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Soliloquies Anthology
Concordia University's Student-run Undergraduate Journal
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Soliloquies 15 online launch! Dig in.
We’ve put Soliloquies 15 online for your viewing pleasure. Dig in, and keep an eye out for our next call for submissions in the new year!
Read it here.
Erotica and Video Games: The Jeff Blackman Interview
Jeff Blackman co-founded The Moose and Pussy, Canada’s premiere sex-lit mag, with his partner Kate Maxfield and award-winning writers Jeremy Hanson-Finger and Rachael Simpson. Jeff was recently featured by the In/Words reading series and VERSeFest, Ottawa’s multi-genre poetry bash. He’s been banging out poems about maturity and Super Mario Bros. 3 for a project tentatively titled, “Oh, Thank Heavens I’m Back To My Old Self Again!”
Dylan Riley: From what I can tell, The Moose and Pussy is based out of Ottawa. I actually spent last summer there, and I can remember a conversation I overheard between two people, one from Toronto and one from Ottawa. The person from Toronto kept asking the person from Ottawa what they were still doing in Ottawa. How do you feel about the idea that Ottawa can get painted as a stopover between two larger cities?
Jeff Blackman: Everywhere’s a stopover town. Montreal’s a stopover for every Canadian going to Europe.
DR: How do you feel the Ottawa writing scene compares to Montreal’s?
JB: I don’t know much about the Montreal scene, beyond what I learned in modernist poetry seminars. A new poetry festival, VERSe, debuted this year. What came of that could be called a reconciliation between the page- and slam-poet communities.
DR: There’s a lot of play with spaces, indents, lack of capitalization, and italics throughout your poem “tower defense (or, our love is like 9/11 and I don’t want to jump).” What were you looking to accomplish with the form of this poem?
JB: I tend to experiment with rules and forms. “tower defense” comes from a time, about a year and change ago, when I was experimenting with multidirectional poetry, which is a term I may have invented just now. The idea was the reader can jump ahead and skip parts, or at least see a separation of ideas. I also on occasion use breaks and spaces to pace a poem. As for the lack of capitalization, that has to do with a desire to uphold proper nouns and characters above the rest of the words. I admit much of this is nonsense.
DR: What’s the intent with the sexual edge to the same poem?
JB: When you’re in a relationship, the sort that aims to last, you’ve got to keep pushing on. That means the sex has to develop, and that means danger, pushing boundaries. For me, those boundaries are articulated in speech. Dirty, dirty speech. In “tower defense” I hoped to express that need to test your lover, especially when that lover is just so damned generous it’s unnerving.
DR: On your recommendation I found another poem of yours, “Mario in Koopaland circa Movember.” Why Mario?
JB: A couple summers back I was walking home from a friend’s in the rain, heavily influenced by this and that, and I had one of those “take a look at yourself” moments: I saw myself walking hurriedly, umbrella clutched, avoiding eye contact with the locals, and realized: what a two-dimensional character! I’d blown off my old Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge recently and everything just fell into place. “Koopaland circa Movember” was written more recently, the last day of Movember 2010, when, after muttering to friends, “what fools these mustachioed jocks be,” I realized, what a snob I have become!
As for “why Mario? Why keep with him?”: ask a random twenty-something to name all seven of King Bowser’s “Koopa Kids” and you’ll probably get at least four. Ask that same person to name four Canadian poets writing today…well, let’s just say I’m happy to write “genius poems” that have a chance for broad appeal. There’s too much damned retreat-from-society ethos among poets. Let’s at least try to meet the masses halfway, eh?
DR: Are you working on a series of these poems?
JB: These poems aren’t all about me being a jerk, but there is definitely a theme of seeing oneself. My initial plan was to write eight solid poems, one for each of the “lands” of Mario 3: Grass Land, Desert Land, etc., ultimately ending in Dark Land. I’ve had trouble sticking to that, and now, once in a while, I write a Mario poem. A lot of my poems these days that have nothing to do with Mario begin as Mario poems; i.e., I try to express something using symbols and such from the mythology and eventually edit them out.
DR: What about the process of editing the work of other people makes it easier to write your own work? What makes it more difficult?
JB: I’ve only edited little magazines, like In/Words out of Carleton. What makes a little magazine, for me at least, is personal investment. I guess even newspaper editors of major dailies will write copy one way or another. Editing is, in a form, writing. If I edit your poem I am, in a way, writing a poem, using a palette you defined.
I rather believe [editing] makes writing more complex. Reading so many of my contemporaries is humbling and inspiring. When I suggest/order an edit, I make rules which I live by for a while and then discard.
DR: By your own admission you seem to be having trouble drumming up entries for The Moose and Pussy Short Story Contest. Let’s hear the elevator pitch.
