THE POET LAUREATE PODCAST
Neil Surkan: Season 2 Episode 6

Empties, Tenderness, and the Poem as a Space of Attention

Links

Neil Surkan — official website
neilsurkan.com

Empties — Neil Surkan
Empties

Neil Surkan — Poet Laureate of Nanaimo
City of Nanaimo: Poet Laureate

Haus of Owl: Creation Lab
Haus of Owl

“Time to Apologize to Your Mother”

[Neil reads “Time to Apologize to Your Mother.”]

KYEREN:
Welcome to The Poet Laureate Podcast, a space for poetry and presence. The poem is listening.

I’m Kyeren Regehr, and we’re recording at Haus of Owl: Creation Lab in Victoria, BC, on lək̓ʷəŋən homelands. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

We just heard “Time to Apologize to Your Mother” by Neil Surkan, the Poet Laureate of Nanaimo.

Welcome, Neil, and thank you for being here.

NEIL:
Thanks for having me. It’s such an honour and a delight, and great to be with you again.

KYEREN:
Thank you. Yes, it is great to be with you again too.

We just heard that poem for the first time. How did it arrive for you?

NEIL:
This poem is mostly true to life, but, like a lot of my poems, it travels as a collage of different instances that are brought into contact with one another.

There actually is a palimpsestic boulder outside of Keremeos, BC, and I at least think those cliff sides look tear-streaked when I’m driving by. But the impetus really was that I was headed to the Banff Centre to do a residency, and I had never noticed before this very threatening little red sign on the side of the road that said, “No stopping at any time.”

For some reason—maybe you find this too—a phrasing just got latched in there.

KYEREN:
Right.

NEIL:
And a couple of weeks later, really near the end of the residency, this poem kind of tumbled out in all of its parts. Then, through a bunch of teasing and revision, it felt like it was in the place I wanted it to be.

KYEREN:
Do you find that happens with your poetry—that you get a moment of inspiration and then it kind of gestates before it comes out? Or do you have other ways that poems come to you?

NEIL:
I tend to find that I’m quite retroactive in my inspiration. Six months later, six years later, a memory will just kind of appear alongside a palette of other images or things that are starting to swirl together. It’s out of those kinds of contact points that something new and surprising seems to jump off the page, or jump into focus or into the spotlight.

I love that phrasing—it seems to be applied most of the time to sports, where someone will say, “Oh, I didn’t know you had it in you.” But I say that to myself all the time. I didn’t know that these coalescent moments had actually maintained their place in my—I don’t know—my neurological network, and now, much later, they’ve kind of popped their heads up.

So for a poem like this, it was the little red sign that took centre stage in that moment. But the apology in question, the millions of times, it feels like, that I’ve driven past that boulder—they all kind of jumped into contact in that second.

KYEREN:
Do you mind if I go further with that? How do you know when a poem’s arriving? Is it a rhythmical pressure, or is it an image? Does it alter? Does it vary?

NEIL:
I have no idea how to replicate the feeling of a poem that is properly beginning. And I wish I could.

I think it’s actually that desire to maintain some kind of normalcy around a poem’s arrival, and the fact that I keep failing to do so, that fascinates me about this art form. I just relentlessly fail to make the feeling come back.

I recognize it as this kind of bewildering little rush in the sternum or something like that, like a little flame, and always this moment of surprise that something has come together, or that a word has appeared in a new way, or that things have become accentuated differently than I had appreciated them in the past.

But I have no control over when those moments happen. In the times when there’s a drought, the grief is very profound, at least for me. And the question of, “Will it ever happen again?” makes it even more savoury when another line starts to grab my attention.

It tends to be a line. It tends to be an image.

I also have weird lingering similes on scraps of paper around the house, and sometimes finding the other part, or the other half of the simile, is the project or the process. So just beginning with like or beginning with as—and then being like, “Like what?”—and waiting to see when it will come.

KYEREN:
Oh, that’s fabulous. Thank you.

In your new collection, Empties, you gather around emptiness in such an evocative way. There’s absence, residue, aftermath, the emptied-out or left-behind. What first drew you to that constellation of meanings? Did it kind of come together like those similes?

NEIL:
Yeah. I would actually say it’s perhaps analogous. A book project, for me, vaults into focus. The bookends of a project are like an envelope of time where I got really obsessed with one word or phrase.

For my first book, this idea of On High and mixing together psychedelics, faith, vantage points, solitude—how do these pieces come together?

For my second book, Unbecoming, it was: “Oh, weird, this idea of transformation, becoming away from the way that I was raised,” or something like that. That sustained a book project.

And in the case of Empties, it was this first poem titled “Empties” that got me dreaming about all of the possibilities that coalesce between draining oneself for the sake of another, or letting oneself relinquish control or autonomy for the sake of another—specifically around parenthood, I think, in that case.

KYEREN:
Yes.

NEIL:
But on the other side, there’s this feeling of being drained, or feeling like a discarded entity or something like that. And that kind of raggedness or bewilderment at the state of the world is in counterpoint to this desire to look to the future, really for the first time in my life.

So these two sides of empties—the feeling of emptiness, the act of emptying out—seemed to create some sort of tension between them.

And then, for me, the hook of the book was that I started to reflect on the fact that only a discarded entity like the can or the bottle—specifically the bottle, when blown into—can make a song.

So this idea of song beginning from a space of emptiness was kind of what propelled the book forward.

Again, I don’t know how to recreate that feeling of the next time a book will begin. But for all three of the books that I’ve published, the eponymous poem came first, and then all of the aftershocks were what generated the momentum for the rest of the collection.

KYEREN:
I think it was a Poetry in Voice interview, and you were talking about poems as nesting dolls.

NEIL:
Mm-hmm.

KYEREN:
So it seems like this is a theme for you, in the way that you’ve got this initial poem arriving, and then the other poems nest within it.

NEIL:
Yeah, totally. I like to think of my books mostly as an envelope of time containing the poems that were generated by my idiosyncratic brain—as we all have, you know? My own ways of interacting with the world or texturing language.

It’s not like, “Oh, this book has a timestamp,” or something like that. It’s more that suddenly those nesting dolls managed to produce a certain number of poems, and then, from those, I scoop out the ones that felt like they were most relational.

Because there have to be misfires and there have to be risks, and of course there have to be so many failures.

KYEREN:
Yes.

NEIL:
But even then, I always tell my students this, and I live by this principle: I never discard a draft that’s not working. I’ll work it sometimes to death and then put it in that folder.

