Interview with Tom Cull

Interview conducted by Kevin Heslop

This interview took place on July 13, 2018. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Insomniac Press, 2018

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Kevin Heslop: So, let’s begin by acknowledging that the land on which we’re speaking is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Attawandaron, and Lenape Indigenous peoples. This territory is covered by the Upper Canada Treaties, including Treaty 6, the London Township Treaty.
​
The opening lines of the first poem in Bad Animals are, “I’ve waded below the Hunt Weir / where the dam drops the river.” They seem to explain that the book will, in part, go on to identify human abnegation of responsibility for the world around us: we’ve “dropped the river” by means of the dam. Laurie Graham has it that the book “sings a natural world rendered absurd by human hands.”

Tom Cull: Yeah. Yeah.

So, what in Nick Cote’s photograph “City Parks” were you responding to with your opening poem “After Rivers”; why did this feel to you to be the image of the book’s beginning; and what tone or tones did you want to activate with this opening poem?
 
So, this came out of a course I was teaching at Western, Writing 1000, the Writer’s Studio, and the writer-in-residence that year was Margaret Christakos, and she was doing some work around ekphrastics, and I thought: OK, this is a perfect opportunity to get my students involved. And I was teaching this course and she said do you want to get your students involved in this? Which just involved taking them to Art Lab?
 
Yeah.
 
And it was the collective show of the fourth-year students––their major works.
 
Right.
 
So, I brought my students, and Margaret invited other folks to come and we all kind of chose a painting or sculpture or something. Then, we had a night when we invited people and walked to the place where their art piece was hanging and then they recited their poems. It was just a great event. So, I really responded to Nick’s triptych––it’s a triptych of three photos of the river, an almost panoramic view in black and white, and they’re great because there’s no intent to try and capture pristine, untouched nature.
 
Right.
 
One of them is the photo of the construction on the west London dyke. That west London dyke was put there historically because of massive floods in 1937 that had Blackfriars underwater, right?
 
Yeah.
 
So there’s massive construction. I think there’s even Portapotties in the background. So I love the image of the Portapotties beside the river because I think about sewage and how much sewage goes into the river every year due to city infrastructure. It’s a portrayal of the river that I really responded to, because there’s a whole tradition in poetry and nature writing that’s sort of responding to a romantic, uh––
 
Pure nature.
 
Pure nature, untouched, all of those kinds of things.
 
Because where is it pristine?
 
Where is it pristine? And nature’s always filtered through our cultural––nature is a discourse.
 
Yeah.
 
But, the other thing I really liked is that this photo of the Thames River, or Eshkani-ziibi––if I could puncture that gallery wall, I would have been looking at the river. Right? ‘Cause Western is bisected by the river––it goes right behind the gallery––so I liked that idea of, “This is not a river.” That line which is obviously an allusion to that line, “This is not a pipe.” Is it Magritte?
 
Can’t say.
 
Right, that famous painting of a pipe––
 
Oh, yeah, yeah yeah. Magritte. It’s a painting of a pipe; it’s not a pipe.
 
It says, “This is not a pipe.” Which is about representation and all those kinds of things. And so I liked the representation of the river and the river being right there. And, you know, the river is contained within this photograph, or contained in the poem, but also this river that in this photograph is being contained by the west London dyke, and being held in.
 
And so all these ideas were percolating, and then, also, the river is, for me––personally it’s kind of like a––I don’t know how to describe it, but I spend a lot of time at the river. I pay attention to the river with my environmental groups––
 
You’re invested in the river. It’s part of––
 
Yeah, so we spend––the river is the source, in a lot of ways. Our river clean-up group, we’re doing a clean-up––
 
Tomorrow.
 
Tomorrow morning. So, I’m constantly at the river, thinking about the river. My partner Miriam, and our son, our relationship evolved at the river, so––
 
You started the Thames River Rally together, yeah?
 
Yeah, we started the river rally together. At our first river rally, Emmet was about a year-and-a-half old, and I had just met them a couple months before. And so that’s kind of the beginning of our story as a family, is also about the river, and about London, and this journey we’ve been on.
 
And anyway, all of this is bubbling along in “After Rivers” as well as all the ecological stuff––abandoned nature, dollar-store pottage, the current state of this very embattled river, as well as these tangled narratives, right?
 
So, since you brought up the question of family and your personal relation to the river and how your relationships with your partner Miriam and son Emmet are sort of embedded, in a way, with your experience of the river––you have the poem, “At the Pinery”, which conveys the beautiful line “This is where I tell you about the boy:”

Yeah.

At the Pinery

We collect every stone,
our pockets swollen,
ready to split.
 
Our boy feeds gulls the remains
of our picnic supper;
we drink wine
from plastic cups, watch
the sun burn a hole
in the lake.
 
The water, high on the beach,
jostles us. My son holds on
as we wade beyond where he can touch.
I point to his mom back on shore:
What do you think?
She has a happy face, he says,
then shouts, Your face is happy, Momma!
 
Last week the boy’s other dad died
alone in a room in Istanbul.
We had to tell him; he asked, Are you sure
he’s dead? Did anyone check?
 
This is where I tell you about the boy:
golden skin, olive-shaped blue eyes,
lithe and limber, muscles gathering.
He lets the waves push and pull,
then karate-chops and kicks, singing
to himself alone in the surf.
 
On our way back to the car,
we ignore the sign
–STAY OFF THE DUNES–
pick wildflowers and
hide them in the trunk.

How do you think and feel about the world––this is a big one––the boy’s going to inherit, and what proportion of the book and your work in the community is written and done with, if not exactly him, the next generation in mind?
 
Yeah, that’s interesting. A pat answer to, Why do we care about the environment, is, Oh, we’re passing this on; we have to think about the world that our children are going to inherit. It’s a line that always seemed a bit simplistic, and a little bit, um––
 
Overly-altruistic, or something?
 
It just seemed almost clichéd.
 
Yeah.
 
But now I have a son. *laughs*
 
Right, right.
 
And I am thinking about: What literally is the world that he’ll be walking around in. And how will he make sense of it? And what will this look like? And will he have a place in it? And what will be that place? That’s all theoretical before you are responsible for a little, ‘nother life.
 
