Geist blogger and Editor-In-Chief of Poetry Is Dead, Daniel Zomparelli, will be organizing an ongoing series of interviews with poets, and people doing interesting things with poets. If you are a poet doing interesting things or have a tip off for Daniel, you can email him at editor@poetryisdead.ca.

. He is
a poet who challenges genre, or rather, busts it. Geist.com met with Garry to
talk about his genre busting prose.

Daniel Zomparelli: I was explaining to you one
day about how you muddy the waters of poetry and prose. And I meant it in the
nicest way possible. In your short stories in
, you move the reader quickly
through the narrator’s thoughts, to the visuals of outside, to the subtext, to
dialogue in an unrestrained fast pace. I was able to go back and read through
parts and find different scenarios of what I thought happened. To me, this is
what poetry does, do you approach fiction/prose with the same approach to
poetry?

For my own part, I cannot
approach fiction in the same way because of my own wacky poetic process. This
method of writing poetry has been derided at least since the Romantics, but the
poem does arrive to me in lengthy bursts of inspiration. It’s been a source of
irritation since my young years. I become moody as a gravid mare while carrying
around the poem, if I can even say that. I write it as a form of exorcism. Since
writing
, I only tend to write serial poems or long poems instead of what Jack
Spicer called "one night stands", which we see a lot of in journals
and published books.

So when I interpret the poem, I feel the
language is revealing itself to me, and if there is an audience, it is
eavesdropping on this state of being in which I am merely an instrument,
supplanted by the language and what it has to say and what voices emerge, etc.
I have been criticized for having this viewpoint, and while it is perhaps an
arrogant egocentric stance to take, in surrendering my ego to the text, I feel
subject to this unwieldy force that leaves me tremulous in its wake when
interpreting a text. It is exhausting, which is why I don’t necessarily like to
do readings, and I delight in my own lonely discoveries more than an audience
might ever perceive.

With fiction, for me, there is a different kind
of work ethic. There is still inspiration but it is something I have to
trigger, to initiate by putting pen to paper or clack to virtual canvas. And I
mean it’s something one goes to like an imaginary job, even when not working at
one's business or "real jobs". I find it helpful to set hours or a
routine. I wrote all of those stories in notebooks in a number of Vancouver
pubs, so there is perhaps an experiential authenticity to its “slurreality”.
You are quite right about there being different scenarios of happenstances
because to me the book was like the same story being retold from various
perspectives with similar characters. And there is some overlap here and there
between stories, although merely as shadows in the eyes. That means YOU are
telling the story to some extent, depending how you decide to gather what
really went down.

There’s also a nod to the novels of Virginia
Woolf and James Joyce, and their own Bergsonian experiments with narrative
space and time. By this, I am referring to narrative shifts based on vague
formulae inherent in the content instead of an all-knowing omniscient narrator.
Sometimes the proximity of another character is enough to cause a reaction in
the narrative and sometimes a sense of consciousness erupts in the middle of
the telling. And I owe a great debt to Daphne Marlatt and one of her writing
workshops, as it was in one of these workshops that due to her presence and
inspiration, I began to find my knowledge of poetic structure was being
informed by an emotional sensibility that enabled me to enter into prose,
starting with the prose poem. This goes against the grain of T.S. Eliot's notion
of depersonalization, because for me the intellectual and emotional form an
aesthetic synthesis that "feels" quite natural to me, even as I am
aware it is and is not a type of artifice. And what is the result? Chicanery or
sincerity? Who can say, eh?

And the short answer is HELL YES, because I am a
poet attempting prose. Be gentle with me.

DZ: I love the idea of Fitzgerald, Gatsby and
Zelda finding new forms in your work. My favourite part being how Gatsby is the
handsome DJ whose name pops up everywhere, but the Fitzgerald is having trouble
getting any attention at all. Please tell me this is an allegory for
avant-garde writing.


