Shane Neilson is a poet from New Brunswick who published Exterminate My Heart with Frog Hollow Press in 2008. My Manic Statement will be published with Biblioasis in 2009, White Coat, Black Bag (a book of medical poems) in 2010 with the Porcupine's Quill, and Alice in 2011 with Goose Lane.
Making Sense
I'm flummoxed: hock me up in a big hammock,
spin me. All top-heavy me, and let the lummox
go, watch the lunkhead stagger, watch the ox
stomp, watch him at angles to the world,
watch me. And I'll tramp and stamp,
swagger dizzy and abuzz, I'll be headlong,
I'll have no line, far-flung, and as the world
stems to lacklustre, as I am stemmed,
as sense rights, the hammock empty
and I've travelled far, flung far
into a lesson: the world is not vested,
it has no angle, it sets you, and atwitter
your head goes.
The Inventions of Love - "Love invents the sadness of tolerable departures." Dannie Abse
Love invented me; my patent is pending.
Love took my pain and invented the succour
of tolerability; love was a niche market,
a special-order product, sadness its brand name.
But this three-word naming,
this I-love-you of destitution,
I feel each time I say it like I
am waving bon voyage at a cruise ship;
you are on it, laden with the inventions
of love. The boat is named, ominously,
The Good Goodbye,
and I invent other words to call you back.
I invent a magical trombone to call to your
purely invented heart,
that you would ever come back
the invention I have come most to love.
Just Saying
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind. -from Philip Larkin's "Talking In Bed"
And I converse in double negatives,
that negation of negation that is pillow talk;
that not love could unsay, but there is not still,
not silence nor anything I don't mean,
and in this rush to unclaim declension
and any part of not you, not you,
or not unkind and not untrue,
at once, at once, it is not undifficult to find
the basest reasonings of will; and here, I am,
I am not willing to say these unsimple words,
but I am also not unwilling. The hinge of or,
the sulk of not. I stare. It is not morning,
nor night either. Your back does not balk;
It has no non. It is aware. Perhaps you will not hear.
I love you.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
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