Norm Sibum was born in Oberammergau, Germany, in 1947, grew up in Alaska, Missouri, Utah and Washington, and moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 1968. He has published poetry with presses in the UK and Canada, the most recent of which are The Pangborn Defence (Biblioasis, 2008) and Smoke and Lilacs (Carcanet, 2009). His Girls and Handsome Dogs (Porcupine’s Quill, 2002) won the Quebec Writer’s Federation A. M. Klein Award for Poetry. He lives in Montreal.
This interview was conducted via e-mail between 26 November 2008 and 20 January 2009.
EJ: You’re the least biographical of poets, so perhaps we could start with some biography. You were born in Germany?
Norm Sibum: My descent is one of those complicated wartime stories, but both my parents were German-born, my father a peasant, my mother bourgeoise Berlin. I don’t write about it because it’s been done to death by scads of writers. Although I’m nearly as much European as I am an American (plus being a Canuck as well), I don’t feel that comfortable in Europe until I get over the Alps and into Italy. For the sake of protective camouflage I have gone through life posing as a barbarian. It has been one of my more realized fantasies, sweeping into Rome on the train as a Visigoth.
EJ: I was wondering, if it’s not too personal, about your decision to come to Canada.
NS: Vietnam. It was everything it was advertised to be: horrendous. Those people who think it’s all now water under the bridge are deluded. What divides keeps dividing forever. But my memory is somewhat fogged on the particulars. The impulse had seemed somewhat spontaneous, but actually, I do remember that I talked it out loud quite a bit with a group of Unitarians who ran a coffeehouse at that time in Olympia, Washington. One night my father showed up in this den of iniquity, and to put it briefly, he indicated that if I was going to go, then go, I had his blessing in the matter. My father had been a lifer in the army. In effect, what he had to say trumped anti-war politics inasmuch as he had no great respect for officers who might get me killed for no good reason. The Unitarians had come out from Boston, were students of Roethke and readers of William Carlos Williams, a pretty eclectic crowd. Perhaps some of their eclecticism rubbed off on me, and which is why, some years later, the Black Mountain poetry world began to seem rather confining.
EJ: When did you move to Montreal? Do you see yourself as part of the Canadian literary history of that city?
NS: Do I feel myself part of the literary history of Montreal? When I first read your question, I thought you meant Canada over-all, and the answer would be that no, I don’t feel a part of it. To the extent I’m uninterested in Canadian identity and in the various poetic quarrels, i.e. west coast poetry versus east coast which, in a very general sense, was (and I guess still is) an argument as to the virtue of a more freely practiced poetic craft as opposed to the more formalistic. Et cetera. What I found when I first began meeting poets in Montreal was, so it seemed, a more independent-minded sort of poet. Poets who were and are more skeptical of things and leery of belonging to schools or even to a scene. This suited me fine. And for the first time in Canada, I felt no need to have to explain myself or in any sense apologize for what I write. In other words, a poem was good or bad on merits that hadn’t much to do with prevailing fashions of thought and poetics. Coming to Montreal did me a great deal of good. There’s almost something of a city-state atmosphere here, and although I can’t make its history my own as a Quebecker might in either official language, I feel much less of an outsider in this city than was the case in Vancouver where, paradoxically enough, I had more trouble with the American expatriates than I had with the B.C.ers. Exile is too fancy and culturally loaded a word now to describe what my condition has been, but the word does apply to me to some degree. One is both much less exiled than one assumes and is exiled from a great deal more than one realizes. Otherwise, I have kept pretty much to myself.
EJ: What you describe about Montreal seems to me to be the history of the better poets in that city. There’s a quote by Irving Layton, for instance, about A. M. Klein as the great outsider – outside the French community because he was English, outside the literary community because he was a cosmopolitan sort of poet, and outside the Jewish community for the same reason. Is there a lineage there that might better suit your identity within Canada?
