Stephen Collis is the award-winning author of over a dozen books including The Commons (2008), On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018). He lives on unceded Coast Salish Territory and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
The Middle, Stephen Collis’ three-part poetry collection, dwells in the discomforts we know too well—loss, climate grief, displacement, and uncertainty. We are wandering, wondering, reaching for hope. This multi-faceted collection sings as much as it teaches, wails as much as it lifts, and ultimately seeds in each reader the quiet solace of the poet, the wisdom of the natural world, and the echo of “an infinite loop that actually leads / nowhere which is / likely what beauty is.”
Interview by Tara Colborne
Tara Colborne (TC): The world is on fire and in the first part of your book, “Sketch of a Poem I Will not have Written: A Blazing Space” that fire is everywhere. You used the phrase “quaternary crisis” but we need another word, don’t we? (Plethernary?) Stephen, a quick bit of research made it clear that your work has long moved between the personal and the political, the lyrical and the critical. In your opening section there’s a profound tension between elegy and resistance, grief and love. In fact, the whole of the book journeys with loss, the kind that’s personal but also emblematic of a collective unraveling. How did your experience of grief inform the shape and tone of the work?
Stephen Collis (SC): The personal and the political, elegy and resistance—these seem to be the right terms for this work. A close friend, the poet Phyllis Webb, died on November 11 2021; the next day the first of a series of atmospheric rivers hit the coast, causing widespread flooding and washing out bridges across the province. For me, these events were linked: what happened in the world of poetry also happened in the world writ large, personal loss and the grief of a climate lurching towards disaster formed a fearful symmetry. I began to write “A Blazing Space” in the coming days, a poetry of fire and flood and apocalyptic visions, which became a search for pathways through the unfolding climate disaster. I was, at the same time, assembling a library of another dead poet’s books: Robin Blaser (Blaser, blazing), and I began following his marginalia and finding references in his reading to fires and floods, so that became a method: the poet’s readerly gaze led me to the poems I was writing; Blaser, who had also been a friend, played the role of Virgil guiding my Dante.
All this happened by chance—I wasn’t planning to write this book—but the need to process grief at multiple scales, and being someone prone to following linkages between the micro and macro, or as you say, taking the lyric as a critical method for feeling-thinking, set my compulsions in motion. The book gained momentum, and I soon realized that The Middle was the middle of a trilogy I had begun in A History of the Theories of Rain (2021), and which continues now in the book I’m currently writing, Sweet Vernal Grass.
TC: “Your largest fears…your daily despairs” – you say you want to put them into poems. Are poets not just witnesses but also an ark of sorts, carrying into the future what we ought not lose? When reading your preface, I thought of something James Baldwin wrote about the nature of being an artist: “The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty of is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.” How has your notion of the role of the poet shifted over the years?
SC: Somewhere along the way I came to think that poetry had the utmost importance, engaged in speaking truth to power, a means of galvanizing resistance, that sort of thing. Then I actually became involved in social movements and came to a better understanding of how state apparatuses manage dissent, and came to think that either poetry didn’t matter much at all, or—and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it mattered no more or no less than, say, being a good poster-making artist, or a cook capable of feeding a gathering of protestors, or a tech guy with a portable PA, or having good organizing skills or whatever. Just another way of social functioning and community participation. Then, shifting slightly again, I saw that I kept being asked to read or write in movement contexts—that poetry kept being invited into community spaces, that people wanted and valued it still, despite what book sales say to the contrary! Now I think the poet is there to articulate our inarticulate feelings and thoughts, to fill the void when words seem to be failing us—more on this in response to the next question. Yes poetry is there to hold fear and despair (amongst other things!), but it does so in a Beckettian way, by carrying on when we can’t carry on.
TC: Throughout the second section, “The Middle” I felt that there was a lot left unsaid and in Canto 17 you write, “Give me / the possibility of song / without words.” It’s almost as though the poems themselves are pausing to breathe, or to listen in places. How important is silence in your poetics? How do you decide what to include and what is too noisy?
