Daniel Scott Tysdal was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and raised on a farm. He received a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Regina (Saskatchewan) in 2003, an M.A. (English) from Acadia University (Nova Scotia) in 2006, and an M.A. (English in the Field of Creative Writing) from the University of Toronto in 2008.

He is the author of The Mourner’ s Book of Albums (Tightrope Books, 2010). His first book of poetry, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau Books, 2006), received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007), the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006), and the 2004 John V. Hicks Manuscript Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2006 Brenda MacDonald Riches Award. He currently lives in Toronto and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

The following interview was conducted in the side dining room at The Free Times Cafe, in a booth overlooking College Street in Toronto on a Friday in the late afternoon. A white blanket of sky lit up the large windows but darkened as the conversation progressed.

E Martin Nolan: It’s hard to call The Mourner’s Book of Albums simply a book of poems, although that’s what it is primarily. But there are short stories in it, graphics, photos. How would you categorize the book?

Daniel Scott Tysdal: Hmmm. A good example to start with would be the first poem I wrote for this book.

EMN: Which is actually the last poem of your first book [Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method].

DST: Yes, “The Man Who Shot Himself Online.” Seeing that video was such an overwhelming experience. Seeing how the dead are preserved in this new way—this is a video posted for entertainment, it’s supposed to be funny. The dead are entertainment now. So writing poems about that often required a certain level of formal play. For example, with that piece [“The Man Who Shot Himself Online”], having to work with the images, as material, whether as a kind of word within the line or distorting the images themselves. It was a process in which many of the poems in the book would start out just as, here’s a poem, but in order to speak to all those forces that surround that, it required different forms; it required dealing with different voices.

EMN: So would you agree with Robert Duncan, who suggested to Charles Olson the rule that “content precedes form?”

DST: Definitely. It’s not like I sat down—say with “Research Material [for 21^st Century Art],” probably the most formally involved poems in the book … that didn’t start by me saying “I want to make a bunch of ‘real’ documents.” Instead it started in Banff in 2005, where I thought ‘I just want to make some nice, traditional lyric poems.’ And I had seen this picture in National Geographic in a story about people returning to Chernobyl, however many years later, and I thought, ‘huh, I’ll write a poem about that.’ But then I started to write the poem and suddenly I realized, no, I need to write that from the voice of these people who—you know, we have scientists going back to Chernobyl, but what if artists went back, what would they preserve? So then from there that piece develops. So, yes, the content comes first and the form comes later.

EMN: That kind of answers a different question I was going to ask: there’s this multimedia presentation, with all this stuff going on, but if you took that all away, there’d still be a poem worth reading. I’d say that the reader is immediately impressed with how you handle this extravagant form, but then is like, “this guy can also just write a great line.” On the other hand, if you dug under all that stuff and found that the line didn’t hold, the poem wouldn’t work. So, the question I have is: are you ever afraid that all the other stuff going on in your poems will overwhelm the lines themselves, or are you safe from that because you start with the lyric and work outward from there?

DST: Yeah, as you say, because the line is there, the impulses behind the initial lyric experience, or whatever you want to call it. And not only because the lines are strong enough to support the multimedia aspects of the poem, but also because, to me, in the process of creation, the lines are a part of the truth of that poem’s particular kind of speaking. The reason I kept pushing is because, this doesn’t feel true. To go back to the “Research Materials,” it was like, this isn’t saying what I want to say about this struggle—

EMN: You mean the poem itself?

DST: Yeah, to go back to the Chernobyl piece, it’s not like I wrote a poem that I kept and that I turned into this. It’s this kind of dialectical process, or hermeneutic circle, from form to content and back. It’s a moving back and forth that happens once it clicks, and I know that’s what I want to do. So I don’t think you can take that [the form] away. I mean, that’s why I wrote it that way; I think it’s necessary to the piece.

EMN: So, as a rule, do you write that way, starting with the lyric, and seeing where you can go from there?

DST: No, that’s just how it happens. Take some of the poems, like “Twoface the Two-Faced Kitten,” or “Poetry Hero,” those were pieces that just worked. I wrote them, and there was never a sense that oh, here’s a chance to try this or do that. So there’s that experience as well.

EMN: So you basically do whatever needs to complete that picture you have … in your gut?

DST: Yeah. Like the phrenologist poem, for example. What is the formal architecture to that poem? You have numbered lines, then the phrenology head with numbers on it. I had this idea to write a poem for my girlfriend because she was writing a paper about phrenology when we met. I thought, “write a poem for the phrenologist lover.” The payoff in the poem is that, when you get to the end, you realize that there are these instructions for when I’m dead—phrenologist style—for my skull to speak the truth that was inside the heart, inside the mind. These lines of love need to be written on my skull. Take my hair off, and you see where these numbers are on the skull? Take the line and write it there. You don’t have the poem without those instructions; you don’t have the poem without those images, or numbering the lines. It would lose its point, its power, without that.

EMN: In that poem you link the phrenologists to what the poets were doing at the time, which was similar [“they said truths were palpable”]. So in this day and age, with the multimedia experience etc.—you were reading something on your BlackBerry when I came in—is it necessary to use the materials of the time to describe the time? I don’t think you think of it that way, but is it inevitable that you will draw from these materials from everyday life?