And the death folder is actually quite generative for future poems, even if it’s just a line, or an enjambment, or a particularly snarky remark or something like that.

KYEREN:
Something that lingers.

NEIL:
Yeah, that lingering. Or it’s something to return to years after, and be surprised by something that just didn’t arrive properly the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time, and so on.

KYEREN:
And so when you have your folder of poems, do you find that when you’re shaping your book, you write extra poems?

NEIL:
Oh yeah, for sure.

To me, one of the greatest treats of being a poet is spreading out the entire manuscript for the first time.

KYEREN:
Oh God, I love it. Yes.

NEIL:
And just putting it on the furniture. Every poem is there, and I’m kind of arranging things.

I like to, performatively—I only do it once per book, so I’ve done it three times—I spelunk around in the book, put on a little headlamp and just spotlight—

KYEREN:
Oh, do you really?

NEIL:
Yeah. It’s almost as a joke, but there’s a joy in that sense of arrangement, and then just starting to swirl or swish the poems together and noticing which ones just can’t find their place in a given collection.

I’m not someone who saves the poems that don’t survive in the collection for another project. They’re the ones that go back into that drafts folder for future rearrangement or reconstruction.

KYEREN:
Right. Amazing. It’s so lovely to hear your process.

NEIL:
It’s a weird one, I guess.

The last thing I’ll say—and this is, I guess, an intimation, but in podcast form, so now it’s in the world—I do write on a typewriter. And it’s like a millennial thing, probably.

KYEREN:
What, a real typewriter?

NEIL:
Yeah. Like an actual clunk, clunk, clunk. I always have.

I can type really fast, so writing by hand, I can’t rewrite as quickly as I would like to. And were I to work on a screen that was connected to the internet, I’ve tended to find that in the moments where I feel like the writing is painful—for instance, I just shared a poem that I find painful to read, and it was painful to write—if I had been on the internet at that time, I would have started shopping on Facebook Marketplace in the middle of it.

It’s almost without even being aware of how quickly I’ll start to distract myself.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
So the typewriter is so sufficient for that reason. And it also makes it so I can mechanically work really quickly, draft after draft.

I’ll write seven, eight, nine, ten drafts in a row. Every time they come off the spool, I’ll edit by hand with a pencil and then go back in.

So I kind of am my own tiny printing press for a morning.

KYEREN:
Wow. It’s so Ginsbergian.

NEIL:
I guess so, yeah.

But it’s such a delight to have everything contained in one place and have a physical thesaurus, a physical dictionary—

KYEREN:
Yeah, I like those.

NEIL:
—and then my notes. I print everything off. I like to be disconnected in those moments of solitude and reflection and creation.

KYEREN:
Amazing. Oh, it’s just wonderful to hear that. So inspiring.

I bet people are going on Facebook Marketplace for a typewriter now.

NEIL:
Oh no. Now I’ve created a bubble.

Honestly, they’re such strange machines. I bemoan the fact that we’re at this time in the world where similarity is so important in our tech. Typewriters are just so peculiar in the way that they were manufactured to look unique on a person’s table. There’s such a joy in that.

I don’t collect them or anything like that, but when I bump into a nice one, sometimes there’s a swap.

KYEREN:
Oh.

NEIL:
Yeah, that happens, and a new one takes over the desk.

KYEREN:
So is it a mechanical or electric typewriter?

NEIL:
Oh no, a mechanical one.

KYEREN:
Oh, and it’s even mechanical. It’s not even electric.

NEIL:
Yeah.

And I know it’s also in my genes, I guess, because when my grandfather passed, we were going through his things. He had very few things at the end of his life, and one of the things he had saved for a really long time was a typewriter that he’d purchased for five dollars at a garage sale.

It was unused, but I know he saw it and felt that similar connection to this one machine. It has this fake wood on it, this wood grain.

I could just imagine him picking it up and being like, “Someday I may need this.”

And it’s true. I did.

KYEREN:
You did. You needed it.

NEIL:
But much, much later, yeah. I wrote a couple of books on that typewriter.

KYEREN:
Wow. That’s incredible. Thank you so much for sharing your process.

NEIL:
Thanks for letting me share it. I do feel bashful. It’s embarrassing. I feel bashful that I work in such a kind of cliché way.

KYEREN:
Really? Oh, so few people work like that anymore. I mean, if you reach back, sure. But nowadays it’s novel.

NEIL:
Yeah. I definitely feel like it gets an eye roll in terms of, “Oh, you’re into poetry? Oh, you work on this thing.”

KYEREN:
Oh no, I’m delighted.

NEIL:
It’s like, “You betcha I do.” And I’m leaning into it, because it’s just such a lovely way to think through a process.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

So Neil, I’ve noticed that your poems often create this uncanny feeling where the ordinary suddenly becomes strange or newly visible. And I came across your beautiful phrase about poems making the world feel more precious.

I’ve been thinking about these things, and I want to know what you think about poetry in terms of it altering perception.

NEIL:
Thanks for that question.

I tend to think of the poem as one’s best language, or one’s best attempt. And this idea of the attempt is so important, I think, in the poem itself—the fact that reception is potentially going to be way off what one meant to articulate in a work, and playing with just the failures that can come from trying to perfectly encapsulate something.

But that desire to perfectly capture something novel or bewildering, on the level of the line, is something that I think poetry uniquely gives us access to—or just to really play with the limits of articulation or the limits of emphasis.

The poem is always related to sensation and then also to provisionality. This idea of the provisional really persists throughout my work, and the ephemeral also.

I think that fits our world right now, where a lot of the grief I feel is that things feel terrifyingly impermanent and susceptible to such massive changes, for which I have very little agency to protect the ones I love from those kinds of impending dooms, I guess I would say.

And the poem becomes like a tiny, ragged little space, or a ragged little capsule, that is trying to fend off that hopelessness.

KYEREN:
Oh, that’s beautifully put. Thank you.

Do you have a practice of editing, or some sort of steady practice each day?

NEIL:
When I’m at my healthiest and best, I like to write first thing every morning.

That time sometimes just generates a line or two. And the hope is always not to make something feel more permanent than it ought to be at the draft phase. So actually leaving endings, or leaving lines a little bit ragged, so I can return to them with, quote-unquote, “fresh eyes” the next day—or fresh ears the next day—is part of that practice as well.

But it is a steady kind of routine.

That tends to get disrupted right now because parenthood and my teaching practice sometimes compete with that really quiet space first thing in the morning.

