CONTACT WITH POETS

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and text function as objects on display as the installation progressed; and I think that that is an important contribution to the development of the work. beaulieu: How has the festival affected your own poetic practice? Trehy: I’d have to say it has stoned it dead! After the first festival, I took a year off to recover during which I wrote 50 Heads. And with a gap of 4 years between the first festival and the second, I was able to write a body of works including Reykjavik and Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective plus various text art installations. This time the festival was almost too big for me to handle and in the run up and afterwards, the huge creative demand of it has pretty much drained me. I had a handful of very useful conversations during the festival (not least with you and Christian Bök), which suggested to me where my writing should go (an inkling of re-inventing a non-poetic form, taking my interest in language and space in a new direction) but there seems little chance that I will have the energy to address it anytime soon. 93
Every Word in the Sentence: An Interview with Natalie Simpson Natalie Simpson is a mainstay in Calgary, Alberta’s poetic community. Longtime editor, publisher, facilitator, host and generous colleague, Simpson’s work has been published extensively across Canada. Renowned for her poetic delivery, Simpson’s two volumes of poetry, accrete or crumble and Thrum complement almost twenty different chapbooks and dozens of anthology and magazine appearance. This interview was originally conducted in two parts immediately following the publication of Simpson’s two volumes of poetry. It has been knitted together here into a single discussion of poetics and process. derek beaulieu: To start with, I’d like to discuss your first book of poetry accrete or crumble (Line Books, 2006). You did your MA thesis at the University of Calgary, writing on Stein’s sentences—to what extent did the Steinian sentence influence your work, and specifically accrete or crumble? Natalie Simpson: I think with Stein the issue is how to escape her influence—I first started reading Stein near the end of my undergraduate degree and immediately everything I wrote sounded exactly like her. Stein’s writing has such distinct rhythm and such a seductive style that once her voice gets into your head it’s difficult to avoid trying to rewrite and rewrite her. I like to think that I’ve been able to incorporate her influence without writing too derivatively. There are a few distinct elements of the “Steinian” sentence that stand out for me. First, the flattening of syntactical hierarchy, which means giving every word in the sentence equal weight, regardless of its function. In Stein’s sentences, all the small words, such as prepositions, pronouns, articles, demand as much attention as the nouns and verbs that in normative sentences drive the narrative or convey the sentence’s information. This equalized approach to parts of speech results from (or contributes to) the move away from referentiality towards 94
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THE UNBEARABLE CONTACT WITH POETS
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if p then q classics 41 Fulford Str
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For Madeleine
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That’s not writing “That’s no
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transcend transcribe transfigure tr
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(1966) and the people mover: a demo
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creating an inundation of descripti
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face. another takes one in the hand
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and correspondence bervins work in
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gysin and burroughs collaborations
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* judith copithorne has published o
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ties with middle english in the gen
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how does it sound? 1. why would one
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tical analysis content is subsumed
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populations around public squares w
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pageant, these rows of lines or vin
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[...] when i let the letters shift
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juring of texts within texts czechs
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these contemporary concrete and con
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CONTACT WITH POETS

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