DST: I think it’s partly just what I grew up loving. I grew up reading books, reading poetry. But I also read comics—read a ton of comic books, and watched a ton of TV. I grew up on a farm, so I had that idealized poetic experience of being able to wander around nature, but I also had a satellite dish that we got in, what, ’83, when I was five, watching Nickelodeon and USA network. It seems that those forms, and the play side of art, the enjoyment you get from making a poem, that’s just what I enjoy doing.

EMN: So what you’re describing is a synthesis of what’s come into you and figuring out how to put it together. But are there any artists that clued you in to how you might join these different mediums, or are you interested in this art and that art and you put them together?

DST: I think that’s a major part of it, but then there’s when I went to teach English in South Korea—taking a break from undergrad—and I first read David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. That was my first introduction to metanarrative, that kind of self-consciousness. Up until that time, I had only written surrealist, metaphor-heavy, I don’t know what you’d call them, really traditional Leonard Cohen rip-off lyrics. Just a lot of really bad poetry. So reading Wallace in Korea, I wrote “An Experiment in Form,” the first poem in the first book. The poem that serves as the spine for that piece was something that I wrote sincerely, and it was terrible. I was mad I had written another terrible poem. Suddenly, this critical voice came in and said, “let me critique this.” But that was too cruel, so I thought let the author come in and defend it. I had that poem on my computer when I was back in Moose Jaw, bartending, and I sent out a bunch of poems to Grain Magazine. They ended up accepting eight poems, so I thought I’ll just throw this one in with it, and they ended up really liking it, and publishing it. So I’m like, “oh, that’s something you can do.” Inhabiting these different mediums, languages, jargons, became something I was interested in exploring. But definitely Wallace.

EMN: You also have an elegy for him in this book.

DST: Yes.

EMN: We’ll come back to that. Reading your work, I’m tempted to take Pound’s dictum, “make it new,” and change it to “make it more.” Would you agree with that? Although I must add that it would be ridiculous to say that the straight lyric poet doesn’t have a place anymore.

DST: Yeah, that would be ridiculous. To get back to what we were talking about before, I don’t write the way I write because I think this is the only way to write. This just happens to be the way that I write. Assuming that I have another 40 years left, I’m assuming that at some point I will write a book of straight lyric poems, or a book of just—lines.

EMN: Another weird thing that I find about the book—and this comes back to what we discussed about the poems beneath the craziness—at one level, I look at the page and it’s out there, I’ve never seen anything like it, we’re trailblazing here. But at the same time, it’s very in-the-world: bodily, present, direct. There’s a kind of hook to it. For instance, there’s a poem about the G20 in Toronto, and that grabs your attention, it’s a recent news story. Is it important to you to have that hook on reality?

DST: For me it is. I can’t write a poem otherwise; that’s not where poems come from for me. For me, it’s being in this crowd of thousands of people and being so overwhelmed by the unity and the beauty. There’s this cause and there’s this and there’s this. Then there’s that, as you say, bodily feeling contrasting with the police just completely trying to F with the people, to stir something up. It’s those moments, for me, where it’s like, “yeah, there’s a poem.” Or, take the phrenologist poem. That comes from just being overwhelmed and in love, and then one day after class I was walking through the park and looked at the snow and was hit by these images. I saw a snow angel, so there’s a line in there, “as though snow angels were/ MRIs of the soul, these icy impressions limning/ eternity.” It just hits you. It’s that sudden work of the metaphor, that twist of language that combines with the emotional experience that gets things going.

EMN: Sticking with this marriage of the everyday with the experimental, James Wright once said he wanted his poems to be accessible to anyone with a reasonable degree of intelligence. That’s a high percentage of people, but a high percentage of those people don’t read poems. Is that something you think about? That even though your work is pushing boundaries, that the subject matter will bring it down to Earth?

DST: I hope so.

EMN: Have you ever had an experience where someone who is not a poetry reader—a friend you play basketball with, say—has connected to your work, has checked out your blog and said, “I like that one about David Foster Wallace,” because of what you write about?

DST: No, not that I can think of. Uh-oh … I mean, I hope I’m not turning people away. Well, I had a good experience—it was obviously just a good class—but I had a good experience a couple years ago. Andrew Dubois [PHD and Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough] taught my first book. There’s a poet’s ideal audience: a group of students who have been studying contemporary poetry all semester and I had the chance to go in and read and talk to them. So here’s a group that hadn’t been exposed to this type of poetry before but were very receptive. Even those who were not receptive were willing to go along with it.

EMN: Could you see it in their eyes that they related to it like they would, say, a funny YouTube video? Or a dark YouTube video? Because people watch those.

DST: Yeah. For instance, a poem that is weird, experimental, etc.: the Mad Magazine one [“A><B,” from Predicting, in which the reader is instructed to fold the page after reading the poem in order to create a new poem out of the same text, as in a Mad Magazine gag]. People were really digging that fold, the playing with the page, thinking “that’s something I haven’t thought of before and I like that.”

