Toronto poet Jade Wallace talks to Sabyasachi Nag about their debut poetry collection.
Sabyasachi Nag(SN): The title of your poetry collection “Love Is a Place” (Guernica, 2023) is juxtaposed with the rejoinder “but you cannot live there.” What is intended by the title; how did you arrive at it?
Jade Wallace (JW): I suppose I meant a few different but related things. That you can always go back to a place you associate with love, but that place will be different when you return. There is hiraeth in every homecoming. That there is persistence in love, but you might not be part of it at any given time. That our psychological and geographical landscapes are constantly changing one another. As for how I came to it, I’d honestly love to know. The phrase just appeared in my head one day when I needed a title for a poem. I later decided it worked better as a title for the collection.
SN: The collection of over fifty poems is spread over five sections; the title of each section (except for one) stands outside the poems it contains; the poems within each section seem to be thematically caroled. Can you elaborate a bit about the structure of the collection?
JW: The first four sections of the book each centre on a particular place and a particular relationship, and focalize a significant moment in that relationship. Cynic’s Guidebook, for example, is about a mother and her adult child visiting New York, the first trip they have ever taken together since the child left home. The poems in each section, both individually and cumulatively, form a loose narrative. We see, for instance, the mother and child planning their trip, visiting New York, and finally leaving it again. But each single poem tends to be more concerned with impressionistically rendered moments that hang beside one another like flowers in a garland.
The final section, Genius Loci (which refers to a ‘guardian spirit’ associated with a particular place) offers something more like character portraits, in which we witness individual people interacting with familiar locales that are of particular, even formative, importance to them. In “You Gather Their Bones,” for example, a person who feeds stray cats in Kensington Market is seen briefly mourning a dead bird they find on their way. I always enjoy a shift in focus at the close of a collection.
SN: There is a distinct sense of place running through the collection, for instance many poems in the first two sections are set in (ghost and tourist towns of) Southwestern Ontario, followed by poems staged in New York City, followed by poems set in a coastal vacation town. The collection has been described as a ‘psycho geographic investigation.’ Could you talk a bit more about the influence of place on these poems and how the collection plays out in time?
JW: I tend to think of these poems as being like pinball machines. Their focus bounces back and forth between the speaker and other people as they interact, but also between the people and the place they are experiencing, and the ball never really lands anywhere.
Throughout this process there is a lot of ambiguity about cause and effect. Is there pathetic fallacy occurring, with the people anthropomorphizing, or even physically altering, their environments to suit themselves? Are the environments exerting their own forms of influence on the people? Of course, those two things can be mutually inclusive, so it’s a dynamic but obscure process that’s in play between people and place—and the exact nature of that relationship remains “An enigma I need never answer” throughout the course of the book. (That, by the way, is a quote from one of the poems in the book, “The Way Out of Paradise” and in the poem the speaker is talking about a rock, but I think it applies metatextually to the whole collection.)
SN: Economic alienation, social inequality and class analysis recur as central or pivotalsubjects in several poems. Is class struggle one of the key engines for your poetry ingeneral or is it incidental to this collection?
JW: Definitely not incidental. I can’t go anywhere without reading the effects of class in the landscape. I come from a blue collar family in a blue collar town, and I grew up during an age when we were all really being pushed to make the move to white collar work. Go to university, get a job where you come home clean at night, that’s what our parents wanted for us. Social mobility is a difficult feat to pull off, so I think the pursuit of it inevitably makes one hyper-conscious of the trappings of class, wherever they manifest (which is basically everywhere). It’s not that I set out to write about class, it’s just that it feels like lying if I try to ignore it.
I’m finishing my second poetry collection now, The Work Is Done When We Are Dead. As you can probably guess from the title, class consciousness is one of its chief preoccupations as well. I suppose it’s hard for me to avoid talking about social and economic inequality, which are, to me, some of the most outrageous unfairnesses of our time (or maybe any human time), and also eminently fixable.
SN: Somewhere within the collection, you say “Inheritance is for my grandmother, Nancy Fenderson, who really did all those things”; several other poems in the collection are anecdotal, telling stories that appear to have been crafted from lived experience. Can you talk a bit about how important it is for a poet to be factual?
JW: I think it is not important at all for a poet to be factual—which is precisely why I felt the need to clarify that this particular poem did indeed confine itself to verifiable truths.
Having said that, many of the poems in this collection do share a passing resemblance with actual events, sometimes from my life, sometimes from other people’s, but that’s just a selfish little theft an artist commits when they need material. Any basis in factuality doesn’t necessarily make the resulting poem better or worse.
