INTERVIEW

with CATHERINE OWEN

by John Herbert Cunningham

Catherine Owen was born and raised in Vancouver, lived in Edmonton from 2006-2009 and is now back home. She has a master's degree in English from SFU (2001) on Robinson Jeffers. She started a home tutoring and editing business in 2002, and is currently working on multiple projects, including a multimedia piece with an encaustic artist, a website with a photographer and a collection of imagined epistles with Joe Rosenblatt. She has six trade books out: Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Exile Editions, 1998), The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, 2002), Shall (Wolsak & Wynn, 2006), Cusp/detritus (Anvil Press, 2006), DOG (with Joe Rosenblatt, Mansfield Press, 2008) and Frenzy (Anvil Press, 2009). Her books have been nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, the BC Book Prize, the Air Canada Award, the George Ryga Award and the ReLit Award, and have won the Earle Birney Prize. She has been the singer/bassist in two metal bands: Inhuman & Helgrind, and is starting a new metal project, Medea.

John Herbert Cunningham: What was your first encounter with poetry and how did that affect your subsequent writing?

Catherine Owen: I was given a book called the Golden Treasury of Verse when I was three, a tome featuring garish illustrations and poems by everyone from Dickinson to Tennyson. My parents would recite poetry to me before bed and I very quickly became a devourer of verse myself. I suppose that having such a classy introduction to the genre enabled me from early on to give poetry a high priority in my life, to maintain the shaping of rhythmic structures as the primary practice in all my writing.

How has being a musician in a metal band affected your writing?

I wouldn't say being in a metal band per se has affected my writing, only offered me the opportunity to compose song lyrics along with my poetry and prose. Being exposed to and playing music from youth, in my case the violin through the Kodaly method, has definitely honed my ear and rendered the aural qualities of verse paramount.

In your first book, Somatic, you showed a fascination with the painter Egon Schiele. Why?

I was first introduced to Schiele through his Expressionist-style poems in the book I, Eternal Child. Through these spare, colour-rich pieces I was drawn to the story of his life and, of course, his art. His honest and often painful portrayal of the human figure appealed to me most intensely--the way he painted the bones, the skin discolorations, the agonizing awkwardness of inhabiting one's flesh. And the difficult eroticism behind it all, imbued with the deep knowledge of inevitable death. The fusion of sex and mortality and his bravery in countering the superficial morals of his time, their hypocrisy. And then, of course, he was beautiful.

Your second book, The Wrecks of Eden, was a collection of eco-poems. This was quite a different direction from your first. This was followed by Shall, a book of ghazals. Do you approach the writing of poetry from the perspective of the individual poem or from the perspective of the book? Why?

I think any artist's mind is teeming with a turmoil of influences, sources, obsessions, with certain tropes or touchstones returning to haunt them over the course of their vocation. I don't like to be bored! Once I've entered particular subject matter over a period of years and written its book, then I usually wait for another, disparate set of materials to find me. However, it is only on the surface that Egon Schiele, endangered species and the ghazal form are starkly contrasted. Beneath, they all evince my preoccupation with death, the liminal, love, history and memory.

Lisa Robertson has stated that she approached the writing of each of her poetry collections as a problem needing solution, leading her to write very different books each time she returned to poetry. What approach have you taken that has led to the writing of such different books?

I would never want to think of my books as solutions to problems; this approach seems too closed to me, final. They are more fluid entrances, a dance with research and the unknown, one which doesn't really end but folds itself into a momentary sleep after a period of vigorous movement.

You have written in a number of forms--the villanelle, the ghazal and the sonnet, to name just three. Why form poetry?

Form intrigues me for several reasons. First, I believe that learning multiple forms from many traditions expands the poet's facility with language and subject matter and creates, in effect, a poetic tool box. Secondly, poetic forms are part of our literary history, thus writing them allows one to attain a deeper sense of connection with the past. And thirdly, writing in a particular form increases the work's chanelling potential. As with a focus on certain kinds of research, attention to one form intensifies the potency of the material the writer will produce. And I am fascinated with the way form both expands and contains one's subject matter, leading one to write in ways one never before imagined possible.

In your book of ghazals, Shall, your poems are not the traditional Persian ghazal. First, what was your initial encounter with this form? Second, why did you not use the traditional Persian form? Third, given the huge difference between the traditional form and your form, why still call them ghazals?

My initial encounter with the ghazal form wasn't through its traditional manifestation but through John Thompson's book Stilt Jack. His reconfiguring of the form led me back in history to read the traditional ghazals of Hafiz and Ghalib, as well as forward to other ghazal writers like Phyllis Webb and the ghazals of the anthology In Fine Form. The last poem in my collection Shall is a traditional ghazal but I would never write a whole book of ghazals that kept to the traditional rules of rhyme and convention, such as the writer's inclusion of their name in the last couplet. That practice would be less genuine than a re-envisioning of the form as we have lost the original context, a communal, itinerant, foreign realm in which the form was created. They are still ghazals I believe because they remain true to the primary principal of the form, which is the composition of couplets that leap between disparate yet strangely associative imagery and allusions, the form's engagement with the mysterious correspondences of existence.

Your next two books, Cusp/detritus and DOG, were collaborations. What was it about collaborations that intrigued you?

Cusp/detritus was not a poetic collaboration but collaboration with a photographer, Karen Moe. Her photos of castaway objects in alleyways enlarged my lament over society's rejected individuals, providing echoes at times, at others elaborations. DOG however was an actual poetic collaboration with Joe Rosenblatt in which we collectively wrote sonnets, taking turns to write the octets or sestets. Such a practice enabled me to take risks, explore forms I'd previously shied away from and, as Joe would say, set my ego on the shelf to trust another's vision. Collaboration is like the sun through a crystal. One suddenly sees facets one wasn't previously aware of.

Many of your sonnets in DOG are written in a free style. When writing a poem, do you decide prior to writing that you are going to use a particular form or do you experiment with free verse and forms before arriving at the final "product"?

In the case of DOG, Joe decided it would be sonnets as that is his form par excellence. Shall emerged completely from the ghazal form itself. It's not a conscious decision more often than not but an organic emergence of form from subject matter or vice versa.

What are your upcoming books going to be about?

Seeing Lessons is a series of letters, journal entries and poems in the voice of the pioneer photographer Mattie Gunterman. Intimate Industries is a compilation of memoirs and essays about childhood, the muse, and being an artist in the world. I've also just completed a book that fuses medieval culture and forms with the world of metal, called Trobairitz. A collection of "sliver fictions" titled Food I ate with Frank is also in the works, as well as several children's picture books and the ghost of a novella.