Gerard Beirne: With the publication of your first book, Mean, you really seemed to hit the ground running. You established yourself as a poetic force to be reckoned with. Did it seem that way to you at the time?

Ken Babstock: Certainly not, no. I wasn’t completely without confidence in the poems as poems. The two years previous to ‘Mean’ had been buoyed by several acceptances in journals and magazines. I’d taken that as a good sign. But back then—1998, ’99, ’00—I was living so far outside what’s now commonly called a ‘writing community’ that I had no way to gauge my own book’s reception, or whether it was even being read. I was working on building sites, various other unskilled labour, etc. I had approximately exactly one long-time friend I shared poems with, the very brilliant poet David O’Meara, but even he lived on the other side of the country. We wrote letters (imagine!), on paper, and put them in the mail. Still do sometimes. Anyway, pre-internet/social media, there was a scary, and I think sort of healthy, chamber of silence that fell over any book’s publication. One had to wait for a spell before even beginning to hope it might receive a review.

Most likely it’s those reviews you’re referring to in your question. I was very fortunate on that front. The book received positive attention and that was gratifying. But to be honest, I remember most distinctly a feeling of having earned a kind of permission. I was, it turned out, perhaps allowed, to be doing this. I had a high school diploma, a catastrophic upbringing, very low earning potential. It wasn’t easy then, and still isn’t at times, to internalize any sense of acceptance into a literary world I’d always framed as—if not intellectually ‘heroic’, at least as originating from very much elsewhere.

GB: Since then there have been four new collections. Airstream Land Yacht was a finalist for the Griffin Prize, and Methodist Hatchet won it in 2012. There has been a real sense of bravery in your language and form, a willingness to explore new poetic territory from collection to collection. Is this more an organic process or is it more deliberate than that?

KB: Can I mess with the either/or construction a little bit? I’d like to suggest deliberation is organic, or organic exploration requires deliberate interrogation. In other terms, the making of poems has felt organic to me since the outset—not easy, but organic, unwilled, central to my sense of a self. When I’m making poems, though, I’m also aware I’m participating in the act of making meaning. Meaning created so as to make sense of a self and a time. In simpler terms? Poems are language but there’s no language without the body, and no body without the brain and no embodied consciousness without the socio-historical world it finds itself an inhabitant of.

GB: Did getting shortlisted for the Griffin and then winning it have much of an impact?

KB: Easy answer first: it meant that at a point in my 40s, with a very small child, I had a couple years of relative financial stability for the first time in my life. That was important, massively so. And the internal validation that comes from public acknowledgement like that is no small thing. Again, the sense of having been told it’s Ok and even right that you’re doing this. It can keep a person’s head out of the ditch a while.

Otherwise, I’m not sure what impact it’s had. I’ve yet to be invited to read in the US. In the UK some years ago I had a wonderful time in St. Andrew’s at the Festival there.

GB: And now for those dreaded words… “In an interview you once said”… anyway, in an interview you once said, “I’m one of those people that has sort of invested everything in sound, except that meaning won’t leave me alone.” I love that. Could you elaborate on it a little more?

KB: I’m very happy you didn’t land on something I “once said in an interview” and now have no memory of and cannot explain. This one I do remember, and do still think about periodically. It’s likely irresolvable, or needs no resolution. But the outlines remain present to me. I think I was just trying to point, first, to what I consider the primary driving force in my own process, sound. I don’t suffer from tinnitus but something analogous to it in the part of cognition that deals in creation. Before writing I have a strong, if ill-defined, nebulous, mental picture of what sound or sonic qualities, I’m trying to generate for—not “for,” maybe coterminous with?—this or that particular poem. A kind of static, or white noise, or drone that I hope will take fuller form as words and phrases and lines fall into relation with one another. When I know, immediately, something has failed, I know it not by virtue of what I’ve said but how what I’ve said sounds to me.

And then meaning. It “won’t leave me alone,” I said at the time, but I could have used the plural noun. We make symbols, always have done, and meaning is what happens when the other wanders into the cave and apprehends the blown-dye hand print on the wall.

GB: I know you have been to Ireland, but I am particularly taken by the entry for you in the online “Canadian Encyclopedia” which under the heading “Early Life and Career” states that you “attended Concordia University in Montréal but dropped out and spent the following 12 years doing manual labour in Ireland and across Canada.” It sounds almost like a punishment. A sentence. Penal servitude. So how was your time in Ireland? Was it a backbreaking experience?

KB: Dublin. I should write an outsider’s memoir. It was only a year, and just as the Celtic Dragon could be heard snorting its first snorts (apt metaphor, yes?) I spent ’89-’90 living on Gardiner St., and my days on a building site in Temple Bar. In fact, just across the street from Temple Bar pub. The neighbourhood then was creaky, a bit dodgy some nights, heroin around, the sense, if you weren’t keeping your head down, something might kick off. But I adored it. I worked for two lovely guys, builders who’d take me drinking AND to the theatre! We drove down one weekend to Waterford, along with one of the owners of Temple Bar, to see my boss’s sister perform in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. I bought Mike Scott of The Waterboys a pint in a biker bar there. During the two months it took me to lower the sub-floor by hand, I found a postcard from Joyce in Trieste buried in the rubble, and met Adam Clayton because he was stood watching me tip wheelbarrows into a skip all day. I saw Beckett plays, a wordless Russian avant-garde theatre piece, and Paul Durcan read poems in protest of the first Gulf War.

GB: Also, I am curious if you got a chance to meet any Irish writers at the time or to engage in the so-called literary scene? I know you have listed Heaney and Muldoon amongst your influences. What is it about these poets in particular that appeals to you?

KB: I was truly without any sort of ‘scene’ in Dublin. Yes, I’d loved what Muldoon and Heaney I was familiar with then, and Paulin, Longley, Mahon, (and later, Carson, Sweeney, Boland, etc.) but being unpublished myself at the time, 20 years old and working with builders, I couldn’t really see any way ‘in’ to Dublin’s literary happenings. Wouldn’t have known where to look for them, in fact. Also, I should admit I was—and still am—even more enthralled by the works of Beckett. So, pushing my bike around Rathmines in a stupor wondering what it was all for was more my jam. Bit of a fanboy? My son is named Samuel (!?).

And what is it about Heaney and Muldoon that got me? Two incredibly different poets, and I’ll likely say nothing that hasn’t already been said of them. Heaney’s patterns. Diamond-cut diction, control, feeling and how he enters History through the cat-flap. With Muldoon, it’s the appearance of chaos giving on to the slow-reveal of control. The hallucinogenic associative leaps. But again, the patterns. Perhaps I’m attracted to poets of pareidolia.

GB: One of the things I discovered from living in Canada for 18 years was that a lot of contemporary Irish poets are unknown or not very well known. The same is true, I believe, of Canadian poets here. So, apart from yourself, of course, who are the Canadian poets you would recommend to any young Irish poet setting out on this hazardous journey?

KB: What you say is true. And is true of other countries in the anglo sphere, no? In Canada we know too few New Zealand poets, Jamaican, Scottish, Australian, etc. Best I can figure, though, is it boils down to socio-economics and power. What poets do travel are those who pass through the moneyed power centres of the US and UK. Those massive publishers have the powers of distribution, dissemination, prestige real or imagined. And I’m grateful to them for every poet I’ve read who I wouldn’t otherwise have known. I just wish it wasn’t so very difficult for the rest of us to get a look in.

Canadian poets, I’m treading carefully as there are just so many, so consider this a teaser or taster. A generation or more older than me: Don McKay, Tim Lilburn, Margaret Avison, Sharon Thesen, Erin Mouré. My cohort, more or less: I’m guessing most are newly acquainted with Karen Solie. David O’Meara, Suzanne Buffam, Kevin Connolly, Matt Tierney, Jana Prikryl. And younger by a little or a lot: Souvankham Thammavongsa, Linda Besner, Ben Ladouceur, Paul LeGault, Canisia Lubrin.

GB: Finally, any words of advice for a young poet setting out?

KB: Expect nothing. Read everything. Love something. Write about anything. Expect nothing.