Alessandra Naccarato is the author of Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene (essays) and Re-Origin of Species (poems). Based in Tkaronto (Toronto), she is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including the Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the CBC Poetry Prize.
Featured in Speak—Poetry in Performance
Interviewed by Jean-Paul Thuot
Jean-Paul Thuot (JPT): I thought that I would like to start by acknowledging the land that I’m on. I’m calling from, Lekwungen Territory, Home of the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, and I’m a guest here and I’m very grateful to be here and talking to you.
AN Naccarato (AN): I love that land. It’s so beautiful. I’m in Tkronto, Toronto, a place of many nations’ meeting spot. I hope that, always and in this interview, I’m being a good visitor.
JP: One of the things that I discovered about you is that you have worked and traveled as a spoken word artist and I really enjoyed watching some of the work that you’ve posted and things that I could find on YouTube.
I’m just wondering how spoken word poetry affects the writing of your poetry and how it informs poetry that you would want to publish as opposed to, or in addition to, speaking?
AN: I feel so grateful to have had a lifelong love affair with spoken word and to have had so many amazing teachers. It feels like an art form that is about how we are together – richly steeped in tradition of community and being together and speaking about what’s happening in community.
I think there’s many ways to do that, but it’s a beautiful part of it.
I have leaned more and more into a contemplative life and the kind of slow pace and deep time that can be reflected in poetry that’s really written for the page, like a siren song that drew me to it more and more -especially when I moved to Salt Spring Island and was in the woods for years. It felt like the voice of that time and of that way of life was kind of like the voice a tree might have or a mountain.
JP: Should all poetry be read aloud or are there some poems that seem to be better savored in silence?
AN: Often, whatever book I’m reading, I’m reading it out loud. Maybe I read it twice. Maybe the third time I read the poems out loud or a line that stands out for me. And I think that part of the magic of poetry is sound always, whether it’s for the page or not.
I would say both. Always both.
JP: One of the things that I came across was your Postcards for My Sister, which won you the CBC Poetry Prize in 2017. I was deeply moved by it, I thought it was really beautiful. One of the things that I keyed in on was the real sense of the rural or the old country of Italy in that poem, especially how you describe your grandmother and the women who “make plans for weddings and daughters,” which I thought was a great line.
I’m just curious about your connection to your ancestry and how it might show up in your work.
AN: My grandmother was an incredible person who immigrated to Canada for an arranged marriage from southern Italy and spoke a hybrid language that was part Italian and part English. She lived in rural northern Ontario after she moved here – I am fascinated by how different my life is than hers and curious about what is lost, what is transformed, and then what can be reclaimed in powerful ways.
I was the first person in my family to return to the village where she grew up in Italy. In this really small village in the mountains, in the forest. It was a really pivotal moment for me, as it’s described in the poem.
I spend a lot of time working with my ancestors, to try to continue contemplating what right relationship might look like in this world, in whatever land I’m on as a white settler. I wanted to step deeper into contemplation of my relationship with all my ancestors as part of an understanding of where I am and how I am, and what this earth needs, and how I can be a good visitor wherever I am. So some of the things like how she tended her garden in this beautiful permaculture-like way in Northern Ontario is a way of tending community and tending land and feeding her neighbors.
JP: Beautiful. Thanks for that.
Another sort of process question is, everybody seems to have a slightly different way of coming to their writing. I’m just curious about your poetry writing process. How do you go about it and do you have a discipline or a schedule?
AN: I do believe writing is a craft and for any craft you need to show up and practice and put your work into it. What you give to the muse and the craft comes back to you threefold. And I have to have worked to expand my understanding of what that is, particularly with poetry.
Every morning I do morning pages where I write for 15 minutes nonstop stream of consciousness, work that I won’t read again. The poet Jon Sands says it’s the “muscle of permission” that we’re giving ourselves as writers, that the reason to sit down and write and move beyond the critical voice in your mind is the permission to speak if only to oneself really is a muscle.
So that is a practice I have that feels both like a sacred practice and a professional practice. Beyond that I read a lot of poetry.
