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Text of the page (random words):
s ago by j a baker i came late to the love of birds for years i saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision and actually you first read the lines as quoted in a judith van gieson novel lines that you savored for years waiting for the chance to use in a recipe of your own tell us more about the origins of the poems as a cycle the intertextual tracing the widening of your own vision to include birds your desire to widen vision for others arguably the greatest gift of poetry kasturi firstly thanks so much for having me on lobster canary and you are very kind in your praise indeed my god to be mentioned in the same breath as heaney etc swoon i was so struck by that quotation when i saw it in van gieson s book the raptor a mystery novel incidentally that i looked up baker s book the peregrine which is where the lines are originally from and bought a copy from abe books i think it s out of print now anyway the peregrine is itself an odd thing and not much is actually known about baker himself he wrote this naturalist s study but it actually reads like poetry his passages are so eloquent and beautiful i can t even describe them i m not a huge non fiction reader unless i m doing research for something specific but that s a book that i d go back to just for the beauty of its language i think it should be on all poets must read list i mean he s even mesmerizing when he s talking statistics but that s not the question i often think in titles so come late to the love of birds was just something ringing in my head for a long time and i thought it would be a good title for a book and then it just seemed like i was writing poems that involved birds in some way without really planning to it all coalesced when i wrote the first poem in the book roc although of course i didn t really think of it as an opening poem for anything it was just a thing i wrote and workshopped in my poetry group so when i was thinking about my next poetry book it all came together and i went hey that might be a cool thing to do i went through my newer poems and picked out the ones that seemed like they would fit in the books poems literally about birds or about flight or space travel which was when i realized i had nowhere nearly enough and i d better get off my ass the thing is as you start thinking about themes for your writing and pulling a book together you start looking at the actual things your poems are about so i would really notice birds in a way i hadn t before i would notice their funny little personalities and how some of them would get cross with each other and squabble in our backyard when we were in rhode island i saw this hawk in the botanical gardens there which resulted in the poem one red thought the movement of birds is like poetry incidentally helen marshall liked the title of my book so much that she developed the very naughty habit of writing all these awesome poems which were perfect for my book so i will obviously have to write poems for her next book now heh question two i came early to the love of birds i started birdwatching when i was nine years old so i am enthralled by your trenchant sketches of birds as in your words poetry made flesh nodding as i see old friends so well depicted since your conversion besides seeing birds for the first time have you also found them in literature where you previously had not noticed them i am thinking of to name just a few in a flock ted hughes mary oliver the sublime walton ford devious homage to the magnificent audubon emily dickinson birds drawn for john gould by edward lear bartram s travels through north south carolina etc and wilson s american ornithology white s natural history of selborne da vinci s codex on the flight of birds from our medieval forebears the parliament of fowls kasturi i think i notice them more in mythology and folklore or fairy tales you find them in grimm and andersen and the greek myths of course weirdly i don t really read a lot of poetry but the stuff i love i love a lot people like anne carson anne sexton laura lush david clink helen marshall of course but i remember the birds in the mary poppins books best i think p l travers was such a weird and funny writer i love her so much she anthropomorphized birds and animals of course but i ll always remember mary poppins arguing with the cheeky starlings and you know i grew up loving dinosaurs all those in school claymation documentaries how i loved them i m still sad brontosaurus doesn t really exist and later ray harryhausen bliss so when the theories about how dinosaurs evolved into birds it all seemed to make a kind of exquisite sense question three let s talk prosody for a moment when you compose a poem such as the flowering tide palelemon sunstreaks arc wide amid snow falls of cherryblossoms that shiver through chills or warmth fickle gusts of vernal air that blow from the east do you have the meter already in your head before the words come or do the words tumble out challenging you to order their rhythm here is another passage that spurred this question from poets and other birds of prey such exsanguinations had to be effected personally flesh rendered by others was even at the very moment of death already too old to be touched you were fastidious or likewise this from cardinal look two cardinals perch on a still bare tree one red one brown watching sharp eyed the least movement sends them skyward winging free across the slow evening kasturi i must confess that with the flowering tide it was terribly contrived i had this sonnet a week project that i was doing where i was trying to write yes a sonnet a week because i m not really a formal verse person so i wanted to see if i could do it one week i couldn t think of anything but i wanted to write a spring poem so i asked my friend writer jason taniguchi to give me the end rhyming words so he did but very naughtily gave me only winter words which you can see if you look at the last word of each line but i like restrictions when writing i think sometimes the more severe the straitjacket the cleverer you are forced to be so it expanded the way i thought and the way i wrote which i think is good i sort of trailed off before the year was out though so really it ended up averaging out to a sonnet every two weeks i think cardinal of course is also a sonnet i wrote it for my great uncle after he died and read it at his funeral again the severity of restrictions involved in a form like the sonnet i think lend themselves beautifully when a tremendous amount of emotion is involved with what you are doing it keeps you from veering off into hysteria or maudlin thoughts allows you to say things and makes it easier to handle all the unhappiness and despair you feel when you lose someone you love greatly as for poets and other birds of prey my god i wrote that a loooong time ago it might actually be the oldest poem in the book i know i absolutely did not think about meter then i do it far more now some things seem to lend themselves naturally to certain rhythms and you usually know from the first couple of lines what it s going to be i ve had things change from very formal verse to free verse because i was trying to force the form and it wasn t working and i ve done it the other way round too realized that it was a hodgepodge mess and it needed more stricture and then gone off into the formal vein isn t stricture a wonderful word it sounds like a poison