Over the next couple of months, the Town Crier will be featuring short interviews with Canadian authors published by BC publishers, conducted by BC publishing professionals. The fifth in the series is an interview with Daniel Zomparelli of Poetry Is Dead magazine (see complete bio below) and Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir and Sub Rosa.
Daniel Zomparelli: Is there something about poetry that can speak to your queer self that maybe prose cannot?
Amber Dawn: My usage of the word “queer” has never been as an umbrella term, a word applied to anyone who is not heterosexual or cisgendered. Queer, to me, is a deliberate push back against the dominant normative culture. Not simply being outside or under-represented by normative culture—not “non-normative”—but an outright rejection of normativity—“anti-normative.” Queer is to dream, desire, and create new possibilities, most especially the possibilities that we’ve been systemically told are not possible. For this reason, queer is a noun, a verb, and an adjective—one that describes anti-normative aesthetics and ideologies. Take, for example, the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s that was spearheaded by indie directors like Cheryl Dunye, Rose Troche, Bruce LaBruce, John Greyson, and Gus Van Sant. So in Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho the queerness of the film isn’t when River Phoenix’s character declares his love for Keanu Reeves’ character. The queerness of the film is revealed through a love story that is far more complex than a boy-meets-girl narrative. The queerness of the film is its plot that weaves in ways that a typical three-act structure with a Hollywood conclusion does not. Queerness is character development that is fluid, rather than about Hollywood normative tests for the characters to pass or fail.
If I take my usage of “queer” and replace it with “poetry” and also replace “normative” with “narrative” then I arrive at my definition of poetry: Poetry, to me, is deliberate push back against the dominant narrative culture—or what has been deemed canonical literature. (I’m not saying that reading John Steinbeck or Cormac McCarthy or reading the newer canon like Haruki Murakami or Yann Martel is to be a normative sell out. I’m not canon shaming. I’ve read Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy several times okay—no shame.) Poetry is beyond character-driven conflict, the hero’s journey, redemption arcs, etc. Poetry cares little for the fabula and the syuzhet. Poetry can’t be drawn as good fortune or ill fortune continuum across Kurt Vonnegut’s Universal Shapes of Stories diagram. No poet has ever tried to classify all poetry into a finite classified list, whereas Vladimir Propp postulated that plot has thirty-one functions, and Georges Polti asserted a thirty-six category list for every dramatic situation that might occur in a story. Bla bla: straight white men like to name and quantify things. You get my drift.
“Poetry, to me, is deliberate push back against the dominant narrative culture—or what has been deemed canonical literature.”
Poetry is about limitless possibility. Poetry deliberately does things that are rarely attempted in prose. Poetry can certainly be narrative. And it can also be a meditation. An experiment. A letter. Instructions. A thesis. A manifesto. An experiment. Somatic. A credo. A rupture of the fourth wall. A disruption of the status quo. Oracle. Activism. Speculation. A finding. A collage. A treatise and more. Poetry is perpetually creating new possibilities of what the written word can be and therefore poetry is inherently queer. Me making poetry and queerness analogous by stating one is the other is also queer, and it is also poetry.
DZ: Your first book of poems had such a varied form and then your second book was very committed to form. Did you notice a difference in how the poems came about with each book?
AD: How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013) was a memoir told mainly through prose: personal narratives and a couple earnest and perhaps greenly-written essays. As a sex worker, survivor of multiple-perpetrator abuse and a transgressive queer femme, putting a memoir into the world was an act of resistance of the pervasive stigma and silencing I, and my communities, face. I wrote prose because readers buy prose. Prose is accessible in its messaging, and it is market-friendly. Since I already hold several “outsider” identities, I figured prose was a surefire way to reach a wider readership. However, I could not speak my truth through prose alone and opted to include 18 poems in the book. Poetry offered me more dynamism and aggregateness than prose. These poems often mark where my story, values, and emotions are the most complex and vulnerable—my memories of missing and murdered women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are told solely through poetry, as they are anytime I write about my wife.