EMN: You’ve brought up Mad Magazine. Your work mixes playfulness, mischief, with seriousness and heaviness. In your mind, how do those two sides interact?

DST: So much of it comes down to your personality, and I have a lot of mischievousness in me. I like toying around with people, or being toyed around with myself. Again, it comes down to what you like to make, what you like to experience in the act of creation. But it also has something to do with wanting to think about—very specifically with the new book, writing these elegies—what we mourn, what is the status of how we mourn? As soon as you start asking those questions—what? how?—is when you start getting into different conventions, different decorum. As soon as you get into a convention, a form or decorum that is desecrating, or is of a false consciousness, that’s when the satirical needs to come in. Take the one about Sierra Leone with people donating money in order to get victim’s scars [“Dear Anna” from “Research Material for Poetry on Late 20^th-Century Art,” which describes fictitious people in the western world wearing the scars of Sierra Leone’s civil war like tattoos as a sign of solidarity]. A friend of mine used to run a leftist political magazine, and he published it and renamed it “Bleeding Heart Capitalism.” I didn’t realize then that that was what I was satirizing/critiquing, but when you focus not only on the loss, but also on how the loss is bourn witness to, then a darker playfulness and satire becomes necessary.

EMN: You’re using the mischief to, for example, bear witness to the murder of an innocent bystander. Does that make the play/mischief liberating, or does it lead you to a place where you’re entrapped by what you’ve uncovered?

DST: Hmmm.

EMN: Was it fun writing this book? Was it sad? A mixture?

DST: It’s both. There is the manic liberation that comes with writing something that’s terrible but very true. I’m thinking of “Hic Jacet.” I started that poem in 2005, and at one point it was half the book. At one point it wasn’t even in the book. One day, I was at the library and saw [Gerhard] Richter’s stuff about Gudrun Ensslin and the baader-meinhof group and, that night, I’m on the Internet, on a shock site and: hey, “Popeye,” what’s this? I click and find this photo of a person who has just been run over by a bus [which prompted the poem and is printed at its start]. Right away I have these two images, two people preserved after being taken down by progress in completely opposite ways. Struggling with that, it’s liberating to think it through. Finding a way to express that poetically has a certain liberation to it, but then there is the question: where does that liberation take you? [Daniel laughs, slightly exasperated but also giddy, perhaps in response to the unconscious and barely perceptible head shake of the interviewer as he stares out the window at College Street]

EMN: Staying on the mischievousness, is it necessary in this day and age to use mischief in order to get at something sincere, or is it at least helpful? Or, and maybe this is postmodernism here, do you have to unscramble the code of our modern living in order to crack it?

DST: Yes to the second question. Scrambling the code and the mischievousness are two separate questions. Scrambling the code: that’s something I struggle with. In postmodernism, with its kind of uber-scramblings, the world that those existed in is gone. Now, we’re in a world that is self-scrambling. That’s something that I struggle with. I want to engage these forces and take them as this wave that you can go along with. Instead of saying, “I’m just going to write this lyric poem,” allowing that wave to help shape the lyric. But at the same time, if our world is so fragmented and, as Baudrillard said, it’s this mass ecstasy of communication, and if you write a poem that just goes along with that, are you just writing a book that’s as disposable as the rest of it?

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DST: Now, the mischievousness. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about, in relation to some other projects, is how, with the Internet, the idea of satire is changing so much as we get more and more tangled into these e-codes, these e-identities. It used to be that if you satirized someone, yeah, you satirized their image by drawing something funny about them. But that paper was very separate from who they were in reality. Whereas, as we become more integrated into these codes, into these other sorts of identities—I mean, when you get satirized online, people can work at such a level now that they are changing your very presence, your very identity, to someone who is a part of your e-community, or even your regular community. There’s that, coupled with the fact that the consumer has almost become an element of composition, in how you can provoke the consumer and become a story based on how you provoke the consumer. Obviously, Warhol knew this, Lady Gaga knows this. It’s in how they become so big that the audience’s reaction becomes the story, as much as what they make is the story. Lady Gaga is composing with us when she wears a meat dress. Our reaction is something that she is orchestrating, is something that gets taken up and disseminated.

EMN: I’d like to say that my question sequence is now scrambled as hell. [Daniel laughs, again in a spirit somewhere between giving up on the world and going down a waterslide.] Okay, to get back to the scrambling, are we now in a state in which we need reconstruction?

DST: [sighs]

EMN: Or is that a dream?

DST: Yeah, when aren’t we? Personally, I’m just in a need for quiet. I find myself getting more and more into painting. When the AGO [Art Gallery of Ontario] had that “Artists at Work” stuff, especially with Agnes Martin, you know, twelve paintings of white, with these very faint grids. I could sit in that room for hours because it’s in such contrast to everything else that’s happening to us right now. I guess we’re always in need for some reconstruction, but we’re definitely in the need for just some quiet.