Well, if there is something running through
the whole book, it is a sense of the pathetic or the unfulfilled, or quite
simply several characters who feel they have all the time in the world to do
whatever they really hoped to do, until they are rather rudely interrupted and
as Shakespeare says, "it is too late." I was often thinking of Joyce’s
story “The Little Cloud”, although F. Scott Fitzgerald does express this
concern about one of the characters in
, whose writing starts to
decline after his first success due to his social obligations and writing
watered down pieces for Hollywood. That’s if you don’t have time to read

And I'm not sure it's avant-garde so much as our
reading habits have changed over time so that our expectations are lowered to
the point that we resist something that challenges us and call it avant-garde
when it is merely pushing around our expectations a bit more. I often wonder
why we are so desensitized to blatant misogyny, jarring violence, litters of
prettified corpses and patronizing formulaic propaganda we find in most films
yet balk if an expletive or derogatory expression pops up in the mouth of a
fictional character. Of course, now that
movie is being redone in 3D,
we won't need any more great books. Phew!

DZ: In the story “Salt Chip Boy,” you rewrite
language, I'm assuming for the future, and this to me was lyrical prose. The
reframing of language in prose creating poetry. At certain points I could only
understand the story through the sounds the words created. Was this a way of
refreshing a language that already exists or a complete destruction of
language? Or is "extirpate" a better word choice?

Well, in what is left of our English
courses, broad statements are always being made, such as T.S. Eliot ended the
language in "The Waste Land" or one cannot write poetry after one
turns 25 or one cannot write poetry after Auschwitz. I was responding to all
this talk about the speculative genre and its general lack of experimental
language, trying to imagine the utilitarian business language of Ancient Rome
and also how this might be reconfigured in a pell mell hodgepodge medley in the
future. As you know, I ended up expanding upon these ideas and writing a highly
overstimulating series of five novels called
, which will include the
complete destruction of language you refer to. And just for you, sir.

To answer your followup question, I'm going to
have to take the liberty of inserting a snippet from one of the stories called
"Dry Gray", which is about parsing a phrase in French on a napkin
picked up at a rather ubiquitous coffee chain:

The man lifted a pointless pen & started
to tap at the surface of the small device. There was something strange &
simian about the man's movements, although he was managing with relative ease
to manipulate that small slender pen without a point. After several more
tentative taps of the nub, he lit up. Gray had a vision of the first man
discovering fire as he offered him the glowing list of results.

extirpate

1. Make disappear completely (unroot,
destroy)

2. Tear up by the roots until it cannot grow
back

3. To remove radically -> extract ->
Remove a tumour

4. To make (person, thing) leave with
difficulty

So you see, they are going to completely
uproot & eradicate the secrets of my soul. The greying man palmed his
device & stared back sleepily. Gray pointed to the dark writ on the brown
serviette. "see, that's what the napkin says."

DZ: The language is quite interesting, but
seriously, what is “blogging” and “smurfing” within “Salt Chip Boy?”

At some point in my childhood I taught
myself to read Roald Dahl and because of this autodidactic effuppery, I am
overtly conscious about how language is presented in a context before the rules
arrive, like Homer's
before Plato decided that everything had to be
grammaticized. So "Salt Chip Boy" is quite simply some scraps of
language waiting for its rules to arrive. Perhaps the interesting bit is that
the characters enjoy partaking of "our language" as a kind of vintage
fantasy.

I enjoy the pre-existing definition of smurfing
as a financial term for a form of money laundering in small transactions. No
offense to the smurfs. And I am almost certain there are depraved online sites
dedicated to the graphical realization of smurfing (NOW IN 3D). Of course, I
don't have a future gloss for 2088, so I have no idea what it would mean by
then. All I know is there are a lot of male smurfs and they often use the word
in a derogatory fashion in one another's company. Because they can!

In the future, blogging may be this atrocious
activity of talking about oneself superfluously in lieu of providing content.
Not at all like the highbrow videos of tragic accidents (and kitties) today. Or
this shamelessly brilliant interview.

DZ: Some writers don't like to address this type
of question, but do you have any particular influences in the world of (short)
fiction?

Well, while I write books of poetry and
also decadent voluminous works, the short story is still a form that mystifies
me. In particular, I am completely in awe of the short stories of Sherwood
Anderson and Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro. There is something to the story
that is short and simply told that also reveals something mean and petty and
terribly sad about human nature, really without saying much at all, even while
hinting at a larger interconnected story in general. I mean, I can write short
stories, but I will probably spend the rest of my life aspiring to them as an
art form. I mean where it seems if you take one word out and the whole thing no
longer works. Maybe that is just a myth, but the excellent writers make you
believe wholeheartedly in it.

