Highlights - Sonnet L’Abbé - Poet, Songwriter, Editor of “Best Canadian Poetry in English”

Interviewed by Mia Funk and Abigail Gray

Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us how you entered that phonic space when you wrote Sonnet’s Shakespeare and what kind of conversations were you having with Shakespeare and with yourself when you began the book?

SONNET L'ABBÉ

The project itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean. And at the time there were conversations about appropriative poets where there were specific instances of pretty shady power dynamics around certain poets taking certain texts and presenting them as their own and saying, "This is just an appropriative poetics move, or I'm using the text simply as material and putting my name on it.

So those appropriative poetic conversations happening, and then people doing erasure poetries by blocking out and deleting were really interesting to me. And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text.

All of the critical writing was quite supportive of using the text as basically like marble, that you were carving or something like that. Just taking the poet's role as very creative, even though they were in effect destroying an original text.

So with all of that, I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian and in rooms where, classrooms where, playgrounds where, churches where, malls where certain signifiers of difference would make fitting in harder.

One tries very hard. At least I did as a child, as a teenager, to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?

One of the first songs that I wrote was - I was asked to write poetry for a little show that was Poets Respond to Music. And we were given a Pretenders album and my song was Thumbelina, and so I said, "Well, how about I respond with a song instead of a poem?" And so I wrote this song. And making decisions that are about vowel sounds and repetition was new to me because whenever I write poetry, I still do read it aloud to listen to how it sounds, but it's not quite the same as composing the sound in the moment.

You know, when we were in undergrad, gender or orientation around being bi or straight or gay was what we felt empowered to explore. And that even as a person who at that point was like, Okay, I'm a girl and find myself desiring people with penises, that means I must be straight.

Right? I wouldn't have questioned anything other than like, Well, if I have this body, and I desire that kind of body, then I am straight, but in undergrad you could still make out with a girl and be like, I'm just experimenting, but now it seems to me that the opportunity to ask oneself about one's own gender is there. And the more I learned about fluidity, the more I thought about my own relationship to the pronouns that I've grown up with, the more I was like, I think that these other pronouns really more accurately express how I've lived most of my life. So they feels deeply right for me now.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Abigail Gray with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Abigail Gray. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth.

The songs by Sonnet L’Abbé appearing in this episode Fair Fairy Tale, and Vanilla are recordings of unreleased songs, specifically prepared for this podcast.

Interviews - FEATURED

THE DIPLOMAT

Conversation with Showrunner · Creator · Head Writer
DEBORA CAHN

I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.

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Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal · Ecological Intelligence

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DUSTIN O'HALLORAN

Emmy Award-winning · Oscar-nominated Composer · Musician
1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion

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JEFFREY ROSEN

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

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BERTRAND PICCARD

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Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse

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ED ZWICK

Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
Glory · The Last Samurai · Shakespeare in Love · Thirtysomething
Author of NYTimes Bestseller Hits, Flops & Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood

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ALAN POUL

Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
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I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from.

Featured

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MICHAEL CRONIN

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Snr. Researcher · Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation

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CAMILLA HAWTHORNE

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A Black geographic perspective for me was really helpful in trying to clarify how we can simultaneously understand Blackness as a global project, that is anti-national, that transcends borders, but that also takes on really specific meanings and practices in different places, engagements with Black geographies that are looking just beyond the framework of North America.

ITA O'BRIEN

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SY MONTGOMERY & MATT PATTERSON

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ANDRE DUBUS III

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LUDOVIC SLIMAK

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This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.

PAOLA SPINOZZI

Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

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MACIEJ HEN

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According to Her · Solfatara · Segratario

I wondered who could be a better narrator of the story of Jesus than his own Jewish mother? When I was young, as a European Greco-Christian, I was aware of some of my Jewish history, but writing According to Her, I tried to imagine the story of someone considered to be a Messiah or prophet by some Jewish followers. What could be the genuine story of something that really happened or was told? This led me to write a realistic novel about how it could have been.

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Climate change gives us a chance to re-imagine the world in a way that every single human being can participate in. And so whether you're in a remote part of the United States or some other country, when you learn about climate change, it shouldn't just be the science. It should be the opportunity. –Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay·ORG

Songs of Nature

Musicians, Writers, Ecologists & Philosophers on the Mysteries of the Natural World

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BRYCE COON

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KATHLEEN ROGERS

President of EarthDay.ORG

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The Unseen Invasion of Microplastics in Our Lives

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DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR

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How do you have economic growth that is socially equitable and environmentally sustainable? It's not just that you have ecological sustainability; hence, that is sustainable development. Because lots of examples of economic, ecological, and ecologically sensitive growth need not be socially equitable. That's why this whole emphasis on just transition is not just about climate, but it's also about justice. It's about social equity in economic growth. Unlike in Europe, where there is now the call for degrowth or a circular economy, most parts of the world would look at you blankly if you talked about degrowth because they are hungry for growth. And so sustainable development is about managing these trade-offs.

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Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
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I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.

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PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

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In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

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The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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Highlights - Sonnet L’Abbé - Poet, Songwriter, Editor of “Best Canadian Poetry in English”

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