features work from Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf.

Mini interview between co-editor Kate Eichhorn and Nathaniel G. Moore

NGM: When did you start working on this project?

KE: We started working on this project in May 2007. At the time, I was traveling in the US and meeting a lot of poets. I realized that many of them had not yet encountered many of the writers who are in this anthology. They could usually mention two or three poets … not always the same ones … but that was it. Heather Milne and I started an email dialogue about the need for an anthology that might parallel American Women Poets in the 21st Century. When I returned to Toronto, we approached Alana Wilcox with our idea and a few months later, the project was in motion.

NGM: What were some of your goals along the way, like what poems simply had to be in the collection?

KE: I can't say that there was a single poem that had to be in this anthology because nearly all of the writers in Prismatic Publics work in longer form, and even those who do write individual poems tend to conceive of them as part of larger projects. Of course, this posed some challenges, since it’s not easy to excerpt part of a book-length project. But our goal certainly wasn’t to compile a book of “seminal” works because that would be entirely inconsistent with the way the writers in the anthology work and understand their writing. Rather, our goal was to choose a series of works that might provide readers with some sense of the various textures and shifting registers inhabited by each of these writers. It’s not easy to do that with only 14 to 15 pages per poet, but I think we achieved that goal. I should emphasize, however, that we negotiated the selections with the writers and the process was a bit different in each case. Typically, we’d ask for some parameters and make a few suggestions and initiate a dialogue about which selections would work best. A few writers felt very strongly about including a range of work from across their careers. Other writers preferred longer selections from just two or three books. One writer choose to create a pastiche of her published and unpublished works. Some writers wanted to use primarily unpublished work and others were reluctant to give any new work at all. As a result, I think that the range of selections for each writer is also significant. It is important to both read and read into the selections and perhaps the absences too.

NGM: What do you hope people will get out of this book and what are some of the events you are looking forward to?

KE: All of the writers in this collection are engaged in ideas-based work. For some readers, this writing may be a bit intimidating, but this is precisely why we chose to frame the selections with interviews rather than critical essays. An interview or dialogue provides a bit more room for readers to enter while at the same time privileging the standpoint of the writer over the critic, which is essential. For readers who aren’t already familiar with the writing in this anthology—both students and readers who generally avoid work that might be described as innovative, experimental or avant-garde—we hope that the anthology will open up a few new ways to approach this writing.

We also hope this book highlights how innovative women’s writing in Canada has continued to expand and shift over the past twenty years or so. A few of the established writers in this book, including Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt and Gail Scott, have received considerable critical reception over the years. Many readers may be familiar with their work but be entirely unfamiliar with the midcareer writers we’ve included here. We hope that someone who has been reading Brossard’s work for decades might encounter Margaret Christakos’ writing and go back and read through her nine books. It’s immensely important to us that this book aligns different generations of writers. At one point in my interview with Nicole Brossard, she turned the tables and asked, “What are your questions today?” This wasn’t simply a question about my questions but about the questions writers of my generation are asking. Of course, they are very different. The questions preoccupying Rita Wong and Rachel Zolf, for example, are not the same as the questions that Gail Scott or Daphne Marlatt were exploring twenty or thirty years ago, but there are also some surprising lines of descent and continuity rendered visible in this book. This anthology provides an opportunity to explore both a particular lineage of innovative women’s writing and more importantly, its diverse manifestations at this particular moment.

There is a huge financial risk involved in committing one’s life to producing work that will likely never pay the rent. In the micro economy of the experimental poetry world, it matters if three or four university instructors decide that they are going to teach your book year after year on a course. It matters if your work is taken up by a few more readers and critics. It matters if it receives serious critical engagement. Without these things, how does a writer sustain herself? So this anthology was also initiated because we care about the ability of these writers to keep writing, and anything that might affect the conditions under which that very difficult and financially risky work can continue to take place is critical. I don’t want to over-determine the impact of one anthology, but there is no doubt that literary anthologies play an important role in the structuring literary economies. We hope this anthology will at the very least render some of these writers increasingly visible at a curricular level and to a broader reading public .

Finally, and this comes back to our original dialogues, we have a strong hope that this book will circulate south of the border. A year into this project, I moved to New York City, and I’ve continued to expand my conversations with poets here since then. On a very practical level, it helps that I can now point them to an anthology!

Bios:
Kate Eichhorn is the author of Fond, shortlisted for the 2009 Gerald Lampert Award. She is an assistant professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School in New York City.

Nathaniel G. Moore is a Toronto-based writer and editor. He is the author of Bowlbrawl (Conundrum) and Let's Pretend We Never Met (Pedlar).