Ottawa poet and writer Frances Boyle talks to AW’s Sharon Berg about her newest collection of poetry.
SB: Your first section in the book, focuses on your sense of what is lacking in yourself as you reminisce about your past; whether it was the receipt of caring from your mother, knowing how to care for your daughters, or simply having the experience of family love being returned. Yet, these are definitely love poems, and you write more love poems to your children later in the book. Can you comment on that seeming dichotomy; lacking nurture yourself but finding ways to give it through these poems?
FB: A couple of the poems in that first section repeat the notion of a “chasm” opening because of failures (real or perceived) in mothering and being mothered. This is echoed in the physical world when “the heart of the wall aches to be filled”. As you note, I think this lack does arise from uncertainty as to whether and how nurturing will be provided. Another interviewer commented that my poems serve to flag or expose mistakes experienced in our families of origin so that we don’t repeat them – to which I responded that, while true, it also enables us to make different mistakes!
How to resolve the dichotomy? Possibly by recognizing that lacks run deeper than a single generation and seeking a capacity to love by harking back to old stories, old rituals, finding compassion by honouring our histories. In my poems, figures like the Celtic warrior queen Boudicca, various goddesses, and the Virgin Mary manifest aspects of love: tenderness, ferocity, bodily ease and even forgiveness. Nurturing can be seen as “love in layers / of the everyday”, treasures like “little amber objects to pocket” to be found in daily tasks like hanging laundry.
SB: Your language strikes the reader as genuine and unique. For instance, in the poem ‘My Grip On Earth’ you speak to the way the rocks converse; “Round beach stones clack/ conversing together”. And later on: “chuckling rumble as they bump/ against companions eggs boiling/ in a pot.” Can you speak to your intention in making the earth around you come to life in this way?
FB: Envisioning the earth as a living thing is obviously not unique to me, but the sense of the physical world as having stories to tell is something I did hope to get across in “My Grip on Earth” and several other poems, including one where I personify Earth as an angry teen. Animism, which attributes conscious life to objects in and phenomena of nature, holds a great appeal for me, although I haven’t studied it at all deeply. It cropped up in some of the poems in my earlier collection This White Nest, where humans identified with, learned from and even morphed into things such as trees and ocean waves. I carried that sense of metamorphosis and the mythic into Openwork and Limestone, including in lines such as “to find / the water table in my veins.” Imagining the lives of natural objects and the histories that our surface world contains is important in probing deep time, the shape of pre-history. Oceans and mountains breathe, rocks speak, and our ancestors reach out to us, for nourishment and to offer old knowledge.
SB: Can you please speak to your title choice and its deepest meaning for you? I am curious about your vision for both ‘openwork’ and for ‘limestone’ and what you would like your readers to come away from reading this book with.
FB: “Openwork” includes crochet, lacemaking, filigree, wrought iron work. I’ve focused on openwork as meaning the work primarily of women’s hands, which leads me into the stories and family relations of women over time, the rituals of women’s work that segue into mythic ritual and devotions. Because the objects created by this kind of craftwork are physically open (unlike, for example, felted fabric, or tight-gauge knitting), I wanted to imbue a sense of possibility in the openness. Limestone is rock, obviously, but in my conception of it for the book, it relates to layers of the earth, the undersurface of things. Deep time, and the Old Stories. So, both parts of the title relate to myth and ritual, to history and prehistory.
I’ll also mention that am totally delighted by the cover image, which features artwork by Montreal textile artist and Concordia University professor Kathleen Vaughan. It is a detail from her larger piece that is a revisioned map of Iceland. The detail focuses on a border of Icelandic lace (openwork) juxtaposed against a series of small lava rocks, some suspended from silk threads, others strewn on fabric (not limestone, but ancient rock nonetheless).
SB: What you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?
FB: The final word of the last poem is “breathe,” and that is very much the feeling I’d like the reader to be left with. I’ve included elsewhere in the book poem about the Welsh concept of Awen, as poetic inspiration or its embodiment, the source of which is a word meaning “to blow”. I’d like the dual meaning of inspiration (i.e., both the physical and creative senses) to create a feeling of openness, of possibility, a sense of how nature and our world are and remain dynamic and ever cycling like the rush and retreat of waves. But also like the signals we might pick up if we were tuned to the resonances of the past, becoming aware of how the layers of history and prehistory fold upon themselves so that ritual has a far deeper meaning than we are capable of understanding intellectually. That family histories are complex, deep-rooted and variable, and resonate with human connections over time. That we can be animated by this connectedness with the earth and the tides and all that has come before us.
SB: What would you say is the most fundamental difference between your earlier work and this new collection?
FB: The most fundamental difference between Openwork and Limestone and my earlier poetry collections, Light-carved Passages (2014) and This White Nest (2019) is the extent to which I’ve worked and reworked each poem and the overall structure of the book. I also hope that the difference is a greater assurance, in voice and in craft. There are certain themes and preoccupations that I’ve returned to in all three books but this time the workshopping, revision and editing along with the number of iterations of structure were more intensive. I was lucky to work with three exceptional writer-editors over the several years this book was “in progress”. I came to the Sage Hill Writers Workshop with a motley assortment of poems, uncertain if they amounted to a book and Sandra Ridley helped me sift, sort and begin to create order. Susan Gillis encouraged me to develop through-lines, and identify and enhance space and airiness within, while digging deeper into what the oldest of tales mean to my life. And John Wall Barger, editing for Frontenac House, challenged to me to look at nearly every line of the poems, for clarity, precision and music, and helped guide my poetic freefalls back to earth.