And I’m also a notoriously bad sleep practitioner. I like to stay up late and then feel a little bit dazed in the morning because of that.

So all of those elements combined—maybe that contributes a little bit to the recursive qualities of the poems, in that they are these gradual accruals.

I actually don’t know who said this. I have it in a notebook. It may be a total lie. But fifteen years ago, I remember maybe a professor saying that Sylvia Plath never started a new poem without finishing the one on the table.

Whether or not that is true—I actually kind of doubt that it’s true. I can’t imagine it—I tend to live that way, where I like to attempt to finish something, even if it gets discarded at the end.

So, one project at a time.

And again, in the present, where I tend to find that my attention is splayed across a number of different surfaces at once, working on a poem that way actually becomes kind of a recourse against this feeling of genuine scatterbrainedness—being really distributed unevenly across a number of different projects.

The poem becomes a space that I’m just picking at, working through, and then, because of the typewriting, reworking and rewriting over and over and over again until something starts to feel—it’s risky—but starts to feel true, at least to me.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

You spoke about parenting. I’m wondering how parenting has altered your relationship to time and attention and language. Has it changed the conditions under which poems arrive for you?

NEIL:
Yeah, totally.

I’m extremely inspired by the way that my son interacts with the world. My son Edi is just about seven, and there are these phrasings—and also these devastating questions—that come up and sometimes serve as real inspiration for my own defamiliarization with the world, which I think is an important place to begin a poem from a lot of the time.

KYEREN:
Really interesting.

NEIL:
His questions, the things that he notices, kind of slink in—or else throw me off enough that I want to work through what he said in my own time.

On the flip side, yesterday I was trying to do some writing, and Edi was trying to listen to this podcast called Greeking Out, which is about Greek mythology. It was wonderful, but it was bleeding through the wall.

So there’s something to be given and something to take from trying to strike that balance.

For the most part, though, feeling so astonished by my hope that he will exceed my life, and that he will have his own experiences that are beyond what I could imagine, is, I think, a really helpful position for me as a poet—especially thinking about this idea of how my language is received, and for whom or to whom I’m trying to write or speak or craft.

So he’s definitely thrown things in a new direction for me, one that I honestly didn’t anticipate until he was born and interacting with his own world, you know?

KYEREN:
Yeah, yeah.

You know, speaking about that tenderness we feel for our children, I’m remembering your chapbook Their Queer Tenderness. And thinking about tenderness in a culture that often rewards irony and speed and hardness—what does tenderness make possible in a poem?

NEIL:
I think I’ve been able to track that in my own body of work. It’s strange to say, but given that this is the third book, I can go back and read those first poems and love that man who was writing them, but also notice different affinities, or different vulnerabilities, that I was willing to portray.

An emphasis on wit was really important to me in my first book—this idea of trying to be laser-sharp all the time.

And it wasn’t really until I started thinking about my own queerness in relation to poetry and where I grew up. I grew up in the Okanagan.

KYEREN:
Yes.

NEIL:
My high school was a hockey academy.

KYEREN:
Oh, okay.

NEIL:
So there’s a particular kind of masculinity, and a kind of bravado and closed-heartedness, that was necessary for survival.

And so this idea of queer tenderness in particular really is thinking about how much I cherish the queer people in my life, and the queer friendships and relationships in my life, because I just have so much admiration for the courage to be oneself.

For me, it feels like it was hard-won, or it took a long time to come to that reckoning with myself as a bisexual person.

I think a poem is a good place to house those ambivalences and those moments of wonder and care and fear also.

So that chapbook, Their Queer Tenderness, when it came out, was also kind of my coming out in a way. On the page, anyway.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm.

NEIL:
Originally, that book was going to be called Desire Path. At the same time, I believe a collection was coming out from a Vancouver-based poet—I can’t remember their name—called Desire Path.

So my publisher and my dear friend Kirby called me up and said, “How about Their Queer Tenderness?”

And I remember the world snapping into place, and also feeling really—

KYEREN:
Wow.

NEIL:
—threatened for a moment, or frightened, to have it be on the cover in that way.

I think it was one of the best decisions I ever made, to accept that recommendation from Kirby.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
So I’ve kind of tracked away from your initial question, with apologies.

KYEREN:
No, it’s fine. No.

NEIL:
But this work with tenderness in the poem is a really hard-won space of intimation, at least for me, and I revel in those chances to take those risks.

I recognize all the privilege I have to take those risks in the place where I live—to feel destabilized but safe to do so.

I think the poem becomes a really important vehicle for that exploration.

KYEREN:
Yeah. Gorgeously said. Thank you.

You have other chapbooks too. I think you have three chapbooks?

NEIL:
Four.

KYEREN:
Four?

NEIL:
Four, yeah.

KYEREN:
Yeah, four chapbooks. Four.

So I’m curious about your movement between full-length collections and chapbooks. And also, you’ve written long poems and very little poems.

When do you move into a longer form, like a long poem? When do you know a chapbook is sort of emerging, as opposed to a full-length collection?

NEIL:
I’ve always treated the chapbook almost like an EP. I love EPs. I love these almost sample packs, or these first forays into an experience or an attempt. That’s how I’ve always thought about that form of writing.

And Lisa Robertson, one time in a seminar I was in, said that the chapbook is part of a friendship economy. It’s something that we exchange with other poets.

KYEREN:
Oh, gorgeous.

NEIL:
So the chapbook as a testing ground has always been how I’ve thought of it.

And then recalibrating the poems that have appeared in the chapbook, for the most part, into the next collection is a process that I really like—seeing it almost become soluble in the context of the larger work.

KYEREN:
Oh.

NEIL:
So that’s how I’ve always treated them.

Now, for this latest collection, Empties, there are two chapbooks that kind of dispersed into it.

One of those chapbooks is a procedural poem called Die Workbook. It was a book-length poem that kind of generates itself by rolling dice.

That chapbook really stood on its own, and it wasn’t until I was right at the end of this manuscript, trying to figure out how everything would relate together, that this idea of relinquishing control seemed to be a good place to moor the collection—or to end the collection.

So Die Workbook appears at the end in a slightly reconfigured form.

KYEREN:
Oh, amazing.

NEIL:
But for the most part, the EP just kind of gives you that. And it’s also my way of testing the waters and seeing how these poems are being received and how they sit in the world.

It’s been such a joy to work with chapbook presses. I’ve had two chapbooks out with knife | fork | book, and I think they’re so beautifully designed. I feel overwhelmed by the craft that went into creating them.

My first-ever chapbook with Anstruther Press was kind of the moment where I felt like I was a poet for the first time.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And working with everyone on staff there was just amazing, and Jim Johnstone encouraging that book along—it was really huge to me.

KYEREN:
Amazing.

And what about the long-poem form?

NEIL:
Long poems—I always write them in parts, and I like this idea of a faceted kind of procedure.

But I adore book-length poems. I love encountering longer works in that way.

I don’t know how to do it myself yet, but just this idea of sustained engagement, and the magic of having something go on for months…

It usually arrives as six or seven pages, but months of work, just really dreaming about this one project, have been some of the greatest, most joyful periods of my life.

KYEREN:
Yeah. Because you have some long poems—or at least one long poem—in Empties, yes?

NEIL:
Yeah, that’s right.

The long poem “Vessel,” I would say, is kind of one of the centrepieces of the collection.

It just started one day, and then three or four months later, I popped my head out of the water and it was there. Or it was mostly there.

And then I started sharing it with trusted readers and friends and seeing how it would sit on the page.

Long poems require more attention from the reader in a way that I want to be really careful about, because I’m so grateful for anyone encountering my work.

So those moments of reprieve, or working in parts, have always been one of the ways I’ve tried to accommodate for the fact that sitting down to read a long poem takes a lot of cherished time.

KYEREN:
Yeah. So you’re allowing for breath and space with those sections.

NEIL:
Mm-hmm.

I have no way of really—the forms kind of choose themselves over time.

KYEREN:
Yes.

NEIL:
Or something in me chooses the forms that I’m not able to access.

But in the moments where something longer is beginning, I’ve always been really bewildered by its emergence, or its occurrence.

KYEREN:
Wow. Like you don’t know where it came from, and it’s like—

NEIL:
Yeah. I can’t believe it’s ongoing.

KYEREN:
When you’re writing a poem that’s longer, do you have a sense of the end, or are you kind of blind?

NEIL:
Oh no, definitely not. It’s definitely eyes closed—

KYEREN:
Stumbling around.

NEIL:
—feeling forward. And then suddenly, that final moment when it arrives becomes, in itself, its own reprieve or its own kind of moment of astonishment for me.

In you asking this question, I’m thinking—I don’t know, maybe I’ve written six long poems that I’ve published in my life—and I can remember where I was at the end of each of them.

KYEREN:
You can?

NEIL:
And when the final line came, kind of jumping up and fervently sipping some coffee, and having a little walk around, and being like, “Hmm. Is this it?”

Because for each of them it was such a prolonged process that letting go of it was also almost a grief.

And it’s exhilarating at the same time. It’s like, “Oh, it’s over now.”

KYEREN:
So Neil, reading aloud seems important to your work. I’m thinking back to what you said about reading your initial poem, and how it was difficult for you.

I want to know about your practice of reading aloud—in public, in private—how those things differ, how they speak to your work.

And also, if you have something that’s difficult, how do you arrive at an audience with that difficult work? How do you protect yourself emotionally? How does that come into the world?

NEIL:
Thanks for this question.

I think, when I’m writing, that my voice in my head coheres with how the poem is going to feel when it’s embodied.

And the moments where I’m incorrect about how something sounds in the air, or how something feels on my tongue, or travelling through my larynx, or whatever it might be—when I catch myself off guard and it’s the case that I actually wasn’t accurately conveying how the melody was going to feel from the page into a room—I love those moments.

Those are, again, those problems of reception, and they often begin in my own body.

So this idea of my mind being certain that a line will sculpt in the room a certain way, and then it betrays me, or it slinks out the side of my mouth, or I get tangled on something, or it rhymes more than I intended—I love those moments of surprise.

That has happened a couple of times reading in public as well, reading a new poem.

There was one time where I realized with shock that something still rhymed more than I had thought it did.

KYEREN:
Oh wow.

NEIL:
And going into the microphone, all of a sudden I was, at that time, horrified. The melody was much more hammered in than I’d expected.

There was another time where I was reading, and a poem that I thought was incredibly sad was actually quite humorous to people in the audience. When they laughed, I was blown away.

But I also revelled in that moment of displaced reception, or my own perception of how others would experience my work.

So those possibilities of interaction—I’m open to them, I guess, when I’m reading.

On the flip side, though, I prefer not to go in really shelled up before I read. I’m sometimes caught off guard by moments where I feel emotional again about something that I wrote years previously, or that I thought I had worked through in writing the poem, or worked through in conversation, or—I don’t know—through meditation, yoga, friendship, therapy.

Those recurrences of grief that are captured in the lines are also a part of this genre, I think.

Those historical hurts or vulnerabilities or moments of tenderness can suddenly rear their heads again in the present.

I try not to shun those or to protect myself from them, with varying results. But it’s okay, I think.

I think it’s important sometimes to cry with strangers at a reading.

KYEREN:
So you’ve done that.

NEIL:
Yeah. That comes up.

I want to say occasionally, but I would say quite frequently, honestly.

Something will catch me off guard, and it’s something about the timbre of the room and the people who are there.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And this feeling of feeling heard, or like people are going with me to a certain place—that’s such an act of generosity that it will sometimes just bowl me over.

Also, the first time I launched a book—I was launching On High in Vancouver—I was really nervous and frightened.

And then, as soon as the first reader began, I was so moved by their work that I had, of course, that reminder that the reason I love this genre and I love this art form and I love this community is because I’m also an avid listener and an avid reader.

Being reminded that it’s not just unilateral, and that—

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
—at any event, at any time, I could be really struck by the words of a peer, or someone I admire who doesn’t know me at all.

Those opportunities or possibilities are endlessly exciting.

And that’s really where my enthusiasm for writing often begins: the fact that there are so many other wonderful poets who’ve had a hand in changing the way that I feel in the world because of the way that they language their own thinking, or the way that they’ve worded their own experiences.

Golly. That’s the best. It’s the best part of the poem, for me.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm.

NEIL:
It’s just the work that others are doing, and how bottomlessly exhilarating others are with their experiences.

KYEREN:
That’s really well said. Wow.

I feel and hear the emotional vulnerability in your work, but you also have formal control, and those things are working so beautifully in unison.

How do you know when a poem needs structure or restraint, and when it needs permission to loosen or fracture?

NEIL:
Thanks.

I honestly don’t know if I know a lot of the time, as much as it just suddenly creates a kind of ambivalence or ambiguity that seems like it gives that energy of falling down the page.

