In his newest collection of poems , PhD Candidate Jay Ritchie is motivated by the possibility of a future that is fulfilling, luminous and held in common.
Shortlisted for the Quebec Writersâ Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, Listening in Many Publics is Ritchieâs fourth collection of poems, and features three long poems that are composed of individual, interlinked poems.
Characterized as a collection of poems that grapples âwith the incoherencies of modern lifeâ by Montreal Review of Books, Listening in Many Publics is both âdisparaging and optimisticâ and has been praised by his peers, such as the American poet Ocean Vuong, and Canadian poet D.M. Bradford.
We spoke to Ritchie about the inspiration behind his latest collection of poems.
Q: What inspired this latest collection of poems?
JR: The inspirations were mostly musical. Iâve always thought of the poetry collection and the album of music as analogous forms, in that they consist of individual compositions that come together as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. I love the way, on certain albums, that one song can flow directly into another while remaining distinct and wanted to see if I could do that with poetry. A poem that is also part of an adjacent poem, both discrete and connected. Thatâs how I eventually landed on the three serial poems that make up the collection, which are themselves composed of individual, interlinked poems.
Q: Your book was recently shortlisted for the QuĂ©bec Writersâ Federationâs A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. What was it like to have your work recognized in the industry and amongst your peers?
JR: It was like waking up with perfect hair. Can you imagine? You go to sleep like on any other night, and when you see yourself in the mirror in the morning, no further adjustments are needed. What I mean is that in the realm of poetry, where all work is a labour of love, public recognition is an affirmation that Iâve been doing something right. Itâs motivation to continue, to keep making space for poetry in a world where there is less and less room to do so.
Q: Listening in Many Publics uses a âcircular structure that resists linear capitalist logicsâ while also using fragmentation and a hybrid form that traverses both poetics and narrative. What inspired you to go with these stylistic choices?
JR: I encountered the circular structure while composing music to accompany the poetry. I was using a loop machine and a synthesizer with a loop function, and I thought it would be fitting for the poems to mirror this musical repetition through linguistic repetition. This led to the crown of sonnets that opens the book. (The word sonnet is derived from son, âa song, sound.â) In a crown of sonnets, the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of second sonnet, repeating until the final, fourteenth sonnet whose last line is the first line of the first sonnet. The content means to complement this form, as the sonnets are a kind of diaristic exploration of both the intractability of capitalism and the unquenchable desire to live another way. A line in one of the sonnets reads, âRivers easily ruin their borders.â This is both a critique of the militarized nation-state and a statement of fact: as one side of a river accumulates sediment the other side is eroded. The way capitalism worksâinfinite growthâis at odds with how nature works, which is oriented towards cyclicality, repetition, balance. There is no accumulation, economic or otherwise, without degradation somewhere else in the system. I thought the circular structure of a crown of sonnets could express this non-linear poetics of phenology as a living alternative to capitalist logics.
The fragmentation emerged from an erasure of a novella that I planned to put in the middle of the book. The novella, however, was a terrible piece of writing, so I took a sharpie to it, blacking out nearly all of it. I then copied the few remaining words into a document, the same way they were laid out in my blacked-out novella. These words werenât any good either, but I liked the way they fell on the page, and I liked the unexpected syntactical disjuncture that erasure generated, so I began writing poems into the resulting shapes and patterns. Through this process I found that meaning could be inversely proportional to sense, especially when I focussed on how the words sounded rather than what they said.
The hybrid form also developed from some writing I was unsatisfied with. I had written a lyric essay that ultimately wasnât very good, so I took it for a walk and rewrote poetry in the margins as I walked from Northampton to Easthampton, in western Massachusetts where I was doing my MFA. I let the prose style carry through into the new poem and ended up drawing on a katabatic conceit, this story of descending from a world above into a world below, prompted by this long walk.
Q: The poems in Listening in Many Publics are characterized as âplural, civic, and political.â How can these poems, and poetry in general, bring readers to engage in public and political discourse?
JR: One of the questions poetry is often confronted with is this question of use valueâwhat is it for? This is a political question, less about poetry than about how life is organized. When we devalue so-called ânon-usefulâ or âunproductiveâ thingsâsocializing, wandering, reading poetry, noodling on a guitarâwe devalue a precious part of our humanity. Life is wonderous and strange, and poetry allows me to connect with this understanding of life, allows me to see it and hear it and experience it. The extra step I wanted these poems to take was to simultaneously be a conduit for experiencing this wondrousness and a subjective representation of how we are systematically and materially robbed of it. So Iâd say that poetry doesnât bring readers to engage in public and political discourse, but rather that poetry is the discourse. By engaging poetry, we are making decisions about what is valuable, about how life should be lived.
Q: You are currently pursuing a PhD on the poetics of contemporary intermedia in the post 1970s shift to deindustrialization. How does your research inform your poetry?
JR: Spending time researching and thinking about art and poetry over the course of my PhD has been such a tremendous gift. When I write poetry I try to ânot think,â which allows me to draw from the well of all that I donât know I know. Since I spend my time studying poets and artists whose work I admire, I end up writingâand even livingâthrough their example. The title of this book is a perfect instance of the reciprocity between my research and my poetry: I couldnât come up with a title, so I asked my editor, Peter Gizzi, for help. He suggested the line âlistening in many publicsâ from the middle of the book, a piece of sea glass on a stony beach I couldnât see until he picked it up and put it in my hand. Once I had the title, I became aware of an intelligence in the text that outpaced me. I pursued this intelligence in a dissertation chapter on the aural poetics of intermedia from the 1980s. After writing the chapter I spent the summer doing intermedial performances with portable cassette players and field recordings, revealing a mutual causality between the research, the poetry, the performing, and the living. I donât think I would have had the guts to pursue an intermedial performance practice without the precedent revealed in my research, and I wouldnât have pursued this research without the intelligence revealed to me by the poetry. Itâs impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
Q: How have your poems resonated with readers, friends, and family?
JR: My family has been very encouraging and celebratoryâmy sisters sent me flowers on my publication day, and my aunt put a bunch of my books in Little Free Libraries this summer. Like, câmon! Iâm also lucky to have a lot of poet friends, who get it. Another strange thing about poetry, though, is itâs difficult to express how and why it resonates with you. Anything that can be said feels like it either falls short or betrays a deeper truth that remains unexpressed. So being sent a picture of the book in a readerâs hands, in the grass, opened to a page (or as a tattoo!) sounds a resonance in that place beyond language.
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Jay Ritchie is a PhD Candidate in English at ș«čúÂăÎè. A Wolfe Fellow in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Faculty of Arts, his research has also been funded by a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and the ș«čúÂăÎè Institute for the Study of Canada. He has published critical work in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and creative work has appeared in Maisonneuve, SAND, The Malahat Review, on CBC Radio One, and at the PHI Centre. His first poetry collection was published with Coach House Books in 2017. Visit him online at jayritchie.org.