DZ: I'm going to make a statement, and you can
talk about it or not. In "Two Scoops," the reader falls into dreams
within dreams within story within porn and the dizzying story is wrapped in
consumerism. Once again, the destruction of language is brought up, but through
advertising. The idea that advertising is destroying language is made clear by
the dizzying control it takes. The power we let it have on us in choices. Don't
think, just buy. Less questions, less answers, less language to discuss.

Heh heh, you just reminded me of one of my
favourite SNL advertisements, where they keep wrapping food with more food,
like a hot dog in a burger wrapped in a taco inside of something bolognese,
etc, which is absurdly spot on, if not a gooey allegory for these times of
excess. The closest thing I can think of is how William S. Burroughs relates
advertising to various forms of conditioning, so this is really retro old hat
stuff gone recyclage. The point in such works is not to tell the reader
anything but rather to immerse them in an experience which is a refraction of
what we experience everyday. At some point, it would appear to be more
effective for literature to set up shop across the street from advertising and
to sandwich board similar techniques without making direct eye contact.
Statistics show that people who have been exposed to
start to have commercial
memory lapses, no longer quite certain whether they ever used Feltcro or not.
They also have higher levels of oxytocin, and therefore glow more often, make
more friends, succeed more often at job interviews, and so on.

We want to attract more web traffic so we should
talk some more about porn. Some time ago, I saw a feature on porn censors in
Canada and however wrongly, it struck me as slightly amusing to have this body
of people in Ontario reviewing porn flick after porn flick and deciding on how
to rate the content along with other criteria. I suppose the point of the story
is that someone has gone missing, or at least has been absorbed by some kind of
trafficking outfit, and the nationalistic censors are not really equipped to
realize this or even form a helpful opinion. Actually, I snatched the idea from
Ingmar Bergman's
. And stay tuned, because the porn censors have more
adventures in
, where they are attacked by yummilicious pornographic
products. And that is another question, whether some porn is more honest than
advertising because it is selling itself and not deceptively using the promise
one thing to sell another? Or is it less exploitive for the news stations to
show Internet footage of people getting shot or having their heads kicked in? I
am only going by news I saw this week. This will offend some or many. Discuss.

DZ: "The Book" in my reading, is a
long poem—a Fugue if you will—but the more I read your work, the more I think
about what is a poem. As a writer, do you feel a necessity to place a term on
your writing?

"The Book" was exploring an idea
of Mallarme's, that everything exists only to end up in a book. In this case,
the protagonist takes this abstract idea literally and thinks a great deal
about what must be sacrificed to such an ineffable entity. I've always
maintained that
is a book of stories, although people keep calling
'em poems. In French literature, the divide was really less clearly defined,
particularly when the prose poem became a popular entity, even before those
American Modernists began to borrow these concepts and promote them more
widely. So far as I know, one of the earliest forms of meta-fiction was written
by Guillaume de Machaut as a series of poems/songs about an old guy who was
impotent yet who expressed his interest in a younger lady in the courtly love
tradition. That was around the 14th century, even before Oprah could tell us
what was fiction and what wasn't.

is a collection of stories,
but they are also embryonic material, like the seeds of other things I am
writing and have yet to write. As with serial and long poems, I like how such
oeuvres start up and maintain internal conversations. The protagonist in the
book is the forerunner for another novel series I am writing called
. And
just as I borrow (and critically discard) voices from Dostoyevsky or Beckett, I
also borrow from myself. I tend to see all of literature, whether poetry or
prose, as a series of nurse logs that other living things grow out of. It is
through a foundation full of nutrients that entirely new things can grow,
tenuously attached yet also independent in every way. That is how I set out to
rewrite other things and end up with entirely new books. Strange but true.

I don't know if "The Book" is a fugue
in either sense of the word, although you are quite astute to use this term.
is
one kind of fugue, in the sense that my grandfather and father went out of
their minds and suffered severe delusions and this has heavily influenced the
way I interpret the state of a character who goes into fugues, for lack of a
better word.
is more or less written in the form of four fugues
that are polyphonically drawn together in the final part. In this way, the
characters and situations become like motivic devices. Although I do not always
understand what I am doing at the time of writing, I cannot escape the way
musical constructions affect the way in which I put together my poetry and
prose, even subconsciously.

