Photo credit: Heather Pepper Jason Camlot is a Montreal poet, songwriter and critic. His first collection of poems, The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000) was nominated for the QWF A.M. Klein Prize for poetry. A second collection entitled, Attention All Typewriters will be out this summer (2005). In the 1990s he released three compilations of songs in quick succession, O Glee (1994), Mr. Fedora (1995) and Letterbomb (1996). Then, he got a job teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University. He still keeps it real, though, playing bass with the Montreal based Rawk! outfit Puggy Hammer, which released its debut record Rock Like Idiots in 2004. And, O Glee is slated for re-issue in 2006 with Urban Myth Records. His scholarly articles and reviews, some on poetry and poetics, can be found in journals such as Postmodern Culture, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, Atenea, Semiotic Research, English Literary History, Book History, Victorian Studies, etc. His poems can be found in numerous literary journals and anthologies including online at nthposition.com, and on the page in Poetry Nation, Short Fuse, Career Suicide, 100 Poets Against the War, In The Criminal’s Cabinet, Queen Street Quarterly, Rampike, Matrix, Postmodern Culture, and many other such places. Buy his books here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I loved song lyrics long before I ever loved poems. If you’re counting song lyrics in your ‘first poem’ question, some of the earliest songs I learned to sing (from age three/four) were among the first poems I ever loved. These included, “Those Were the Days My Friends” as sung by Mary Hopkins, “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” as sung by the Andrew Sisters and “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” as sung by my older sisters. I loved these songs because I sang them with people I loved, and it was fun. I probably came to loving poems (the way I loved those songs) quite late in life, in my late teens—and it was a more solitary kind of experience. The first poem I ever loved like a song was Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England.” I think I loved it because the voice in which it is delivered is so friendly and inviting, and interesting—it’s like the voice of an interesting stranger. I think I loved it because it is (apparently) a narrative, and this was a pleasant surprise, it being a poem and all. Because it created a wonderfully strange and estranged little world out of another fictional world that I thought I knew pretty well (Robinson Crusoe). Because it was a long poem that I enjoyed from beginning to end, and I was proud of myself for reading such a long poem and liking it all the way through. And, initially, I loved Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” because of the lines: One day I dyed a baby goat bright red with my red berries, just to see something a little different. And then his mother wouldn't recognize him. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I read the cartoon Dilbert by Scott Adams pretty religiously, but then, what’s more literary than Dilbert? I have a few ‘non-literary’ books that I return to pretty regularly, for no obvious reason. They are: Photofact Guide to TV Troubles by Howard W. Sams, Electronic Organs by Robert L. Eby, and The Puppet Book edited by L.V. Wall. All three of these books are on subjects I know very little about, and I continue to be in ignorance of these subjects even after I spend hours studying reading about them. I suppose that is a primary reason that I read these books. So, there are two possible reasons that I read them. Either I hope that at some point I will learn something from them, or, I take pleasure in knowing that I can read these books again and again without learning from them in any calculable sense. They move me, somehow, but they sure don’t make me smarter. Further, they are all “Profusely Illustrated” as the cover of Electronic Organs boasts, and I’m sure that’s another reason I like to read them. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I have been influenced by the discipline of thought called philosophy insofar as it is a discourse demanding a kind of discursive and conceptual mastery that I know I will never achieve. That knowledge hasn’t deterred me, and I do enjoy reading the work of philosophers (aesthetic philosophers in particular), sometimes because I am able to grasp the ideas being communicated, and sometimes because I simply enjoy riding the big wave of conceptual abstraction. The stylistic elements of philosophical discourse interest me. Berel Lang has written about the rhetoric of this discipline. I’m not so interested in what he has to say about the rhetoric of philosophy, as I am in reading philosophical writing for the effects of the discursive forms he is interested in analyzing. I love reading Adorno (especially Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation of Aesthetic Theory), Benjamin (any Benjamin), Spinoza, Levinas, Bakhtin, Arendt, Austin, for this kind of pleasure. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Zbigniew Herbert, Horace, Tu Fu, Yehuda Amichai. I read Herbert and Tu Fu in Translation, although I own many of Herbert’s books in Polish. I don’t understand any Polish. When I was in Poland I bought a bunch of his books just because I was so excited to see so many different Herbert books on the shelves. Horace and Amichai I read in parallel translation. My Hebrew is much better than my Latin, and my Hebrew is not very good. The short answer to why these are my favorites: They communicate an immediate humanity that is familiar to me in a cultural iconography that is foreign to me. I like that mix of very familiar and rather foreign, a lot. I read lots of poetry in French, and love reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, Mallarmé, and especially Verlaine. I love the songs of George Brassens very much. I have gone on Brassens-listening binges that have lasted at least as long as some of my Dylan, Cohen or Morrisey-listening binges. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I’m in the business (I’m an English literature professor) so I read poetry all the time. That said, I don’t only read for work, I also read a lot of poetry for pleasure/purely inspirational purposes. I’d say I read at least ten poems every day. I had never thought about it before your question was posed to me. But, now that I have thought about it, I wonder if it is healthy to read so much poetry. Poetry is very important to my writing. I am inspired, primarily, I’d say, by the poetry (and other things) that I read. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Given that I am a literature professor at a Canadian university, it might surprising to some of my colleagues that I have never read a Margaret Atwood novel from cover to cover. There is no particular reason that I haven’t read Atwood’s fiction. It’s just that there has always been something else I’ve wanted to read first. Of course, now that I have said this, I will read a couple of her novels so that if any of my colleagues see this, and say, “I can’t believe you have never read an Margaret Atwood novel from cover to cover,” I can say, “Well, actually, I’ve read a few since that interview.” 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I’m not convinced it’s useful for a seven year old to be taught such a conceptual category as “poem.” It’s quite an institutionally defined generic/aesthetic category, and while I’m pretty sure I could communicate to a seven year old a sense of what powerful works in this category mean to me, I just don’t think I’d want him or her to use that word, or to attach it to anything in particular (like words lineated on a page). On the other hand, once your seven year old turns seventeen, I’d like him or her to start calling all kinds of things poems. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Poets are the unacknowledged, to truncate a famous line from Shelley’s Defense. I think that’s a good thing, and I’m most comfortable with the role of the poet as an unacknowledged something or other. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Sprite Chiseled**Chisler I**Fu Of**Above Form**Fromm 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I love bodies. And I love texts. I don’t feel I’m trying to write the body in any particular sense. I do feel that many textual experiences can feel very corporeal and a corporeal textuality is something that I aspire to in some of my poems. Allen Ginsberg was working for a while with some of his students on a project he called “Graphic Winces,” which were arrangements of words that might trigger a wince response the way an actual sensory experience could. I sometimes keep a log of small clusters of words that I put down in my notebook in three-line ‘vertebra’ stanzas. I write them down the center of each page so that each page, once filled up has a small spinal column of little word vertebrae on it. The rule is, no more than three words per line, no more than three lines per vertebra. The goal is to capture something visceral in each of these vertebra stanzas. Something nerve-pinching. Many of these vertebrae have been integrated as image clusters (re-rationalized, re-habilitated) into my poems.