Karen Solie Expands the Canadian Landscape, Time, and More in New Interview

Toronto-based poet Karen Solie is interviewed at The Rumpus, causing us much delight. Solie is author of, most recently,  The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). Daniel Fraser begins the conversation by asking about a tension in Solie's poems: the relationship between nature and human life. "I suspect that separating the natural from the 'man-made' has allowed us to distance ourselves, to neglect the implications of our technology, to compartmentalize our responsibility," says Solie. A further excerpt:

Rumpus: To expand this further, I wanted to ask about the way time works in your poems, which often seem to conjoin a kind of instantaneous temporality with an expansive, almost geological sense of time. Do you see this shift between registers as a vital component of your work?

Solie: That’s a generous interpretation! I do enjoy working in different registers—tonal, rhetorical, metaphorical, musical, I suppose, if these are even different things. Sometimes I err on the side of enjoying it too much. But it feels closer to what thinking is like. No one thinks wholly in the abstract or wholly in particulars, wholly in terms of the immediate or the expanse. My language reservoir gets runoff from my religious upbringing, regional vernacular, work jargon, advertising, sports commentary, music, writing, each place I live. Everyone draws from their own. So I guess it is a vital component in that, for me, it’s more accurate to lived life.

Rumpus: How does this connect to the sense of place in your poems? The expansive landscape of Canada often seems to bring with it a feeling of geographical displacement and liminality.

Solie: I hesitate to generalize about the effects of the Canadian landscape, or of landscape, period. A sense of place in any landscape has to do with one’s experience of it, which involves history, demographic factors, events, inclinations. And that sense of a place evolves—should, I think—as times change and one learns more. Liminality, displacement, are not about where you are, necessarily, but how you are, and how you are apprehended and treated by those who put themselves at the center. I grew up in rural southwest Saskatchewan, and as a grandchild of immigrant settlers, as white, Catholic, working class, I was pretty much the same as everyone else. If certain experiences pushed me toward the edges of that particular community, to become largely an observer, this did not diminish the larger privileges of being at the center. It may have complicated them, but it didn’t negate them.

As I learned more about the history of the place I still think of as home, which is in fact on the traditional lands of the Plains Cree, my identifications were necessarily complicated. It was only after moving away to work, and then to go to university—where I met young people who talked about their “gap year,” who’d read Camus and Whitman in high school, and who said things like “You haven’t been to Paris? You must go!”—that I realized what I’d thought of as the center of the world was not. I met people for whom growing up in the country was a bucolic fantasy...

Read the full interview at The Rumpus.