I love Ben Lerner’s definition of poems as “events in language.”

So this beginning and the ending, and how we get to that ending, and how that silence also, of course, doubles with one’s death—the end of sound, or the end of the breath in the line, the end of the words—is something that I’ve always taken up with a feeling of responsibility, I think.

But at the same time, the structures that we inherit, and the traditions in this genre that we can reject or take on or renovate or redeploy—I love those parts of being a poet, and thinking through how I can try to make my own space in, say, the sonnet, or a line that is quite alliterative or accentual in its metre.

So just playing with those elements, but then also letting there be these moments of flummoxed awkwardness, I think, is definitely central to my own style.

KYEREN:
Flummoxed awkwardness.

NEIL:
Yeah. This feeling of being a little bit in a tangle, and how frankness or vulnerability can also interplay there, or how one can tumble into meaning or tumble into a thought.

Lately I’ve been really into breaking words in half with enjambment, almost letting things feel even more snapped into place.

I don’t know if that’s going to go anywhere, but I’ve been liking seeing how more disruption can create a feeling of immediacy or intimacy in the poem.

KYEREN:
Oh, interesting.

NEIL:
Yeah.

For me, it’s always been—what’s a good example? That Matthew Walsh book, These Are Not the Potatoes of My Youth, has some of the most radical enjambments, and I think about them all the time because of how exhilarating it was to be surprised line by line, and to really not know where the next intimation was coming from, or where the next speech act was going to be deployed, and how it was going to hit in my own body or my own experiences.

Those moments are so inspiring to me, when something can vault toward the end of the page and then careen into something new.

It’s very exciting.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And then, again, to hear a reader or a poet read their work aloud, and to notice that they treat those enjambments or those moments of caesura totally differently than I read them—or the way that I read them aloud to someone I love—it just adds to the depth and the possibility that happens when we’re together in this community.

KYEREN:
Yeah. The private experience of a poem on the page can be so different from its public iteration.

NEIL:
Yeah. I love hearing poets read. I love being caught off guard by their affect.

The pandemic was horrible in most ways, but something I still think about is how many Zoom readings I attended and how many poets’ houses I suddenly saw.

I saw people’s kitchens. I saw people’s bookshelves as they were reading. And that suddenly domestic element of the immediacy of a poet’s work, and how they saw themselves, or what they thought was the best thing to wear to a Zoom launch—whether they felt they needed to dress up or deliberately dress down.

These aesthetic concerns somehow get bound up in the reading of work that, of course, was painstakingly brought to life.

So it continues to affect me and inspire my work going forward—that there are so many facets, and that performance creates another well to fall into.

KYEREN:
To swim around in for a while.

NEIL:
Right. And then hopefully climb out of, of course.

KYEREN:
You’ve also spoken about being obsessed with music before poetry. You’ve played in bands and written songs.

Do you still feel music moving beneath your poems? What’s the relationship now between lyric poetry and song for you?

NEIL:
Short answer: not as much of a relationship as I would maybe hope for.

And the reason is that the more time passes, the more I’m just totally confused about how good lyrics work.

Something about performance and song and melody in relation to rhythm seems to demand a kind of frankness in the line, and a confidence around that frankness, that I actually personally don’t possess.

So the records I love—if I were to look at some of the lyrics on the page, perhaps I would be critical about them.

But the reality is that when they’re sung, the whole world changes.

KYEREN:
It’s amazing.

I think the only person I can really think of is Leonard Cohen, right?

NEIL:
Yeah. Totally. Yes, absolutely.

KYEREN:
His lyrics ring on the page as well as in the air.

NEIL:
Yes. Yeah, for sure.

And, no shade with this, but when I see song lyrics published in book form, I’m not interested in the least to dive in, because I love them in the format they were originally intended for.

I was thinking about that even on my drive down here. I was listening to ANOHNI’s great record, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm.

NEIL:
And a lot of the time it’s her repetition of a line of lament, or a line of joy, or a line that pangs in a certain way, that makes it land differently. Whereas, were it repeated visually on the page itself, I don’t know if I would be that compelled to engage as deeply as I felt it—tapping on the steering wheel and watching rain hit the windshield at the same time, you know?

So for me, I’m totally confused at this point.

But I do get to write little pop songs with my son.

KYEREN:
Aw.

NEIL:
And he tends to be the lyricist.

Again, these are these moments of frankness and confidence that I personally can’t replicate. But his phrasings are so wonderful and weird.

He has a song about bedbugs that we recently worked on, and it’s just a really good punk song.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And I could never have come up with it, because there needed to be that freedom from an attempt to control, I think, that I love in poems.

I love the fact that I fail to control things in the poem, but I give it a good, earnest try before publication. Everything’s tapped down as best I can, or it’s snicked into the right place.

With performance and song, there has to be something a little more harried, or something a little bit weirder getting into the mix. And it’s the best.

It’s just not something I understand anymore.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And maybe it was because I was young, when I was really into playing in bands, that I thought I could understand it. Because that’s a certain kind of confidence that I just don’t possess anymore, for better or worse.

KYEREN:
The shifts in life.

NEIL:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And uncertainty is so central—self-reflexivity in the poem. The poem is just such a good place, I think, as an art form, to doubt, and then to overcome that doubt or to be shocked by relinquishment.

And I personally am not super into it when a performer is so self-reflexive that they appear to be more obsessed with their own delivery than the way it’s making us feel, right?

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
But the poem can kind of undercut that in, I think, an interesting way.

KYEREN:
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. You’re right.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Neil. Would you please read your next poem?

And listeners, this season of The Poet Laureate Podcast is unfolding as a kind of unique audio-first publication. Each featured poet brings a brand-new poem into the world, first in sound, shared here in voice.

So this is a brand-new poem by Neil Surkan.

“Frame”

[Neil reads “Frame,” a new audio-first poem set in Powell River.]

KYEREN:
Thank you so much, Neil. That was gorgeous.

NEIL:
Thank you, Kyeren.

KYEREN:
You teach English at VIU, so you’re living inside literature not only as a writer, but as someone guiding students through language and attention and interpretation.

What’s the relationship between your teaching life and your writing life?

NEIL:
It’s fun to get to think about the trickiness of that dynamic in a form like this, where I get to talk to a fellow poet about such conundrums.

What I’ve honestly found to be the case most of the time is that, in terms of what we’re working with as a literature professor in particular, I’m endlessly caught off guard by the questions my students ask about a given poem or a given work that we’re focusing on in an English class.