EMN: Okay, is it that—and I think this touches on the book as a whole—is it that we’re not in a need for reconstruction, but for reconceptualization? Maybe we can’t stop the flux. What’s the Hemingway quote? We didn’t want to know what it was, we wanted to know “how to live in it.”Is that more it?

DST: Definitely.

EMN: Because, as is a theme in your book, it’s not the events themselves, necessarily, that we need to deal with, but how we conceptualize those events. But then, if we’re talking about how something is represented, then your book becomes its own subject. It’s not elegy, it’s about elegy, but it’s about elegy because it actually contains a bunch of elegies: for David Foster Wallace, for Dahlia, etc. But ultimately, it’s a comment upon elegy, which is made clear in the end, as in the review [“If This Is the Experiment, then the Results Are Not Good”] which is not about the film, which is an imagined film, but about outrage toward the reaction to the film. So, it’s a book about itself at the same time as it’s a book about so many other things that it can’t get to them all, not even close. So, if it’s such a big job for us to establish how we look at things, do ever get to look at things?

DST: I guess that might be what other poets do; maybe that’s a type of poet: one who looks at things. Then maybe there’s a poet who looks at how we look at things.

EMN: So one is squelching one kind of doubt—are we looking in a proper manner?—and approaching another—the looked upon object—and you’re doing the opposite: fixating on the manner of looking.

DST: Yeah.

EMN: Sticking to this examining of how we perceive, I’m thinking of the story about the war photographer [“Breaking News”]. You say that he’s far from the death he has captured, but “the lens had made him intimate with the tones of burns and bleeding.” That’s like the viewer of the Internet porn you write about, or as we’re far away from the pictures of the G20, I could mention a million things, you’re far away from the uncle whose writing you found. But we’re close to these things through a lens, or a screen. That sounds like an ancient line from Corinthians, “we cannot see in this world but through a glass darkly.” So, in one sense seeing reality through a screen or lens is not new, but has it changed so much—

DST: Has it changed so much that, for the human mind, as the human mind evolves and as these lenses evolve—or are developed—is the mind moving at a rate that allows it to keep up with these lenses that are taking us close to and keeping us far from—you know, it’s a funny paradox we live in. These lenses are telling us, more and more, that we need to have a kind of global consciousness, to think globally. Yet, at the same time these lenses are allowing us to, more and more, move inward and self-manicure, with your status update, and make sure you have the right pictures tagged and this and that. I think it’s a tough spot for the human mind to be in, both as a perceiving entity and as one that has these structures of knowledge to navigate with.

EMN: But, on the other hand, you said what you long for most is quiet and disconnection. So, has it gone so far that it’s irreversible? One thing I wonder about is: is it asking too little of people to not expect them to be able to resist what might be bad for them?

DST: Definitely.

EMN: With all this talk about the Internet making you dumber, I mean, isn’t that because you allow it to? It didn’t make Julian Assange dumber. Is that part of your project, to make this technology make people smarter? Not fighting against it but with it?

DST: Thinking with it. It’s funny, you want quiet, but it’s fun. It’s fun writing, working with a screen. Like with “Sergeant Deadhead” [“Last Flight of Sergeant Deadhead, the Astronaut! (A Message in a Bottle)”], a graphic poem dealing with my uncle’s own outsider art, that’s just really enjoyable to do. Getting it just right, manipulating these little images, that kind of tactile work that working on a screen allows.

EMN: That brings it ’round to Olson again, and what he said the typewriter allowed the poet to do. Same with Photoshop; he would be overwhelmed with joy at that tool I imagine.

DST: Totally.

EMN: Okay, so let’s touch on form. “Sergeant Deadhead” might’ve been the hardest poem in here for me to crack. I’m not sure I even tried to understand it, but just let it wash over me.

DST: That’s a funny poem. Based on e-mails I get, a lot of people have really liked that one, they’re really responding to it. But when I was working on that piece at U of T [University of Toronto], people were like, “cut.” But at the time, it was just this [the crazy graphic poem itself], there was no story introducing it and I hadn’t included the songs. So I think a lot of that material—say, the letter that introduces “Research Material”—a lot of that was written in response to what you were saying before, wanting people who have just a basic understanding to be able to pick it up and read it. Just the poems, though—at Banff, having Don [McKay] read it, or Tim Bowling, or Anne Simpson, they would be like, “I have no idea what’s going on.” I’d say, “oh, well, here’s the story,” and they’d say “oh, OK, that makes sense.” So a lot of that [introductory material] came from wanting to make the poems more engaging.

EMN: Before we get back to the introductory material, I want to get into how the visual aspects emerge. The story with “Deadhead” is that you find your uncle’s writing and it has this incredible story behind it—which is about reality, which we’re going to get back to later—but it’s this untrustworthy reality.

DST: Basically, knowing that story, I just wanted to imagine this story that my uncle would tell, imagine this cold war paranoia with this kid who’s a part of this soldier unit trained to murder the moon, but murdering the moon is just a big—what’s that Anthony Burgess novel, The Hunting Seed, where there’s overpopulation … at the end they realize that they need to invent a corporation called W.A.R. where war is just a corporation that brings people together to shoot one another to keep the population at a nice balance. That’s the kind of story that’s happening here, where people are kept in this fever to keep them distracted. It’s obviously working on something like “let’s murder the moonshine,” the futurist saying. So that’s where the story came from.

But the strategy for the form came from Chris Ware. I’d been reading Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. I thought, ‘I’m going to try to mimic his style in how I do this.’ I wanted to create, to use, a graphic in a way that let the image act as a word and the word as an image, moving the eye in a way that would create the aesthetically pleasing experience that you get from reading comics. When I was back in school in 2001, I read some stuff by W.T. Mitchell in his book Picture Theory, and he has a line in there that says where the image and the word are joined is in formal graphic iterability. They can be repeated graphically. And all these differences are coming out of them—for Mitchell, that’s a result of institutions, desires, conventions and so on, the different power relations he explores throughout the book. That has always stuck with me; that’s where I decided I wanted to explore that area where the word and the image lay down beside each other in the same bed.

EMN: Okay, I see that, like the picture of this little kid [in “Sergeant Deadhead”], if you look at each picture the kid gets cuter and funnier—

DST: Yeah, those are trying to have a sort of filmic quality, the look of a filmstrip. You have our astronaut tumbling down the page, there is a zoom in.

EMN: It’s playfully bootleg at the same time, purposely low-tech, like a B-movie.

DST: That’s a case where my skill level thankfully lines up with the aesthetic. I don’t know how Photoshop works, I don’t get it, I just go on it and do things. “Sergeant Deadhead, the Astronaut!” is some old crappy Disney movie from the fifties; that’s where the title comes from. So, luckily, my inability to use Photoshop lined up with what this piece demanded.

EMN: In that piece, you’re a reader as much as a writer, working off this other material—and you do this elsewhere. You’ve written some of the stuff you’re working off, such as the “Research Materials.”

DST: With the “Research Materials,” I published those as an insert in Prism [the insert was taped to the back of the magazine in an envelope]. I went to read there [in Vancouver] and they presented me with a gift. It was the poems taken from the issue and mailed back to them by this very helpful librarian at Notre Dame, with a note that said “Dear Prism Magazine, one of your students left his research materials attached to the back of this magazine. Hopefully, you can find them so they can finish their project.” So you have to have these signs for people so they know. And, what happened with that whole project: Sheryda Warrener wrote to me and asked if I’d like to do some poems and I asked if she’d be interested in doing this insert. She said great, “send the poems.” So I send her the first copies of it and she sends back this panicked e-mail thinking I’ve pulled some Dadaist move one her, like “I don’t write poems, I just photocopy things from books and that’s what you’re going to publish.” She said, “We can’t just published things you’ve photocopied.” I told her “No, I made that, I put it into books and photocopied it.” She said, “Okay, okay, okay.”

EMN: As a reader, I have the feeling that these poems are all connected, but that they connect somewhere off stage, if you will. It’s like they have these tangles with each other and you just get the sense that they connect off the stage, or the book. So, as a reader, I feel like I’m the one connecting them, especially because you’re drawing my attention to the act of reading and to the act of watching and to the act of watching someone make elegy. And this relates back to your first book, in which many of the poems act as a choose your own adventure [or order the sequence] for the reader. How much of this do you leave to the reader?

DST: To go back to “Hic Jacet,” on page 93, J.G. Franklin—the guy who gets the whole thing going—he says, basically, “write more.” And then included is a piece by [fictional poets] “YEAH!ts,” J.G. Franklin, Adhita Dasgupta. It’s the same with the “Research Material:” here’s my research material, but here’s also the call to produce your own. I mean, that’s how I read and I’m hoping that’s how other people read as well. I’m making it a little more explicit, maybe.

EMN: So the poem itself is a call for submissions.

DST: “The only response to a work of art is another work of art.”

EMN: Getting back to the use of introductions as a method to situate the reader, to give the reader an idea of how to run with this thing you’ve made, do all the introductions—the stories, letters and essays that often open the pieces—work that way?

DST: Often, it’s just completely necessary. Take “Dahlia’s Dead:” if I just put these napkins [which contain designs and are captured on Polaroid and scanned on to the page], or these other pages that are scanned on there, it’s just not going to mean anything, you need that story. It’s like if you read “Leda and the Swan,” and don’t know the myth behind it, it’s like “whoa, that’s a crazy swan.” These are the same way—not that they’re at the same level of myth—but you need the story behind it to understand the responses to it [which is made up of the designs, drawn on cocktail napkins, and comics drawn on notebook paper].

EMN: Again, creating the text, and then commenting on it. To stay on “Dahlia’s Dead:” in the story, the narrator tells of making comics with Dahlia, saying “I wrote. Dahlia drew.” Then, there are comic strips, which only have writing, which is just really, really sad. But then, I appreciate the originality of that construction, there’s joy in that. Again it takes me to this place where I’m half frowning, half laughing. In either case, I want a beer. Shifting now, Anne Carson kept springing to mind for me, particularly Decreation, where she writes essays and then comes back to the themes established there. Specifically, I’m thinking of “Research Material.” Can you talk about how you act almost as a critic of your own work?

DST: How do I act as a critic of my own work?

EMN: Well, say, in “Research Material,” there’s a kind of manifesto there that explains what you’re trying to do.

DST: I see, yes, in the letter [that opens “Research Material”]. It’s funny, I actually wrote that letter after Dionne [Brand] came and talked to the creative writing students at U of T [when Daniel and I were both working towards our MAs]. This part, at the end, was inspired by something she said in that talk: “Let the dogmatic and homogenized language that poetry opposes crack open poetry’s own homogeneity and dogmatism and, hopefully, sound something new.” So, that piece is taking on the art catalogue, the footnote, the newspaper, these things that we, as poets, might think make language too solid, too reified. Using the reification of these things, working within them, to renew poetry’s own reification.

EMN: That brings us back to addressing the prescient issues of the day, looking the world in the eye, instead of from above it, or outside it. You’re work is immersed in the everyday world. For instance, the porno poems [“Desire, A Lyric Pornographologue of Autoerotic Haunts”]: that’s something like a ten billion dollar industry, but there haven’t been a lot of poems written about that—or maybe there have been, I guess a poet like Margaret Christakos might write about that—but talk about identifying with that unseemly commonality in the world. Specifically, talk about how you’re talking about it in third person, and then the “me” comes in and you’re a part of this underworld. Is that a hard place to go to, because your project was also to go to these shock sites, the dark underbelly of the Internet.

DST: Those poems are actually some of the oldest in the book, written at the tail end of Predicting. I’ve always written and read in the lyric traditions but I’m interested in explorations. So I was thinking about love poems as an essential form. But, god, love, what’s happened to love? Love is in big quotation marks in terms of pornography, but how does the lyric run up against that? It forms a kind of trinity: the first poems are about the history of poems and desire—different forms that have existed—while others had to directly draw on the pornographic website and the last ones are about how the traditional lyric can think about self-love. Actually, initially when I made those—when I was still in my undergrad—I had these chapbooks of porno poems. There’s actually a lot more written with pornographic websites, I think ten in total, and ten of the masturbation ones, and I gave them to my professors [laughing heartily]. They must’ve wondered what the hell I was doing. That was a project that was born out of—not that I’m not naïve now—but that was born out of a very deep naïveté and just sort of going with it.

EMN: To stick to those, you told the Toronto Quarterly that each poem in this book is about “finding a place for something we lose.” How do the porn poems work into that, what is it that has been lost?

DST: As we get more and more virtual, the potential for losing physical contact, of losing that side of the desired object, the experience of satisfying physical desire, is where those were going. [David Foster] Wallace has that great story, “Datum Centurio,” written as if it were a dictionary entry from the twenty-second century, about a time when “date” is defined as a virtual experience, basically having any sexual desire satisfied. Or, it describes, you go to the scientist, they take your blood, check your DNA and find your perfect match. Those are the two dates of the future, there’s no more rambling about and finding and colliding. That’s what it’s about. Maybe Internet porn is the cusp of that.

EMN: You said before that you want silence, to look at paintings at the AGO because that allows you to detach. So we become—or, it’s possible for us to become—detached in a physical way as we become attached in this multitudinal way, which we then feel the need to detach from. So as you said before, writing in the expected, traditional language becomes almost avant-garde; George Elliott Clarke writing romantically becomes this shocking thing. So, in the same way, does reattaching to the physical world become an act of rebellion?

DST: In terms of poetry, you say, “I’m this kind of poet, I’m what’s breaking,” and these other poets say the same thing. But, no. Poetry, as such, that’s what unites poetry, this kind or that kind, against the disposable, against the completely solipsistic, what all these technologies have the potential to do to us.

EMN: In my better moment of defending poetry in my mind against some imaginary businessman, I think it re-sensitizes.

DST: Absolutely.

EMN: But you can’t quantify that, people don’t get that argument. Or maybe they do?

DST: Well, re-sensitize is the perfect word, that’s why I like to go look at those [Agnus] Martin’s: you sit in that gallery and you don’t detach, you re-sensitize because suddenly these very subtle canvasses are blasting at you. These things might as well be eight-hundred-foot speakers that are just blasting your senses because you start to pick up so much from them.

EMN: That brings to mind Buddhism, which I think people misunderstand as this dismissal, when it’s actually an attunement to what something really is and not our overreaction to it. With that in mind, let me jump on a big topic: reality. Eminem puts it this way: “I am whatever you say I am, if wasn’t then why would I say I am.” Now, I could ask you, “what is real and what is made up?” Because the reader is left wondering that. But the more I read, the more I thought that would be both lame and beside the point. Isn’t the question not “what is real and what is fake?” but “what is presented, and how do we relate to it?”

DST: Yeah, nothing’s gained from suddenly realizing, oh this part was made up and this part is true, and you have this big breakthrough. That’s not it. It’s about creating these different relationships to the real, whether they were real or not in the first place. Like with “Research Material,” which were all fabricated.

EMN: Or as in “Videos for Children,” in which a misrepresentation, or the sloppy creation of a sign, leads to a deeper understanding of the G20. The least sincere thing you see there ends up being the most illuminating. That brings us back to unsettling notions of reality or representation. Are you trying to construct reality?

