Toronto Poets 5 Questions Series - Elana Wolff

Elana Wolff is a highly accomplished poet who divides her time between writing, editing, and therapeutic art. She has published five collections of poetry with Guernica Editions: Birdheart (2001), Mask (2003), You Speak to Me in Trees (2006), Slow Dancing: Creativity and Illness: Duologue and Rengas (2008), and Startled Night (2011). Her third collection You Speak to Me in Trees, was awarded the 2008 F.G. Bressani Prize for Poetry. She has taught English as a Second Language at York University in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Wolff’s latest collection Startled Night has been lauded as an integration of art, image, and word, combined with the mysterious energy of the dark shadow that lingers in all of us, unexplained, and often times misunderstood. Wolff writes of a need to reconcile the most acceptable aspects of our personality with the parts that we consciously or subconsciously try to hide. Her poetry reeks of irony, twisted surprises, and unexpected truths, giving credence to the fact that Startled Night is worthy of some attention. Many of the poems in Startled Night have appeared in numerous literary journals including The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, Carousel, Contemporary Verse 2, Existere, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The Nashwaak Review, Other Voices, The Paterson Literary Review, Lichen Arts & Letters Preview, Taddle Creek Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Vallum, The Windsor Review, Dream Catcher, and FreeFall Magazine.

FISHING WITH DEAN BARLOW

We went down to the zipperlip
with our one, two, three little wishes –
hooks, lines, sacrifices

and summer-solstice time.
Sat there at the water’s edge
and waited for the fish. I didn’t know

how little a boy could have to say,
but his fingers were pretty nimble
and he hooked the bait for us both.

I felt his breath; it stunk of mud.
At least it seemed to be his breath –
could have been the water-hole,

earthworms, or the bucket.
From the side of my eye, I saw
the sketchy freckles on his nose –

blurred to watery blots.
Not like mine – all separate
and peppery. His arms

and legs were skinny-long,
soft blonde hair on his shins.
I saw this, too, from the side of my eye;

looked askance at my own shin hair
and wanted madly to hide it;
tucked my legs beneath me, making it

hard to hold the pole. Dragonflies
skimmed the water, shimmering pink
and evening-blue – so beautifully I forgot

my legs, our freckles, and the stench.
And in the tug of a simultaneous catch,
the bone of our strangeness broke.

*Note – Fishing With Dean Barlow was published in Contemporary Verse 2.



AUBADE

A woman went for a walk at dawn and came
to an iron bridge – high, yet in the river
below the sky appeared
so close. As if she could have

stooped and touched its hue. By the river
stood a wood of densely-fretted firs.
For years she’d longed
to fall, be caught.

How beckoning, she thought,
and off she leapt.
The branches broke
her fall. Winded,

she returned to earth.
Not a soul had seen the leap,
nor the ragged landing.
She met a man with a camera

on the path back into the city.
You’re wearing fir, he laughed
and asked if he could take her picture.
Sun arose, prodigiously,

and rinsed the heavens red -
he fell to his knees instead:
How would we stop from bowing
down, if the sky were always this vermillion.

*Note – Aubade was also published in The Paterson Literary Review.


TTQ – Your latest collection of poetry, Startled Night (Guernica Editions, 2011), has been described as integrating the shadow, of coming into personhood and love—through the process of encounter and crisis; also through the chiaroscuro of art, image, and word. How difficult was it for you personally to fully identify your own shadow and then integrate it into your new collection of poems? Was writing this book a kind of self-indulgent journey into trying to discover more about your own darker self and to what degree did that journey change you as a writer?