Ceases to be cliché.
 
Yeah, that’s when cliché does a flip on you, as they do. And so, the thing with Em is that he’s always been a part of the river clean-up since day one. We did it together. He was one-and-a-half or two, and Miriam or I had to be holding his hand the whole time because we were picking up needles.
 
Yeah.
 
And we were picking up all this sharp stuff down by the river. And it’s not dangerous if you’re smart about what you’re doing. And some people would say, Why would you? But this is something that we’ve always done as a family, and we find meaning. We’re not particularly religious; we don’t go to church on Sundays––
 
*St. Paul’s Cathedral chimes*
 
––but even if you don’t go to church on Sundays, you still need things to believe in.
 
Timing.
 
*laughs* Yeah, like the chime. The river is something that we believe in, something that we do together. It’s hard not to think in terms of religious metaphors, but there’s a fellowship when people come to the river and do this work. It’s not easy work, and it’s work that’s kind of mystifying in a lot of ways.
 
How so?
 
Because you go back to the same spot summer after summer––sometimes in the same summer––and we’ll clean up the same spot two or three times: garbage that we have picked up has reappeared.
 
Well, I mean, intractably related is the question of poverty and homelessness, right?
 
Yeah. Yeah.
 
I mean, you’ve got people making make-shift camps on the river, and––
 
Absolutely. And we’re in the midst of an opioid crisis. We have real and present problems with mental health, addictions, chronic homelessness. These are environmental problems as well as social problems. And they overlap; and they dovetail; and they’re part of those entanglements of doing environmental work because, yes: I was at a clean-up we did this fall, or this spring, where we picked up over nine hundred needles in one site alone, and that’s a site––
 
You do two hours there and pick up nine hundred needles?
 
We did two or three hours at that place, and then we went specifically back to it because we found a whole other area that was in the area that we were cleaning up. And we went back with the needle-recovery team from the Middlesex County Health Unit, and we picked up over nine hundred needles in this one site alone. Three hundred of them were in a tent.
 
So that becomes: OK, so how do we deal with that? That’s a problem that’s much bigger, just like phosphorus floating in the river, or even plastics. We’re doing this impossible task and you feel like it’s…. We lose volunteers sometimes, because––we gain them too, but––we lose them because they just say this work is––I had a person who was very honest who just said––it’s depressing.
 
Yeah.
 
So, our group, as you know, went from thinking that we were picking up Tim Horton’s cups and six-pack rings to really getting involved in harm reduction in this city, and branching out in all different ways that were unexpected to us.
 
But there’s incredible meaning in doing all of that work. And meaning isn’t always happy meaning, you know?
 
But I want Emmet to have those memories of what it was like when we did this work. That is something that he could––I think we all struggle to find meaning. And I think the river––it has to be a faith in something that you really believe in, and it’s not unproblematic; but in some ways it is unproblematic, and simple: what we can do is try to do something for this river, and for ourselves. We know that picking this piece of plastic out of the river is an unproblematically good thing to do.
 
Right.
 
All the reasons that that piece of plastic is there, and trying to get that plastic out of there, and all those kinds of things, those are all filled with entanglements and cascading issues. But just the act of getting it out of there, you can say: that was something good. That was something real. That was something actionable. It’s maybe minuscule and unimportant, but in the way that we have to build meaning in our lives, it is incredibly important. So I think it becomes––I don’t know if existentialist is the right term, there.
 
I mean, if you expand the scope of meaning beyond a human life, or even the life of the species, I mean, you’re fucked.
 
Geological time is interesting, thinking in deep geological time.
 
But it seems to me impossible to derive meaning at that scale. One has to narrow it to at least one’s life––does that sound right?
 
Of course. So the river is the site of that for me. And the river is just the coolest thing we have in town. Miriam was biking to work two days ago, and she saw a mink scampering along the rocks with a chipmunk it had killed. You see these animals down there. You have these encounters with beavers, mink, muskrat, turtles of different kinds. We were taking a walk recently and saw a twelve-point buck the other day. This time of year their antlers are still felted, and we were from here to that fountain away from it, and it just stood there and stared at us.
 
In some ways I see more nature living in London than I did growing up on a hundred acres of woodlot, because you just didn’t have those interactions. In the city, you do, because they’re––
 
Less bashful?
 
Yeah, maybe less––maybe, you know ...
 
Tell me about the cover of the book.
 
The cover of the book is a photograph taken by my older brother Patrick Cull, who’s an artist. It slips my mind exactly where this is, but the location is outside of Kitchener-Waterloo somewhere in a wetlands, as you can see. The cover is just a beaver stump. And it’s a beaver stump that he encountered. And it’s interesting because it looks like a kind of sculpture; it looks like it’s been man-made, but it was just how this stump looks, and it looks almost like a sculpture. And it’s become interesting, kind of like a Rorschach’s blot, because people will tell me, Oh, that’s definitely a beaver. Or a sculpture of a––I see a bear.
 
What is it for you, if you’re going to go with the Rorschach reading? Or is it just what it is?
 
It’s kind of what it is, but it’s also, for me: I like the idea of beavers getting together and doing a sculpture of a bear. Bears figure highly in this collection.
 
I kind of like this idea of bad animals: these are bad artists doing a bad rendition of animals. Which of course is a reflection on this bad animal sitting in front of you trying to capture animals in ways, and these crude renderings––
 
Because it’s impossible. Because it’s language; it’s impossible.
 
Yeah, exactly. Literal cages or cages of meaning, or what have you.
 
All right. Let’s exfoliate the title. You just touched on it, but can you give me more?
 
I like the assonance of bad animals––the way that sounds. But of course this is about the relationship between human and non-human animals.
 
Right.
 
And so, What is bad? What does bad mean? Bad means badass or revolutionary. Bad as in poor, like poor, or unqualified, or whatever. Bad has libidinal …
 
Undertones.
 
Undertones or connotations. Bad as in evil. So, all of those are possibles––
 
Right.
 
––that then are paired with animals, which is another really overdetermined term. So, who are the animals? They’re obviously meant to be the animals described in the poems, or talked about in the poems. But also humans. And naming is important in the book. And how we use language to kind of name and capture and control. That’s what’s behind “Choosing the Animal Laureate.”
 