SB: With what other book will this work make a good comparison? Are any ideas/ themes/ tropes/ forms in this collection that relate to a comparable work?
FB: Fellow Frontenac House “Quartet” author, Kim Fahner and I have already been thrilled to discover so many resonances between my Openwork and Limestone and her fantastic new collection Emptying the Ocean. We are equally drawn to mythologies, Celtic ones in particular, but both our books are also centred on the elemental, the physicality of longing, loneliness, fear and grief. There is commonality in some of the landscapes our poems evoke, including Ireland, shorelines and water. A search for home.
Another book that I think is comparable to mine (though in different ways than Kim’s) is Katherine Lawrence’s Black Umbrella. Very many of the poems in Katherine’s book use vivid detail and precisely recalled memory to evoke the speaker’s relationship with a problematic but well-loved mother and other family dynamics, from childhood days into adulthood. We both even have a poem about our mothers’ camel hair / camel wool coats!
SB: What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
FB: There were various sources of inspiration for the poems in the book, which were of course written over the course of several years. Many originated in response to poems that members of my Ruby Tuesday writing group would bring as prompts or launching pads to our weekly meetings, while others are ekphrastic, responding to works of visual art. However, one book that was particularly influential was Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful Underland. Several of the poems in my book directly respond to various of its elements, and others were influenced by my reading about his (literal) explorations beneath the surface of the earth. His book deals with “burial and unburial and deep time” and the places where people place “that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” My images of caverns and ancient tombs in part reflect Macfarlane’s tangled path through history and memory, as do the way I imagine using monitor dials to pick up traces of dark matter and my evocations of the mythic in memory and in nature. Like Macfarlane, I strove to illuminate the darkness below ground, both in the physical world and in family histories.
SB: How long did the first draft take for you to write? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts, were you working on the structure or the story world or aspects of style and language or something else? In terms of sheer length what did the book look like after the first draft? Did the length change?
FB: The poems in the first draft were largely written between July 2017 (when I submitted This White Nest for publication) and July 2019 when I came to Sage Hill. The working title of the draft I assembled there was “Peripheral Maneuvers”. At 53 poems, it was shorter than the book’s ultimate 60 poems. However, only 38 poems from the first draft made it into the book. Between drafts, I was both writing new poems and revising older ones to fit into my evolving conception of the book. Changes made while working with Susan Gillis often involved “going deeper”, finding the story (or the emotion, or the source of an image) behind a poem. I substantially reimagined several poems, and wrote new ones including responses to existing poems, to problematize or expand what was meaningful to me. The final revisions, after the manuscript had been accepted, operated to ground the poems in place or in voice. At my editor’s suggestion I changed some poems which had initially been second person singular to either first person or third person to avoid an amorphous “you”. I added floating “tags”, a kind of subtitle to many of the poems, for additional context and/or possibilities.
SB: How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Did you have a form/ structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving the choices of form/structure – efficiency or something else …style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
FB: The structure did change over time. In shaping the initial draft, I came up with five sets of common elements or themes, which I grouped into sections, “Urgencies on the Steel Grey Sky” (ghosts, water, wind, smoke); “Part of a Larger Mass” (stone, sculpture, statues); “Dismantled, Unpieced” (mothers / daughters / childhood); “For Salt or Sweet” (poems in different voices or characters); and “Ecstatic Sacrament” (women’s strength, largely via nature). In the second major draft, the sections were no longer titled, and the themes were more loosely and sonically threaded through the manuscript. The themes didn’t significantly change (although a number of the persona poems were dropped) but there was more weaving and less clumping. When I was editing for publication, despite some significant revisions to the poems and their order, the structure of the sections themselves remained largely intact. A structural element that I kept from the second draft through publication was to introduce each section with an untitled poem that can be considered as a kind of section title or epigraph. These poems don’t appear in the Table of Contents, so I like to think of them as buried artifacts for the archeologist / reader to stumble upon.
SB: Are any aspects of the book that is autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?
FB: Yes, I wrote about aspects of my life and family history(ies) in a number of the poems. The speaker is, of course, often me (or a stand-in for me) and some of the poems are quite close to the bone, dealing with things that are very real and personal. But most of the poems feature elements of imagination rather than being pure recollection. I incorporated imaginative extensions, embroidered histories or pure fictions; not everything that may appear to be autobiographical is in fact wholly true to life. I think that “telling it slant” let me probe some painful places but also allowed me the slight buffer of not necessarily exposing all. By juxtaposing autobiographical material with ekphrasis, incorporating historical and mythic figures, exploring the nature of ritual, and featuring the natural world as an actor, I hope that I’ve broadened the sense of what is “true”.
Frances Boyle’s books include the poetry collection This White Nest (Quattro Books 2019), Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions 2018), and Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill 2020), a short story collection which won first place for short fiction in the Miramichi Reader’s Very Best! Awards and was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed and ReLit Awards. Her writing has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. Raised on the prairies, Frances lives in Ottawa with her partner and an eccentric standard poodle. Openwork and Limestone is her third poetry collection.