I love having a new facet brought to a text that I feel generally pretty confident about by the time I’m arriving in the classroom.

KYEREN:
Right.

NEIL:
So that relentless possibility of being surprised as a professor is, I think, a true joy. And it suits poetry really well—just getting asked a question that I have to maybe tumble back to solitude before I can really work through it. That happens very frequently.

Being open to having my mind changed by my students is also, I think, really conducive to writing.

On the flip side, I’m a very introverted person, and I get my energy from moments of quiet, and then getting to return with exhilaration to report back to my partner and my son and all of my community and relations about the things that I got to think, or things I got to see or do or experience.

And I do find that writing poems comes from a similar repository in the body as doing the kinds of extroverted acrobatics—the extroverted parts of teaching, and managing different dynamics in the classroom, and keeping things on track, for what it’s worth.

I tend to find myself getting a little bit burnt out from trying to balance the two of them around the middle of the semester. But I’ve also taught for long enough now that I know those moments of reprieve will come, whether they’re through the reading break or a residency on the horizon, or even just in my office before class, making sure to take time to savour what we’re going to talk about, and maybe sneaking my own poems in, or the poets that I’m reading, before I go into the classroom.

KYEREN:
Right. So you’re protecting the private, unfinished space of making your poems from the classroom?

NEIL:
Mm-hmm.

I also get to teach sessionally sometimes as a creative writing instructor at VIU.

KYEREN:
Oh, fun.

NEIL:
And that’s an area that gets really tricky, because I feel so overjoyed to be talking about this art form that I love so much, and yet at the same time it means reading a lot of poems by others on a timeline, which can sometimes kind of co-opt or take over my own voice.

So I’m still working through how to maintain those boundaries.

It’s the best to have my mind changed by the writing of others, and my students’ writing often does that. But reading with a certain kind of attention that is also that of someone who is going to assess the writing, for better or worse, does seem to pull from a well that is certainly not infinite in my own psyche.

I’m just trying to give myself permission to get obsessed with teaching when that’s necessary, or when the opportunity affords itself—to really sink in there.

And then likewise, in the times when I’m not teaching, to really be protective of that time to be creative, and also to be a little bit more associative rather than structured and logistical in ways that I think a good instructor has to be.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm. Definitely.

And you’re also the current Poet Laureate of Nanaimo.

NEIL:
Yeah, that’s true.

KYEREN:
What did it mean to step into that civic role at this particular moment? I mean, not just in your career, but in this city and in this cultural climate?

NEIL:
I applied for that role because I felt like I was hitting a juncture in my life where I really wanted to uphold the arts in a way that I’ve benefited from the stewardship in the arts of so many of my colleagues and peers and friends and predecessors.

I felt a lot of responsibility in terms of applying myself in similar ways, and also rising to the challenge of really talking about—or emphasizing, I guess—the way that poetry can enrich not only one’s own life, but also the life of a community.

So, more than anything, I wanted to see if I was up for that challenge, and to really emphasize the place of the poem in my neighbours’ lives, or in the broader community’s life or series of multitudinous relations.

I’ve really focused on this time as a time of curation—a time of offering prompts or possibilities or opportunities or workshops—as much as it is contributing my own voice to try to articulate what I’m seeing happening in the community.

It’s just been so fun to read my neighbours’ work. And I say “neighbours” specifically—Nanaimo’s a pretty small city, relatively, you know?

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And just getting to know the other writers in town and getting to celebrate their work has filled me with zeal.

I feel so taken aback by a lot of that work, and by the willingness to be courageous and to share that I see in so many of my peers and neighbours.

KYEREN:
Neil, what makes poetry community feel genuinely alive to you?

NEIL:
For me, the poem is a unique space of attention, and it demands our attention in a certain way.

I’ve had these really amazing experiences, especially as laureate leading workshops, where after we’ve savoured a poem together and talked about its effects and its affects and its different facets, we’ve taken time to write together.

And there’s something about just being silent but creative with people who perhaps one has met for the first time. I’m not really aware of other places where we do such a thing.

KYEREN:
Right.

NEIL:
And take those risks.

That’s something I’ve been reminded of over and over again in this role as laureate specifically: a healthy community of writers or poets is one where we feel safe to take those risks together.

Not that there’s some sort of demand to produce something publishable, or even to produce something that we’ll share at the end, but to actually just hold space to be affected by the words of others or by our own imaginations.

That’s been one element of this role that I’ve especially cherished, and carried with me into the weeks thereafter—those moments where we write together in silence.

And on the flip side, having poets from outside of the community come in, I think, is a really important part of being a writer and having a healthy writing community.

KYEREN:
Yeah, absolutely.

NEIL:
So I’ve started curating a reading series with that in mind, and also trying to open up spaces where we get to meet one another, or celebrate the arts in intentional and maybe novel ways.

KYEREN:
Yeah. So tell me about what it is that you’ve been doing. I know that you have the Poetry in the Harbour series.

NEIL:
Yeah.

One of the things I proposed in my application to be Poet Laureate was a reading series that would be consistent and that would bring Nanaimo-based poets into relation with poets who are visiting from outside of the city.

It’s been such a wonderful journey to do that active curation.

I don’t do it on my own. I’m supported by Jamie-Brett Sine, so we do that work together. But I get to invite the poets and to kind of craft those nights together.

Especially post-COVID, where so many reading spaces closed down or drastically changed, I just think it’s really important that we have zones that, as poets, we can look forward to visiting, and interacting with the writers who are in a given place.

I think geography does matter. And thinking about history and context in relation to land becomes more complicated and exciting, and, I think, open to change when we are inviting others into that space as well.

KYEREN:
Yeah. Yes.

NEIL:
So that’s been part of it.

The other thing I really want to say about curating Poetry in the Harbour is that the first time I was getting ready to host, the great poet Susan Alexander was coming over from Bowen Island.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm.

NEIL:
And in preparation, a couple of days before the reading, I realized that I should probably say something about the point of poetry, or why we’re doing this.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And I’d never taken that risk before—to really talk about the place of the poem in the life of a community, or to put myself on the spot to say something in my own words about why I thought it was important for us to be there together.

For me personally, that was a life-changing moment.

So now I always do a little kind of prologue to the reading where we talk about a given theme, whether it’s that poetry can increase our sense of attention around the language that we use, or poetry can change the way that we think about our relationships to, say, darkness—or moments where we feel like there isn’t any light to look toward.

