I read Vermeersch’s latest collection in a single sitting, which I don’t do very often. The language is dense, but there’s such a strong rhythmic pull to it – to me, gloriously reminiscent of James Dickey – that you just get carried; at times, it feels as though it’s being spoken to you by the most captivating and enlightened tent preacher. There’s also a deep empathy in Vermeersch’s work that helps to remind me what poetry – what language – is, or should be, about.Read the whole piece here.
Jon Chapman: When did you know you wanted to be an author?
Paul Vermeersch: When I was a kid, I always sought out creative activities. I loved to write, but I also loved to draw. I had a subscription to National Geographic, and I liked to imagine that one day I would write stories about wildlife for them. But I also wanted to be a painter. I couldn't choose between painting and writing. In university I studied visual art and English, and when I gradulated I moved to Poland to teach at a college there. I thought I would paint a lot in Poland, but I didn't. I wrote a lot of poems, though, and when I came back to Canada a year later, I had most of my first book written. That's when I knew which path I needed to follow. I decided to devote myself to my writing, and I haven't looked back.
JC: What do you like best about being an author now?
PV: I don't really think of being an author much to be honest....
What is the purpose of literary criticism? Among other things, to guide the reader past his or her resistance. Most art, subtly or aggressively, resists the familiar. Poetry in particular suffers from this resistance, because poets take the material that we depend on to operate in and make sense of the world (language), and bend it to other, often seemingly obscure, purposes.
Readers, sophisticated and beginner, need critics to explain why and how poets are using language for these different purposes, and what those purposes might be. Our attachment to familiar language is powerful, and understandable. Without critics, we will hold on to the familiar and be unable to accept that there are other uses for language, that there is new and exciting poetry all around us.
Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader. Only then can the reader grow to meet work that is unfamiliar, that he or she does not yet have the capacity to love.
Both a swan song to our shared primordial past and an examination of how the animal within thrives in spite of, or perhaps in retaliation to, our best efforts to subdue it, The Reinvention of the Human Hand might very well be the year’s most astute meditation on human nature and its lingering pastRead the whole review here.
