete fiction. The tongue-in-cheek poem, “Hello, Bobbin” is also outright fiction (I don’t really talk to my sewing machine—in fact, I’ve neglected it for years). Some poems are simply exercises in word-play, like “Everything’s Hunky-Dory” while several others are ekphrastic, responding to works of visual art, as in “The Juggler” (1956), which considers Remedios Varo’s surrealist painting of twenty women under a single giant grey cloak while gazing at an enchanted juggler. Visual art is a welcome source of inspiration for me. SB: Titles are often difficult to come up with, though some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for this book? MH: For the longest time, I was wedded to “Bus Ticket, Window Seat” from the poem of the same title. I liked its cadence and directness and sense of urgency. I still like it! And choosing it alerted me to the undercurrent of “journeys” in the collection. But a trusted friend suggested it wasn’t the best title for the book, and though I was reluctant to let “Bus Ticket” go, I had realized it suggested the poet was more of an observer than an active participant in the world. “Take the Compass” felt like a more forceful stance for a title, not just a directive to the reader, but equally to the writer—a suggestion that a complicated journey was ahead, and that it would require aids and supports to keep from getting lost, or giving up. SB: If your book were to be chosen for the list in a graduate course, what discipline do you think it would fit in: history, politics, social change, philosophy? Or would it be used to describe a particular taste in writing, a genre, a literary style or ___? MH: This is not an answer about what academic field Take the Compass belongs in, because I think it responds to all the disciplines you mention, hopefully social change or social justice the most. But in terms of how I think of a poetry manuscript, I sometimes see it in textile terms — an embroidery, a tapestry, a woven carpet, a clever costume. It is something whose threads and patches need to be stitched together into a harmonious pattern or a seemingly random, but striking dis/order. This “textile” theme reoccurs in the poems, as in “Midwinter Day” where I ask “what is the fabric of the veil / behind which the unconscious / hides is it a net curtain // with hundreds of sequins or a steel mesh / or plant-based like a lavender sachet”. SB: Is there a certain book, a collection of works, or a literary movement that inspired you to begin work to map out Take the Compass? Please elaborate. What was the initial inspiration, even if it’s, perhaps, something counterintuitive? MH: I actually don’t map out a collection ahead of writing it. I envy those poets who do. I work poem by poem, and when I have amassed a goodly number of poems, I begin the difficult task of choosing what to keep and what to omit, and discovering themes or a common thread throughout. Of course, I do long for a single, overarching, theme to draw me in sufficiently strongly that I could write a whole collection on that main theme, or single event, or person, or relationship in my life. I very much admire poets like my friend Arleen Paré, who writes an entire book in deep response to another poet’s work—Etel Adnan, for example—or to a single event or family tragedy, as in her very recent and extraordinary Absence of Wings. Another poet-friend, John Reibetanz, writes collections that are, for example, all glosas in response to the work of the tenth century Chinese poet, Wang An-Shih; or, as with his poems in By Hand, a collection that is centred on various forms of human creativity. However, it seems I need to discover my theme by writing the poems, rather than consciously beginning with a single theme or source or experience to help me to map out the book in advance. For me, pulling together a manuscript is more like a jigsaw puzzle—where does this poem-piece fit? The search for the right place and order is, for me, a difficult one. SB: Many people say that an author is never really finished with their work and would always wish to adjust and tweak their writing. Do you feel that way about this book, wishing you could change something? MH: Well, of course there are always some small mis-steps in a collection—and sometimes larger ones!—but I don’t feel that this collection is “unfinished.” I think there might be a couple of poems that I now find weak-ish. But in general, I am usually satisfied with the poems and how they are organized into a full manuscript. By the time a book is published, I have actually moved on to newer work, and that always constitutes the major challenge: the work ahead. And as I’ve said earlier in this interview, my main poetry goal is to keep writing new work, keep generating new ideas and overcoming new challenges. SB: Books are often turned into television shows, movies, or radio scripts. They are also frequently translated into other languages. What would you say is the key point about Take the Compass that should not be lost if it was converted to another form or another language? MH: Well, I can’t imagine this collection as a movie or TV show—it really isn’t narrative enough—but a translation into another language would certainly be a very welcome honour! I think the key point of this collection is the compass as a kind of symbol, an aid, but also a directive to find and keep a tool—or many tools—in order to navigate our paths safely and compassionately and creatively through our collective lives. The poem mentions other objects—"the harp, the Fitbit and the Band-Aid box,” a shoe pebble, and more abstractly, “the air recently flapped under a gull’s wing.” Of course I know that our cell phones can supplant a compass, but I like the idea of this hand-held object, invented in China two thousand years ago, as a sort of talisman or guide to our chosen destinations through challenging waters, difficult landscapes or turbulent air streams! SB: Thank you, so much, Maureen. Your responses have answered several questions that I didn’t even realise I had about both your book and the writing journey in general. Maureen Hynes lives in Dish with One Spoon territory/Toronto, and is the author of six collections of poetry, including this year’s Take the Compass, from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her first collection won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and following collections have been finalists for the League’s Raymond Souster Award, and twice for the Pat Lowther Award, as well as the Golden Crown Literary Award for lesbian writers (U.S). Her poetry has been included in over 30 anthologies, including three times in Best Canadian Poems in English (2010, 2016 and 2020), and in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2021). Maureen has given numerous poetry readings and workshops, and has taught at the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing certificate program. (www.maureenhynes.com).
Sharon Berg is a poet, a fiction author, and an historian of First Nations education in Canada. She's published her poetry in periodicals across Canada, as well as in the USA, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, India, and Australia. Her first two books were poetry published by Borealis Press (To a Young Horse, 1979) and Coach House Press (The Body Labyrinth, 1984). This was followed by two audio cassette tapes from Gallery 101 (Tape 5, 1985) and Public Energies (Black Moths 1986). She also published three chapbooks with Big Pond Rumours Press in 2006, 2016 & 2017. Her fiction appeared in journals in Canada and the USA. Porcupine's Quill released her debut fiction collection Naming the Shadows in the Fall of 2019. Her cross-genre history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School was published in 2019 by Big Pond Rumours Press and received a Bronze 2020 IPPY Award for Best Regional Nonfiction in Canada East. She lives in Charlottetown, Newfoundland, Canada.
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