Alberta poet Annette Lapointe speaks to Emily Cann about her newest poetry collection.
Emily Cann (EC): This book is full of geographical and temporal markers: for example, “lilies on the road to île-à-la-crosse”, “north Saskatchewan”, and “fly-in 1970-74” are all titles in this collection. What about these areas and eras inspired you to write about them? What work do you see this precision of space and time doing in the collection?
Annette Lapointe (AL): These are very much poems that fuse family lore with autobiography and geographical study: they allow me to fully locate myself in the world.
Before I was born, my parents lived in Saskatchewan’s far north, including a number of communities which could only be reached by air or water. My childhood bedtime stories were often set there, and my father in particular had no qualms about mixing truth and fantasy. As an adult, I became fascinated by that place and time, to which I had only second- and third-hand access. A handful of my parents’ books from that period survive (I stole them as a teenager, and I still have one), and a small number of photographs I’ve seen. That combination of the material and the mythic has put these places I’ve never been at my psychic centre, and the poems set there allow me to step into that territory.
EC: At the same time, many of these poems focus on moments of transience and transition: roads, ferry crossings, flights, etc. “vancouver layover seoul to saskatoon” especially seems to invite readers to dwell in that liminal space between destinations. What role does in-betweenness play in this collection? What draws you to these moments of transition?
AL: I think of those transient moments very much as places. They are the places I stop and re-centre when I’m travelling. On a quantum level, I suppose, it’s the conflict between knowing where I am versus being aware of my own motion. So much of my experience of high-speed travel is blank: cars at highway speed, planes crossing oceans, both generate white noise that induces me to sleep. I wake, then, at these transitional moments, not fully certain of my own existence, and I’m forced to take stock.
That longing for location, longing to be centred, is nearly physical, and it blurs with the emotional and the erotic when I allow it, creating an idea of love that is contained within transition.
EC: In “if she descended” you write, “she walks toward him / on water too saline / to let her submerge / not cold enough to drown.” In this book, cold and water are central. As you worked on these topics, how did you keep warm—literally and metaphorically? How did you write your way through the cold without drowning?
AL: In Saskatchewan, I think, all water is cold water. I think of water as something I need to brace my body against; the awareness of the pain of a dive is the source of its terror. And yet I swim, and I love swimming: I just always need to move through that first urge not to go forward. As I learned to swim athletically, as an adult, I learned that cold water is better, because in warm water I overheat. The key is to keep moving: resting makes me cold. If I pause, I need to tread water in place; if I lift myself out, I’ll be cold again. This is literally true, but it’s also a useful metaphor for my writing: I don’t want to start, because I can feel the resistance about to meet me, but once I’m going, the best choice is to keep going, until I’m exhausted, until I can crawl back to the warm and dry.
EC: Are there any aspects of the book you would like to change /tinker with?
AL: Amazingly, no. The earliest drafts of poems in this book were written in 1998/99, and I spent actual decades revising, reconnecting them, and finding the connections I needed. In response to an early draft of the book (early/mid 2000s), Carole Itter told me, “A book of poetry isn’t a book containing all the poems you’ve written so far. It needs to be a fully unified collection.” She was right, and I was terrified by that. But I decided that this wasn’t going to be a book unless it was genuinely the book it needed to be.
Whatever element was missing for me when Anvil Press accepted the manuscript emerged in the book’s physical production. The book’s physical design thrills me. I love the unexpectedly brilliant colours (the orange inside of the blue colour), and the integration of my father’s Dream Fish etching. The icons separating sections of long poems look to me like waves. I love it as an object as much as I’m happy with the poems inside!
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?
AL: I spent a lot of time with Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. It’s a book I’ve loved for decades, and I continue to find new layers in it. I read and re-read Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. And I read The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. All of them focused me on the material as a medium for presenting complex emotional states indirectly. Seamus Heaney’s North also informed me: I love its fusion of the mythic and the locational.
EC: Can you name a source of inspiration before the age of 12 that impacted your writing in some way?
