Karen Solie

Standing at the Intersection

In her latest collection of poems titled Pigeon, Karen Solie embeds herself in places where various pursuits and realities intersect. Her job as a poet, she says, is to pay attention to what is transpiring and to report the experience honestly. This methodology serves her well. What she proclaims often is the primacy of detachment and indifference in her own thinking, whether the focus of that thought happens to be politics, war, the environment or sundry other topics.

Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Solie was raised on her family farm in the southwest part of the province. She notes the strong influence of where she grew up. “In my neck of the woods there’s a lot of gas well activity,” she explains. “It’s a complicated thing because it’s very destructive and it ruins the water, and all of the bad things that one would expect of that enterprise. But the companies pay rent to the farmers to lease their land and that money has helped a lot of people. Situations are so rarely wholly good or wholly bad. That interests me, how to negotiate that.”

Negotiating the good and bad in life is liberating for Solie and her readers. It is refreshing to absorb how willing she is to contemplate the outcomes of different situations without resorting to simple judgements. This shines through again and again in Pigeon and points to a way of being beyond the tiring life of drawing lines in the sand. In her poem ‘Erie’, she recounts an excursion along the Great Lake shoreline near Port Burwell, where the Erie Shores Wind Farm holds sway.

At the wind farm, minimalist daisies
rotated on humming vertiginous stalks,

chunks of air like bathtubs falling
around us, good intentions complicated

by avian mortality and the eternal
complaints of The People. Nothing’s

perfect, I said, trying to please you. I didn’t.
But that’s okay, you said, that’s okay.

Solie lays bare the confusion in our responses to the natural world, observing that it is hardly helpful, though perhaps unavoidable, to think of human beings as separate from nature. Really our technological and industrial pursuits are part of the natural environment. “I think sometimes it’s easier to think of the manmade versus the natural because it establishes a relationship where you feel like it’s something that you either care about or not. It’s funny. I don’t think it’s all that helpful to think about ourselves in opposition. Even the idea that people are out spoiling the wilderness or protecting the wilderness, there is a lot of truth to it, but then again it’s that opposition that I don’t think is that helpful. We don’t feel part of it. That is why, I think, we’ve mucked things up as much as we have. We don’t feel really responsible because it’s something that lies outside of our world.”

It is fascinating to ponder what it would mean to transcend the view of manmade things as somehow distinct from the natural world. As Solie puts it in the extended piece called ‘Archive’, ‘the end of contemplative attention is a purity of heart’.

Intertwined with the complex intellectual currents coursing through the poems is the straightforward wonder of exquisite phrases. It is hard, for instance, to look at a construction site in quite the same way again after reading ‘… the nose-down backhoe resembles someone fallen asleep in a library’. Another highlight is in the terrific ‘Prayers for the Sick’, which is set in a medical waiting room.

Are we not beset
by homesickness, wayfarers like all of our fathers,
our mothers? A short span
You have made our days, only a breath.

Karen Solie is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Short Haul Engine (2001) and Modern and Normal (2005). With Pigeon she has enhanced her position among the very best Canadian poets. The book has been nominated for the prestigious Griffin Prize as well as the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Currently Solie lives in Toronto.

The following conversation took place over coffee at John’s Italian Café in Baldwin Village in Toronto, just before the lunch crowd arrived.

CI: Let me start by asking about the poem that closes the first section of the book. It is called ‘The Prime Minister’. Essentially it includes a description of the Prime Minister staring out into the indifferent spring night after having watched a hockey game. You juxtapose the singing of the national anthem at the hockey game with the scrolling faces of dead soldiers, maybe a reference to when Don Cherry puts up the faces of the people who have died in Afghanistan. What do you remember about the origins of that poem? When did you decide that you wanted to write about the Prime Minister?

KS: Well, I think it originated one year when the Senators were in the playoffs. I remember that Don Cherry was showing the soldiers that had been killed. There was the cheering crowd, and Harper was in the crowd. I just felt that we are at war! We have people who are at war right now. There seems to be a lot of talk about the bravery of these people, which is absolutely the case. I don’t think that most of us could imagine the situation that those people are in and how they’ve been trained to handle that situation, which will stick with them for the rest of their lives. They’re not going to be able to leave it over there.

Through all the talk, I felt like for Harper, as supposedly our leader through all of this, that this is easily forgotten. The matter at hand is money and corporate interests, and what the people are doing, not just the soldiers, but what the people are actually doing is just sort of forgotten. It is paid lip service to and then more or less forgotten in the larger enterprise, which is acquisition.

CI: One of the awards that you have been nominated for this year is the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. I remember reading her poems when I was in school, and certainly her life and work had a real political dimension. When I came across the poem ‘The Prime Minister’ in your book, it made me wonder about the political responsibilities of the poet. How do you see your role as a poet when you are viewing politics?

KS: I don’t know that I think of myself as a political writer, but I do think that, if one is writing about being in the world, there is an element of politics to that. It is inescapable. So I don’t identify as such, but I don’t really identify as a particular kind of writer in any respect, a prairie writer or lyric poet or what-have-you. But I do think that it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on. That involves the intersection of a number of pursuits and realities, and politics is definitely one of them. One’s responsibility primarily is just to pay attention and to think about what is going on, as a writer, and to express honestly what one feels is important about that experience.

CI: Well, that poem stood out to me in the book, but it didn’t stand out in a strange way because you jump around the country a lot, from Lake Erie to New Brunswick to Alberta and all over. I am guessing that the circumstances of your life put you in these different places in the country, but at a certain point did you want to put together a book that represented the whole place?

KS: No, that never really crossed my mind. It’s just a reflection of the way my life has been. I don’t know. I guess that I don’t move around a lot relative to some other people, but trying to cobble together a living takes one places – thankfully! It’s one of the opportunities of this kind of life, to be able to take a writer-in-residence stint in New Brunswick or Alberta. So it’s just a reflection of how my life has turned out.

CI: Throughout the book I noticed again and again mention of the natural world, and sort of this confusion at the heart of our response right now to the natural world. We are seeing things spoiled and fundamentally altered, but there is also a desire in all of us to protect things. I wrote down parts of a few different poems just to get at what I am trying to say.

In the poem ‘Bone Creek’ you write of a campsite that has been selected because ‘it satisfied all our prerequisites – / shade trees, a trout stream, some vague / narrative significance’. I loved that phrase ‘some vague narrative significance’. So often if you ask people why they travelled to a certain place, they give some vague answer that has nothing behind it except advertising.

Then in ‘The World of Plants’, there are the great concluding lines: ‘Anyone / who spots the alien invader Asian / longhorned beetle in the neighbourhoods / is asked to report this immediately / to the city. Without our efforts, no tree is safe. / It’s as if everybody always wants us to do something. I’d like to see someone make us. Please, / someone, come on over here and make us.’

And in the poem ‘Erie’, when you are driving along and talking about wind farms – are they a good thing or a bad thing – and I think most people, unless they are at the extreme ends of the environmental debate, for or against, sort of have this feeling of indifference, of ‘what are we supposed to do?’

How would you characterize your stance toward the natural world as reflected in these poems?

KS: Well, it’s interesting to me. We’ve found ourselves in a position where we talk about our world almost versus the natural world, when we are animals and all of this stuff that we’ve made is just an extension of what animals do, making caves and nests and paths through the woods. I think sometimes it’s easier to think of the manmade versus the natural because it establishes a relationship where you feel like it is something that you either care about or not. It’s funny. I don’t think it’s all that helpful to think about ourselves in opposition. Even the idea that people are out spoiling the wilderness or protecting the wilderness, there is a lot of truth to it, but then again it’s that opposition that I don’t think is that helpful. We don’t feel part of it. That is why, I think, we’ve mucked things up as much as we have. We don’t feel really responsible because it’s something that lies outside of our world.

Now I don’t know what to do about that, or what I think of that, but it’s something that has come to be interesting to me over the last few years. In part, a lot of how I feel about landscape has been influenced by where I grew up, which is a farming location in southwest Saskatchewan. The area is mostly wheat farms. Some people run cattle. It is rural, and it is the country, but it’s certainly not wilderness or the natural world. People will say, ‘it must have been really great to grow up in the country amongst nature’. Well yeah, but the farming area is a very industrialized area. So I’ve never been able to think of the urban and the rural as a clearly defined split, or the natural world versus the manmade world as something that has clearly defined parameters. They always seem to be leaking into each other. … Landscape isn’t just something that happens in the country! The city is a landscape. For people who were born and grew up here, it’s as much of a landscape as is the countryside.