This type of "wit" is abstract and
elusive and downright Haydnesque, although in terms of content or
"story", it likely makes no difference whether this is noticed, just
as my operatic improvisations are often too subtle for many sound poets to
perceive as an unformalized approach to the synthesis of language and music
that pleases neither the novelists nor the opera directors nor the
"avant-garde". And I concur, it takes far less energy to surrender to
what we already know, and of course instinctively to scoff. I often think we
have lost sight (or sound) of what Henry James and Gertrude Stein and even bp
Nichol were doing in their prose works, which is to say, treating it as an
abstract medium more like painting where words and phrases become more like
strokes of the brush than mere semantic vectors, mere verminous carriers for
decaying ideas.

So no, I find such terms to be redundant and
often inaccurate. I thought I'd end up a fussbutton Classicist to be honest. I
was kind of shocked to find I was being called a contemporary poet. Zoincks!

DZ: The stories all appear timeless, or rather,
in a time between the 50s until now. I didn’t even realize the time frame of

until Padam “googled” something. Were the stories created with a sense of
timelessness or are they supposed to be current day? I ask this purely for
selfish reader reasons.

I will take this as a fronthanded
reacharound compliment. My approach as a writer is to visit the works of the
past in order to understand how they would project into the future. Right now,
I see a lot more about our society in older novels. I see the decadence of our
society in
of Balzac. I find our
political and social hypocrisies in Proust, our financial crises in the works
of Dreiser, and our issues of abstraction and alienation in the writing of
Musil, which appears to address our problems with coping with information
overload, even before various technological advances.

So I suspect the sense of timelessness arises
from recognizing how the past reflects forward into the future. Or perhaps I do
not possess the data capacity I feel is necessary to write about what is
important in the present. There are some souls who can make something profound
of our present times, but they are rare and most likely unknown. One has to be
able to capture all the surfaces without being flattened oneself, in order to
ensure what they capture can survive beyond fifteen minutes. I tend to feel that
documenting "the present moment" is like taking a snapshot that
rapidly ages amid a glut of other photographs. This is surely the point,
finding the one moment of beauty or depth or shading among our endless
galleries of gatherings and ceremonies. If something truly worth recording were
to happen, we would likely be too distracted to notice. I am sure that the
extraterrestrial opinion would be that we only ever attend parties and do
nothing else. Such is the sad and amusing irony of our times.

, the story is about more
than just the characters, but also about the narrator. Is it not a story of the
artist attempting to create timelessness, knowing its futility and fighting
death with every chance he/she has?

This is really a technique that is at least
as old as Milton's
, where the nature of the material being presented is
changed due to a narrative shift. In this case, the narrator suddenly appeared
like one of Somerset Maugham's narrators, those impassive storytellers who are
brutally frank with the other characters. In an old film, the narrator would
have been played by Herbert Marshall. I realized while I was still writing that
Padam's character was influencing the third person narrative from the
beginning, and in not the most objective fashion. Padam's character is somewhat
styled after the admittedly talented Benvenuto Cellini, who nonetheless would
always tell a story in such a manner that everyone, including Leonard Da Vinci
and Michelangelo, had the wrong idea, and it was fortunate that he, Benvenuto
Cellini was on hand to save the day, because he was absolutely correct about
the matter in question, and so on.

DZ: You detail a hotel called the
"Istoria" but it is visually representative of the Sylvia Hotel. Why
the name change? Or why the amalgamation of hotels in Vancouver? I am asking,
essentially, why Vancouver?

Originally, I decided to call the hotel the
"Istoria", as this is the root of the word history, from the Ancient
Greek ("a search, a means of enquiry") and this left it open to a
wider concept, because it is "EveryHotel" in Venice or Marienbad or
wherever. I now realized it would have far more self-serving to call the book
, whatever I tossed inside of it. As for Vancouver, I still think of it
as a transient city and what is more, a frontier town. There is something
disparate and disjunct about this city, even as we global our way towards a
supposedly refined sense of cosmopolitanism. I mean, I wrote some of the stories
at the Ivanhoe and the Lamplighter and the Bourbon and the Wolf & Hound and
the Irish Heather, and the Irish Heather is hardly gone, but it has been
displaced from its historical positioning as containing part of the town jail,
which was a story in itself stemming from Jack Deighton and John Clough to the
self-numbing heroin addicts in the courtyard and alley. I am sure the ale and
scotch tastes just as terrific but that is not the point. The point is only
that we don't notice these subtle transformations and inherent relationship or
simply become complacent about their importance. And is it really important? I
was fully aware at the time of writing that the characters (whether historical
or architectural or "real") would soon vanish. I am sure they already
had by the time the book was published.