SN: Several poems in the collection are pure narratives told by one distinct speaker: stories containing repeating characters, plot, conflict, and resolution; stories with a distinct beginning, middle and end. How would you describe the inclination of this collection towards the narrative over lyric? Did you mean for this collection as a kind of life writing in verse?
JW: You can probably guess my feelings about lifewriting from the answer above. As for story… People sometimes complain about poems that are “just” prose broken up into shorter lines, but I love that type of writing. Why shouldn’t prose be stuffed full of dramatic pauses and meaningful silences and made to go slowly? I think poetry is great at offering a particular kind of attentiveness to the world, and to language, and that is eminently useful for some forms of narrative.
So yes a lot of the poems in this collection are liked pared-down stories in their general gist, but I do like to use lyrical flourishes here and there, because poetry looks good when it’s a little dressed up. (I’ve been accused of being a writer who doesn’t dress my poetry up quite enough, but in my defence it’s a difficult balance because you really risk losing the poem under mounds of clothes, which are in my opinion nice but rather beside the point.)
SN: Bukowski once said, poetry should come out of “out of your heart / and your mind / and your mouth/ and your gut” and while they are all parts of the body they mean different things. Where does your poetry come from—a happy, loud and chaotic place or a dark, silent and still place? Does the place of poetry in a poet’s work remain static forever or does it change?
JW: My poetry is made up of everything I want to say that doesn’t have the right audience. It’s whatever’s left after I’ve exhausted every practical way to explain something important.
Maybe there’s been an argument with someone and I would like to have the final word but I know it will do no good. That goes in a poem. Maybe a small alternate reality has opened up in my mind, and, like a dream, I don’t know who would possibly care about it other than me. That turns into field notes for a poem.
A poem starts as a murmur in the night that makes you wonder if what you’re hearing is a voice or just the wind; I write a poem to bring it into full view so I’m not alone with it anymore. So far that hasn’t changed since I was eight years old.
SN: Is your writing practice influenced or in any way informed by a sense of writing to or for others? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?
JW: Often when I work on a poem, I write it, in my mind at least, as if I’m addressing someone in particular. As if it were part of an extended dialogue we were having. This person needn’t be the “you” in the poem, and it certainly needn’t be the actual or intended reader. I just pretend that there is someone in particular listening to the poem, and I let their presence guide it. It’s like talking to a ghost.
For me, this is mainly what distinguishes poetry from fiction. There’s an (imaginary) intimacy in writing a poem that I can’t access through fiction or other forms of prose. Writing prose feels comparatively lonely.
SN: Can you recall an experience where you might have worked with another poet/writer ormaybe you collaborated with a visual artist, or a performing artist (say a musician/actor/dancer) —how was that experience different or similar? Or seminal or generative?
I have a long-time collaborative practice with Mark Laliberte, who I also live with. Writing together under the name MA|DE, we’ve done four chapbooks and one full-length collection, and have another four full-length collections in various stages of progress. Collaboration, for me, clarifies that question: who am I writing the poem to? We’ll I’m writing to my collaborator. He is the first and most important reader of anything I contribute to our poems. And I write to him in our shared voice that we’ve developed over five years of writing together, and he writes back to me in the same voice.
This kind of collaborative writing opens up a very particular space in my mind and on our page that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to access.
SN: Can you reflect on any (inescapable) social contexts that might have been inspiring orgenerative (or conversely, harmful, or inhibitive) to your writing practice at somepoint?
JW: In general I find social contexts to be very non-conducive to the writing practice. They can be gathering grounds for ideas, but I can’t think clearly when other people are around. I’m preoccupied by my own self-consciousness. I need a good lonely silence to write—or to sit and think about what I will write, as the case may be.
SN: Could you name a source that served as an inspiration earlier but is no longer aninspiration, rather something you are currently conflicted with or even hostile towards?
JW: Ha! I like this question. I have many conflicts and hostilities, though I try to keep them mostly internal. I suppose the true answer is God. I went through a very pious phase as a teenager, and wrote a lot of devotional poetry (I know), and when I came out the other side of that I was at first writing against the idea of a God, and later trying to write my way to a replacement. These days I am stably (un)settled in my agnosticism.
SN: What are you writing against or towards?
JW: The dissolution of the self.
Jade Wallace is the book reviews editor for CAROUSEL and co-founder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE alongside Mark Laliberte. Wallace’s debut novel, Anomia, is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in 2023. MA|DE’s fourth chapbook Expression Follows Grim Harmony is coming out with Jackpine Press in August 2023 and a debut poetry collection, ZZOO, is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in 2025. Keep in touch: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca