Zachariah Wells is the author of the poetry collections Fool's Errand and Unsettled, a prolific critic and essayist, a translator and an editor. Some of his poems are being translated into Serbo-Croatian for an anthology of Canadian poets to be published in Bosnia. In previous lives, he has been an ice cream slinger, cargo handler, security guard and bartender. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he has since lived in Ottawa, Montreal, Nunavut and twice in Halifax, where he presently lives and works as a conductor on board the train to Montreal.
Dani Couture interviewed Zach Wells in March 2006.
You recently returned from a cross-country tour, which you organized to promote your book, "Unsettled", and your latest chapbook, "Ludicrous Parole". Most people have a difficult time organizing a weeklong vacation, how did you manage to organize such an extensive tour?
I'm a shameless procrastinator and I work a mainly seasonal job, so last winter I was sitting around at home thinking it would be pretty cool to take a trip around the country and stop off at various points to visit friends and family. Then I thought that while I was at it, I could do some readings. Then I thought that maybe if I really got my act together, I could get some funding. Then I stopped thinking and started sending out emails to reading hosts and friends to put me in touch with other reading hosts. Basically, I started with Toronto and set up dates at the Art Bar and I.V. Lounge, then built a southern Ontario and Quebec schedule around those dates, then chose a date around 6 weeks from the tour's start to finish in Vancouver, then started filling the gaps in between. I've got a background in transportation logistics, so this sort of thing is second nature to me. Once I had a decent looking schedule set up, I applied for a Presentation Grant from the Nova Scotia Government's department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage. I got most of what I asked for, but had to cancel a leg of the trip that would have taken me to Yellowknife, NT and surrounding towns, as that would've put me in the hole. Which is too bad, as the book's subject matter is northern, but everything costs more up north, as I know from my work in transportation logistics... But once the grant came in, I added a bunch of readings (in Ottawa, Edmonton, Nanaimo) that weren't on the original application.
So it was a fair bit of work, but things kind of fell into place once I got the ball rolling. Unlike trying to get poems published in magazines, which can be a Sisyphean task (one I have little to no time for), I've always found reading hosts very receptive. Last summer at work I met a guy from Prince George who I told about the tour. He not only invited me to stay with him, but took me down to a little town in BC's central interior called Wells--how could I resist?--where I read at a small arts school. And once news of the tour started to get out, I actually got invitations from people to do readings, e.g. from a friend's mom who teaches high school English in Peterborough. I read to two classes of teenagers there and it was one of the coolest events on the tour. I always like having an opportunity to face an audience who isn't initiated into all the arcane rites of the lit scene, y'know. Keeps one honest.
How many days were you on the road, and how many cities did you visit?
I was gone for seven weeks. I did 22 readings in 15 different cities and towns: Ottawa, Montreal, Hamilton, Toronto, Peterborough, Windsor, St. Catharine's, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Prince George, Wells, Vancouver, Nanaimo. I also had overnight stays, but no readings, in Jasper and Prince Rupert, whence I rode ferries down the BC coast to Vancouver--same route where a ferry sunk the other day! Unfortunately, the tour ended somewhat anticlimactically, as my last, and westernmost, reading--on Lasqueti Island--had to be postponed indefinitely due to bad winter storms in the Georgia Strait and maintenance on the Lasqueti ferry. But I added an impromptu reading on the train on the way back east.
Do you think that writers should work harder on promoting their own work, rather than relying on publishers to do it for them?
I think that writers should do what they jolly well please, but I have a hard time understanding the mindset of the person who publishes a trade collection and then sits back on their heels waiting for something to happen. Yeah, it would be nice if publishers had more time and resources to dedicate to promotion, but for the most part they don't. And the simple fact is that for poetry most of the industry's standard means of promotion aren't all that effective; if poetry isn't a part of people's lives, then no number of full-page ads is likely to convince them to pick up a book of it. And even for those of us who do read a lot of contemporary verse, there are just so many books published each year; how often does an ad or a review make you want to race out to your local store to get a book? There's no substitute for making live contact with an audience. So even if a publisher's really good about organizing readings, it's still ultimately the writer who has to do the work. You hear numbers bandied about. Apparently, average sales for a collection of poems are around 200-300. In less than a year and a half, I've bought and sold 200 copies of *Unsettled* myself--nearly half of those on this tour. And this isn't something I consider work, really. It's fun. I love reading to a live audience. To me it's far more important than publishing in magazines, or even books.
Really, having a book is for me a great excuse to do a lot of readings. You know, you hear a lot of people going on about poetry publishing being in perilous straits. I don't believe it. I mean, I know there's no money to be made in it, but given just how much (too much) is being published, it seems silly to think that it'll all just grind to a halt. But if poets are really concerned about this happening, then they should be doing their bit to support the efforts of their publishers. The way I saw it when I signed my contract with Insomniac was that I took it upon myself to make the publisher's effort on my behalf as small a financial burden for him as possible. No, it wasn't written into the contract, but I see it as a kind of partnership, wherein my obligation doesn't end when I hand in my corrections to the final proofs.
I guess some people just aren't comfortable putting themselves forward, or lack the self-confidence or whatever. And some people actually do their work an injustice when they read it publicly. Given that readings are par for the poetry course, it seems to me that people would do well, if they're not comfortable with public performance, to take some training in public speaking, voice coaching, acting, or something related. I used to do a lot of amateur theatre and film, so talking and performing in front of a crowd is something with which I've become very comfortable.
There's kind of an unspoken understanding that poetry readings are something rather to be endured than enjoyed, and there's no good reason for it. I think we've strayed a long way in the last century from the origins of poetry in song and dance and theatre. If you write quiet, imagistic poems, maybe you should figure out a way other than readings to present them in public--or maybe you need to figure out a style of delivery that makes them resonate better. The poems I choose to read in public tend to be ones that have a greater element of soundplay in them. Obviously, a listener encountering a poem for the first time at a reading isn't going to get his or her head all the way around it, but it should get inside that listener's head (thru rhythm, rhyme and other sound effects), make them want to take a closer look afterwards, to read and re-read it--how often do you catch all the lyrics of a song you hear on the radio? I often get comments and questions after readings about the "musicality" of my poems. How far we've strayed from poetry as music, how impoverished our notions of the artform, when this becomes something that people find exceptional. So yeah, I think poets would do well to reinvent themselves as medieval troubadours and balladeers, rather than sensitive individuals working in isolation, a precious legacy of Wordsworthian Romanticism--have you heard that his famous line was originally "I wandered lonely as a cow"?
Anyway, to me this isn't a matter of "promoting" the work I've done--not a matter of commerce vs. art--but an extension and continuation of the work. A poem on the page is a bit like sheet music; if you're used to reading it, you can get some idea of it in your head, but it only really lives when you lift it off the staves and bounce it off some eardrums.
Would you do this kind of tour again?
Not for a while. It was fun, but exhausting, and I find it hard to get writing done when I'm travelling. It's also hard to imagine the right constellation of time and funding happening again. (Unless there's some wealthy philanthropist out there who wants to be my patron!) But doing readings will always be an integral element of my artistic practice.
I just read on your website that your new chapbook, "Ludicrous Parole" is already out of print. Congratulations! Do you know if there will be a second printing?
I think so, but not sure. I think the publisher wants to get some idea of there being a demand for it. But given that the first 100 copies sold in under three months (I sold out by Edmonton), I don't think it'd be a huge risk for him... So yeah, if anyone wants a copy of *Ludicrous Parole*, bombard Ben Kalman with emails.
Finally, are you working on any new projects?
Slowly building a second trade-length collection. I've been working on it for the last 7 or 8 years (many of the poems I was writing at the same time as the poems in *Unsettled*) and I've got a fair bit of it written, but don't want to rush it into print before it's ready; I don't write poems or books from pre-conceived plans, so it takes me quite a bit of time to figure out how what I've written fits together. *Unsettled* was easier in this regard because it was unified geographically; this next book, the poems are all over the place in terms of setting, form, style, but a pattern of preoccupations seems to be emerging out of the soup. I find too many good young poets push out a sophomore collection too soon and I don't want to make the same mistake. I'm also editing a landmark anthology of 99 English Canadian sonnets, which is nearing completion and has been amazing to work on; I've learned a lot in the process and discovered some very good poets and poems I might not have otherwise. A collection of critical reviews and essays is in the works; a few publishers have expressed interest in this book, but no firm commitments yet. And I've had some interest from a publisher in the manuscript of a kid's narrative poem I co-wrote with my wife, Rachel Lebowitz--who, like you, has a book forthcoming from Pedlar Press, plug, plug. I've also been translating, in desultory fashion, the poems of Emile Nelligan. Six of these just appeared in *Contemporary Verse 2 *. With so many irons in the fire, I haven't done any Nelligans in a while, but I'd like to get back to it when time permits. Translation does great things for breaking me out of the rut of my own voice. I like to do them when I haven't written any of my own poems for a while; no worries about what to write, just the how of it. And the extant translations of Nelligan really don't do him much justice, in my opinion. Other than that, I've had vague ideas about writing a prose memoir about my time in the Arctic, but I think that'll have to wait until a) I've got more time and b) I've forgotten more of the actual facts of the matter. Don't want facts getting in the way of a good story, eh.
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Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading