Sonnet L’Abbé is a Canadian poet, performer, editor, and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, Anima Canadensis and Sonnet’s Shakespeare. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books. They had their first solo performance of songs and poems at Nanaimo’s Port Theatre in 2021.
Sonnet will be showcasing new/ previously unpublished work at the festival.
Interview by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): Is your new work a departure from your earlier work? And if so, how did you move in this direction, or what moved you?
Sonnet L’Abbé (SL): Songwriting is either a huge departure from my earlier work or a natural extension of it, depending on how you look at it. Poetry has often been described as expression living in that place between speech and song. Greek and Roman classical bards considered their verse inspired by Muses and often referred to their work as “song;” Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes both famously “sang” of America. The dub poetry that came up in Toronto emerges out of Jamaican riddims and music; hip hop and spoken word are explicit about the musicality of utterance. I’ve always written “book poems” that think explicitly about sound, tone and accent, and about living the intersection of Caribbean (diasporic Black and South Asian) and North American cultures. So, while it’s a big change to write more explicit “songs,” and to think first about performance rather than about print publication, I’m still in the same creative practice of exploring rhythm and percussion, the body, and tone in relation to my images, word choices, storytelling and reflection.
BP: We have a glimpse into the whole here. Do you have a plan for the entire completed manuscript, or is it arising one poem at a time? How is this manuscript arising?
SL: I haven’t decided whether these song-texts will become their own manuscript or be incorporated into the hybrid memoir / creative research writing I’ve been doing. So far, I’m writing a song at a time and journaling a lot of prose.
BP: What is your writing practice? Are you a ‘going to work’ kind of a person, sitting down at the same time every day or carving out a portion of your day to writing, or do you move in bursts of energy, or?
SL: My writing practice used to look like sitting down at a computer to type words nearly every day. I never have had a set time, but I definitely feel a deep impulse to work and a great satisfaction from working, so I could usually work from impulse and still be realizing the benefits of a disciplined practice. I now work on my instruments (voice and guitar) every day, and it’s possible to gain a lot of knowledge or finish a song in muscle memory without any of it landing on a page. So these days I have to be more intentional about the writing actually manifesting as a readable document.
BP: When do you know a poem/a manuscript is completed? Do you just ‘know’ or do other poems sneak in sideways, or do you throw out a number of ones that don’t fit?
SL: That sense of something being finished has always been deeply intuitive. The feeling of satisfaction, of the spark’s potential having been developed into something substantive and whole (even if it’s an untidy or unresolved whole), is an awareness and trust each artist cultivates for themselves. The ideal is to bring a work, whether it’s a poem or a whole book, to a level of completion that feels good and only then to show it to a handful of trusted readers or a trusted editor, who can then talk to me about poems that might not fit, poems that might be missing, poems that don’t feel fully finished. The conversation is less about wondering how other people like the work than it is being walked through my set of poems and listening to myself answer questions about what I want for the book. As an editor, I’m always working with poets who have manuscripts at that stage of completion where they’re looking for that conversation. I’ve seen projects move forward with very little new poems sneaking in or poems getting cut; I’ve seen poets rewrite or add or delete entire sections of books. Ultimately, it is a very personal knowing and probably different for each project.
BP: Where did the idea of this manuscript come from? What influences/inspirations/suggestions worked on you to begin this manuscript?
SL: My last book was very dense work, with a strong visual and intertextual element, that explored identity, belonging and trauma in relation to colonial systems that structure life in the Canadian state. I felt, when I finished it, that the energies that propelled that work could only find so much satisfactory expression in print poetry. I also live in Nanaimo, where conversations about race, decolonization and art, and conversations about poetry, don’t intersect nearly as often as they do in larger centres. There are extremely limited venues for sharing work publicly with people interested in that intersection. But there are people interested in the active creation and performance of songs, so working in this genre allows me to write about my experience and interests (which always have these intersections at play) and still have spaces to share with audiences and experiment with approach. Because Nanaimo has a blues scene, and the blues canon is an archive of Black experience and virtuosity, I’ve been able to situate my new work in conversation with other Black femmes whose blues helped shape the culture and community around them.
BP: Who would you consider your greatest influences and teachers? What books do you turn to for energy and ideas?
SL: Victor Wooten’s The Music Lesson has been on repeat in my Audible. I’ve been studying albums as if they were poetry collections. Some examples: Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Mélusine, Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters, Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, the Sister Rosetta Tharpe anthology, Tierra Whack’s Whack World, Lucille Bogan’s Shave ‘Em Dry. Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. Alison Russell, Rhiannon Ghiddens, Amythyst Kiah. Within the past decade, a whole bunch of new non-fiction books have come out that address the failure of Western therapeutic modalities to work in context to support racialized people to thrive in structurally racist society. My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem, for example. I find it hard to consume these in isolation from others interested in the same support, so I get energy from people who make media content based on this kind of research. Finally, as far as poetic inspiration, I’m always reading to teach poetry and reading as an editor for Brick Books. Conversations and close reading with poets I work with (e.g. Manahil Bandukwala, Jan Conn, David Bradford, Erin Robinsong and Emily Skov-Nielsen) always renews my enthusiasm for language and invention.
BP: Though your readers won’t know this yet, your poems are in end-rhyme and in song form. What are your thoughts about rhyming poems?
SL: I’m all for rhyming when it’s intentional. I think rhyming works best in a contemporary poem when the writer has a sense of how our cultural conditioning and our awareness of, say, 19th century rhyming poetry, will inform how the rhyme “lands.” If you use rhyme in a certain way, your poem will sound like a winky limerick or kids’ nursery rhyme: do you want that? Do you want to play with that? Cool. Use rhyme in another way you sound like Sylvia Plath. Use it in another way you sound like Britta B or Rapsody. All good.