How often had you sent out Sailing to Babylon before it was
chosen for publication in 2012 by Able Muse Press?
I was fortunate; I did manage to get
eighteen submissions out the door, but to my delight the manuscript was
accepted only three months into my submission process. I had planned to send
the manuscript to about a hundred presses in the U.S. and Canada over the
course of a year. At the time it was a little bewildering because one of the
places I submitted it to, Able Muse Press in California, had indicated in its
submission guidelines to expect a six-month wait for a response, but in fact
they accepted it just twelve days after I sent it to them. It was thrilling, of
course, but this was essentially a new press (they’d only published three or
four books at the time), and I wondered if I ought to wait to hear from some
more established presses first. But I asked around and got some advice—the poet
Eric Ormsby’s good word was especially decisive—and ultimately I gladly
accepted the offer. Though not before I’d heard back from some other publishers
first. The book was a semi-finalist for the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First
Book Award. McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal was interested, but the
editors wanted me to make the manuscript longer by twenty-five pages and submit
it again within five months, which didn’t strike me as the right thing for this
book. And some presses sent letters of praise that nevertheless didn’t make me
an offer, including Graywolf and Etruscan in the U.S. and Gaspereau in Canada.
The most whiplash-inducing of these was from someone at Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, whose words are forever burned into my memory: “Your verses are
lyrical, your images exact and moving, but our small poetry list is booked for
the foreseeable future.” Alas! But in the end I’m very happy the book was
published by Able Muse, for a variety of reasons. For example, many small
presses have trouble with distribution, but that’s not an issue; it’s not hard
to get your hands on the book. It’s also in my contract that, as long as the
press stays in business, the book will never go out of print. That’s hard to
beat. And my editor at Able Muse, Alex Pepple, has been a pleasure to work
with.
Tell me about the title. Had it always
been Sailing to Babylon? Did it go through
any other changes?
The working title for many years was Northwest
Passage, which is also the title of two of the poems in the book. But when
I finished the manuscript it didn’t fit. The phrase lacks the mythic resonance
outside of my native Canada that it has there. And on the other hand it’s been
so well-used in Canada that, there, it’s almost a cliché, at least for the
title of a book. What I wanted was a title that would place the book in the
main stream of Western literary tradition, and one with several layers of
meaning—in this case, an image of a sea voyage, an ironic or disputative
allusion to Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” an allusion to the several
Babylons of history, the Bible, and nursery rhyme (“How many miles to Babylon?/
Threescore miles and ten./ Can I get there by candle-light?/ Yes, and back
again.”), and so on. I wanted a title that would be inviting to readers at
first glance, and resonant with new dimensions of meaning later on: a complex
symbol. I myself keep discovering new ways of thinking about it even now, and I
like that very much.
It seems like there’s a possible
misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book
published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a
contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book
out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?
Book contests, with their reading fees,
are simply a business model many poetry publishers rely on in the U.S. in order
to keep publishing books, and they’re a perfectly good one. But there are also
plenty of publishers that call for open submissions, and in fact a lot of them,
including Able Muse Press, do both. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason
to choose one over the other, because just about every manuscript that gets
published—as opposed to self-published—is the winner of a competition with
other manuscripts, whether it’s called a book contest or not. As for me, among
the eighteen presses I sent the manuscript to, six involved contests, though I was
planning to enter many more.
And anyway, after a book is published
there are also plenty of post-publication book awards, the point of which is to
publicize the book, to find readers for it. I’ve entered some myself, and my
publisher has entered my book in some too, fifteen altogether. When Sailing
to Babylon was named a finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Literary
Award in poetry, a major honor in Canada, it gave the book a big boost in
visibility. There was a $1000 prize for each finalist, and a finalists’ reading
in Montreal which meant a lot to me. The book was named the runner-up for the
2012 Posner Poetry Book Award, in Wisconsin. And now I’ve learned that it’s
been shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize, Canada’s most prestigious
poetry award, and the publicity for that has already been extraordinary. Each
finalist will be given $10,000 for doing a reading at the Royal Conservatory of
Music in Toronto on June 12, 2013. And the winners—one Canadian and one
international—will be announced at a gala the next evening, and given another
$65,000. I’m overjoyed, as you can imagine, and filled with gratitude.
What was the process like assembling
the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it
out?
I sent it out in one version. It took
me about fifteen years to write the poems, but once I had finally written
enough good ones for a book, it didn’t take long to put it together—just a few
days. I spread the poems out on the floor and read them all, putting the ones
that seemed to belong together into piles, then ordering the poems in each
section and putting the sections in a natural order. Granted, there are only
eighteen poems in the book—the last one is twenty-three pages long—so arranging
the poems was probably not as difficult in this case as it might have been
otherwise.
The hard part was writing it. I wrote
many more poems than made it into the manuscript, and I was ruthless in
deciding whether a given poem was good enough. Hence the fifteen years. The
last thing I wrote was the long poem, “Quarry Park,” and when it was done I
knew for the first time that I had written a book.
How involved were you with the design
of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.?
