CONTACT WITH POETS

sentences and the pleasure she seems to have taken in the minutest
grammatical shifts are really infectious. When I write (and in particular
when I wrote most of the poems in accrete or crumble) I’m primarily focused
on sound, syntax, rhythmic shifts, tensions, torques—all very intricate and
delicate aspects of sentence construction—and minimally interested in
meanings, themes, larger patterns. I’m not convinced that my approach to
writing is entirely successful. accrete or crumble for example, probably suffers
from a lack of overarching theme or an obvious structure. But a large part
of the pleasure I get from writing and reading poetry rests in that sort of
transcendent or disoriented feeling of being surprised by language, the
sort of double take when successions of words reveal their strange possibilities.
Oh yeah, ostranenie, that’s what I’m describing. Making strange.
beaulieu: In some of your recent poetry—Dirty Work
(above/ground press, 2008), for example—is that interest in materiality
and ostranenie driving you towards the use of found language? To me it
does seem to be an attempt to assert your voice, and—in the case of Dirty
Work—assert a female voice within the masculine discourse of the oil and
gas sector in Calgary.
Simpson: Yes, found language is a wonderful method for revealing
the tenuous and fragile relationship between the words we use and
the information we expect them to convey. My found language poetry
revels in failures to communicate, linguistic gaffes that often subvert their
speaker’s or writer’s intentions. It’s also fascinating to realize how much
context matters. Decontextualizing phrases or sentences from any number
of mundane contexts and recontextualizing them in a poem tends to strip
them of any rational significance, laying their absurdities bare. I love finding
poetic language in the least likely places, and it’s amazing how much
poetry is out there, hidden in technical manuals, corporate memos, spam
mail, and people’s habits of speech. I once started a bit of a manifesto
about found poetry, which centred on the idea of “snag” language, bits of
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