Vancouver poet, Alexandra Oliver talks to AW’s Emily Cann about her newest poetry collection.
EC: Many contemporary poets shy away from rhyme and/or fixed meter, as those techniques often create a kind of antiquated sound or quality to the work. You, however, use rhyme, meter, and form to great effect in your work. What is your relationship with these structural elements and what is your process like for engaging with them? How do you avoid producing that antiquated sound/feeling?
AO: My fascination with form springs from a dual need for order and subterfuge. I like to use lists and follow patterns. It gives me a sense of safety and purpose. However, I’m also bloody-minded enough to smuggle things in: allusions, scientific facts, clichés, jokes. My love for form/order is abiding, but I also have a healthy vein of disobedience running through me.
For form to serve as a transmitter for thought in the Now it has to encompass fluidity and contemporaneity. Nowness takes a special kind of nourishment. I listen to music, watch films, eavesdrop on conversations, and gorge on TV commercials. I pack my structures with the everyday. That tempers the forms and makes them less strident and antique-sounding.
There are no hard and fast rules for shaping work. I’ll sometimes allow myself to riff on a line that has particular contours and then see where that takes me. Or, if I want to give myself a good brain workout, I’ll dare myself to (for example) write a poem in triplets with one radically longer line. Sometimes a theme or story will lead, sometimes the rhythm. There’s always an element of flux and play working behind the scenes.
EC: The third section in this collection is based around Ethel Wilson’s 1947 novel, Hetty Dorval. This section is composed of sonnets, written primarily in Frankie’s—the novel’s protagonist—voice. What was it about Hetty Dorval that compelled you to take up the story yourself? And why was a series of sonnets the best vehicle for that response?
AO: The first thing that drew me to Hetty Dorval was that it was such an “underdog work”—it doesn’t hold a lot of cachet in the canon. You read it for the first time and it seems twee and didactic. Then you reread it and you realize that Wilson is doing something more subversive. She’s commenting on how people can be made to adhere to socially “appropriate” patterns and prejudices. Frankie is drawn to Hetty, her sense of autonomy and her inclination towards reinvention and survival. She’s a free woman. None of this washes with the adults in Frankie’s world, of course. They physically remove her from Hetty, send her off to boarding school, and then farm her out to genteel relatives in England. By the book’s end, she’s been irrevocably altered, and Hetty has been cast aside.
In reading Hetty Dorval, it was easy to see the narrative unfold as a series of vignettes, like sequential images on a ViewFinder — each sets the reader up for the next moment. In thinking conceptually about how to present this, the sonnet sequence made sense. The shape of a sonnet, for one thing, mimics a little screen, the perimeters of a slide.
EC: You take on a number of different voices in this collection, from a futures trader, to a schoolteacher, to Ottilie, Anaïs, and Anu, to Hetty Dorval’s protagonist, Frankie—and more! Which voices did you enjoy writing from the most? What challenges did you face when getting into character?
AO: Persona work allows one to both handle “hot” materials while in disguise and to explore the realities of others and therefore access empathy. I valued the experience of “becoming” those I initially felt conflicted about, including Anaïs and Anu. Anu, in particular, struck a chord with me. A dreamer, she falls in love and gives up everything for a domestic routine that involves taking up the mantle of triple caretaker (for her child, for Simon, and eventually for Anaïs—with disastrous consequences).
There’s another poem in the book called “Mrs. Beryl Armstrong, 86, Beats Closing Time at Longos” which deals with aging and the infantilization of elders; it also touches on what it is to lose one’s social/sexual currency. I found writing in Beryl’s voice to be an unnerving challenge—she’s got 34 years on me but mourns many of the same things I do.
When I write these poems, I ask myself: How can I inhabit this person? You have to get past your ego and overarching artistic aims; however, elements of you do sneak in. You have to be true to the voice but you also have to allow yourself to be directed by the process.
EC: Are there any aspects of the book you would like to change /tinker with?
AO: I think I would have liked to have expanded “The Blood of the Jagers”. I feel as if more context could have been provided in order to explain why Anaïs (the society-wife mother) behaved as she did towards her children rather than chalk it all up to marital dissatisfaction and depression. In reading through the poems about Anu, the transplanted wife of Simon Jager, I see where she might have been fleshed out and given more of a backstory and a sense of agency. The last glimpse we have of her is as a completely broken woman, changing her baby’s diaper and rubbing baby poop into the grass of a neighbour’s manicured lawn in rage. What might she have gone on to do? She has her own role in the cycles of violence that dog the family, but how does she get to that place? Finally, I feel as if Simon Jager could have been made more multi-dimensional and that the suffering underpinning his position and actions in the narrative could have been given more of an airing. He exists as a shadowy figure—spoiled, narcissistic, destructive, and then vanishes. I think even he deserves better. They all do.
EC: 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?
AO: When I started Hail, the Invisible Watchman, I was mid-PhD and therefore immersed in required reading. That comprised coursework books and a good deal of dissertation-specific stuff on domesticity and anxiety. I was naturally going back to Hetty Dorval, as it informs a big chunk of the book. Finally, I kept returning to the idea of haunted people and places (this especially during the pandemic and the fear, suspicion, and conspiracy theorizing it engendered). Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw came into its own here; I cite James in the epigraph to the first section of the book, and I slip in a sly reference to the 1961 film adaptation (Jack Clayton’s The Innocents) in the poem “The Creatures”. The narrative of a governess who becomes convinced that the ghosts of two dead servants are messing with the children she cares for took on a whole new meaning, as people succumbed to the virus itself or to anxiety, went down rabbit holes of misinformation, and/or languished at the mercy of locked-down nursing homes or substandard online schooling. It seems like a leap perhaps, but to me it made sense.
