In Conversation with Suzanne Buffam
Suzanne Buffam, by Ellen Dunn |
Half-close your eyes and squint into the shadow this side of the window. There she is, in the chair across from you; she's just said something, and the pith of it is still twirling, hovering in the air.
SUSAN GILLIS: What first brought you to poetry?
SUZANNE BUFFAM: I guess, like most poets, poetry
brought me to poetry. Reading it as a child--an ancient anthology of my
father's I found lying around the house, I remember-- falling in love with the
then-to-me-opaque music of poets like Shelley and Dylan Thomas, memorizing
poems whose content escaped me almost entirely. Also, I had some great
teachers in high school. Mr. Heath, wherever you are, I hated you with
your clipboard roaming the halls and scolding me for my nail polish and
hiked-up kilt, until I took your English Lit class in grade twelve and fell in
love, through you, with Shakespeare and John Donne. What else? Heartbreak,
melancholy, boredom? "To fill a Gap--" says Emily Dickinson.
SG: Many of your poems share certain
characteristics with other, more everyday forms: the memorable aphorism, a
really good joke—the zing of truth delivered in a concise yet complex language packet
I feel I could carry around with me like a pocket stone. Is this a form you
continue to work in? What other forms are you probing?
SB: I love aphorisms. I also love Thomas
Bernhard's hilarious excoriation of them, and those who write them, in his masterpiece
of self-mockery, The Loser, which I'm reading right now:
"So-called half philosophers for nurses' night tables...those disgusting
tagalongs of philosophy who exist by the thousands...I could also say calendar
philosophers for everybody and anybody, whose sayings eventually find their way
onto the walls of every dentist's waiting room...the so-called depressing ones
are, like the so-called cheerful ones, equally disgusting..." This
made me laugh out loud, with the sting of recognition. I think it's safe
to say that my thinking still leans towards the petty, but I often find myself
feeling restless when it comes to form. For the moment, I'm working on
something longer, which is mostly in prose. Made up, mind you, of petty
units.
SG: What’s inspiring you these days?
SB: Over the past year or so, I've spent a lot of
time reading Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book--an 11th century miscellany
written from within the gates of Heian Japan--and thinking a lot about the
form, such as it is, of this unruly text. Anecdotes, descriptive
passages, etiquette tips, gossip, and of course her famous lists--all these,
and many other sub-genres, find their way into this book, and rest side by side
with no clear sense of structure (and certainly no scholarly consensus on
structure). In the work I'm doing right now, I'm hoping to find a way to
make a home, within a somewhat coherent whole, for an assortment of styles and
genres, including a lot of lists. Also, lately reading a lot of darkly
hilarious prose--along with Bernhard, lots of Lydia Davis. And watching
reruns of Louis CK, who just may be my favorite living artist today.
Suzanne Buffam is the author of two collections of poetry, Past Imperfect
(House of Anansi, 2005), winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, and The Irrationalist (Canarium / House of
Anansi, 2010), a finalist for the 2011 Griffin Prize. Born and raised in Canada, she currently lives in Chicago. Read her poem "Altered Proverbs" here.