SC: Picking up on my last answer, yes silence is crucial, and yes what you leave out is as significant as what you choose to put in. Emily Dickinson’s poetry was described, by one of her contemporaries, as “the articulate inarticulate.” Poetry is either where we go to say what we have no idea how to say or what we are going to say—where we articulate our incapacities—or (and this is a version of the same thing) where we allow something else to happen in language—something other than mere communication. Keening. Echolocation. I’m interested in the moment where an inner, emotional and intellectual hum tips over into speech or writing—where you are just on the cusp of the poem, where what you are hearing is the music that will move into the words on the page. I want to hover on that threshold. That’s what writing poetry is about to me: pure possibility, the potential to articulate something—right before you actually articulate something. Poetry has that impossible task: using language to escape or reach outside language, whisper on the edge of communicability. I love its paradoxical nature. In some theories language arose from music; poetry takes us back, shifts us back into the body where a moan or song rises from before recorded history.
TC: In the last section, “Gardens in Motion” you linguistically, geographically, biologically, and even geometrically take your readers into flight – as seeds, as diaspora, as trees, as travellers, as seekers looking for answers and you ask us to look and you ask us to see. What is it you hope that your readers will see? What do you hope we will take away?
SC: I suppose I would want a reader to see and feel the inevitability and ubiquity or movement, of being in motion. If even the plants are fleeing their warming climates, what are we doing? But I also wanted this section to move, formally, from a collage of plant and linguistic research into a narrative of tree displacement and tree resistance—to return to the burnt and flooded BC of “Blazing Space” to end the book contemplating the incredible age and stoic nature of the most ancient coastal trees—trees which themselves had been forcibly displaced, planted in tree plantations in the UK, where their indigenous forests had been cleared long ago. A reverse and phytopoetic colonial history. I hope that’s there and graspable. I wanted the whole long poem this book comprises to travel, to move via its form, and arrive somewhere new: narrative! Not something you would typically find in my poetry. And I wanted that narrative to return the reader to a sense of mystery and wonder, awe even.
TC: There’s something generous in the way you invite other voices into your work. I could fill an entire page with the list of authors you reference. Whether italicized or invisibly folded-in or seeded with clear citations, in a time when authorship and originality are often prized above all, what does it mean to you, politically or creatively, to write in this intertextual, communal way?
SC: I write a bit about this in the book’s notes. I’ve always doubted the necessity or “truthiness” of self-expression, have always been more comfortable as a listener, always saw writing as a form of reading. But yes, there’s a politics in there—what I’ve always seen as a politics of the commons. Life always depends on the free gift of an environment or ecosystem, which is itself prepared by the living and dying of past forms of life. Writing—especially poetry for some reason—has always struck me this way. Research on the history of the enclosure of common lands in the UK (begun long before I published a book of poetry called The Commons in 2008) further convinced me and gave me a language of commoning for thinking about poetry. Poetry is relational through and through, and I pursue this via various methods of citation, taking other’s words to be as significant as my own to the building form of the shared space of the poem. Maybe this is esoteric. But it continues to compel me as a writer.
TC: I did an unspeakable thing in order to ask you a question I think all artists are considering right now. I asked Chat GPT to write a poem in the style of Stephen Collis. Read “the poem” if you can stomach it (apologies!) and consider this question – how is AI a threat to writers? Is it, even? Do writers need to ponder the machine?
A crow
drops
a walnut
I walk
not mourning
exactly
not
staying
the middle—
the pause
before
the break
a question
inside
the shell
SC: LOL. I’ve done this myself before, as a warning to students. What a terrible poem! I think AI is no danger to anyone’s creative practice as such—we will always be art-makers and imaginers, and even if the machines become better mimics, they will remain just that. AI makes me a believer in the soul—even if what we can “soul” is the inimitable complexity of lived, embodied thought and feeling. The danger exists where the danger has always existed with technology: people’s jobs! Marx on the machine in the nineteenth century is just as pertinent today when it comes to the use of machines to “discipline” labour and increase surplus value for the owners of capital. The more things change, the more they stay the same!