NS: As I have read very little of Layton and Klein, I can’t say as I’ve taken anything from them which might expand my own practice of verse and add to the way I accommodate myself to this city. Perhaps there was a reason I came to Montreal, if one subscribes to the theory that nothing happens by accident. On the other hand, I’m sure it’s purely coincidence, and if I look around and note that this was Layton’s town and Klein’s, and so forth and so on, well, so much the better, and it’s not just an Anglo provenance. How about Robert Melançon, for instance? This man, if anything, is doubly a maverick, writing in French as a Quebecker, but availing himself of the entirety of the French and English traditions, not to mention the classical canon. I believe he’s one of the most important poets on the continent, and no one knows, because of all the bloody walls. What has come to sustain me, after the time spent with Yeats, Eliot, Pound et al, is my reading of the Roman poets. I have never really understood why they should sustain me, but I think it has something to do with distance; that the poetry is both so far away in time and yet so immediate. I’m pretty much a recluse and they are such social poets. Go figure. Even so, when you would speak of ‘lineage’, this is the lineage I have in mind as would bear on my own identity.
EJ: Why the Romans?
NS: I have no idea. One is almost tempted to believe in the transmigration of souls. I won’t settle for the cliché of reading the past in order to comprehend the present. I don’t claim any success in the matter, just that to make something solid of those shadowy figures in ancient Rome satisfies me in some peculiar way; something compels me in this, and I really don’t know why it’s happening. I don’t do it so as to make political statements, though I suppose one could, and it’s been done. I am not even that interested in writing set-pieces though I have a few of those in my books, the latest being in Smoke and Lilacs. Perhaps the attempt, in the end, whatever the result, simply allows me to see waitresses and cabbies and cashiers in a somewhat sharper or at least different kind of relief – but I can’t say. Or perhaps it’s a way of giving the mundanities a slip for a brief time, and playing a kind of joke on my own particular stretch of time, and the waitress or the cabbie or the cashier just happen to stand on ground richer than the floor of Wal-Mart.
EJ: Do you see the Romans as more pertinent now?
NS: I have certainly had conversations with academics in which I was warned off the America-Rome analog, and that the analog was, if nothing else, old hat, a cliché, but in at least a couple of instances, it seems to me there are uncanny similarities, chief of which is the amount of power both ends of the analog enjoyed and enjoy, to do good and to do, and we may as well be blunt about it, evil. Another similarity is the religiosity of the Romans and the Americans, for better or worse. It certainly seems to me I have been watching America as ‘republic’ drift into what has been called Caesarism, a condition which is not strictly fascistic, but does have fascist tendencies. The state of mind of the early Christians fascinates me for what they may have or may have not been thinking in their daily routines on the Roman streets, how much was worship of the Christ-figure, how much was taken up with simply trying to remain a human being in a mean reality. That the Roman world was a cruel world, there is no question. But so is the American world, despite its suburban comforts. Technological advances et al. It’s such a huge subject, particularly in the way it has become personal with me. I was just downstairs in my local, drinking coffee, watching the snow fall, and it hit me that, when I first read Livy, for instance, and putting aside questions of the actual worth of the histories he wrote, that it was like sex is sometimes, a way of stopping time, cheating death. And what’s more personal than that?
EJ: Can you tell me about your friendship with Marius Kociejowski?
NS: I was introduced to Marius Kociejowski in London by a mutual friend. We eyed one another warily, a couple of roosters. I had already read Marius’s essay, the one entitled ‘The Machine Minders’, which was his commentary on the state of contemporary culture back in the 80s. He has long since disavowed it as immature, but even so, the effect of having read it has always stayed with me, and it remains for me a kind of signpost for when I find myself in confusion. In other words, I think machine minders and I am reminded of what art and culture have been for too long and are even now; it’s bad enough they are not much more than disposable commodities subject to market forces; they are pills one pops, and eureka, one is cutting edge, comforted and consoled by the proximity of the glassy-eyed. It was Marius who brought my work to the notice of Michael Schmidt. Over the years we have harassed and insulted one another; ours is, despite it all, something like an affectionate relationship. He has a horror of the casual in poetry; I am pretty much the barbarian he can’t quite remove from the landscape. Even so, my love of the poetry and writings of Leopardi, for instance, is as deep as his; and after Leopardi, all the radical-chic of a Warhol is pretty damn insipid stuff. A respite from the stuffily academic on all fronts turned into the endless vacation from hell. Well, I’m speaking in generalities here, but I think you get my drift.
