Poet Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah (review)

Author interviews have been an important element in Canadian literary criticism, no doubt because ours is a young literature in which the contemporary plays a substantial role. Collections of interviews began to be published in 1973 with Donald Cameron's Conversations with Canadian Novelists, and Graeme Gibson's Eleven Canadian Novelists, and since then perhaps a volume a year has been published. In Poets Talk, the most recent, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy interview seven Canadian writers about their poetry. Five of these writers are well known (Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, and Fred Wah); two may be somewhat less familiar: the Native author Marie Annharte Baker and the politically engaged Jeff Derksen. Because several of the poets in this volume are also authors of fiction, the focus is not everywhere so strict as the title of the collection might suggest.

If you are interested in the authors being interviewed, these conversations are all of real value – but the volume is not without its weaknesses. Though the book obscures the fact, the time of these interviews has largely passed, and they feel somewhat dated. Poets Talk was published in 2005, but these interviews (which can be located in time only by internal evidence) took place as much as fifteen years earlier. Two (those with Kroetsch and Marlatt) are quite evidently from 1990; two are from a few years after that (the interview with Mouré dates from around 1993; Brand from around 1995). Several of these pieces are printed with dingbats, which suggest they have been spliced together from separate occasions: thus the first part of the Baker interview seems to date from the early 1990s but the last section is from 2003. Nothing else is that recent: no part of the Derksen interview (which also appears to have been assembled) is later than 2001; the interview with Wah is at least two years earlier than that.

My second reservation concerns the interviewers. In the four interviews they conduct jointly, they sometimes get in one another's way, and whether working together or separately (Butling with Brand and Baker; Rudy with Wah), their questions and responses are shaped by their own agendas as much as by their interviewees' concerns.

Fred [Wah]: It's a performative poem ... It's kind of jazzy and ...

Susan [Rudy]: And really angry!

Fred: Yes, but it's jivey, this is a jivey poem.

On the other hand, the up-to-date prefaces to these interviews serve as valuable introductions to the writers and both they and the interviews feature ample selections of poetry, enough to give readers unfamiliar with these writers a sense of what's at stake. As well, Butling and Rudy have brought together highly articulate writers – theoretically informed about the problematics and poetics of their craft – so their conversations are studded with interesting observations. Kroetsch, arguing that his writing is characterized by comic excess, observes: 'you can't argue inside the cosmology and win; it's got you beat ... But over and over every cosmology that gets defeated is defeated by excess.' Brand describes building her life around what she now calls 'struggle work' and contextualizes that project by explaining that, in writing for 'an immigrant Canadian audience,' she has also felt the need to resist her readers' desires 'to hold things static, the way they were back home' – meaning that 'I had to, as Langston Hughes, says, not simply represent but also break, violate.' The interview with Baker surprises when it shows how this indigenous writer constructed a literary tradition drawn partly from canonical sources: 'if I told you which writers interested me you'd think it was strange. I think of it as funny now. I liked anything to do with humour, so one Canadian writer I liked was Stephen Leacock.' Derksen's ideas about hyper-referentiality in...