Shedding Some Ink on … Mark Callanan, Featuring 2 Poems

“It’s not so much that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ but that the unexamined life has not yet been lived.” – Mark Callanan

I don’t hesitate at all in calling Mark one of the best poets in Atlantic Canada right now, or one of my personal favorites in the country. Clean, lean, and unpretentious, his poignant poems skillfully dissect their subject matter, peeling back layers to expose rich imagery, metaphor and meaning. His work manages to be lucid and reflective in a small space. In this very interview, he speaks of being drawn to the power of compactness provided by poetry, and at their best, his poems really are nothing short of linguistic firepower. Some poet’s aim to capture a fleeting thought or moment; Callanan tends towards mulling them over for meaning. And it’s what makes his work so powerful. I’m quite often left feeling struck like a bell by his work, so I’ve got no problem suggesting you go ahead and get a copy of his brand new collection, Gift Horse.

“Chicken Scratches” from Gift Horse

Hen-pecked
pencil markings
in a weak hand,

symbols scrawled
across bedroom walls
in manic crayon

or written ten-foot-tall
in spray paint
on a passageway,

cuneiform entrenched
on a baked
sheet of clay,

elegant cursive
pissed in a
snowbank.

Everything written
is doomed
to be misunderstood.

Now, if you will,
your signature
here, please.

A Newfoundland-based poet, Mark has won a Newfoundland & Labrador Arts & Letters award 5 or 6 times now, and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies as notable as Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets and Open Wide A Wilderness. He published his first collection, Scarecrow, in 2003, which was shortlisted for the NL EJ Pratt Poetry Award. Track down a copy, trust me. Or trust The Chronicle-Herald via poet George Elliott Clarke, who said “Callanan has talent to burn … his eye is exact.” It received the ultimate compliment from University of Toronto Quarterly: “This intelligent book will yield more riches with each reading.”

He followed up on that praise with a chapbook last year, published by chapbook champs, Frog Hollow Press. They dubbed it “A nautical tale bent by poet’s logic.” It was shortlisted for the coveted bpNichol Chapbook Award, and quickly sold out. But you can read the whole thing here: http://issuu.com/markcallanan/docs/sealegend

Callanan is back in fine form this fall, with his latest collection, Gift Horse (Véhicule Press). Many of its poems were written in response to his near death experience in 2007, so its poems “offer up the story of a young man whose gratitude at being alive is undercut by Lazarus-like confusion and ambivalence.”  Quill & Quire praised its “understated, thoughtful observances” and wrote, “Callanan’s poetry is not fussy, nor is it driven by ego; it is humble …  There is an exactitude to his art, displayed in the efficiency of his diction and his tightly organized stanzas. [Callanan] should also be applauded for his pitch-perfect rhythm, and his unforced use of metre and rhyme.” Likewise, The National Post praised its “deceptively simple language.”

Click on a Book Cover to Read More about One of Mark’s Books:

Salty Ink: My favourite poetry, and much of yours, dissects fleeting thoughts; it’s about mulling over moments for meaning. So how does the quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living” tie in to why you write? What is it you are trying to do when you sit and write a poem?

Fundamentally, what I’m trying to do is figure out my own thoughts and feelings on a given subject. I don’t really know what I make of anything until I sit down to write about it—more than that, it feels as if I haven’t properly experienced the thing until I try to articulate that experience on paper. Really, in my case, it’s not so much that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but that the unexamined life has not yet been lived. I’m sure this is probably a deficiency on my part—my inability to parse experience without writing about it—but it’s the way I was made.

According to your publisher, this collection, conceptually, was written in reaction to your own recent, near death experience. What’s the story there, right from the Gift Horse poet’s mouth?

Many of the poems in the collection were written in the aftermath of a brush with death I had back in 2007; the ones written before that have gained greater resonance since the event. To be brief: I contracted Meningococcal Meningitis, was admitted to hospital, and then put in a week-long, medically induced coma. At a certain point, my prognosis didn’t look very good, but I came out of it relatively intact. It’s strange to have missed such a significant event in my life, especially given that, for my friends and family, it was a nightmarish experience. I have trouble reconciling my own experience with theirs. For them, it was a period of complete uncertainty, during which they almost lost me. For me, it’s just missing time—I have no recollection of that week, or of the hours leading up to and following the coma.

 Why might the extinct Newfoundland wolf, and sea legends like mermaids, be prominent in your poetry? 