So just taking a couple of minutes at the beginning to invite everyone in, to arrive there, and also to stake a claim on why the poem might be something we can rely on or turn to in these turbulent times has been challenging and intimidating, but also really rewarding.

And I’m hoping—I can’t say for sure—but I’m hoping that my neighbours and community members perhaps feel empowered to also spread that word of how these moments of attending to language can be life-changing, life-saving.

KYEREN:
Yeah. Healing.

NEIL:
Healing.

KYEREN:
Healing.

NEIL:
Yeah. Healing.

KYEREN:
Amazing.

Neil, has becoming Poet Laureate changed the scale at which you think about poetry—from the private page to a more civic or communal ecology?

NEIL:
Not at the moment of writing. And I have tried.

I’m not good at writing occasional poems, and I’m not good at writing—

KYEREN:
God.

NEIL:
—poems that comment on anything.

But often I’ll get a request to write a poem about a given theme or for a specific purpose, and it’s a really funny kind of boundary to negotiate around how I’m going to meet that prompt or that request while also holding space for the poem to become unfamiliar and to slip away, or to go into an area that I wasn’t expecting.

So I still try to keep my writing practice free in the imagination in that way, even though sometimes I write with a different sense of responsibility.

I’d say the thing that’s changed more than anything is probably the editing stage.

KYEREN:
Right.

NEIL:
But the actual moment of creation, I try to keep untouched by the responsibilities that are brought up with this new post.

KYEREN:
So you’re not thinking about audience? You’re not thinking about—

NEIL:
Not at first. Not until I start to shape or sculpt things, or to revise.

Because otherwise, if I think about audience first, my go-to response is to be like, “Well, what do y’all think?” I want to know. I’m like, “Let’s be here together,” rather than tell anyone how to think or how to be together.

I hope that’s satisfactory to the folks in Nanaimo who are encountering my work, but it still comes from that kind of space of intimation.

Then it’s more a consideration of how those intimations are going to become a meeting place. Before I submit things, I ask myself those bigger questions.

KYEREN:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Many poets eventually become community stewards almost by accident—you know, teacher, organizer, editor, mentor, host.

How do you balance protecting your own creative life while also giving so much energy outwards?

NEIL:
I’m not good with deadlines, but I like having deadlines—even artificial ones—because they sometimes give that little bit of a catalyst. Or at least they take over my dreaming life or something like that.

Just having something imminent in the books is one way that I’ve managed it, because I’ve found that right now so much of my life is outward-facing that the times where I get to just be in solitude and reflective have become really precious to me.

So trying to protect those, while also being good with my logistics so that I can be free inside of the structures that may feel tiny in terms of creation time, has been a tactic I’ve taken on.

I would love to do more residencies. The last residency I did was at the Banff Centre, and it took me a long time to sink into that space. But I gave myself permission to let that be kind of a cumbersome process—settling into that solitude again.

KYEREN:
How long were you there for?

NEIL:
I was there for, I guess, twelve days or something like that.

KYEREN:
Okay. So one of the summer writers residencies.

NEIL:
Mm-hmm.

And that was a time that I still think back to. It felt like a routine I had as a graduate student or something like that, where the most important thing was to write and to read.

And so I’m curious about whether I can turn, on days where it works, a Saturday into that space.

And also, again, the early morning becomes that cherished time where shreds of dreams are starting to manifest on the page and things get kind of weird, you know.

That, for me, is the beginning of a lot of my projects.

KYEREN:
Right. That’s very cool.

You know, we’re in such a fragmented, accelerated cultural moment. We’ve spoken about that today. You’ve spoken about that today.

How do you see poetry sitting right now in attention and community—in people’s actual lives?

NEIL:
I think maybe we’re at an interesting moment, or a turn in the road, where people seem really interested in poems, even if they feel like they aren’t for them, or that they don’t belong in the space of poetry.

That’s been my experience a lot of the time in curating events.

Every time I’m at a reading and someone winds up there who didn’t expect to be moved or affected by what’s happening in a room where poems are being read…

I think that the more central the poem can be to a community’s life—or these spaces where we share poetry—the more those who think poems are not for them may find that it’s actually in those times when we struggle to perfectly articulate what we mean, or where we’re really hitting that wall, trying to communicate to one another something we’re passionate about or care about, that the poem is beginning.

I’ve felt so much joy and hope and optimism in the spaces where people are gathering in the name of poetry, around poetry.

And it’s shocking to me how differently I feel about the world when I’m in a space on social media, or anything that is being curated in a media sense.

I tend to find that my face-to-face interactions in the world are very contrary to the way I’m led to believe the world is right now when I’m online specifically.

And so I think the poem can be like a little space of refreshment—a place where we salvage our good intentions with one another and our care for one another.

My hope is that those spaces continue to grow and to dilate and to become new and strange and wonderful.

Of course, with the awareness that sometimes those spaces are not available, and that expressions of outrage can also be poems, and should be poems.

KYEREN:
Yeah.

NEIL:
And those spaces of grief and bewilderment can also be a space, as you’ve said, for healing. So those counterpoints are there.

But I choose to be optimistic about the generosity of the people around me, and the community I’ve come to know and love differently in my role as Laureate especially, and in the classroom and with my students.

But realizing that, macroscopically, it feels like outrage is the only way forward a lot of the time—I’m still struggling to figure out how to make the transition between the spaces I know, and the people I’m around and the way that they express their hurt there, as opposed to the broader scope and the stranger encounters that we have on social media or things like that.

I don’t know if that makes sense.

KYEREN:
Yeah, no, it totally makes sense.

And has your sense of poetry’s role changed over time?

NEIL:
Yes and no.

I still love quiet lyric moments of intimation, and I’m drawn to books like that. But the more I encounter poets who understand how to talk about disparity and troubling power dynamics, the more I’m inspired by that kind of louder voice in the poem, I would say—or the yell as opposed to the intimation.

I’m still working through what that might mean for my own work, but I make a point of really upholding those voices and those poets in the classrooms that I get to teach in, and also in the rooms where I get to curate or welcome others in.

So recognizing that curation and teaching can be really welcome and important counterpoints to the moments of intimation that I cherish when I get to write them in my own work.

KYEREN:
Yes. Yes.

Neil, in this podcast, we’re often returning to listening—not just to poems, but to each other.

What does it mean to you to listen deeply, and how has your relationship to listening changed through writing, teaching, parenthood?

NEIL:
I think, at base, the act of listening is an openness to being changed.

I think about that as a definition of conversation a lot of the time, especially as opposed to polemic or dialogue—this willingness to be changed, right?