EC: Are there any aspects of the book that are autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoided the dangers of straight autobiography?
AO: My imagination isn’t good enough to have dreamed up all the base material for the book—experience and history did have a hand in its making. The first section features characters who are pastiches of multiple people—the terrible teachers in the “Schoolteacher Report” poems, for example. “The Blood of the Jagers” was an amalgam of stories I’d heard or experienced about families; I will admit, however, that the stroller incident in “Lobby” and the visits to the café in “The Marine Room” are totally true—they happened. As for “Clever Little Dragon”: it’s based on Hetty Dorval but there were phenomena in there (boarding school, gossip, class anxiety) that resonated and made the shaping of that section more of a personal experience than it might have been otherwise.
The actor Ellen Burstyn used to talk about approaching a role by “taking an elevator down to [her] inner archive.” I like to keep this in mind when making poems. When something awful or frustrating or exhilarating happens—or if I simply have a crappy meal or a prophetic-feeling dream—that all goes into the archive. I’m cheap by nature, so I don’t let a thing go to waste.
EC: How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
AO: I’ll reference two of the writers in my personal Pantheon: Anne Sexton and Harold Pinter. Sexton once said that she was a storyteller who wrote poems. I second that claim. I’d like the book to be assessed as a means of spinning yarns and presenting characters in crisis. I’m perfectly fine with it being a conduit for mood and/or an object of escape or entertainment. Maybe a suite of little machines that work perfectly to reflect on things and people that are broken. Or a series of uncomfortable home movies. Hauntology is a term on my cultural radar. I want people to feel haunted.
Secondly, someone once asked Pinter what his plays were about, and he rather facetiously replied, “The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” What he meant was: he didn’t want people to ascribe a greater meaning to his plays. He wanted the critics to lay off the analysis and let the absurdism do the driving and take people to a place where they could sense the greater import and looming threat themselves. I’ll summon my own cocktail weasel and say that I want people to just be with these poems. Sans morals, sans message, sans agenda.
EC: What memorable or formative experience around learning to write springs to mind?
AO: About thirty years ago, I had an exchange with an acquaintance—a real stuffy mansplainer— regarding a poem I had written about a horrible omelette. He gave me a sonorous lecture on how poetry should be “academic” and “noble” and that there was no room in the craft for either humour or omelettes. That poem was probably terrible, but I think back to that moment, and I feel that a teeth-gritting defiance took hold in me regarding the use of the ordinary in poetic process. I pledge allegiance to the idea that the perplexing, the sublime, and the potentially “important” can be explored through the mundane. I think one of the primary dangers of poetry-making, especially in the era of InstaPoetry, is that people feel they have to go straight for the candy—they need to say Important Things, usually couched in brutally direct abstractions. This cheats the reader out of both craft and identification. Craft, because you need to seduce them with some kind of musical/rhythmic sweep. Identification because you want to alert your reader to the possibilities hidden in the ordinary and render it more thrilling, more resonant. You want to help the reader make those connections.
EC: What emotions do you associate with writing? Or, differently put, how does writing impact your emotional state?
AO: Poems spring from a variety of emotions: outrage, sadness, lust, wonder, and so on. But what I feel (apart from frustration when I’m stuck) is predominantly relief—I have a place to put the idea. I always say to my students “You’re mad? You’re overwhelmed? You’re terrified? Take it to the poem.” Poems provide us with the cubbies in which to store our baggage. The trick is to do so in a way that avoids the obvious and/or doesn’t lean on abstractions. When something has been bothering me, I try and find a way to smuggle it into a poem. Sometimes that emotion/experience makes its way in, despite my best efforts. It depends.
I believe that most poets don’t sit around in their frilly shirts, smoking and drinking black coffee, constantly going, “AHA!” — although there are “eureka” moments like that. There’s a lot of exhaustion, tedium, and frustration that can enter the process. In this way, making and editing work isn’t much different from marking 50 essays or answering all your emails on Monday or cleaning out the fridge. Having said that, I will assert, for the record, that writing is the cornerstone of my keeping it together.
EC: What stories do you have about yourself as a writer? How have these stories changed or remained the same over time and across different experiences?
AO: In the 1990s, Vancouver had a phenomenal performance poetry scene. My friends and I would gather, drink coffee/bad wine/bourbon, chain smoke, and swap work. There were loads of series operating at the time, and it boggles the mind how we got any writing done because we were gallivanting about and keeping horrendous hours. I ran a show at a restaurant off Robson. We had poets, songwriters, and performance artists, including a guy who wrote and delivered parody Jim Morrison songs and a woman in a bodystocking who peeled oranges with her feet. We attracted a wild crowd. I remember we had this silver fox from South Africa who wore black turtlenecks and beautifully tailored trousers—very Halston. He used to sit in the front row and shout, “ROCK ON!”
Time and the advent of social media (and the pandemic) have changed everything. Readings and performances have changed; part of me longs for that sense of community and experimentalism. But I’m optimistic! My advice to young writers: if it’s within your comfort zone, get out into your community and listen to people read. Just enjoy being in the room. It adds such a valuable dimension to the writing life.
Born in Vancouver, Alexandra Oliver is the author of three collections published through Biblioasis: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (2013; recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Let the Empire Down (2016), and Hail, the Invisible Watchman (2022). She has performed her work for CBC Radio and NPR, the National Poetry Slam and numerous festivals and conferences. Oliver holds an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine and a Ph.D. in English from McMaster University. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Toronto.