It opens “The badger is smug?”
 
No, it was, “The manatee is smug.”
 
Right. It’s a great opening line for such a title. 

From "Choosing the Animal Laureate"

The Manatee is smug.
Standing at the lectern, book in flipper:
"Is it hot in here or is it just me?" He turns
to hang his suit jacket on the chair,
revealing the propeller-shaped scar that runs
the length of his back. Please.

Panda refuses. She cannot bear it--
reading to a room of clench-jawed heavy petters
snapping photos for status updates,
voices in their cute-addled brains screaming,
"Widdle furry buddy is weading a poem. Yes she is.
YES. She. IS!"

The Blue Whales sent a wire. "All is lost" stop.
"In translation" stop. "Including this" stop.

The Donkeys renewed with Babstock.
Foxes? Signed with Hughes.
The Fish are mired in modernism.
House Cats busy with the internet.

The Squirrel--too anecdotal.
Rabbit claims he is "post-rabbit."
Skunk--too confessional.
Hummingbird is a drunk.

Corporate Cattle are doping,
Organic Cattle, dying of happiness.
Apes can't get funding.
I won't tell you what the Badger said.
(He said, "Go fuck yourself.")

​...

I mean, obviously most people who are concerned about animals––manatees are these beautiful animals that are always being hit, and scarred. So then, if you’re going to go for the anthropomorphic gesture, really hammer it to the point of being ludicrous. Don Mackay writes about a kind of thinking anthropomorphism that doesn’t say, We shouldn’t anthropomorphize; it says, we should, but we should do it in a thoughtful way. We don’t turn away and say we can’t possibly return the gaze of the other, or understand the other, and we can’t fully do that, so we shouldn’t do that at all. He’s saying that that’s irresponsible. Because then if we can say that it’s purely otherness, and there’s no linkage, what does that actually allow us to do?
 
Right.
 
Some pretty horrifying things. So, we understand that speaking for animals, or making them think in this way, is intensely problematic, and you can turn them into a Disney-fied version of––
 
Dumbo the elephant.
 
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. As kind of allegories, or as actors in a script of harmony. I mean, we see this all the time on YouTube videos, this weird investment in cuteness, and in animals loving other animals that they should naturally be killing.
 
As the whole world burns, we’re watching these highly screwed-up stories of this kind of harmony, and we’re bringing these animals into our homes.
 
A digital Eden.
 
Yeah, a digital Eden. And even the BBC's Planet Earth series? Holy shit. I think that more and more David Attenborough is trying to ring the bell a little bit, but those first ones you never see a piece of garbage.
 
Yeah.
 
Always the animals are kind of represented, and there’s huge symphonies playing in the background––
 
Gorgeous sunsets.
 
Gorgeous sunsets, and it’s like, Hey, the world looks pretty damn good. And I can enjoy it in the comfort of my own home. So, I think that animals coming to our homes, as well as us going to see them in aquariums. The whole thing about “At Ripley’s Aquarium” is the act of what happens before going in there, which is you walk by a great lake to go in to see a spectacle of plentitude of a great lake that no longer exists outside.
 
Fascinating.
 
And that’s kind of the conceit that I work with at the end of the poem, that the actual animals outside are starving because there are no more fish in the lake, so they come to aquarium to eat, because they’re hungry. I mean, it’s pretty simple and straightforward.
 
It’s clever, though; it makes the point well. I want to bring in a poem here, “Anti-Apocalypse”.
 
Ah, yeah, yeah. That’s interesting: no one’s really remarked on that one yet. So, that’s cool.
 
It was one of my––I think it’s the strongest short poem in the volume. So.

​Anti-Apocalypse

no nuclear winter
no ice age
no superbug
no second coming
no robot revolution

a pear tree
buckthorn
plastic bags
a river
​turtles

So, it seems like what the poem is saying is that apocalypse is not going to be what Hollywood has imagined it for us to be, or what we maybe fear or dread: it’s a becoming. This is a longer term idea––we were talking about geological time earlier. It’s not a second coming, it’s not a robot revolution; it’s gonna be fuckin’ plastic bags, and a mountain of garbage on the ocean, and shit that doesn’t break down that we’ve created will be here for a hell of a long time but the pear tree’s gonna come back; you’re gonna have buckthorn; the river’s still gonna be––there are gonna be turtles. They’re going to be eating the plastic, maybe.
 
Yeah, exactly. So, yes, it’s a thinking-through narratives that Hollywood has been giving us about the end of the world. And it’s anti-apocalypse in some ways because we are living in the apocalypse. The apocalypse is happening. We’re in the midst of it, and these are all narratives of impending: this might happen, right? This could happen––possible futures.
 
And my thinking is, we’re in the midst of it now. So, it’s kind of a critique of those narratives, or how we feed ourselves on those narratives. And what the actual apocalypse is, is a pear tree, buckthorn––buckthorn’s an invasive species that is in London, and I come around to invasive species elsewhere in the text––living together in one space, and the complexity of that. There’s nothing complex about ‘The end of the world is here, and now we’re all starving and people are eating people, and then you’ve got two bullets in the gun.’ That’s ‘nature red in tooth and claw.’ This notion of a pear tree, buckthorn, struggling turtles and plastic bags, I mean, that’s what it is.
 
So that’s the idea that I was riffing on. Because I was thinking that, gosh, so many poems are written about apocalypse, and apocalyptic vision. And how much are we feeding ourselves these narratives and consuming them in a way that actually gives us comfort, and allows us not to actually engage with apocalypse, but instead just turn it into entertainment on a Saturday night?
 
Here’s another set piece, if we can take the next step here. It would be difficult, maybe impossible, not to revert, occasionally, to embittered sarcasm and dark irony when writing such a book as this. And to that end, dutifully supplied, we have the collection’s second poem,  “Swim”––

Swim

sunlight maps synapses
across the bottom of the pool
everyone loves the belugas
I stay in my lane
you move like a pool vac
sucking, thumping, erratic

it's important to take
turns pretending things
are all right

the water lifts pressure
off your disks
we goggle search
the starling that shits the pool
same time every day

I practise flip turns
you glide
like a dock spider
a whistle blows
the lifeguard
​has seen enough

The line break after “it’s important to take” amplifies the narrator’s sense of remoteness and a certain disdain towards the way the species of which he is a part behaves, kind of like the occasional taciturn character you’ll run into in Cormac McCarthy who enters into the narrative only to turn his back and walk away from it.
 