JB: Online magazines, statistically speaking and rounded up, suck. When we had a print magazine we’d get a hundred people submitting for every issue. Online, it’s hard to distinguish yourself as widely read, while print magazines are given the benefit of the doubt (there’s concrete proof of readership). We only received a dozen or so submissions by our original deadline, and not one compared with the best stories we’d ever published. It wouldn’t be right to give fifty smackers for a story in a different universe than some of the classics in our back catalogue. That being said, please submit.
DR: Your website’s “About Us” section certainly leaves a lot to the imagination: “We are transforming. That sound you hear is a car part becoming a vulva.” Care to elaborate?
JB: We should probably update that. We used to put out a big ol’ print issue every four months. We’re reaching a lot more people as a web magazine. The occasional chapbook or broadside still gets made, but it was a lot of hassle to keep things fresh while worrying about layout, advertisers, launch parties, and the rest of the mess. The trouble now is keeping a strong amount of content and distinguishing The Moose and Pussy from a million other online mags. Right now we’re just seeing, playing it by ear, and trying to avoid a concrete definition of The Moose and Pussy.
DR: Have you started planning out a Halloween costume?
JB: The wife and I might do a gender-bending The Monarch/Dr. Mrs. The Monarch.
DR: How is progress on “Oh, Thank Heavens I’m Back To My Old Self Again!” coming along?
JB: Odourless Press requested a sample of my Mario poems and just put them out under the title “Back To My Old Self” (you can hear me read the sextet on CKCU’s Literary Landscapes via Odourless). I’ve been too busy with school and work to focus on a larger manuscript, but I’m hoping this winter, once I’m done my graduate studies, to put a more regular focus on these poems. In the meanwhile, I’m going to try to get “Back To My Old Self” for sale on the counter at the new Chumleighs used games store that just opened here in Ottawa. I just sold them a pile of games so I think we’re on good terms.
DR: Are you sending work out now? Poetry? Fiction?
JB: Poetry mostly. Bit of a windfall right now. Going to be in Burner Magazine (online/Toronto) and Nōd (student print/Calgary) this fall as well. Waiting to hear back on a few others.
DR: Fingers crossed.
JB: This is the first year in my life I’ve actually made money off of poetry. (George Johnston Poetry Prize, second place; VERSeFest opening act).
DR: How do you feel about fees for contest entries?
JB: So it goes. I’ve never paid one.
Actually, I tried once, but Arc never cashed my cheque, or, presumably, read my poem.
Halifax to Helsinki: The John Barger Interview
John Wall Barger’s second book, Hummingbird, is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in Spring 2012. Barger divides his year between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Tampere, Finland.
Dylan Riley: The first things that jump out from your bio are the divergent locations — but maybe that’s two questions.
First, what’s Finland like? What brought, or continues to bring you, there?
John Barger: I fell in love with a Finnish woman! This summer we lived together in Tampere, in the south, for four months. The whole country is eerie and gorgeous. So much dark. So much light. We visited a birch forest in Lapland, in the Arctic Circle, with five others in a cabin beside a frozen lake. It took two days to heat it. We chopped a hole in the lake for water, cut wood, had saunas at night. One night there were northern lights that looked like green flamenco fingers. The eternals (Väinämöinen, the eternal singer) and demons (Hiisi, the goblin who drowns children in lakes) you read about seem very close up there.
DR: I’m from the Maritimes myself, and I noticed a bit of a pattern. Young people seem to move from an obscure, small, Maritime city to Halifax, then from Halifax on to Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver. How do you feel about this, and do you plan on living permanently in Halifax?
JB: I did that: moved to Vancouver at twenty. I love Halifax, but I’ve always felt separate from it. I’m envious of “regional” writers like Faulkner or Margaret Laurence, who can write about a community and have it stand for the world. I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere. My first book, Pain-proof Men, mostly takes place in Halifax, but my next book, Hummingbird, does not have a single poem set there.
DR: But do you feel regionalism can be a trap sometimes, that in a way you’re better off as a writer without it?
JB: Maybe it’s a case of the grass always being greener — because I lack it, I want it. But I love [Charles] Olson’s Maximus poems, and his connection with Gloucester, Massachusetts. It seems like knowing where you are from is a beginning point, rather than an end. Like, once you have place, then you can jump off into the cosmos. I know most of the world lacks this sense of place these days — I’m not unique for this.
DR: “Beautiful Rodney” strikes me as a prose poem. Is this a form you think highly of? One you use often?
JB: I don’t mind if it’s prose or not, if it works. I love some prose poems, like Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End. I like to try to disarm the reader by presenting an accessible (maybe non-academic?) voice and form and (sometimes) narrative. Then once you are inside the poem — feeling comfortable and at home — something shifts.