Where the words end and my body begins (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015) is a collection of glosa form poems written as an homage to and a conversation with other queer women poets. Acknowledging elders and peers is a lynchpin part of being queer. I would not be queer (or perhaps even be alive) if it weren’t for the many trailblazers that came before me, and the many lovers and kin that hold space for me today. It’s of little wonder that queer folk use the word “community” so often, our survival and our dignity has been dependent on each other. I wanted my poetry collection to do what queers do—gather community. So I gathered 19 quatrains from different queer poets. I glossed as my way of recognizing their remarkable contributions to queer literature, and also to my own understanding of what it means to be queer.
DZ: I also love that poetry can sometimes create a “safe space” for producing queer content. It’s lack of mass market reach makes it easier for it to forge out a very small community. I remember writing articles when I first started out and they would get published in big magazines and newspapers and all I could focus on was commenters calling me a faggot to dismiss anything I had to say. I got tired of it, so I stopped for the most part. I mean, I still get called faggot, but that’s usually just when someone yells it from a car.
AD: New Queer Cinema, that I mentioned, also thrived because it was a type of film produced “while no one was watching.” Hollywood and mass market audiences had no interest in our stories, most especially the AIDS epidemic and other queer traumas, as well as transgressive and multiple-partner sex and love. Smaller audiences (and the invention of the camcorder and affordable filmmaking) allowed queer directors to make whatever the fuck they wanted. It was a safe, and radical, space for film. I absolutely agree the poetry echoes this sense of permission and safety. I too have felt attached when I’ve written for or been featured in big magazines or newspapers. Imagine what the online comments sound like when you’re a queer sex worker writing about social justice? It’s horrifying. No one ever posts horrifying comments about my poetry. No one has ever responded antagonistically to my poetry at all, and I’ve read for fairly mainstream audiences. The thing is, if someone takes the time to read poetry or attend a poetry reading, they too are seeking a break from mass market media. Every poetry lover knows there is so much more than the dominant culture. I feel safe being queer and a survivor in a poetry crowd.
DZ: This is a selfish and lazy interview question but I really would love to know who some of the trailblazers are that came before you that inspired you?
AD: I re-read Sapphire’s Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999) about once a year. It is an antidote to the poisonous message I sometimes sicken myself with—the message that there is something wrong with what I write, that my content carries too much stigma, and too much discomfort. I believe that our poetry must work against this pervasive idea that there is something wrong with us. If I were to name only one book that does this, it would be Black Wings & Blind Angels.
DZ: I love the “homage to and a conversation with” aspect of your book, and I found myself doing the same for my first book. It feels necessary as a queer to quickly find a place in some sort of community, even in poetry. Did you find that when you started out entering poetry/literature?
Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010).
AD: Finding a community of queer poets took awhile for me. Sapphire’s poetry I got my hands on right away. Then Adrianne Rich. Lucille Clifton. Dionne Brand. Shani Mootoo. Slowly my bookshelf grew. But I began writing in an early Internet and pre-social media age. Finding queer poets wasn’t as easy as it is today. Now I have autostraddle.com to put together reading lists like “Ten Lesbian & Bisexual Poets to Fall in Love With.” Wow! What I did have in my baby dyke years of the ’90s was a Vancouver-based feminist publisher called Press Gang. Press Gang authors would read at the dyke bar or at the annual Stonewall Festival main stage. It was at Press Gang readings where I first heard Chrystos and Betsy Warland, and where I first began to imagine that queer poetry was a “thing”—both a unique genre and a community.
Daniel Zomparelli is the Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Is Dead magazine. He is a co-podcaster at Can’t Lit. His first book of poems Davie Street Translations was published by Talonbooks. He co-edits After You, a collaborative poetry project. His collaborative book with Dina Del Bucchia, Rom Com, was published by Talonbooks. He is currently at work on his first short story collection.