EJ: That’s the second time you’ve said ‘barbarian’ in reference to yourself.
NS: Now, barbarian poet. Actually, it’s sort of a running joke between myself and Kociejowski, as he thinks me very uncouth if not uncivilized. But there’s a monster in me whom I dub Herr Professor and one way of mitigating the damage he can possibly wreak is to think of myself as a barbarian. Also, as I mentioned, the very first time I entered Rome by train (overnight from Vienna) I had just the barest glimpse of how a barbarian might have felt, coming across the ancient city for the first time, and it’s how I saw it – with awe.
EJ: A number of the poems in The Pangborn Defence are addressed to characters – Lunar, Crow, and Meredith Owens – and in ‘Answering Crow’ you write:
What’s so much more to the point than an alias,
Monicker, epithet, term of endearment, nexus
For all that’s good and brave and true in the face
Of all that’s wrong, than our voices pitched low among
The zinnias and lilies, peonies, marigolds,
Are the shadows now creeping into the realm
From a place where the sun has no purchase.
Meredith Owens was an Islamicist who died in 1966, but his life and relationship to you in the poem remind me of the poet and scholar Eric Ormsby. Can you tell me more about Crow and Lunar? Is Marius Kociejowski Lunar?
NS: Well, I shouldn’t go and blow anyone’s cover. But there is a quite hilarious story as to how the nickname, alias, soubriquet Lunar came about in the first place, and it has nothing to do with any doing of mine or Lunar. I merely pounced on it with something akin to glee. As for ‘Crow’, the crow is Crow’s favourite bird, for all that this sentence is an echo chamber. And the thing about Crow is that, though he’s a French Quebecker, and it took me a while to realize what follows here, that he’s the most profoundly American of North Americans in the best sense of Jeffersonian, the Enlightenment and all that, and, I suspect, he’s the last of a certain mentality that refuses to indulge what’s glibly and fatuously oracular, and I argue with him all the time and he pities me. Ormsby? His best poems are always greater than the sum of their parts, and when I scratch my head and wonder how he does it, it’s as if I encounter stratas of Hart Crane, Edgar Allen Poe, Frank O’Hara, E. A. Robinson, not to mention Rexroth, say, or Robinson Jefferson in the work; and so forth and so on. I’ve seen his work dismissed by the silliest of criticisms rendered by the silliest of critics who couldn’t find their collective tush if you gave them a helping hand, and if this is as good as it gets, I don’t hold out much hope for the future of literature, and poetry, in particular, in this neck of the woods.
EJ: In your poems, there’s an everyday-ness of grocers and waitresses, and then there’s the classical world between that and the poet. These two things are locked together, while expressing a sort of alienation (‘And truly, I inhabit thought’s backwaters…’). This alienation is not necessarily linked to either the urban or the classical – it’s not condescension in any sense – but is it an irony separating poet from subject matter?