DR: I like that. Sometimes you do have to trick a reader into reading something.
JB: Do you know James Tate, the American poet?
DR: I don’t, but fill me in.
JB: I found reading him really liberating. Return to the City of White Donkeys is an amazing book. He writes poems that don’t seem to worry about metaphors or line breaks, a bit like short stories, like micro-novels…you enter one of his poems, and feel lulled by the familiar voice, and then the scene shifts, like a dream. Like, you’re driving on the highway, getting sleepy, when the roadkill suddenly open their eyes, and you don’t know when it all changed.
DR: Do you have any new writing — or other projects — on the go?
JB: After visiting Cambodia this last winter and being blown away at the effects of the Khmer Rouge on that culture, I’ve been writing little hegemonic allegories, like dioramas of imaginary colonized villages. Truthfully, I don’t know how to write about the world falling apart without being zeitgeist or didactic or boring. A revolution seems to occur somewhere in the middle of each poem. At least one is called “Year Zero.”
DR: Are you following the Republican nomination?
JB: I would vote for Michele Bachmann as head of the Shark Eyes Coalition.
DR: Perry or Romney?
JB: I’ve wondered — why do people vote for Republicans? I mean regular, smart, non-rich people. Then it came to me: the Republicans are the fantasy party. We vote for them if we want to join in the fantasy that the American dream is still possible and relevant. That is, the illusion that we can all get as rich as Schwarzenegger; that consumerism works; that this democracy doesn’t guarantee a certain part of the population must be out of work and destitute; that the environment is not falling apart; that everything is all right.
DR: I guess we’ve lost your vote. But who are you reading right now?
JB: Joshua Trotter’s All This Could Be Yours, and Gabe Foreman’s A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People. The Best American Poetry 2011. And King Lear, to teach.
DR: What are you avoiding right now?
JB: I’m tempted to say I’ve been avoiding nothing, but the truth might be that I’ve been avoiding tranquility. I’ve been in a confrontational phase, as if I’m wearing a small sign around my neck saying, “LET’S FIGHT ABOUT BS!”
DR: What are you avoiding reading right now?
JB: Novels. DeLillo’s Underworld. The second book in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
DR: I know the feeling — I read the overture to Swann’s Way and now I talk about it like I’ve read the whole thing. Have you read much DeLillo, or any of the other postmodernists? Is this something that could come up later in your poetry?
JB: I think I’ve read every DeLillo besides Underworld. His characters sometimes have a kind of clairvoyance, or second sight, which is fascinating.
I’ve spent years trying to shake off the postmodern cleverness I learned at university. Now I think that a poem should involve heart, or empathy — not just speak in codes that only academics and other writers could understand.
DR: How do you feel about David Foster Wallace? He seemed to genuinely try to bridge the postmodern cleverness/heart gap.
JB: I’ll keep that in mind. I haven’t got to him yet. Although, Julian Barnes goes too far, I think. And Jeanette Winterson. John Fowles tries to bridge that gap, too. And Joyce tries, too. Proust is the shit.
DR: I guess it’s a hard thing to do; to be honest but also keep up a self-reflexive stance.
JB: I think the self-reflexiveness will not last — a footnote in 20th-century literature.
DR: Any final thoughts?
JB: If anyone is able to use the phrase, “Nights like this always make the neighbors come around,” in a poem, I’d be very grateful.
Call for Submissions!
We are accepting submissions until midnight on October 31st for consideration for publication in Soliloquies 16. Though Soliloquies is run by students from Concordia’s English & Creative Writing Undergraduate Program, anyone in Canada and the United States can submit their work.
Writing on any theme, in any style (though we do not accept science fiction or non-creative essays):
3500 words of prose
8 pages of drama
8 pages of poetry
3500 words of creative non-fiction
8 pages of comics
Visual Art:
Up to 5 images in low-res.jpegs
All submissions should be accompanied by the writer/artist’s contact info, cover letter and a 70 word bio. Please verify the genre of your submission in the subject line.
Email your submissions to soliloquies(dot)concordia(at)gmail(dot)com.
New Editors!
We’ve just sent Soliloquies 15 to the printer, and we’re excited to announce a new editorial board for Soliloquies 16!
Lizy Mostowski (Editor-in-Chief)
Paula Haley Wilson (Executive Editor)
Candice Maddy (Arts Editor)
Rebecca MacPhee, Emma Robertson (Fiction)
Diandre Prendimano, Ashley Opheim, Colleen Romaniuk (Poetry)
Robin Graham (Creative Non-Fiction)
Dylan Riley (Online Editor)
Dave Crosby (Copy Editor)
Liv Albert (Marketing and PR)