I also recognize there are times when a walk is what a poem needs. Like the walk you take or the space you spend away from the screen or by the ocean or in silence is in many ways the work of creating a poem. Because so much of what a poem is, is silence. If we are only in the noise, there is perhaps not enough space in our relationship with silence to know where words enter and where they end.
JP: The “muscle of permission.” I love that.
So, in this moment is there anybody that’s currently residing on your nightstand that you have been reaching for in the last few days or the last week?
AN: The last book I read, it was a re-read but really left me sobbing in a café, was Louise Gluck’s Averno which is about many things. But the Crater Lake in Italy, that is Averno, is said to be the entrance to the underworld. There is so much in that book about the relationship to death. And so I think reading it after her death, it gutted me in the most beautiful way.
JP: Another thing that I’m personally curious about and I’m sure lots of people are as well, is: can you speak to your editing process, both editing your own work and how you might approach other people’s work? What’s important to you when you go to edit, and then the follow up: How do you know when a poem is finished?
AN: Well, my editing process continues to evolve and continues to seek out and find more gentleness in the process and ways to loosen the reins on my own work.
I can be quite an extensive, expansive editor of my own work. And I think many of us are somewhat haunted by the question of when a poem’s done and could keep tinkering forever. I am sitting these days more with the question of, “what is the feeling of closure,” the way that the body knows. I feel like there are times that my inner self tells me when the poem is done, you know?
The first thing I really seek out is where the heart of the poem is. Before I’m looking at anything like form or clarity or style, I sit with how it made me feel, what I think the heart of that poem is, and whether then the structures, the form, the tone, where it’s supporting that heart and where maybe it’s obscuring it or pulling away from it, or might be doing something unintended.
You know, I think the most important thing is our own voice. How we find it, how we share it, our own point of view. The urgency of what we most need to tell the world.
I think there’s no one way or best way to write a poem. At the heart of that process other people can witness us and our work and reflect what moves them, what they see at the heart of it, and then offer us the tools that might best support it if we’re being witnessed in our truth.
Same with rearranging the order of poems in a book – talking that out with a poet is one of my favorite things to do. Over time, I’ve grown more expansive and gentler, both more precise and light-handed in doing that.
When I say expansive, part of what I mean is allowing for the poem to show me its form, show me its imperfection that it wants to maintain. If a poem is too polished or too clean water maybe can just run right over it with nothing sticking.
There is a lot of space in the looseness of voice that I think I learned from background and performance and from spoken word poetry that, the truth is never that polished. The truth of our lives, the truth of our feelings, the truth of this world is so rarely a straight line or a clear shot that dissonance and difference and absence of punctuation sometimes are the truth.
The work I’m doing now has so much more looseness in it, and I am able to feel the pressure of my educated poet self being like, is this right? And then this other part of me that’s asking what is right, the art is going to tell you what it wants to be, and what is right is to listen to that and let go of the training we’ve had. That’s not to say that poetry can’t be taught or that we shouldn’t learn forms, [or] read as much as we can.
JP: Last question. There was a line in a poem where you said that you believe chaos works itself out eventually. Do you believe this to be true?
AN: I think if you read Imminent Domains, my essay collection, there is a lot about the smallness of humanity in the reality of this ancient world. That book is called Imminent Domains Reckoning with the Anthropocene, that humans are defining this time as being defined by human intervention, right? Such a human centered way to understand change and transformation in the world. It is a way of understanding change and transformation that is rooted in the very systemic thinking and industrialization that is causing the harm itself.
Where I find comfort, where I find awe, where I find resilience, is in knowing that this earth and its systems are not centered on human beings. There’s profound damage we are doing to our own sustainability and way of life to declare that we know what will happen, to believe that our narratives and ability to see is stronger than the principle that truly is at the heart of our reality, which is to say we do not know what will happen. This is how I find ways to go on amidst gutting changes in the world.
Another world is possible. And for it to be possible, you have to believe it is possible. We have to find ways to write those worlds, create those worlds into being. I do believe chaos is a stronger system than any kind of industrialized system.