NS: I don’t know that I have ever felt alienated as such, at least not in the sense the word has come to us through, for instance, certain writings. (I have Sartre in mind whose writings I mistrust, but then it’s been years since I’ve read the man.) But I have to say that in the past few years, especially as the regime of G. W. B. has worn on, I have certainly felt something akin to alienation and something other than just disgust. I am not a scholar, but I have, at times, experienced the curious sensation of an elaborate set of mirrors when I muck about in Tacitus or Livy, or in any other aspect of the canon, or as when I hear out some speech on the senate floor broadcast on the media; in other words, I can see the US in the classical histories and I can hear Tacitus in the rhetoric of certain American senators; I’m thinking of the speech Robert Byrd gave at the outset of the Iraq war. I could provide more examples, but I think what I’m saying here is concrete enough. Now I don’t get this sensation when I read Napoleonic history, say, or when I read about the Mayans or the Incas or even, necessarily, Periclean Athens.
EJ: What do you see as the role of the poet in the 21st century?
NS: A poet’s only obligation is to write the best poetry he or she can, and the rest follows. Otherwise we get bad poetry sanctified by some ‘cause’ or another. More excuses to write badly. Poets have always been rather marginal to any society in which they function, the Greeks of a certain era perhaps the famous exception. Druidic poets had a high profile. Roman poets were pretty much non-entities in their day, though they might have the ear now and then (Virgil, Horace) of Caesar, some Maecenas paying the bills, picking up the bar tab. This ‘Roman’ business is quite personal with me, and a lot of it stems from the fact that Rome in the beginning was a cow town, and a rather wild one, at that, and I’ve certainly known the odd cow town or two. And the fact that Livy, in writing about Numa, could not comprehend the Latin of Numa’s priestly mumbo-jumbo – well, for some reason or another, this really struck me, and the day is coming when the Gettysburg Address is going to suffer the same fate.
EJ: How does one of your poems take shape?
NS: For the most part, I go through endless revisions of a poem. Usually it has to do with hitting the right tone, getting it to sound right in my ear, apart from other considerations of form. I imagine myself standing in a room full of people, blind drunk. If, in this condition, I were to stumble somewhere in the reading of the poem aloud, then something’s wrong with it, the lines, for some reason, not flowing properly. In other words, the poem should deliver itself, as it were, the poet incidental to the process. And I tend to write long poems, and I’m well aware that long poems go very hard on an audience, let alone readers of the page. And just as often it has to do with content, the reasons for all those revisions. What in hell am I on about now and why? Does anyone need this? The fact that I might need it – well, is it justification for a poem’s public existence as opposed to the purely private one? Occasionally, certainly not very often, a poem comes to me whole and seems only to need a bit of tinkering. I’m very dubious of poems that come easily. What easy lies might I be telling? What gibberish tricked up as eloquence? Et cetera. And yet, for all the revisions, anything remotely resembling the barest hint of a work completed remains woefully unattainable, and it all seems so futile. Maddening. I figure poets are masochists, at least the good ones. Their opposites? Well, the answer as to what they are almost supplies itself. No need to pile on.
EJ: What about that audience? Do you have an ideal reader in mind when you write? Do the cabbies, grocers and waitresses fit into your vision of a readership? I take the image of you drunk at a reading as example, but is there something more metaphorical there in the performative aspect? A persona? A vision of the poet? Perhaps there’s that alienation again?
NS: God help us from any more ‘vision of the poet’, persona, role, ideal or otherwise. I’d rather watch clowns performing in the street, only that too seems to have become chic. And besides, poetry is not an elective course; it’s more like a curse one has incurred somehow. The only thing worse than making poetry is not making it. The muse is not a very sympathetic figure. I have no ideal reader as such in my mind when I write, but there are certain people I would hope to please and there are certain people I would delight in displeasing. Most of the time I have a conversation on-going in my mind with either real persons or even imaginary interlocutors. I think all this is fairly standard, nothing new in it. What’s a poem, anyway, but a suggestion even when pitched in an expressly declarative mode? Poems about one’s feelings are despicable, but poetry without passion isn’t going to go very far. If there’s one thing that always drives me around the bend it’s this notion that poetry is somehow self-expression and so, subversive because empowering. Bollocks. If one flatters oneself that one is being subversive, one has already been taken prisoner. Poetry is of the moment, without qualifiers and special appeals, and yet it’s of all time and for all time, and for keeps. If there’s anything like ideal poetry, which I doubt, this then would be that ideal.