or something you d add to a chemical solution to give colourful results second half of interview to come next sunday posted by lobster and canary at 10 02 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday january 19 2014 space break the chinese moon rover jade rabbit yutu in mandarin was reactivated last week having been set on dormant for a month after landing so as to ride out inclement weather the rover begins its mission in earnest now nasa s mars rover curiosity steadily sends back pictures this one was taken on january 17th lobster and canary takes a mini break this week between the two part interview with mike carey and another two part interview to start next week this one with poet editor and publisher sandra kasturi in the meantime we send our thoughts out into space dreaming dreaming posted by lobster and canary at 7 06 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday january 12 2014 mike carey interview part two question four one of the most compelling features of your felix novels is the close reading of urban space the concrete descriptions of the places where both thought and action unfold as well as your allusions to the history and myth that accrue to and sometimes obscure that very reality as a native liverpudlian you bring perhaps an outsider s sharp eye for the quirks and vagaries of london as felix says in the first novel i was born elsewhere you have to understand up north two hundred miles from the smoke and my view of london is an outsider s view hence the specificity of the locales the bonnington archive in euston on eversholt street near drummond street the charles stanger care facility on coppett s road near the north circular and coldfall wood number 14 oak court folgate street right off bishopsgate up the shoreditch end would you share with us how you structure the space and the action within your fiction what place means to the impact of your stories carey it s because the castor books are a noir construct the city often functions as a character in noir fictions and the exploration of the darker interstices of an urban landscape is a big part of the impetus for noir i was on a panel at eastercon where the existence and robustness of rural noir was very strongly insisted on and i accept that lawless is a good recent example the sense of place is still paramount though so i spend a lot of time getting that right in fact the largest part of the research i do on the castor books relates to location i go to a lot of places and walk around looking at them from various angles like a casting director auditioning the landscape even the wholly fictional places in the castor books are based on real places and sort of sit askew on real places there is a hospital not a mental hospital a regular one roughly where i put the stanger home and the roundabout in west london where i put the oriflamme actually has the derelict shell of a small community museum on it the bonnington is very loosely based on the london metropolitan archive with the location changed but a lot of the interior and exterior geography retained i like that there s a thread of real world sinew running through the books psychologically it feels like that anchors the supernatural elements and makes them more believable question five regardless of medium you work primarily within the field of horror the bleaker ends of fantasy the nouveau gothic at its core your work strikes me as profoundly moral in a refreshingly old fashioned way your monsters are terrifying but the real evil is perpetrated by the humans and you are explicit that everyone has a choice is the presentation of tortured choice of personal accountability and potential guilt in the midst of the gruesome what keeps readers so attuned to this genre and specifically to your work carey i think it s a strong theme in my writing certainly and it feels like it s very much at the heart of most noir you very often have a protagonist who s trying to do the right thing in a world that doesn t even present the right thing as an option i ve been thinking a lot about this lately in connection with the girl with all the gifts the concept of evil really requires a sense of agency a monster that s insentient or a monster that just obeys its own appetites and urges can be scary but it can t be evil you have to choose evil and you have to choose it knowing what at least some of the consequences will be maybe for that reason i think a lot of horror like a lot of folklore and fairy tale which are precursors to horror is fundamentally about moral choices joe hill s and graham joyce s work spring to mind as very fine and clear examples it s what distinguishes true horror from say fictional disaster narratives in horror characters choose their fates question six you are a reflective practitioner for instance your guest of honor keynote address at the 2011 toronto specfic colloquium speak of the dazzling wings myth language and modern fantasy was anchored in the work of wallace stevens and spanned evolutionary biology touching on brian boyd s on the origin of stories evolution cognition fiction t s eliot hard boiled detective novels comic books owen barfield perhaps the least remembered inkling whose poetic diction a study in meaning from 1928 is steadily gaining more notice and adherents and more you refer to blake and defoe to john owen and isaac watts the reservoir dogs of eighteenth century theology in your memorable phrase i catch allusions to poe and dickens possibly woolf and balzac and you enjoy a sly joke in the way of earlier learned correspondence naming your hard luck protagonist happy beaver for starters do you plan to write more critical commentary about your own work and its place within the genres and or about the work of other writers if so what form might such criticism take carey i don t know whether there would ever be a readership or a constituency for that sort of thing i love concordances but i think the worthwhile ones are always written by people other than the writer of the original text they re free to be merciless in pointing out unacknowledged borrowings and stuff like that it s a fascinating field though i tend to think of harold bloom as something of a pillock and the anxiety of influence as over egged post freudian phallocratic nonsense but there is something in the idea that every text is haunted by the ghosts of other texts and it s wonderful when you re able to tug on one of those threads and see something unexpected unravel from it one of my favourite reads of 2012 was john fuller s who is ozymandias it s a book about literary puzzles and unlikely connections it does a great job of convincing you that certain words and phrases in certain poems are fossils from earlier poems left lying around there because the poet s mind was unable to let go of them so yeah i love the commentaries on my writing that are floating around on the net but i d probably fight shy of writing any myself apart from anything else the most interesting influences and echoes are probably the ones you re not aware of yourself or the ones you won t admit to because they re too embarrassing did i really say that about owen and watts that sounds like something i may have stolen question seven you can invite a half dozen guests to dinner who would you invite and why and what theme or lead topic might you suggest for the evening carey do these have to be real living people or is it a wish fulfilment kind of 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