Peony Vertigo

Massachusetts resident Canadian geneticist and poet Jan Conn speaks to Emily Cann about her tenth poetry collection.

Emily Cann (EC): In Peony Vertigo, you shift in scale between the astronomical and the minute so readily. Things feel at once explosively large and uncontainable, yet incredibly small and quotidian. For example, in “Early November” you write “After a slight hitch in the space-time continuum […] The afternoon reappears in a tube of cadmium yellow.” How do you find balance working with these different scales? How do you find/create coherence between them?

Jan Conn (JC): Questions of scale intrigue me, and I felt able to wield the shift with remarkable freedom during the process of writing this manuscript. One influence is the Japanese haiku poet Basho. An aspect of his genius was to use this form to “compress the experiences of cyclical time, linear time, and the all time-no time of Zen into seventeen syllables¹”. In working and writing linked verse (or renga) with the other three members of Yoko’s Dogs (Mary Di Michele, Susan Gillis, Jane Munro), we found that we could also compress space and link-and-shift spatial scales within and between verses. This was revelatory to me, that the juxtaposition of near and far, for example, intensifies both. The specific shift that you mention above in “Early November” is not narrative, but associative. It’s a leap. Such associations came to Basho through rigorously trained perception, and most such links that “work” poetically may be a signature of a specific human consciousness¹. As I’m a poet, biologist and visual artist, I consider the time-space continuum daily, and I infuse many of my paintings with yellow. Cadmium yellow is very bright and yellow in general is, according to Victoria Finlay², a stand-in for the sun, gold, or corn, but also serves as a warning in the animal world. Ambiguity: it’s everywhere. Balance is a learned skill.

EC: There seems to be a strong tension in this collection between preservation, as in “outlasting erasure” (in “Lascaux”) and persistence, as in “It’s never over / It goes like this until it doesn’t” (in “Part Star, Part Venom, Part Bone, Part Microplastic”). This tension has a strong resonance with our current climate crisis, where permanence can feel like both a threat and a promise. How do you work with this kind of tension in your poetry? How do you determine what is worth preserving and what is merely persisting?

JC: The ecopoetry movement has focused a lot of attention on the climate crisis, although poet Jane Miller reminds us that, “By the time a literary movement gets named, defined, and argued, it has forfeited its value for artists.”³ Environment and landscape are touchstones for how individuals grow and develop, adapt, and evolve. They are also us. The weather shapes how we dress, and, often as not, how we feel on a given day. That being said, the question of what is worth preserving is a thorny issue. Even mountains don’t stick around forever. The caves in Lascaux are closed to the public; what we visit is a brilliantly created facsimile. This solution is site-specific, and questions of preservation (rainforests being an example I am intimately familiar with in my research in the Amazon) depend on tensions among greed, advocacy, and public health, among other forces at work. Heartbreakingly familiar human issues. We aren’t powerless, but vigilance is hard and takes time, commitment and energy. The way I work with such tensions in my poetry is to read and study a specific issue that is meaningful to me, and then make space and time to write, as Jane Miller notes, “allow intuition, curiosity and mystery to take over.”³ ‘Merely persisting’ feels passive to me, not a state I’d advocate.

EC: I feel almost obliged to ask about the flowers in this book since they appear with such vibrancy! From the titular peonies to violets, morning glories, devil’s paintbrush, and more—what role do flowers play for you in this collection? What about flowers compels you to write about them?

JC: I began my deep fascination with flowers during the years of research in preparation for my book Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006). This was an enticing project because the artist/explorer Margaret Mee spent years in the Amazon discovering and painting previously unrecorded species of bromeliads and orchids. Her books, especially Diaries of an Artist Explorer ⁴ were necessary for the generation of those poems. Flowers are so ephemeral and colourful and sensual! They seem to invite an emphasis on karumi, or lightness in haiku that Basho encouraged.⁵ Many of the flowers featured in Peony Vertigo grow in our gardens outside Great Barrington, Massachusetts where I live with the evolutionary biologist/ botanist/gardener Carl Schlichting. We strive for native plants but have a great fondness for Japanese maples. In part because I walk daily, with the intention of noticing my surroundings, flowers have become an intimate part of my environment, my psyche, and my poetry. I had never seen Japanese woodland peonies, ironweed or snowdrops until we grew them ourselves. I think of flowers as essential elements, punctuation marks, in the landscapes I explore and transform into poems.

EC: Did you have an intended audience for the book?

JC: No. I keep trying to answer a fairly basic question in each poem: what is at stake? I write because I must. But perhaps I do have a coda to add to this: I would be enchanted if readers, any readers, were reminded by any of my poems of places they have never been.

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?

JC: Peony Vertigo was written over 6-7 years. Over that period of time I read a wide range of poetry, fiction, ecology and art, but at times I felt, to quote Jane Miller³: “The distressed present acutely focuses all our attention.” My response to the distressed present has been to try to write more deeply, to write poetry as an act of exploration, starting with what I don’t know. It’s challenging, highly charged, difficult, and also liberating. The crucial writers I read, in alphabetical order, included Basho, Frank Bidart, Roo Borson, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Zbigniew Herbert, Jane Miller, Karen Solie, John Steffler, James Tate, Cesar Vallejo, Ocean Vuong, C.D. Wright, Charles Wright and Jan Zwicky. Those I kept visiting, especially during the year before the manuscript felt ready to show to a potential publisher, were Louise Gluck’s “The Wild Iris”, Ocean Vuong’s “Time is a Mother”, and C.D. Wright’s “Deep Step Come Shining”. Each one a lodestone.