Yeah.
 
You, of course, have done nothing like turn your back as a poet or as a prominent member of our community, quite the opposite. But I wonder how you feel about the occasionally embittered tones the collection contains. Would it have been possible to have written the book without them, or are they as necessary to the statement of Bad Animals as they seem to be?
 
Obviously I don’t want the poems to be didactic, but I want those voices there, and sometimes the way to deal with them is to give them characters, to characterize them in certain ways. So, I also see humour as important in the process of estranging, you know, and building in estrangement.
 
What do you mean by that?
 
Defamiliarization, right? Seeing a topic in a different way, because humour has not made funny necessarily Funny, aha, and entertaining, but funny weird, and funny upsetting, and uncanny. And cutting, cutting in the sense that you trip over it. And it’s laughter that you’re not sure where it’s directed. And you have a laugh and then you think, Gosh, is the joke on me? So, those voices––I think of them doing that kind of work, but also just being a range of voices that we identify with.
 
Right.
 
You know? So, having a badger that tells a search-group committee [in “Choosing the Animal Laureate”] to go fuck itself because they’re asking––
 
What did the badger say? The badger said, Go fuck yourself.
 
Because they were asking him to be the animal laureate.
 
Or, no, you say, “I’m not going to tell you what the badger says.” And then, in brackets, “(The badger said go fuck yourself.)”
 
*laughs* Yeah. So, that kind of anger––
 
Did that intensify the humour, saying I’m not going to tell you what the badger said? I’m going to keep this aboveboard, or something.
 
Yeah, and also I’m taking some warranted shots at the poetry community that I am a proud member of: the way that we act like bad animals sometimes: we get together and we gossip and we say this and, Oh I won’t tell you what they said, and that’s always the entrance to, Now I’m going to tell you what they said. It’s an intensifier.
 
Speaking about community, 17 people are named in the “Acknowledgements” as having helped to shape the poems in the collection. You also thank Mike O’Connor, Dan Varrette, and Stuart Ross for their guidance and editorial acumen. Can you talk a bit about the workshopping process, and maybe offer an instance or two of what the original drafts of these poems benefited from most?
 
Yeah, they all were workshopped. I’m a member of two active workshops, and then also people I’ll share one-offs with and get feedback. And then that got them into shape that I could then take to Stuart Ross.
 
Right.
 
And then his eye produced a whole new round of edits and also demands for more poems before the collection was––I sent him a manuscript and he was like, OK, that’s a good start. We’ve got a lot of work to do. And so, he took part in––the great thing about having an editor for the collection is that you [can] get feedback on individual poems [elsewhere], but with an editor of a collection you get someone who’s helping you shape a collection, and think about a collection, and think about your various poetic tricks that you do, and whether you should have some more in the quiver, you know. And so that was the great thing about working with Stuart Ross as probably hundreds of Canadian poets could tell you. He’s such an important literary figure in Canada’s contemporary poetry scene.
 
If one of his suggestions was to add an extra arrow to the quiver, what was that arrow?
 
So, I had the standard poems which he really liked––you know, “At Ripley’s Aquarium” or “Choosing the Animal Laureate”––he’s like, yeah, those are great, but he was also more interested in the more experimental poems. And he was like, Think about that. So, I added the “Sleuth of Bears”––a collection of five erasure poems from news articles about bears.
 
*offering “Auscultation”* That one too?
 
Yeah, that’s an early one. He really liked that one. He helped me tremendously with that one, because that’s a plunder poem.
 
Plunder.
 
A plunder. So, it’s plundering a text, an original text, and that text was a record that I found on the streets of Toronto that said “Auscultation.”

Auscultation
Auscultation: the act of listening to esp. from the heart as a part of gnosis.

The act of listening is silence one finds
what one is looking for for murmur.
Some [sic] trick detected.
Therefore no single step
circumstances detected,
no amplifying omitted.
Ceremonial examination even though
it may seem meaningless.
The time is important.
The choice is essential.
A bell must fit your ear.

And I find this record, and I come home and I’m looking at it, and auscultation is the medical practice of listening to the heart.
 
Right.
 
And so, med students would put on this record and listen––the different tracks are different heart abnormalities. So the first one is *booh, bh-chee, booh booh, bh-chee,* or whatever it is, and that’s how they can identify what a heart murmur is, and then next one and the next one and the next one. And it’s like, what an amazing thing to find on the street. And also the metaphoric possibilities of listening to the heart.
 
Sure.
 
And so I just plundered it, and I plundered the back cover of it which actually gives a list of seven instructions for how to listen to the heart.
 
So that’s something Stuart was encouraging.
 
Yeah. Stuart is like, Push, push, push. He wants tight, tight lines, but he also is really interested in the weird, and the odd, and the taking of left turns––I can’t remember which writer said, Take lots of left turns. And that’s what writers try to do: push into areas that you’re not as comfortable with. And I’ve never gotten a lot of necessarily positive feedback about those kind of experimental poems because they’re perhaps not as accessible, so it was really nice to hear him say, Yeah, I like those ones, but give me more of this. And in contemporary poetry writing a plunder poem is not, is not––
 
Avant-garde?
 
No, it’s not. You’re not pushing any great boundaries, but you are doing something differently with language, and you are doing something that is––in a collection I think you want to show a range of voices, you know. And that is what he was encouraging anyway. Yeah, you’ve got some of these poems, but let’s put them together and have them punctuate and interrupt those other poems, too, so that you’re not just plodding from one narrative poem to the other to the other to the other––then these eruptions come in, and it’s like, what are they doing here, and what is the relationship to the other kinds of poems that are more straight-up lyrical poems.
 
Um, I was wondering if, with respect to Donaldson’s phrase [on the back cover] about how “these poems wander through the surreal artifacts of human life”––I was wondering how that informed your fluency in that area as a result of your literary analyses of freak shows.
 