DZ: The overpowering beigeness of the hotel,
reminds me of so many of the renovations we see to historical spaces. The beige
finds its way throughout the story. What does this signify for you considering
you locate the story in Vancouver?

What I was getting at with the Sylvia Hotel
was a sense of community like a drawing room of the past we no longer share.
For better or worse, many of the same characters would return every evening. In
fact, at the time, I though it prudent to change the name of the hotel so as
not to expose anyone unduly while they were enjoying themselves. But the
renovation was very much like the character Padam's Botox treatment. In the
real sense, it was good to enlargen the windows and let the light in and repair
the furniture. But by doing so, the entire character of the place changed. I am
not even criticizing this improvement, although this is an allegory for the
fashion of making such changes in Vancouver, what is more popularly known as
gentrifying city space. It's like when the cat in the popular children's story
died. When Mr. Gottago died, they had to replace him with a new cat that Padam
likes to call Mr. Gottastay. And now I've just broken a few more hearts.

In terms of the story, the period after the
renovation is like some postlapsarian world where nothing is quite the same. It
is meant to convey the sense of loss we feel or ought to feel in Vancouver as a
whole. As I have indicated, such a personality transplant to a historical site
is probably not important and shouldn't matter to us, right? The overpowering
beigeness is just that sameness, that sense of the same hotel lounge from sea
to shining sea, in every city, where we can be comforted by the knowledge of
that beige sameness waiting for we weary travellers.

DZ: Without revealing too much, the final part
of
returns to this almost rant/dream/stream of consciousness style of
writing. This to me returns the story to poem. It had me wondering, what do you
consider a poem and what do you consider avant garde prose? When we reach the
realm of avant-garde writing, is there any reason to genre-fy it?

I look at this issue the other way round,
since most publishers approach books genre-first, because that implies proven
sales formulae and that further implies formulaic characters and situations. So
I tend to call my prose work genrebusting because I see no reason to settle in
a particular mode. If I were to typify my writing, I would perhaps limit myself
to a set of predefined rules and then I wouldn't be able to do what I wanted or
at the very least, I would not enjoy myself, which is naturally the most
important thing. I might have to come up with a plot and that seems abominable
and awfully artificial to me. I try to write according to what I enjoy and if
someone else enjoys what I write, all the better!

DZ: This book of stories comes to represent or
re-present dreamtime. Which, to me, created a feeling of anxiety throughout
each story. There is no break, there is no pause, just a stream of
consciousness. Can you speak a bit about the use of dreamtime in the stories,
or in your work?

Sometimes I think there's something
culturally atavistic in my approach to writing, as my mother's family included
a number of Kwakwaka'wakw Chiefs who maintained and expanded upon certain
traditions. Keep in mind, this is something I scarcely understand myself, but I
am aware of an intensity, a ferocity of desire to will the world of literature
or opera or even dreams to spill over into life. I refer to the Kwakwaka'wakw
even when I am handling dusty old European literature because the divisions
between dream and life and not so expressly made. Also, there was no such thing
as after-dinner theatre because even the most theatrical performances served a
communal function, a ritual in which the one who may lead must be "clean"
and then wildly erratic and then exorcised and then tamed before returning to
the community.

I suspect that the feeling of anxiety, even of
horror, stems from something deep within all of us. There is Apollonian art, if
it is art, meaning art that supports the state and what is does (say, reading a
poem at the Olympics or penning a play to raise awareness about gout) and then
there is Dionysian art. The latter is more commonly found in myth and the
ancient plays and in Wagner's music, where some part of our psyche is being
tapped in such a way that we become nervous. We are staring at a warped
reflection of ourselves and this confuses and troubles us, mostly because it
defies definition. It is something of a backdoor catharsis because it may put
some people off and ultimately feel good to others, even if it stings a little.

Funnily enough, I found my character and that of my particular
Kwakwaka'wakw line in a family story about a healer I included in my upcoming
book
, which contains no moral or lesson like some of the other stories that
are about hubris and the like, perhaps due to alterations during translation.
The point of the story seems to be that you can claim your own birthright like
Jacob from Esau if you're crafty, and if someone questions the nature of your
magic too closely, their guts should be yanked out. So, we're good, right?

DZ: Until the next book.