The Modern Consciousness: Jake Byrne in Conversation with Steve McOrmond
In this chat with The Malahat Review's Jake Byrne, who is as good an interviewer as he is a poet, I attempt to articulate some of the ideas behind the poems in my new collection, Reckon, which is forthcoming in spring 2018. We talk pronouns, the problems of intelligibility and the role of poetry in an age of extinction.
“Language is used to shout, command, enforce, instruct, influence, tell us what to do and what to desire. In contrast, poetry’s peculiar strength and resilience may lie in its quietness; it listens rather than raising its voice and questions as much or more than it asserts. There’s a tendency in our culture to equate quietness with passivity, but that’s false. In her poem “Butterfly Bones; or Sonnet Against Sonnets,” Margaret Avison describes the insect’s, or poem’s, “fierce listening,” which suggests just how radical, subversive and dangerous a poetics of quiet contemplation and attention can be.”