One perk of publishing with a small
press is that you have some input on these matters. The book was designed by my
editor and publisher, Alex Pepple, and he did a marvelous job. There was plenty
of consultation, lots of back-and-forth, but in the end my main design
contribution was the color of the cover—blue instead of the original beige.
Other than that, my publisher gets all the credit for the design, which I love.
Did you suggest or have any input
regarding the image that was used on the cover?
I suggested several images that
involved ships at sea, and Alex chose an image on his own with a similar theme
but a more abstract style. It’s a photograph called “Sailing Ships from
Heaven,” by a French photographer named Roger-Michael Goerge, and he seems to
have done something to the camera lens. I think I read somewhere that he
smudged it with petroleum jelly to make the image dream-like.
What about the publication of the poems
in journals and magazines prior to the book’s being published? Was there ever a
concern for you to have most of the poems published before you sent out your
manuscript?
Yes, indeed. I understand that some
editors read the acknowledgements page very carefully to get a sense of the
caliber of journals the poems have appeared in, especially for a first book.
The more prestigious and difficult to get published in, the better. And editors
also have a clear sense of which journals tend to publish the kind of thing
their presses specialize in. In such cases, where you’ve published affects the
editor’s attitude, and perhaps how much time he or she is willing to spend on
reading the manuscript. If she hasn’t heard of any of the journals the poems
have appeared in, or if they’re just the wrong journals from her point of view,
she may well give it short shrift—because editors are nothing if not overworked
and short on time.
But the main reason to publish your
poems in journals is to test your work against the standards of the editors. It
helps you see which of your poems are the best, and which either need more work
or just aren’t good enough. And of course, you do it to find readers for your
poems. So I spent many years getting the poems published in magazines. In the
end, all but two of the poems in Sailing to Babylon were published
beforehand, and one of those two was “Quarry Park,” which was just way too long
for most journals.
How much work did you do as far as
editing the poems from the day you knew the book would be published to its
final proofing stage?
Quite a lot. The process delayed
publication for about a year, but I wanted to make sure the book was the best
it could be. A few months after the manuscript was accepted, and with the
blessing of my editor, I went to the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference where
I received some invaluable advice from Joan Houlihan, the poet and critic, and
Jeffrey Levine, the editor of Tupelo Press and also a poet. I’d applied and
been accepted to the conference before my book was accepted for publication; I
had thought my submission process would take longer than it did. But by the
time the conference happened, as I say, the manuscript had been accepted by
Able Muse Press. I went to the conference anyway because I wanted to make the
manuscript better, and I’m glad I did. I ended up removing two or three poems,
revising some others, and changing the order of the poems in a few cases. So it
added up to a significant improvement.
My editor, Alex Pepple, made some
helpful suggestions about a few poems, as well. And a few months later I was
very lucky to have the unofficial editorial services of my friend Carmine
Starnino, a very fine editor, poet, and critic in Canada, who, I was happy to
find, only suggested some judicious cuts to the first three pages of “Quarry
Park.” He’s a famously tough editor, so I knew from the scarcity of his
suggestions that the book must be getting close to ready to go to print. After
I made those changes, my wife, Stormy Stipe, who had been responding to drafts
of the poems all along for years, signed off on the manuscript again too.
That just left the proofreaders. I
think my editor and publisher, Alex, in his remarkable thoroughness, hired six,
some of whom had reputations for being very tough—which is just what you want
in a proofreader. They each caught several different things, some of which were
debatable and which got resolved according to the press’s house style. But one
of these proofreaders—an older man from Europe, I was told—made a suggestion
that really helped the ending of a poem called “Weekend in Vienna.” He said
something about how everyone knows that a certain kind of doorless elevator in
Europe that doesn’t stop at your floor—you have to step onto it while it’s moving—everyone
knows it’s called a “paternoster elevator.” Well, I didn’t know that, but what
a perfect name! It was just right for the ending of the poem. So, many a
thank-you to that anonymous proofreader, whoever he was.
What do you remember about the day when
you saw your published book for the first time?
It was early July, a bright, hot day. I
carried the box in from the front porch and set it down on the living room
floor, and my son Felix, who was six, kept pushing my hands out of the way and
saying he wanted to open it himself. And when we finally managed to get it open
with the scissors, my wife picked up a copy and felt the cover and smiled and
said it felt like flour, and then she went off to read it. I read some of it to
Felix, too, the parts about him, and he was very excited. It was all very
domestic and joyful. The book looked beautiful. But I remember thinking, what
am I going to do with all these books? There were fifty copies in the box.
Since then I’ve had the pleasure of doing several readings, so by now I’m happy
to say I’ve sold my way through box number two, and I’m about to order another.
If you struck up a conversation next to
someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them
that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you
answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”
It’s full of poems about exploration
and discovery, from wilderness explorers like Henry Hudson, John Franklin and
David Thompson to mental travellers like Northrop Frye and Glenn Gould. And it
ends with a long poem about hiking through a wooded park with my two-year-old
son in Madison, Wisconsin, and what we find there. On another level, it’s about
spiritual journeys, and ultimately about making a home for yourself by engaging
imaginatively with the history of the place you find yourself in. It’s an
allusive book, written in a clear style, and with much attention to the sounds
of words.