DST: It’s like with Reality Hunger [by David Shields]. From popular art to the most obscure art, artists are constructing a referent that might not even be a real referent but is created in the text, or piece of art, or TV show, that it then works against. What that impulse is, I’m not sure. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno makes the point that there are certain things that must exist a priori in order for an art form to exist. For instance, in order for music to exist, time must exist. But, once you reflect on time, it becomes content for creation. I think in order for a poem to exist, reality must exist. Then, once we reflect on it, the generation of reality itself becomes content. You can see how it’s hard to ask a question about it, because it’s hard to talk about.

EMN: I’ve attempted to think of your book as it relates to our modern, if you will, metaphysical mindset, which is popularly accepted as being jumbled, fragmented, or, as you put it, “self-scrambling.” Which brings me to Ashbery, who I studied in a class at the U of T. Everyone talked about how he embodies that fragmentary state, but to me what stood out was his failure to stop wondering about it, to stop searching for something. So I’m wondering about that failure to conclude on, I don’t know, the void, nihilism. Do you have any metaphysical sense?

DST: [Laughs] I just make poems. That’s my answer to that.

EMN: Would you agree that there is a failure to disintegrate? Could the postmodern project, to oversimplify it, to dismantle the structures of knowledge, ever be complete?

DST: No. That’s why I love [David Foster] Wallace so much. He’s responding to that potential for nihilism in the writers that preceded him: the postmodernists, the postmodernist fabulous, the postmodern minimalist. It seems to me his project is to show the trajectory that they’re pointing to, and then—in his work, with his frames—finding a way outside of that. For me, no writer thought about now in a better way than Wallace, which is why, when he decided to end his life—that was something. I wrote that poem [“Interlude: Mors Finis Non Est (Why Wallace Wrote Such Good Books)”], and I didn’t write for—I didn’t write for a while after that. For me, that’s who I went to: his essays, his stories, Infinite Jest.

EMN: That is the most straight-up elegy in the book.

DST: And the one for my friend, Blair.

EMN: Yes, those two stick out for that reason: unplayed with, untampered with. And that’s what Dionne [Brand] was talking about, right, putting the straight ahead, even the dogmatic, back into the poem. Do you take it as a responsibility to not just tear something down and walk away from it, but to leave something?

DST: Yes. Definitely.

EMN: But does that then become the struggle: what is it you leave?

DST: To come back to “Hic Jacet,” what I ended up doing was just leaving it to the reader. Basically, taking this image that had been labeled “Popeye,” and “here’s what we see, here’s the story behind it.” Then, showing the process of re-signifying, and then, at the end, just using the icons that appear throughout and leaving the reader with [a blank space that refers to] “here’s where this body sat on a previous page.” After all that, what has changed, what hasn’t changed? So yes, leaving it, in that case, to the reader.

EMN: In that case, you leave us with an absence, but a framed absence. Is that the best you can do with something like that, is it good enough?

DST: Yes. Yes.

EMN: So it ends up being me, I have to put myself, my imagination, into that blank box where the picture of the person [“Popeye”], who was run over by a bus, had been.

DST: Now you write, now you think. This piece, in the book, was originally just part one. There was part two, part three, but that all got scraped. One of the things I struggled with this piece [“Hic Jacet”] was: the crane as an image [with instructions to rip out the page and make an origami crane out of it], as an icon, then the connect the dots, the airplane [again, instructions for making a paper airplane] and we have Popeye. One of the things I kept changing was whether the last one would be Popeye, and then this blank. So the thinking there was: Popeye was the founding moment, so let’s return to that. But that seemed obscene, so I left the second picture out and just left the blank space.

EMN: That brings us back the role of the reader, where you ask readers to put themselves in there. But then you end the book with “Poetry Hero”—

DST: Which is the complete opposite.

EMN: Yeah. You’re fearing in that poem that the creator will disappear in the age of user-generated content. Is it a thin line you’re trying to walk here?

DST: Well, it’s not the user-generated world that “Poetry Hero” is worried about. Hitchcock would always talk about how, eventually, you’re not going to go to the cinema to watch a film, you’re just going to get hooked up to a few cables and the director is the one who programs, pushes that button to make your brain do that, this button for this, etc. And now it’s reaching that point, where it’s this completely technologically generated experience in which nothing is being created. You know, you’re remaking Tron, remaking whatever. In “Poetry Hero,” you’re remaking Milton, or you’re feeling exactly what he felt but you’re not thinking anything, so whatever’s wrong, whatever’s unjust, just continues.

EMN: Is that a real fear for you then: that the audience will overtake the creator?

DST: That that audience will overtake the creator.

EMN: But aren’t you also excited by that?

DST: That’s a different audience. The audience being talked about at the end of “Poetry Hero” is different than the audience that’s actually making, actually creating.

EMN: So you’re fine with the audience that takes your stuff and runs with it, but not with a lack of new stuff being made to run with?