Yeah my dissertation was on 19th and 20th century freak shows.
 
Right.
 
So, the freak show as it is represented in literature. I did these in pairings––paired Melville with Nella Larson, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Catherine Donne’s Geek Love. Trying to think through a theory of freakishness that was about a relational dynamic as much as it was about actual bodies that were conventionally understood as non-normative or freakish. Right? So, I think of the carnivalesque.
 
Yeah. The book summary describes itself in part as a funhouse.
 
Yeah. I think specifically about the mirrors in funhouses. And the mirrors that reflect back to yourself but also they distort you. And then they have also the mise en abyme of representation where you’re just continually representing the funhouse ad infinitum. And so, thinking about languages, reflection, refraction, distortion, delusion, contamination.
 
There’s a parallel here in Disneyworld. I remember somebody said that the purpose of Disneyworld is to constantly remind you that it is a fantasy.
 
So, this gets us into Baudrillard: Disneyworld as being the simulacrum of the distraction that distracts us from the fact that Disneyworld is not separate from America.
 
Do you think Disneyworld epitomizes America?
 
That’s Baudrillard’s argument. We go from the real world into this fantasy world, and Baudrillard is saying, No you don’t: you’re just going from one aspect of the world into another aspect.
 
Do you think that plays into the American pioneering spirit? Like, you go into this wilderness and then you come out with a wholesome Christian household with the log cabin and the smoking chimney––there’s a fundamentally dominating, controlling nature out of which you create a certain pristine fantasy?
 
Yeah, and all of it built on the bones of the people and the genocides and the slaveries and the environmental degradations and all these things. And that’s the story also of land, and river, and nature in Ontario. And also I think something that we have to think through in terms of, What does it mean to write nature poetry in an age where we’re––I can’t remember her name [El Jones]––we talk about “nature” instead of “land,” because land is political. And land immediately makes us have to contend with the history of Canada, colonialism, and genocide.
 
It’s not about a history that happened, it’s about a history that’s happening.
 
Likewise the apocalypse isn’t something that’s going to happen tomorrow; it’s on us.
 
One of the lucky things for me as I got to be Poet Laureate was I got to meet [Indigenous] artists like Erik Mandawe, like Amanda Myers, Summer Bressette, Awasis, and more. Mike Cywink. All of these artists that I met through my position who have been fundamental in helping me through what nature is, what land is, the history of Canada as a nation. And what that history erases and continues to erase when it comes to Indigenous history and epistemologies.
 
“Tractor” opens, “I will tell you, my friends, / how to throw a funeral.” 

Tractor
for the ghost of WCW and others

I will tell you, my friends,
how to throw a funeral.

Start early, noon is dignified,
there's much to do.

The dead should be the first to arrive
and seated at the front.

Make room for everybody.
Choose a good MC,
someone who projects.
They want to hear at the back.

​Invite speakers--
stories and poems (within reason).
"Caro mio ben." "Ombra mai fu."
Have mourners gnash and rend.
People, this is a performance!

Bring the band off the stage.
Seat them in the audience.
Sing! "Abide with me," "Guide me oh,"
I want to hear voices!

Tap the kegs at four o'clock.
Make a bonfire,
eat pork and beef
and lamb and fish.
Eat everything!

Sun sets at nine.
Bring out the dead
in the bucket of the tractor.
Pour his ashes down the barrel
of a potato gun
and shoot him out over the river.

Cheer! Curse! Cry! Dance--
drive your heels hard into the mud.
if things get sexy, let them--
save cleanup for the morning.
Take Advil, drink water, sleep, dream:
every funeral a dress rehearsal.

The note I scribbled beside [the first] stanza was, This is the poet’s job, no?
 
Yeah. So, of course that poem is just stealing from William Carlos Williams’s poem “Tract.” It’s about throwing a funeral. I think we all do it: I think we think about our own funerals, and how it could just be the best thing, and everyone’s going to say nice things, and they’re going to cry in ways that you never saw them cry over you. I think as kids you play funeral games. Alice Munro has a great short story about these kids that play these funeral games and the narrator of the story being kind of on-the-outs, trying to fit in with the crowd. And because she’s not one of the popular kids, she never gets to be the person who’s dead. She always has to be a mourner. *Chuckling* She has to always gnash and rend and be so upset. And it’s always the popular girls who get to die, and have people just fawn all over them. So, you know, I’ve always liked that.
 
That’s such a great premise for a story.
 
It’s so good. So, that kind of indulgent thinking-through-my-own-funeral, what I would actually like it to be––Ceremony is incredibly important. It’s the thing that gives meaning to the things that we do. We don’t kneel because we believe; we believe because we kneel. I don’t know if that’s Althusser, or Foucault, but I’m stealing that.
 
Great line.
 
That idea is that we do these things to shape meaning. So, I think funerals are important––all ceremonies and rituals are important because they become the lightning rods for all those feelings that we have. They need a place to go.
 
Right.
 
Like funerals.
 
To feel some sense of resolution, they say. Or closure?
 
Some sense of closure, or some sense of––
 
That’s kind of bullshit though, isn’t it?
 
Well, there’s no such thing as closure in that way. But it does give mourning for example a place and a voice and some expression.
 
You can tack it to the wall right there, and you know where it is.
 
Well, you can do it with other people, too. It’s a shared sense. So, that’s why when you have a good funeral, a good funeral will have a speaker who can crystallize what everyone’s thinking and say those words that then people can all say.
 
We’ve been spoken for.
 
We’ve been spoken for, and this person has been represented, and some work has been done. This is all probably a hedge against our own mortality because we’re all just going to––We’re all just vapour.
 
It’s interesting to link that with the role of the poet laureate who speaks for, a lot of the time. So, I get invited to events where, Please write a poem about the anniversary of the building of this building.
 
Yeah.
 
Or, This is our twentieth anniversary of our Lake Huron-protection organization. Or for a memorial for victims of opioid poisoning, that I did recently.
 
How do you go about that? Talk to me about that poem.
 