I was fixated on the extinct Newfoundland wolf a few years ago because of its symbolic potential. Extinction is the death not only of the self, but of all other selves. Martin Amis writes about this in an essay on nuclear warfare called “Thinkability.” He’s talking about a nuclear holocaust being “unthinkable,” not in the colloquial sense of the term, but literally: “the unthinkable is not thinkable,” he writes, “not by human beings, because the eventuality it posits is one in which all human contexts would have already vanished.” On a micro level, neither can we conceive of a world in which we, as individuals, no longer exist. I can entertain thoughts about my own death, but it’s no more real to me for that. Extinction is death writ large; an extinct species like the Newfoundland wolf, then, is a towering memento mori.

The mermaids are part of a wider obsession I had with mythological creatures. There’s a poem called “Kraken” in my chapbook, Sea Legend. Really, they’re all stand-ins for humanity. The mermaids are particularly useful because they’re split between two worlds, and I like thinking about them in relation to Newfoundland, which I conceive of as a liminal space.

“Kraken” from Sea Legend

Past the diorama of the diving birds,
the swimming birds, the birds
perched on a cliff face, the faces
of the cliff besmirched
with splattered egg whites
of faux bird shit;
past the skeleton of the extinct
auk in a glass case, propped up
by a metal rod that pins
his long-dead bones in place;
a tank with riveted metal frame
contains the giant squid.

You’d hardly think its phallic shape,
its length (some porn star’s
money shot at fame) would dredge
more than giggles from the belly’s
depths, but this decaying
length of dick and tentacles
once roiled the waters,
crushed ships in its embrace,
and gripped the minds of sailors,
half afraid, half amazed.

You can’t help but tap the glass
as if the squid might scatter
like a flock of birds,
as if it weren’t a kind of relic
from a time when the bones
of saints could cure
the sick and make the lame
ditch crutches, dance a jig,
as if it were a living thing,
and that its eyes,
the size of doorknobs,
might then turn
on you and see you
looking in on death,
watching your reflection in the glass.

Moreover, a lot of your poetry is rich with animal imagery and symbolism paired with personal experience. As a poet published in the anthology Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, why do you think so many poets are drawn to “Nature Poetry.”

I don’t know that poets are drawn to nature any more than they are drawn to other subjects, but the reason we write about nature at all is that we’re horribly aware of the disconnect between the human race and the natural world. Gerard Manley Hopkins has a great line in a poem called “God’s Grandeur”:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

It’s a poem about nature’s resilience against human destruction, but the crucial bit is that line about our feet being shod: we can no longer feel the earth beneath us, and when you can’t feel the damage you’re doing, it’s much easier to do damage. Ironically, the intellectual abilities that made us succeed and proliferate as a race will probably also precipitate our demise.

In my attraction to writing about the animal kingdom, I’m greatly influence by Ted Hughes. He’s a poet for whom the animal world was a place of violent impulse—Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw”: “Nature” being both the natural world and human nature. And part of that human nature is our simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion in the presence of violence. We’re amazed at nature’s obliviousness to our human plight—surprised, for instance, when a grizzly kills a hiker, just as it would any other piece of meat—its indifference both frightens and thrills us.

Other than the whopping royalties, what’s drawn you to poetry?

The power to create something that has a life beyond me. That could be said of any art form, I guess, or of procreation. I’m drawn to poetry in particular because of its concision, because there is great power in the ability to say a lot in a small amount of space; and because I like working with such space constraints; and because poems, to me, when they’re working well rhythmically, have an incantatory quality that feels magical. I’m not writing poems so much as casting spells. If I wasn’t writing poetry, I’d probably have to play RPGs to get my kicks.

What’s the biggest misconception about poetry?

That it’s difficult to read. It’s not. It just requires patience and a willingness to engage. We don’t walk into a new relationship expecting a person to reveal their deepest secrets immediately, so I don’t see why we should expect a poem to blurt everything out at once. Actually, though, I guess people are a lot more willing to reveal things about themselves in the era of Facebook. But on the whole, they trade in deathly boring details; I think they still keep the good stuff to themselves.

 If there’s one trait common to all good poetry, it is …

 A sense that these exact words, in the precise order they’ve been set down, are inevitable. See below.

 What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

 I’ve always appreciated that Dorothy Parker quote: “I hate writing; I love having written.” Let that be my mantra. I find writing extremely difficult to do; I’m too concerned with doing it well to actually enjoy myself. That being said, there’s a moment that comes, countless drafts in, when the elements that constitute a poem start snapping into place, when all its little gadgetry suddenly works and those disparate pieces unite to a single purpose, when the trajectory of the poem seems inevitable—that’s the good bit: when the poem works, when it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, it would seem like a lot of pointless toil and frustration.

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