DST: That’s a fair way to put it. It comes back to what you said earlier, about re-sensitizing. The act that happens in seeing and responding, that act of being re-sensitized, of being shaken and asked to respond—instead of being passive, in this kind of affective experience, and then: done.

EMN: The shaker must remain in order for those others to be shaken. You can’t just keep shaking the old shakes. [Daniel is laughing]

Now, I think I’m getting to what I’ve been getting to. The cup, I had a major light bulb with the cup. For the readers: there’s a cup and it is superfluous to this imaginary scientific study of Chernobyl that is meant to measure radiation some years after the catastrophe there. They’re testing things in a kitchen and there just happens to be this cup, accidentally in the photo, that the speaker fixates on. The cup, obviously, is a container. In the same way, our imagination is a container, our capacity to create elegy is a container—to contain “what is missing,” to use the title of the first piece in the book. Now, you ask “is there more to the cup than the cup can hold?” I’m thinking: Pound, in a previous era, wished to write a poem that would contain history, and I’m wondering if your book cannot even try to do that, but can only tremble in the wake of history, identifying certain tragedies in passing. Is there more to the book than the book can hold? Is identifying the impossibility of holding all we can do to honour all those who we cannot honour?

DST: Yeah. There’s the kind of mind that recognizes that, the kind of mind that has this insight that you’re describing—but it’s not as though that’s a failure. Makes me think of Owen. War has completely destroyed our capacity to mourn in the way we did before. Instead of “their flower the tenderness of patient minds,” in this moment of, as you said, of excess, the book can only stand before that. At least, its calling is to—what we’ve said before: to re-sensitize. So, yes it’s true, but that’s not a failure.

EMN: Would the failure be to give up because of the inability to explain the Holocaust, explain Rwanda, explain global warming?

DST: Yes.

EMN: I’m noticing now what comes above the line I just quoted: “the way the cup in the photo held on.” Even if its capacity to contain its own significance is in question, it endures. Sounds familiar. I think that might be the end. Did that, did that.

DST: So it’s the end, it’s like Ulysses, I’m like “yes, yes, yes.”

EMN: You will “yes…” No. Have you seen Equus?

DST: Long time ago, but yes.

EMN: There’s a line at the end, the psychologist says something like, “I know nothing of eternal things, yet I participate in eternal things.” So you said, when I asked about metaphysics, that you just write poems. But aren’t poems always about that, even if you aren’t thinking about it? Like Williams Carlos Williams, writing about a woman in front of a bank, which ends up being about the bank, and the banking system and what that does to the soul. Is it inevitable to get to that bigger picture, and is it easier to talk about that by not thinking about it?

DST: I was being intentionally coy before, because if I spoke that way I would be a different thinker or writer. I wouldn’t make what I make because I think what I make says it, does it. Whereas if I, sitting here, did that interpretation for you in some half-ass way, it would be nothing compared to that experience of the work itself.

EMN: That brings it back to: is that different than what’s always been the case, like “Ars Poetica:” “a poem should not mean but be.” So, when you read an old poem, is it from a different world, or do you have to do the exact same thing? What’s the flower quote?

DST: “Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds.”

EMN: We still need patient minds, right? And tenderness. What am I trying to get to? Do you feel like you can transcend—or maybe it’s not transcendence, maybe it’s like Andre 3000 said, “the love below”—do you descend into transcendence?

DST: You hope so.

EMN: And I didn’t even touch on the Hades references in this book, or the devil—which would get us back into the mischief.

DST: Yeah, the Devil, the trickster.

EMN: The devil can make a heaven out of hell. Can, similarly, the mind make a pastoral scene out of the Internet? That should be the last question. OK, on the Orpheus poem: you speak of cattle in a way that I couldn’t, because you grew up on a farm. What kind of farm?

DST: A grain farm. This is Saskatchewan, so your dog runs away for a week.

EMN: Comes back?

DST: Yeah. You’re like “come back.” It takes a week. More and more as I meet people, I learn that there are ways of exploring in the city. But our farm was a hundred years old, my great grandpa built the house. You go in these old buildings and you find stuff that no one has looked at in 75 years. Or you just wander in wilderness for a whole day, no threat, no danger, just imagining, discovering. You’re Luke Skywalker. And you see animals, you see death. One of my earliest memories is of watching chickens get slaughtered. Watching my dad and my grandpa chase a chicken and thinking, “something’s happening here. This chicken wants to do something, it wants to keep going.” And, yet, these men are going to get it. And when a chicken gets its head cut off: this spiraling entity in the air, then landing and running, it’s, “whoa.”

EMN: That’s as far away from detachment as possible, but at the same time, it’s the kind of shit that would show up on these shock sites.

DST: Exactly, except it’d be “funny” and it’d be a person and people would be commenting: “ha, look at his arm.” Yeah: can you make a pastoral out of the Internet? No. No.

EMN: You can, though. It’s just not going to overcome the assholes anonymously commenting on someone else’s horrific pain. So talk about that juxtaposition: did you watch that chicken get its head cut off and then go watch satellite TV?

DST: Yeah, but when you’re a kid it’s not a juxtaposition, it’s just reality.

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