Elana Wolff - Well, you’ve quoted part of the blurb on the back cover of my book and followed up with three questions. So I’ll address the partial quote first. I’d like to add, to be more precise, that the poems in Startled Night “plumb the work of integrating the shadow.” As such, they represent part of a process—they are markers on a way, if you will. They are not meant to indicate the way, nor are they representations of a completion. Most of the pieces in the collection were written during a long period of upheaval. I was forced to take a sabbatical from teaching at York University, for medical reasons, and then led by unexpected beckoning to embark upon a course of training in therapeutic art and biography that lasted for six years. I never did return to York, but instead turned to writing, editing, mentoring, and working as a therapeutic community-art designer and facilitator. Writing poetry accompanied me along the way, but not till the latter part of 2010 did I start to think of the accumulating pieces as comprising a book. So to answer your first and second questions: No, I did not set out on a journey led by an idea of “trying to discover my darker self” and “then integrate it into a new collection of poems.” There was no advance idea; the description of the expedition arose inductively out of the work. And more than “indulging” the shadow, I’ve tended to resist it—in various calculating ways. So at no point in my poems do I “identify [my] shadow.” Artist Paul Klee wrote that “all art is memory of our dark origins.” This statement resonates with me deeply. There is no way to create what does not involve self; there is no creation that is fully impersonal, and no creation that is totally light-filled. We are all creatures born to-and-of creativity, out of the dark and into the dark-and-light. This is a universal condition. And our lives are continuously dealing us materials—desolating and otherwise. I take both, the dark and the light, and blend, dramatize, and juxtapose. So there are ‘sendup pieces’ in Startled Night, like “Two in Raluca’s Waiting Room,” (first published in The Toronto Quarterly)—a glosa that pokes fun at the double, and “What Becomes of Us”—a piece written in the manner of a Robert Pinsky poem that comically recounts a double-suicide; plus several other ‘imaginary disaster pieces’, alongside lyrical and incantatory poems, ‘documentary’ art poems, skewed narratives, and dream sequences. So to answer your third question, To what degree has this journey changed me as a writer, I would say that it has opened my stylistic scope and deepened my concern for the integrity of personhood, as well as for the role of art in the relationship between Self and Other in community. American poet Louise Glück, whose work has long been a beacon and standard for me, has spoken of “art in the service of spirit.” This is a beautiful idea, and through continuing shadow-work in visual art and writing I’m seeing how this idea lives in the world.

TTQ – George Elliot Clarke has written this about you: "Wolff's work recalls that of U.S. poet Marianne Moore. There are the plotted indents and line-lengths, the same detonating denotations." How plotted and painstaking is your deciding on the structure, rhythm, and context in which you write each poem and is there a particular poet that has inspired you and your style of writing?

Elana Wolff – I do labour over my poems. I have a sense of making them—of attending to sound, syllable, metre, line breaks and white space, as much as to semantics. I’m an inveterate reviser too—as you have an inkling of: I requested a word-substitution—“littoral”—to the poem “Red, White, Black and Blue” (included in Startled Night) after you’d accepted it for publication in The Toronto Quarterly. Thankfully, you honoured my request. (“It was shallow at the littoral, as physical / as skin.”)

Having said this, however, elements of ‘magic’ and ‘randomness’ have lately been feeding more and more into my writing process. Sometimes an image or line or part of a poem will ‘come’ to me, as if out of reverie. Or sometimes I’ll misread a line of another person’s poem and I’ll have an unexpected ‘gift-line’ of my own. Recently I read two exquisite collections—one, titled Carapace (Palimpsest Press, 2011), by an old York U. colleague and early poetry mentor, Laura Lush, whom I happened to be reading with at P.K. Page tribute event. I’ve always loved Laura’s work and this new collection, her first in many years, inspired me to write a sequence of intuitive ‘response poems’. I’ve never written this way before—spontaneously, quickly, completely associatively. None of the old labour pains. The other exquisite collection, of a completely different aesthetic, is Groundwork (Biblioasis, 2011), by Amanda Jernigan. I met Amanda at a LiT LiVe reading in Hamilton. She’d come to hear me read my suite of poems, “Meridian,” which won the 2011 GritLit Award for Poetry. She, Gary Barwin and Chris Pannell had been the judges. As a token of gratitude and appreciation, I gifted her a copy of Startled Night. She, in turn, sent me a copy of her new volume. Groundwork is Amanda’s first collection, but with this book she’s arrived fully-formed, shimmering, and mythical.

