This interview was conducted over email during the early part of June 2009

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006), and God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2009). Her work was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 2006 and the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004 and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, and China. She is an instructor of creative writing at Douglas College in New Westminster where she is Poetry Editor for Event magazine.

rob mclennan: I have two questions about your use of the lyric. The poems in your third collection, god of missed connections (Nightwood, 2009) are structurally closer to the poems of your first collection (published as your second), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006) than Curio: grostesques & satires from the electronic age (BookThug, 2005). What is it about the small lyric that appeals?

Elizabeth Bachinksy: Stylistically, God of Missed Connections is more of a blend of my two previous collections than one might think, but it’s also its own beast. It’s true, I work a lot with the sonnet in this book—but the sonnets here are a little looser than those you’ll find in Home of Sudden Service. I’m working with a longer line, sprung rhythm, less rhyme. I wanted the lines to give the sense of a rush of seemingly unformed information: a little chatty, overheard, a little stolen. The small lyric forms lend themselves to an economy of language. They’re packed pretty tight. This can give them an explosive quality, I think, which is fitting, given some of the themes that run throughout the book (here I’m thinking of nuclear proliferation, imprisonment, the anxiety of emmigration etc). This is to say God of Missed Connections offers quite a lot of poetry as “made thing.” But, like the material in Curio, there’s also a lot of found material mixed into the text too. I had to do a lot of research to get at the heart of this book and I wanted to work that sense of searching and processing into the text. And I like the trickery involved when one works with found material—is it real, is it imagined? The relationship between the young woman and Michael Bazynski in “The Wax Ceremony” is similar to the relationship between E. and Antonin Artaud in Curio’s “The Secret Diaries of Antonin Artaud.” It’s the me/not me in conversation with the them/not them…which leaves a lot of room for imaginary gardens with real toads in them, thank goodness.

rm: And this collection, very different from the rest, also works through Ukrainian histories, whether throughout history or that of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was it about the lyric that you thought was the best form to work through some of these histories?

EB: I wrote God of Missed Connections one poem at a time. I was working rather intuitively, I think. This book wasn’t planned or plotted. I had an idea of where my research might take me, but that’s about all. I think what surprised me about the research was the vastness of the history I was dealing with. I mean, there are family stories I feel close to that, for me, symbolize my family’s connection to Ukraine—but the larger context for those stories was almost completely overwhelming. I had to break the history down into manageable pieces (poems) in order to really consider the larger picture. It took me about five years to research and write God of Missed Connections, but it was only in the last year before the book was published, when I started to set the poems against one another, that I could actually see my fascination in one place and how the book might work as a whole. One reader, Lynn Manuel, in Kingston, ON, wrote to me to say she was “amazed by the coherence of the found connections, like waves having a consistent phase relationship, with the poems all arriving…in a pulse at the same time. Poems of the history of the Ukraine and Chernobyl arrive in perfect thinking/feeling phase with those of [the speaker’s] own world, each making the other more real…” So, even though many of the poems in this book work individually, the cumulative effect of the piece is much larger, I think.

rm: At the back of this collection, you talk about the importance of Canadians of Ukrainian decent (over a million of them, you write, who claim such genealogy) knowing their own histories. Why did you, then, as response, write a collection of poems? Will there be a further project exploring some of these histories, perhaps through non-fiction? Myrna Kostash wrote her essential book about being second-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, All of Baba’s Children (1976). Will you be taking up the mantle of writing whatever needs to follow?

EB: I wanted to write the book I couldn’t find. When I began this project I found it fascinating how many (hundreds!) of academic texts, memoirs, interviews, short stories, poems, documentary films, videos, paintings, collages, sculptures, websites, blogs, etc. are dedicated to the history of Ukraine and of Ukrainians in Canada—yet very few of these resources are produced by Ukrainian-Canadian authors of my generation. And almost none of these are creative works. I practically fell over when I found work by Lisa Grekul whose first novel Kalyna’s Song (Coteau, 2003) is the coming-of-age story of a third-generation Ukrainian Canadian girl who grows up in northeastern Alberta and southern Africa. I also took a lot of interest in a website called Poetry International Web where you can read poetry in translation by Ukrainian poets born between 1954-1974. I was particularly impressed with poems by Andriy Bondar, Halyna Krouk, Yuri Andrukhovych…all the Ukrainian poets you’ll find on that website, actually. It seemed to me that my poetry was often in conversation with those young poets in Ukraine. And Lisa Grekul’s fantastic book of essays, Leaving Shadows, gave valuable context for my work here in Canada.

It is important to say, I think, that I wrote God of Missed Connections from a place of ignorance. I had never, for example, heard of Holodomor or the internment operations during the First World War that saw between five and six thousand Ukrainian Canadians imprisoned. And I’m not ashamed to say I was ignorant. Ignorance is the resource that made me seek out the works of Myrna Kostash, Helen Potrebenko, Andy Suknaski, Natalka Hussar, and countless others. But, of course, in the act of inquiry there is always the problem of selectivity. Robert N. Proctor writes in his book Agnotology: the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford University Press, 2008):

“A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus on object A involves neglect of object B.” And the world is very big—much bigger than the world of Descartes and Bacon with their hopes for an imminent finish to the project of science. A key question, then, is: how should we regard the “missing matter,” knowledge not yet known? Is science more like the progressive illumination of a well-defined box, or does darkness grow as fast as the light?

I like this quote because it describes, almost exactly, the experience of writing God of Missed Connections. I became obsessed with “missing matter.” So much so that the more I wrote the less I seemed to be able to say…until I arrived at poems like “Holodomor,” which is simply a blank page and “The Wax Ceremony,” which started out as an eighty-page document and is now almost entirely comprised of omissions. So, while I didn’t know some very basic history about Ukrainians and Ukrainians in Canada, and this seemed to me to be a great loss, it also seemed like a great opportunity. What better way to explore the unknown, the unsaid, the miscommunicated, than through poetry? And who better to examine that miscommunication than a poet at the far end of an historic game of Telephone?

Perhaps you mention Myrna’s essential—and it is essential—nonfiction because it offers history as something that can be absorbed directly. All of Baba’s Children is a text you can sit down and read and afterward say: Now I know more about this history than I did before. God of Missed Connections doesn’t offer that same experience. It’s meant to arouse unrest and curiosity in the reader. It’s a book that asks questions, but it’s also a book that requires the reader to participate in the inquiry—which is really what it will take for these kinds of stories to stay alive when our parents and grandparents are gone.

I regret I wasn’t able to include a bibliography at the end of the book. It was too long to include in the edition. Readers who are interested in a complete bibliography can contact me through Nightwood Editions though. Like I say, there are hundreds of resources out there for readers and writers who are looking for research material. And what will I do next? I’ll travel to Ukraine and make another book from what I find there. That’s the progression, I think. I hope. I’d really like to meet some of those young poets from Ukraine.

rm: Home of Sudden Service wrote on those who grow up in small towns, the dark places Of youth in the dark places between cities and open country, moreso the teenage experience now than it’s ever been, and this collection writes of Ukrainian histories. What attracts you to writing through subjects, and where do you think you might be heading next?

EB: Thank you for having read my previous books, rob. I’d prefer not to talk too much about what I’m working on right now. Suffice it to say, I’m always working.

rm: Curio: grostesques & satires from the electronic age (BookThug 2005; 2009) exists almost completely outside of your other two collections. How did this book come about, writing (as the back cover claims) “The Waste Land and The River Merchant’s Wife hit the blender...” How did this book get reissued,with the new afterword by K. Silen Mohammad? Was this simply a collection working your way against subject, as opposed to your other work? Why was this collection important to bring back into the world?

EB: Curio was my first book of poetry. It came out a full six months before Home of Sudden Service, though the books were pretty much written at the same time. It was a fluke they both found publishers. Basically, I have a fascination with formal constraint and I was trying to stretch my abilities as a formal poet in those books. The poems in Curio came out one way and the poems in Home of Sudden Service came out another. I’ve been very fortunate in that readers seem to have become interested in my work. Home of Sudden Service is now in a third printing and Curio went out of print within two years. BookThug has just reissued Curio in a snazzy new format with an essay by American avant garde poet K. Silem Mohammad who wrote an amazing response to the anagrams in Curio for Sina Queyras’ blog Lemon Hound. Mohammad is working on a project in which he takes all 157 of Shakespeare’s sonnets and turns them into anagrams. I’d done the same with T.S. Elliot’s “Waste Land” in Curio, so we had an instant connection. I wouldn’t really say that I’ve ever worked against subject. But certainly the poems in Curio didn’t start with subject. The poems in that book were mostly formal constructions made for their own sake, which seemed (and seems) to be enough. I think they are beautiful. They were certainly laborious! There were never very many copies of the first edition kicking around—only three hundred, and I think my dad bought half the print run (kidding!)—so not a lot of readers got to get their hands on the thing. I’m really glad Jay MillAr has reprinted the book. And I’m also glad you asked me these questions.

Take care,
Elizabeth

bio

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, even though he was born there. The author of nearly two dozen trade titles of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, with new books out this year from Talonbooks, Salmon Publishing, University of Alberta Press and The Mercury Press. He is also editor/publisher of above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and ottawater (ottawater.com). He is currently spending the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays and interviews at robmclennan.blogspot.com