AL: I’ve mentioned this before (in connection with the artwork in the book), but my father is a visual artist. He was also my stay-at-home parent, with the result that I spent a lot of my early childhood in an artist’s studio, and a lot of my childhood summers travelling around Saskatchewan with him. He loves to work en plein air, and my brother and I were along for the ride. I spent so many hours sitting in long grass near the South Saskatchewan River, reading and dozing while my father painted, and he’d wake us up to take us on hikes. His aesthetic sense has, inevitably, had an enormous influence on me, and his sense of place has been essential to creating mine.
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?
AL: I intended this very much as an aesthetic work, located in the senses and giving attention to very particular elements of the physical world. The cultural (books, music food) intersects with the natural (land, water, animals), and each intersection summons a single sensory moment forth.
If the book has a political aspect, it’s in the negotiation between settler and land. The “characters” within the book are all settlers, increasingly aware that they have not “pioneered” the place, or created it with their labour, but simply located themselves within it. Their presence has not changed its fundamental existence, or summoned it into being; they can only move across its surface.
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?
AL: When I was ten or so, one of my friends got hold of a typewriter and declared that she was going to write a book on it, and I was so, so jealous. I told my maternal grandfather (he’s present in “decommission” and elsewhere) that I wanted to write. He’d left farming and moved to Saskatoon, where he amused himself visiting every garage sale in the city, and in short order he’d procured a portable typewriter for me, of my own. My mother provided me with a supply of cast-off paper from her office (printed with forms or something of that nature on one side).
I set about typing with a kind of physical determination that I’m sure shook the windows. My friend abandoned her literary career shortly thereafter, and I kept at it, intermittently demanding More paper! And wearing out my little old typewriter ribbon.
So I suppose my early narrative of myself as a writer was I am a writer, look at me write! My adult (middle-aged, really) story of myself as a reviser: someone who writes briefly and revises at length. Book has ceased to be a single, ecstatic act of I made this! and become an entity that I nurse and re-shape and hide.
The thing that has stayed the same is my family’s enthusiasm. I know there are writers whose families aren’t supportive, and I suspect that this is because my family (immediate and extended, multi-generational) has taken all the support and hurled it in my direction.
EC: What does the craft of writing mean to you?
AL: Craft is essential to me. Writing down words/feelings/ideas is cathartic, but I don’t think of it as poetry, or even as writing from a craft perspective. It’s raw material, but not all of it is usable. The craft begins with sound: reading aloud, or sounding in my mind, finding repetitions and meters. Then lines come – measured and tested and re-created and changed multiple times. Pieces are put together and pulled apart. It makes me grateful for the fluidity of the computer screen – I can move pieces just as I need to.
Each “version” of a poem, though, returns to paper. I print it out, and I write on the page. I edit on paper, revise, change. Fight with it. Go back to the computer screen, make changes, and go back to the page. I need both.
I learned from other poets, but also from craftspeople: potters and weavers and woodcarvers. Craft is practiced: you have to do it, and work with your skills, all the time. You have to go beyond the “good enough” if you want to make something really good. But it’s okay to put something aside if it’s not working, and come back to it later: you can take a different approach, or take it apart and try again.
EC: What emotions do you associate with writing? Or, differently put, how does writing impact your emotional state?
AL: Writing is hard, and I love it. It’s so frustrating, but when I can get something in motion, a draft or an idea, the experience is close to ecstatic for me. It’s exciting! Filled with adrenaline! I’ll ride that for hours, pushing hard against inertia to keep the movement going as far as I can, because I feel so, so good.
That’s never a promise that what I’ve written is good. But the act of writing is fun. It’s exciting, this feeling that I’ve grasped something immaterial that exists, and I’m making it become words on a page.
Annette Lapointe (she/her) is originally from Saskatchewan, and now lives in Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta, where she teaches at Northwestern Polytechnic. She is the author of four acclaimed books of fiction: Stolen (2006, nominated for the Giller Prize), Whitetail Shooting Gallery (2012), You Are Not Needed Now (2017), and . . . And This is the Cure (2020). Her latest book is a poetry collection titled Swim into the north’s blue eye. Her website is www.annettelapointe.com.