How has your life been different since
your book came out?
I spend a lot of time now promoting the
book, along with my book of essays that was published a few months later (You
Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada.) Several doors have
opened—readings, interviews, invitations from editors and translators and festival
directors, and things I’m now eligible to apply for, like fellowships and
grants. And I’ve made quite a few new literary friends. It’s like being
welcomed into a tribe. But on a deeper level, my long apprenticeship in the art
is finally over. I’m filled with confidence, and excited about starting a new
book.
What have you been doing to promote Sailing to Babylon, and what have
those experiences been like for you?
I’ve been submitting the book to
contests, as I say, and applying for fellowships and grants, and scouting out
reviewers, and having review copies sent to anyone who’s interested. I’ve been
developing and maintaining a Web site, and networking on Facebook and other
social media sites—making announcements and responding to people who have contacted
me to say how much they like the book, which is always a pleasure. I’ve been
doing readings, and getting my book into local bookstores and even a national
chain in Canada. And doing interviews, both online and with journalists at
newspapers. And so on. It’s like having another job. But it’s been such a
pleasure to hear from readers and audiences and reviewers and other poets. So
far the response has been wonderful.
What advice do you wish someone had
given you before your first book came out?
I gathered so much advice from so many
sources—including the interviews in this series—that I feel I was pretty well
prepared. The best advice I can give is to be ruthless with your book,
especially after it’s been accepted by a publisher. Make it the best it can be.
What influence has the book’s
publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the
works?
I published a book of essays a few
months later, as I say, and between working on that, and promoting both books,
and teaching, and so on, I haven’t written much poetry. But I do have some
things I’m working on. I’m also editing a volume of selected poems by Daryl
Hine, who just died last year, and writing a review-essay on the poetry of
Stephanie Bolster.
Do you believe that poetry can create
change in the world?
Great poetry not only can, but does,
yes. All the time. It happens on a much deeper and more enduring level than
many other things in the world, and it takes time for it to happen, sometimes a
long time. But just think of the influence of Homer, Sappho, Dante and
Shakespeare on world culture, and you’ll see what I mean.
I have some things to say about this in
the closing paragraphs of You Are Here, which come at the end of a long
essay on poetic value. “Truly great poetry,” I say,
is one of the most powerful of all manifestations of language. Its
object is ultimately the formation, and transformation, of the human self and
community. Its power to do these things is not different in kind from the power
of ordinary language to do them; it’s just greater in degree. This is because
great poetry is a fusion of reason, emotion, sensuality and imagination,
bringing to bear all these powers of the human soul at once, whereas other uses
of language are usually more specialized: rational but cold, passionate but
stupid, beautiful but shallow, effective but ultimately meaningless.
A lot of people—let’s call them Philistines—say this is all nonsense,
that poetry is a marginal and specialized kind of playing with words, a strange
kind of niche entertainment, of no interest to serious people, and certainly
with no real power to make or transform anything. “Poetry makes nothing
happen,” in the words of W. H. Auden, who, while not otherwise a Philistine,
was channeling one, I’m afraid, when he wrote these words.
In response, I can only appeal to my own experience as a reader.
Great poetry gives me pleasure. It stimulates my intellectual, emotional and
imaginative powers. It deepens my understanding of myself and other people, and
helps me pay closer attention to my life. It gives me the power to perceive
things more clearly, to feel not only more intensely but more subtly and
precisely. It resurrects the dead world I live in, and the dead words I use,
and makes the sources of strong value in my life resonate again.
I know from experience, however, what it means to be part of a
community without a great poetry of its own. Whitman and Dickinson are not
quite the central figures in American culture that Shakespeare is in British
culture, or Homer in Greek, or Dante in Italian; but as a Canadian I feel
exquisitely the lack of such a major poetic figure in my own country. An
important part of the community of Canada, and therefore of the self of every
Canadian, has not been fully formed. Now, everyone knows achieving that level
of poetic power is extremely difficult. But we also know it’s not impossible.
I want our poets to
try.
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James Pollock is the author
of Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012), a current
finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, a finalist for the Governor General's
Literary Award in poetry, and runner-up for the Posner Poetry Book Award;
and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (The
Porcupine's Quill, 2012), currently shortlisted for the ForeWord Reviews Book
of the Year Award. His poems have been published in The Paris
Review, Poetry Daily, AGNI, and other journals in
the U.S. and Canada, and listed in Best Canadian Poetry 2010. His
critical essays and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Poetry Review, The
New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. He earned an
Honors B.A. in English literature and creative writing from York
University in Toronto, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing and
literature from the University of Houston, where he held several fellowships in
poetry. He was a John Woods Scholar in poetry at the Prague Summer
Program at Charles University in Prague, and a work-study scholar in
poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He is an associate professor at
Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he teaches poetry in the creative
writing program. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin. You can
visit him at his Web site at www.james-pollock.com.
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