I guess just where I grew up does influence a lot of how I see the coincidence of those elements. In my neck of the woods there’s a lot of gas well activity. It’s a complicated thing because it’s very destructive and it ruins the water, and all of the bad things that one would expect of that enterprise. But the companies pay rent to the farmers to lease their land and that money has helped a lot of people. Situations are so rarely wholly good or wholly bad. That interests me, how to negotiate that.

CI: With that idea of a situation never being wholly good or wholly bad, I thought that the title of the book was interesting. As I turned off Spadina today and came up D’Arcy, I went through an assembly of pigeons. I was thinking about the title of the book and the appropriateness of it. The pigeon is an urban and a rural bird. It is alternately friendly and confrontational, depending on the situation. There is also the perception of the pigeon as a tainted bird, a diseased bird. If the species ever became threatened, I am not sure that we could mobilize people en masse to get upset about it! It struck me that the pigeon made a good emblem for the way that you presented the environment in the book. It is this conflicted thing. We’re not exactly sure how to feel about it. When you attached that name to this group of poems, what was your thought process? Am I way off?

KS: No, no, not at all – actually, that is where it started. They are sort of considered pests in a way, as a lot of rural animals are, but at the same time they are actually quite beautiful. There is ‘pigeon’ as it applies to language, kind of an in-between word. I have this thing about Venn diagrams. I love them! They’re so useful. Anyway, there is the pigeon sort of being the intersection between two languages; it’s a slang word for somebody who is a dupe, and at the same time a term of endearment. It seemed to be at the centre of a lot of conflicting interpretations.



CI: I do this with authors sometimes: I try to judge a book by the cover a little bit. The design on the book by Bill Douglas – what were your instructions for how you wanted the book to look?

KS: None! I have no sense of design whatsoever. Working with Brick Books, the publisher of the first two books, they would ask for input. I would say ‘no orange, no purple, I don’t really like a lot of kinds of green, nothing pastel’. So I would end up with black and white! Then I would say something like ‘how about a fish on the cover? If you could find a fish …’, and they would say, ‘that’s no help at all!’ But I like the colours on this cover and the mechanical-natural bits, the pixellated disturbance.

CI: Well, I asked the question because I thought it was representative of the book: the intersection of the natural and the mechanical – and digitized. When talking about how we view nature, we’re almost programmed to view things digitally in separate bits without seeing it as a whole. Anyway, I just thought it was really an effective design.

KS: Yeah, that little disturbance took me by surprise at first, but just that little disturbance in the usual way that you see things, I thought, was really interesting.

CI: This is the last question that I have for you. In ‘Archive’, you have this little meditation on Wittgenstein and language. Then also at the end of the first poem in the book [‘Pathology of the Senses’], you have this line: ‘Speak of the devil, the devil appears’. I thought this was an interesting idea to highlight, the reinforcement of language, how a thing becomes a thing in our minds just by hearing about it again and again. Did the decision to throw a little bit of language philosophy into the book come just because you were reading Wittgenstein? What influenced you?

KS: That piece [‘Archive’] was written when I was a writer-in-residence in Edmonton. I had to cross the High Level Bridge all the time, and it scared the living shit out of me every single time! I’m a bit of an idiot when it comes to heights.

One thing that refreshes me or gets me going as a writer is reading and re-reading what I have come to think of as fundamental texts in my life. Some of Wittgenstein’s are among them. There was something interesting to me as a kind of meditation, as that piece is – I was by myself in Edmonton, didn’t really know anybody, so I had a lot of time just to stare at things and think – but I wanted to foreground the experience of looking at the world through the lens of what you’re reading, what you’re thinking about, and what is happening around you at any given time. I wanted to put that lens there. There are experiences in looking at something really striking. It doesn’t have to be the beautiful necessarily. But it feels like if you could just get whatever it is in front of your eyes out of the way, you could really see it; that feeling of being separated from the thing that you’re perceiving by the fact of your own perception, the physical process of perception – that’s fascinating. So I really wanted to put that there, put the texts there, and put all the things that come to mind as you’re looking at something, the associations that you’re brain makes with other things and experiences and bits of knowledge, to really put that there and try to enact the experience of looking through it. I don’t know how successful it is, but that was the intent behind that piece, and where Wittgenstein came from. There were a lot of things that I was reading at the time that jump in there.

Date of Interview: 05/13/2010
Location: John’s Italian Café, Toronto ON
Link: www.anansi.ca