And I think the poem opens that possibility up.

But in all of these kinds of outward-facing roles—again, perhaps it’s annoying to folks who come to events or show up in my classroom—but I really am interested in hearing what others think as much as contributing my own thoughts.

I realize there are times where it’s important for me to say what I think, and I do that.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

NEIL:
But I love being changed by the words of the people around me, and recognizing the courage and the vulnerability it sometimes takes to share those meaningful moments that can change the lives of others—whether on the page, or in any kind of space where we’re using language to move each other.

KYEREN:
Yeah. It seems to be easier for people to agree or to disagree rather than just listen and open and find the place where what’s being said changes them.

But you seem to be an embodiment of that.

NEIL:
Oh, that’s kind. That’s really kind.

And it makes me feel bashful and—

KYEREN:
Aw.

NEIL:
—also hopeful.

To me, it’s funny that the poem, as an art form, is often seen as one of the most alienating ones, or the one that is the most exclusive.

Often my students will be like, “I like all kinds of—I like to read everything except for poetry. I don’t get that.”

I just think that being caught off guard, being surprised, being confused—these are such wonderful, productive substrates for something new to grow from.

KYEREN:
Yeah. They’re good for the mind.

NEIL:
They’re so good for the mind and for the heart.

KYEREN:
And the heart.

NEIL:
Yeah. For the heart.

And so catching those limits of understanding has been one of the greatest thrills of being a writer, and getting to teach alongside writing.

KYEREN:
Oh, I’m so glad that you’re a teacher as well as a writer.

NEIL:
Thank you.

KYEREN:
I’m just—I’m so glad you’re out there. It makes me very happy. Gives me hope.

Is there something about poetry or creative life that you wish people asked you?

NEIL:
Yeah, I guess so.

The one thing I love to talk about any chance I get is the other writers that I’m reading.

KYEREN:
Yeah, tell me who you’re reading.

NEIL:
And that must be so annoying to people sometimes, but it’s just—

KYEREN:
No, no. I want to hear.

NEIL:
I love talking about the books that have been moving me.

Ronna Bloom’s new book, In a Riptide, has just blown me away. I’m so amazed by that book.

KYEREN:
Fantastic.

NEIL:
I can’t stop sending people screenshots of it, and I’m reading it to anyone in the vicinity. So that’s been a wonder.

Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things changed my life and continues to unsettle me. Even just memories of reading that book are so wonderful.

Victoria Chang, in With My Back to the World, has this poem called “Today,” in the middle, that is one of the most wonderful and painful grief poems I’ve ever read.

So those are some books that I’ve been keeping close of late and just feeling endlessly astonished by.

I also just got to teach, again for the second time in a classroom, Campbell McGrath’s poem “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium,” which is thinking about climate change and climate collapse in the space of New York.

KYEREN:
Oh.

NEIL:
And there’s this central moment in the poem where the speaker just lists all the possible things that other people could be doing at this time in the city, in this little slice of time.

KYEREN:
Right.

NEIL:
It’s this immense list of activities, and something about it just made my skin tingle—thinking about the multitude of different hopes and dreams and aspirations around us at any given moment.

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm.

NEIL:
And moments of despair and grief and revelation.

That’s a poem that I’ve been keeping close too.

KYEREN:
Yeah. You return to grief again and again.

NEIL:
Well, I think we’re all kind of living there, right?

KYEREN:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. But I’m really grateful that you’re naming it.

NEIL:
I think the poem is such a great place to accompany us in our grief.

Especially reading the way that others grieve and the things they are grieving, I think, opens us up to a different kind of tenderness.

KYEREN:
Yeah. There’s tenderness again.

NEIL:
Tenderness is back.

KYEREN:
Tenderness is back.

Neil, now that Empties is entering the world, what threshold are you standing at? Is there a new form or question or terrain that’s beginning to call you?

NEIL:
Maybe.

But right now, because I’m launching this book so much, I’ve been finding that I really want to hold space this time to savour the fact that it was a long road to get here.

I remember my second book being published during the pandemic and kind of vaulting immediately into this collection. And that was maybe why there was a lot of stopping and starting before the book really felt like it was firing on all cylinders.

I love that cliché.

KYEREN:
They work.

NEIL:
Yeah, this is a good one.

And so, at this time, I’m just imagining writing another book of poems and feeling like that’s impossible—and loving that feeling.

How expansive the time from here to whenever, or if ever, that will happen is going to feel, and how it’s going to be, and how much it’s going to involve revising and casting things aside, and giving up and trying again, and risking—all the risking involved in publishing especially.

So I’m actually just trying to hold a little bit of space for that.

That said, yeah, I’m working on poems, of course. But they still kind of sound like they could go in Empties, so I’m waiting for that next change to come or to become clear.

And the tactic I tend to take in trying to open up that space is just to read widely, and to read with an eye and an ear for things that surprise me.

KYEREN:
And the one that you just read us today, that we’re honoured to feature on the podcast—that still feels to you like Empties?

NEIL:
That poem does feel more like it sits on its own.

I guess because it’s an elegy, and it felt time- or space-specific for that reason.

KYEREN:
Right.

NEIL:
Yeah, honestly, that poem does feel like maybe it’s doing something new.

KYEREN:
Yeah. It feels a little different in terms of how the lines sit and—

NEIL:
Okay.

KYEREN:
—they feel a little more spacious. That’s how I’ve been perceiving it.

NEIL:
And so I’m curious if that’s where things will go, or if this poem will be something that just—I guess, which fits with this idea of trying to traverse an ocean in a boat with no sides.

Maybe it will sink, or maybe it will get there in its own way.

KYEREN:
Yeah. Fabulous.

Thank you so much, Neil, for sharing your work today, and for just being so tender and open and forthcoming with your life around poetry.

Again, we gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Neil’s biography can be found on the podcast website and in the show notes, and books by Neil Surkan can be found or ordered through your local independent bookstores.

If this episode meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need poetry today.

Neil, would you leave us with a final poem, please?

NEIL:
I’d be honoured to.

Before I read this, I just want to say again, thank you for having me.

KYEREN:
Oh.

NEIL:
It was such an honour to be here.

KYEREN:
Such an honour for me too.

NEIL:
And just a delight. It’s always so refreshing to get to talk about poems with a poet that I admire.

So I’m really grateful to be here with you, Kyeren.

KYEREN:
Thank you. Thank you, Neil. It’s been such a pleasure.

“Limits”

[Neil reads “Limits.”]