Well, I’ll first just say a couple things generally about occasional poetry. These are occasional works that I get asked to do––poems specifically for occasions. Which is really interesting, because I give myself completely different rules for writing occasional poetry than when I’m just writing poems that might end up in a book. There are different constraints. First of all: time. “It’s in two weeks. Can you do something?”
 
That means it doesn’t go to two different workshops. There’s no time. You have to produce something. Also, different rules for the relationship between show and tell in a poem. So, exposition, which I try to cut out––the tell which you always want to replace with show, in the classic show-versus-tell model.
 
Because it’s not just a poem; it’s more of an oration.
 
Yes. Yeah, and you think about audience differently. When I’m thinking to write a poem, the audience is the page. There is no audience. I am the audience, I guess. When I’m writing a poem for––You’re thinking about the mother who just lost a son to opiates.
 
How did you begin it?
 
I began it with thinking about the space that we were going to be in. We were going to be in Ivey Park at the river. And the time of year.
 
Which was?
 
Spring. So, I was thinking about what’s happening in that space at that time. And what’s happening in that space at that time is all the friggin’ goslings are running around with the geese. And there’s these moments of rebirth and renewal and spring and all those things are there. Now, if I was writing this kind of a poem––a book poem––I’d be very careful about how that becomes cliché easily.
 
Sure. It’s a different space.
 
It’s a poem that’s going to exist in the air––and maybe someone wants to re-print it, as sometimes they do, but––sometimes that’s the only time. There’s no time to sit there and wonder: that’s interesting. What literary conventions are being used? What are the allusions? No, there’s no time for any of that.
 
The audience is not literary, necessarily.
 
Not necessarily, not necessarily.
 
But they did have the experience themselves, and that gives them all the credibility in the world.

They have the experience and it’s also that great thing about poetry is that in moments of significance, people reach for poetry, even people who wouldn’t necessarily say, “I love poetry” or “I read poetry” or whatever. The poetic has this kind of gravitas that’s called for in events––funerals, weddings, what have you. So I thought about those things, and then I thought about those lives, and then I started talking to people trying to get some background. And then I had a person email me, who’s a friend of mine, saying, I lost someone in January. I’m so glad you’re doing this. And so I thought, OK: now I do have a personal connection with someone who does––because we all do.
 
Everyone’s touched by it.
 
Everyone’s touched by it, even though we don’t know, sometimes. And then I thought about the river, because we were right by the river. The importance of calling it Eshkani-ziibi in the poem.
 
In the interest of the audience’s comprehension, would you have said "The Thames" parenthetically?
 
I think that the context of the poem made it apparent what I was talking about. And the way I was framing it. And also the fact that the whole event began with an address from an Elder, and a song.
 
And we’re also talking about a population inordinately affected by the use of opiates?
 
Absolutely. So, that’s also in play there: I’m thinking, What are the populations? And again, Where am I in this position of power to do this, and how do ––
 
You were nominated.
 
Right. For the position?
 
Of poet laureate.
 
Yeah. I appealed. *laughs*
 
*laughing* You appealed your nomination, did you?
 
Wow. Freudian slip. *laughing* I applied for the position.
 
Well, as far as I’m concerned you were nominated by the whole community.
 
Well, a jury chose me. So, that poem was really interesting––
 
But that authority’s yours. Is it a matter of trying to reconcile having that authority and what to do with that place?
 
And what to do with that place. Sometimes you just have to go, OK, I’m going to write this poem, and this is what I have the time to do. And trust that the people who are asking you to do it understand that they’re putting you together in a program that they put together.
 
Sure.
 
In this case, it was the Middlesex County Health Unit who asked me to read, and of course I get there, and I’m just one speaker in a whole bunch of speakers that represented all the things that needed to be talked about. I was supposed to say something about the significance of these lives being important lives, and these people being brothers, sisters, cousins, people, with real lives and complex stories like we all have complex stories. That were cut short because of this crisis. So, the poem’s not trying to push boundaries, or make––
 
Statements of what we should do.
 
Not necessarily, except, These lives matter. And they’re important, and that if we are a community, if we are a city, then they matter to us, and that they must. But again, it’s very different: it’s like an oration. It hangs in the air for a minute and then it’s gone. And you have to make a connection, and to say something that captures what the event is trying to do.
 
But, a community of this size is inordinately large.
 
Maybe, but I don’t think a job like this should be easy.
 
There’s a lot of good material here. But we talked a lot about things other than you, and other than the book, and that’s all good stuff, and that’s all part of you, but I want to talk a little bit with the next question about the book and about you.
 
Yeah, yeah.
 
So, in “Tractor”: “Sun sets at nine. Bring out the dead in a bucket of a tractor. Pour his ashes down the barrel of a potato gun. And shoot him out over the river.” This is a beautiful, rural, ceremonial image. And the next poem that I flipped to was, “On the Sale of My Farm”. And what about if we talked a bit about––first of all, “On The sale of My Farm”, this sounds like this was an autobiographical poem––And it’s also interwoven with Frost. So, to formulate this is a question….
 
…What’s going on there?
 
Um. Yeah. That’ll do. *laughs*
 
Yeah, so the next work I’m working on now is really about home, and I’m doing it in collaboration with Kerry Manders, who’s named in the text of the poem called “Huron County.” She’s an artist.
 
And she’s from there.
 
She’s from Huron County. We met at York doing our PhDs. We grew up twenty minutes down the road from each other but went to different high schools.
 
And when you met you were both in that interior, excavating place, not necessarily participating as fully as you might have in your communities because you were doing this work.
 
Yeah, and we were in Toronto, and we’d left home, and home had made us––it’s kind of a cliché––we are Huron County kids. And my story is a Huron County kid––I identified with Alice Munro, who’s like, Who do you think you are? But I was also very much of that area. I played hockey, I worked on a farm. I loved it.
 
When did you leave and how long were you away?
 
I left when I was … Well, even when I was doing my undergrad at the University of Waterloo I came home in the summer and worked on the farm. Not my parents’ farm––
 
What kind?
 
Beef farm.
 
Your parents were beef farmers?
 
No. My parents were both teachers, and we had about 70 acres of beautiful woods and forests and stuff, and my dad taught shop, so he taught woodworking, metalworking, auto. You know. All of that kind of stuff. So, he was an interesting fellow. He was––*chuckles*––an interesting guy.
 
What does he think of the poems? Is he still with us?
 
No. He died when I was 26. “How to throw a funeral” is also me thinking through his death and his funeral and his life. Those two arias that are named, “Caro Mio Ben” and “Ombra mai fu,” were his favourite arias. He had a beautiful tenor voice, but he also worked with his hands. He was a builder. He moved out to Huron County, bought this land with his brother, dragged––there was an old farmhouse on it that he fixed up––and he dragged the original log cabin that he found in the back field somewhere. Picked it up. Put it on a truck. Moved it. Stuck it on a new foundation beside the house, attached to the house. And we finished it and rebuilt the whole house over the course of our life. Incredibly smart, but incredibly good at things I’m not good at. I worked on a farm, so I know how to wield an axe, and use a vice grips, but in terms of––he was a builder. He made beautiful things.
 
Out of what?
 
Wood. Metal. His father was a farrier, worked as a farrier in the First World War, then moved to Canada from England, and he became a welder. So, my dad grew up in St. Mary’s. Couldn’t read until he was sixteen ‘cause he had a reading disability––I don’t think he was dyslexic. So, as a child he was put in classes with cognitively delayed students until someone recognized this guy’s just got some problems with writing. Was born with one arm very crippled. The story goes, a drunken doctor delivered him and pulled him out in a way that tore all the ligaments in his shoulder. So, his arm was fixed like this, almost like a claw, and was very, very small. And he couldn’t move it. It just held like this. And then he had just this massive left hand, that was like a vice grip. And strong. And this guy taught woodworking, auto, shop.
 
Wow.
 
And conducted choirs and sang. Really multi-dimensional guy who––my Mom wrote his report cards for him, because he had a hard time writing. He went to university and became a high school teacher, but faced a lot of adversity, you know? *chuckles* A lot of adversity. And I couldn’t do with two hands what he could do with one. So, that was Dad.
 
There are also things no doubt that you can do that he couldn’t have done with twelve.
 
Sure. Sure. Yeah. We had a great relationship. Obviously when I was a teenage I was a jerk, and he and I were at odds for many years until I kind of became an adult, and then we became friends.
 
You were 26 when he died, so you grew out of the asshole teenager phase.
 
Yeah. We were always very close. Our family has always sought each other out for company, not just because it’s family, and that’s what you do; but because we enjoy being with each other. So that was my dad. My mom’s still alive. She lives in London. Her story is interesting as well. Came from Ottawa, Glebe. Grew up there. Her father was a civil servant, a lawyer. He was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.

Wow.
 
He was a very high-placed public official. He kind of wrote the Combines Investigation Act, and the Young Offenders Act in Canada. She moves out to Huron County to take a job at the psych hospital because she had an MA in psychology that she got at Dal. And then she meets my dad, who’s now––he was previously married for three years, but that marriage fell apart. No children. They get together, and––
 
You have two brothers?
 
Two brothers, an older and a younger. So that’s the family picture. So I grew up on this idyllic piece of land. Again, that now has become complicated for me. We had to sell it. My dad died when I was 26. We held onto it for the next 15 years. And my mom was working in London. She went back to school. Re-trained. Became a psych counsellor at King’s and was trying to commute two hours home. She got an apartment here. So we decided to sell it. I was living at home at the time. I was doing my PhD at York, and I had a massive pulmonary embolism, which was very close to a life-ending event.
 
How old were you at this point?
 
33. In my Jesus year.
 
So you died and were resurrected in the same year?
 
*scoffs* Yeah. So, I went home and left Toronto, stopped working at the bars I was working at, and TA-ing, and just decided: I’m going to move home; help get the home ready for sale; and finish my PhD. It still took me another 6 years to finish that damn PhD, but when I was home, I was the one who was getting the house ready for sale––doing all the things that I describe in that poem of refinishing it. Because it needed a lot of up-keep.
 
You weave the poem through with Frost. Written with Robert Frost. Not for. You’ve taken his lines and––

From "On the Sale of My Farm"
with Robert Frost

...

Hours of pruning, lawn cutting, planting--
a reclamation.
                    Even cheerfully I yield
                    Pasture, orchard, mowing-field.
At night, photo albums told the story--
my father dragging the log cabin down the road
on a boom truck. A fool's parade, said those
who came out to watch the house on wheels.
                    Yea and wish him all the gain
                    I required of them in vain.

In the country, you need a gun and a dog
or the outside move in.
The red squirrels were everywhere--
under the roof, beneath the floorboards,
scratching behind the drywall--
through cold winter months.
                    Yea and I can yield him house,
                    Barn, and shed, with rat and mouse.
They ignored my eviction orders,
chewed through efforts to keep them out,
so I shot them one by one.
Sixteen in one summer.
                    To dispute possession of.
                    These I can unlearn to love.

In June the house sold,
we moved off to the city.
                    Since I cannot help it? Good!
                    Only be it understood.

One year later, the neighbors called to report--
house raided, occupants arrested,
five and a half million dollars
of grass up in smoke.
I went home to see.
                    It shall be no trespassing
                    If I come again some spring.

I wandered through the back field--
rows of marijuana stumps stood among the long
spider shadows of the irrigation towers:
yellow plastic KEEP OUT signs dotted the property,
nailed to awkward trees.

...

So, I really like Frost. As an Americanist, I studied poetry and all this kind of stuff. So, I’m working during the day, when I’m living at home, I’m going to Goderich, which is close, twenty minutes, and spending it all day in the Goderich library just working on my dissertation. Got to know the librarians there. One of them––Reggie is his name––is a great historian of Huron County. And he was like, Where do you live? And I was telling him, and we had this great conversation. And then I told him we’re getting ready to sell it. And one day I came in and took my regular table at the library and he came over and he said, “I’ve got something for you.” And it was Frost’s “On the Sale of My Farm,” a poem that I had never read. And I loved it. I loved it because it just––
 
Great timing, Reggie.
 
Spoke to me. When I read in Goderich recently when I went up as part of [a] reading series––
 
Reggie’s still there?
 
Reggie came to the reading and gave me some of the poems that he’s been working on.
 
Full circle, there.
 
Full circle, there. And I mean that poem started out as a short story and that then I cut down into a poem, and then I threw the Frost stuff in there and it’s meant to be dialoging with him in it.
 
So, is there a way in which Freud, um––there’s a slip.
 
Yeah.
 
Is there a way in which Frost––see I’m trying to delve into your psyche a bit––is there a way in which Frost typifies the voice of your father and grandfather? A very stoic, very rural––
 
Hadn’t thought of that, but that could be … yeah. Yeah. What an odd thing that was, living at home. No one living in that house. Just me. And being there for those winters and just trying to get that house ready for sale when we didn’t want to sell it, but we knew we had to.
 
Yeah.
 
And thinking about that process. And now we don’t have it: we will go home, but now we go to my uncle’s down the road, and hang out there. But we don’t have a place.
 
You say trespassing is home.
 
Yeah. Coming home is trespassing.
 
So, you say you tried to get into the old place, but––
 
So, my dad’s ashes are spread at the old place. But, more than the ashes: the ashes are just a thing I say to show the significance of that place. It’s not the ashes physically there. It’s the world that he built, and that we were a part of.
 
But that history has become more complicated since I’ve realized that the Maitland River, originally known as Menesetung River, that ran through our property, was the most northern boundary of the Huron Tract. The Huron Tract was a big tract of land that was negotiated as a treaty with First Nations––there was a whole bunch of signatories on that tract that gave over a million hectares to the crown, that came all the way from Goderich down to London. A huge swathe of land. So, our land sits on that. So, when I think about trespassing, I used to think of home as very unproblematically ours. This is our land. And of course, No. That land––I grew up in east Wawanosh township.
 
Coming home is trespassing.
 
Mhmm, coming home is trespassing. And there’s tons of theory about home and nostalgia and all those kinds of things. But I also meant it very specifically in terms of thinking that this home that I always thought was so unproblematically the source or a primal kind of place was never just so easily mine.
 
Right.
 
Well, let’s bring in this: “Preparing for Apocalypse: 13 Survival Tips.” 

Preparing for Apocalypse: 13 Survival Tips

1. No one will survive the apocalypse.

2. In addition to anything starring Will Smith, consult the following movies: Deep Impact, Melancholia, Armageddon, Waterworld, WALL-E, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, and Eat Pray Love.

3. Add the following titles to your self-help library: anything by Anne Coulter, Blood Meridian, Roughing It in the Bush, Not Wanted on the Voyage, and Les Revenentes.

4. Replace GPS with GSP.

5. Audition for the following reality television shows: Survivor, The Biggest Loser, Hell's Kitchen, Naked and Afraid, Polyamory: Married & Dating, Real World, Deadliest Catch, Full House.

6. Compress your vocabulary--remove words such as ambivalent, ecopoetics, neo-liberal, and crepe.

          i(a). idiom. Literalize your metaphors (open a can of
          worms, eat slow food, put a ring on it, issue trigger
          warnings, make a killing, beg to differ, cross that
          bridge, etc.).

          i(b). diction. Prepare for shifts in word definitions:
          glacial, for example, will mean "very fast." Koodo,
          Google, Hulu, and Snapchat will become onomatopoeia.

7. Know when to follow; know when to retweet.

8. Trade in Apple, BlackBerry, Tinder, and Kindle for apple, blackberry, tinder, and kindle.

9. Loot anthropology museums for supplies. (Didactic panels may also prove helpful.)

​10. Refrain from correcting improper usage of personal pronouns I and me.

11. Stay limber; work on your cardio. When shit gets real, remember tip #1 and/or Will Smith in Bad Boys II.

12. Get comfortable with killing. Start small--a worm, maybe a mayfly--then work up to vertebrates. Don't always choose ugly things. You will get the hang of it.

13. Make a list dividing the people you know into columns A and B. When the time comes, you'll know what it's for.

So, then we have the line at the end, “Make a list dividing the people you know into columns A and B. When the time comes, you’ll know––”
 
“––what it’s for.”
 
Do you think that we will get to that point where we’re going to put people into columns like that on a list?
 
Well, we do. We already do.
 
We already do.
 
We already––Absolutely we do. I mean, Trump speaks to the Holdens [Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian] in all of us. Right? He’s a manifestation of that––talking about putting people in categories. But he’s also in some ways symptomatic of––
 
He’s also a freak himself, isn’t he?
 
Of course, and he’s also a con man. I mean, he’s a Barnum-esque con.
 
He’s both Barnum and the freak.
 
He is. Absolutely. Just as Holden is. Holden is every much a freak himself in terms of selling narratives and hoodwinking. But that’s Trump. But the way that Trump is exposing––in some ways this exclusion has always been happening, and he’s not doing anything but laying bare––
 
The Republican party, say.
 
Nations are built on exclusion, and on walls, and on barbed wire. I mean, consider American foreign policy.
 
To wrap up with an eye to the future, to the anti-apocalypse, if you will, I wonder if you’d talk about how people can get involved in the Thames River Rally.
 
Yep. Thames River Rally, and I’ll tell you that we’re relaunching next year as Antler River Rally. Antler River being the English translation of Eshkani-ziibi. So, the Thames River Rally holds monthly clean-ups of the river in London and we publish those on our website and on our Facebook page. And so, if you have a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, we publicize where we’re going to be: we have a map that says meet here at 9:30, wear a decent pair of shoes, and some pants, and we’ll provide everything else. Not the shirts.
 
Gloves and bags and pickers.
 
Gloves and bags and pickers. And that’s how you get involved. And we need more people to get involved. We work with hundreds of Londoners and many London organizations. We’re starting our eighth year. And it is very simple: you go; you find garbage; you pick it up. I encourage everyone to come out. And it’s interesting: for me, my poetry, and this kind of work, this environmental work, I can’t separate them. They are the same kind of thing. And part of the poet laureateship as well. It’s community, activism, writing, environmental, family. And you get that all for the low, low price of free. 

---

Kevin Heslop is a student of poetry whose work is published in chapbook form with The Blasted Tree. He has won the Poetry London and Occasus Literary Journal prizes. As an actor, he has appeared as Creon and Katherine Minola. He organizes London Open Mic. Poetry.