TTQ – When do you know that you have written a poem that is worthy of publication?

Elana Wolff - I’m fortunate to be part of a longstanding writing group, the Long Dash group. We meet weekly, as schedules permit, to read each other our poems, offer comradeship, conversation, and fair and honest criticism. We’re all very individual in our styles and approaches, yet there’s a great synergy, and trust among us, and we take each other’s feedback seriously. I think it’s important to get peer feedback. If my peers appreciate a poem, I have no qualms about submitting it for consideration for publication. However, just because a poem gets published in a journal does not, for me, mean that it’s ‘worthy’ of inclusion in a collection of my own. I’ve had many poems published in anthologies, papers, and magazines that I’ve not included in my collections. The reviser and editor in me is fairly relentless, and what worked for me at one time and for one context doesn’t necessarily work at another time in a different context.

TTQ – How much has your experience as an editor for other writer's poetry collections helped or hindered you in becoming a better poet yourself, and how difficult was it for you in accepting criticism and feedback from your editor for Startled Night, Michael Mirolla?

Elana Wolff – Editing other people’s work has been hugely important for me. Apart from keeping me deeply connected and committed to the writing community, it forces me to constantly sharpen my reading and interpersonal skills, and has provided fuel for writing and life. Most of my editing experiences have been gratifying, even when they’ve been challenging. I’ve had a few clearly unpleasant experiences, but I can’t say that these have hindered me personally or professionally. They’re part of the learning curve. As far as the editing of Startled Night is concerned, I had two editors—fitting for a book that deals with the double. Antonio D’Alfonso (Guernica’s founder) was my first reader. In addition to making insightful overall comments, he gave helpful recommendations regarding the ordering of the pieces and suggested the title, drawn from the poem “Art Sometimes Makes Me Vague” (in which an alter ego makes an appearance). Michael Mirolla, who gets the editing credit, read my manuscript with great care and precision, challenged me on a number of passages, word choices, and asked that I remove a poem, which I did. He took issue, for example, with my use of the word “dragonfly” in two separate poems. He felt that the word could be ‘safely’ used in one poem only and that if I retained it in two poems, readers would think that I simply couldn’t come up with an alternate word. My first instinct was to resist, but I didn’t. And thanks to my colleague, John Oughton, with whom I shared this anecdote, I have “dragonfly” in one poem (“Fishing With Dean Barlow”) and its relative, the “damselfly,” in another (“Parker’s Point”). Michael also requested that I ‘lose’ the word “earnest” from a line in the poem “Re: Collage, Searching for a Name Thereof.” He felt that word was simply too “earnest” in this context. Here, too, I relented, and substituted “frank” for “earnest”—even though the “earnest” version of the poem had been published in The Fiddlehead. So what was acceptable to one editor was not acceptable to another. These are little things, really, but they are the stuff that editing is made of. And I have to say that I’m deeply grateful for readers like Antonio and Michael, who’ve made me stand up for what I’ve written, and have pushed me to know my work, and polish it.

TTQ – What is your opinion of the current poetry scene in Toronto and what would you suggest be done to get more people reading and/or writing poetry?

Elana Wolff – Toronto has a very vibrant poetry scene. There are cliques, to be sure. But this is inevitable. I laud the organizers of reading series like The Art Bar, Livewords, Hot-Sauced Words, Open Stage, Plasticine, Draft, and others, who devote their time and energy to openly promoting established and emerging poets of all ‘inflections’. The best way to get the word ‘out there’ is to read it and have it heard. The best way to be a better writer is to be a better reader.

*Note - Book cover artwork by Michael Abraham.



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