EC: What memorable or formative aspect of experience around learning to write springs to mind?

JC: When I completed my BS in biology in Montreal and moved to Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, I lived with my brother, writer and librarian David R. Conn near UBC. David was writing poetry intensively at the time and he was close friends with poet/anthropologist/lawyer Robert Tyhurst. Via David and Robert I started to read Garcia Lorca, Basho, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, William Blake, Matthew Arnold, Juan Ramon Jiminez, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akmatova, John Clare, Francis Ponge and Elizabeth Bishop. We discussed their work and tried to make our early poems leap. We attended many readings at the Literary Storefront, Mona Fertig’s brainchild. At the same time, I was invited to join a group of women poets, who were serious about reading, writing and editing. The women in the group who became closest to me were Jane Munro and Helene Rosenthal, both very gifted and generous with their time and critiques. It was a heady, stimulating time for me and gave me a pathway to becoming a poet.

EC: How is your writing practice informed by a sense of writing to or for others? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

JC: It’s curious. I feel compelled to communicate what I feel, and perceive; landscapes, incidents, buildings, art, i.e., whatever enters my consciousness that I am capable of articulating, but I don’t write for an audience, and I write rarely “to” anyone. The exception is the seven-part poem, “To Remember What Never Existed: Lament and Lyric for Clarice Lispector” in Peony Vertigo. I have been reading her writing (in translation by different writers) since I first travelled to and worked in Brazil in 1987. I felt a tremendous empathy with her creativity, imaginative life and, I think, some of her anguish. The poems try to give a feeling for her brilliance and eccentricity, her extreme sensitivity. I wish I had known her.

EC: What emotions do you associate with writing? Or, differently put, how does writing impact your emotional state?

JC: I am in a state of wonder whenever I create art. This applies to poetry and painting equally. It is when I am happiest: I am joyful, and concentrated yet open to random possibilities and associations, and I remain tethered to the earth. I am a strong proponent of imaginative wildness, though I fail as often as I succeed in engendering this in poems. I have disciplined myself to write nearly anywhere: mostly notes that sometimes evolve/transform into poems or paintings. My goal is to write, read, rewrite and/or paint every day. This helps me keep my balance with my science life, which requires both distinctive and overlapping skill sets and neurological connections.

Have you ever collaborated on a writing project with another writer or artist? Can you share that experience?

JC: My collaborative experience has been as one of four poets who together write and publish Japanese-style renga as Yoko’s Dogs. We began to meet in 2006 and studied and practiced this rigorous art form for several years before we felt ready to publish a full-length manuscript. In traditional renga, there are many rules. We learned these and used them until we felt confident enough to break them. We work in person when we can (we live across Canada and in the US), and we exchange verses by email and sometimes compose and edit together using Google Drive. We really need in-person visits to spark our composition, always incorporating a physical walk and a focus on the present surroundings/environment. We can accomplish a surprising amount of haiku writing when we can work this way, laying the groundwork for subsequent renga or tanka composition. Our most recent book, our third, is Caution Tape from Collusion Press, 2021. Studying and learning from the works of haiku masters before us has been inspiring; as has the effort to compose together and reach consensus (not majority rule) about each verse. Our writing has deepened and transformed my own writing practice immeasurably.

What elements/aspects of writing give you pleasure?

JC: Many of Lydia Davis’ twenty-one pleasures of translating⁶ apply equally to writing poetry, for example working with sound, rhythm or cadence, image, tone and voice. I enjoy solving poetic “problems”: how can I express a particular feeling, sound, dream, or memory? What am I hoping to communicate? When I am writing a poem I am not entirely myself: I am present, but invisible, or subsumed within the identity of this other voice or these voices. Would onomatopoeia emphasize a word or phrase and make it zing or would it feel like the word(s) were trying too hard? Two aspects of poetry that remain constant and enjoyable challenges for me are line breaks (long, short, which word or phrase wants to be carried over to the next line, how does this interact with the breath when reading aloud) and titles. For the latter I like to meditate on what Jane Miller opines: “Resilient poems start connotative activity immediately, even at a blockbuster title.”³ In Peony Vertigo, I’d say the title that comes closest to this high bar is “A Roller Coaster, a Hit, a Pint-Sized Devil Machine, Some Dark Chocolate”. The reader doesn’t know what to expect, and neither did I when I began to write the poem.

1. Hass R, editor and translator. 1994. The Essential Haiku Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa. The Ecco Press.
2. Finlay V. 2002. Color: A Natural History of the Palette. Random House.
3. Miller J. 2022. From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & a Boondoggle on Poetry. University of Michigan Press.
4. Mee M. 2004. Margaret’s Mee’s Amazon. Diaries of an Artist Explorer. Antique Collectors’ Club in association with The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
5. Sato H. 1983. One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku in English. Weatherhill.
6. Davis L. 2021. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.