EJ: Could you elaborate a bit on the poem as suggestion?
NS: The least apologetic poems of which I know – The Iliad, for example, or The Divine Comedy – don’t waste time with being ‘suggestive’; they declare this is how it is or how it was, take it or leave it. Yet for me, at least, poems are but suggestions at bottom, because poets are human beings, not gods. Perhaps, as Aristotle put it (or was it Plato, or both?) poets enter some divine state and then bring back the goods to mortals, but even so, Homer or the Homers were human, not godly, and it’s said that Dante was not a particularly nice person. What I’m trying to say is that no poet, because human, can see the entirety of human experience at any given time, let alone understand in full the operations of the universe; yet a poet might get, as here I’ll cheekily submit, a sniff; and then said poet may spend a lifetime attempting to explicate of what that sniff consists. Sex, death and taxes, anyone? I think Shakespeare is perhaps beloved because he doesn’t expunge doubt from his poetry, his own or that of his characters, and yet he’s as clear-eyed as either Homer or Dante for all that his humanity shows. I suppose that the world in which Homer wrote had no room for Prufrocks – such neuroticism would get them killed in an instant – but Homer had to please his lords and masters, and what they wanted was the poetry of the warrior with all their relentless terribleness plus the quirks, and Homer delivered it, but without romanticism. He’s the least sentimental and most grim of poets, minus all that Wagnerian hullabaloo of Siegfried and so forth. But was Homer’s so-called vision the only reality of 8th century B.C., let alone the late Bronze Age? Perhaps Hesiod is the poet to read for that. And perhaps I haven’t really addressed your question, but when a poet can be sure about something, he should be sure; as for the rest of it a little honesty might gain him a reader’s trust.
EJ: There’s a pessimistic tone in your two most recent books, which I think you’ve suggested here is a sign of the times. Will the incoming presidency offer any reprieve?
NS: Off the cuff, I would answer that there’s a sense of futility with things and that, notwithstanding a million good intentions, things won’t get better until we bottom out, as it were, and all the chaos in our minds drifts away. It’s the sense that things have really gotten out of control, if they were ever under control, and of watching worlds smash apart into pieces and wondering what will take their place and not liking very much what appears to be taking shape. And yet, there’s reason to feel hopeful and to dismiss one’s pessimism, the inaugural on telly now. But then, one can’t really know anything, predicting the future’s a mug’s game. My question is, one just jotted down in the journal I keep: how long before a new world begins to reach back for the history it succeeded? Before those shadows reassert? In any case, yes, a reprieve. The new tone was set. The rebuke, however veiled, was delivered. It does the soul good to hear it.
Poem
Uncommon orchid in plain sight,
Poet I like to rib,
Look around, what grabs your notice
If not the warrior ethos of think-tank shills?
Nosediving markets, pensions gone bust,
Hounds pleading sadism and ethical strictures,
The heart of love a pustule—need I continue?
Or that snow begins to fall just now
On this Jezebel Montreal. Wood smoke plumes,
Streets go softly picturesque
With larking dogs, toddlers on sleds.
Pretty picture, to be sure,
But don’t look to me to repulse
Each and every ambush of the thing.
No, I’ll enlist your services.
For I have psy-ops, and it’s your spleen
I’ll put to use, that many-splendoured sack
Occasioned by the ginned-up effluvia
Of culture and counter-terrorism (or whatever else
Preoccupies a state’s legal teams).
And, happy outcome, my ruse all along,
It’s yours, not mine, the ire you rate
For mooning judge and jury
And the groupies of the court.
It’s worthy of CNN, of some shrill anchoress
Compressing air through her windpipe,
How your pale backside gives the bum’s rush
To darlings of the law and the arts.
—Norm Sibum