酷我-北美枫

[anna]

Kate Cayley is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. Her first collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End, was recently published by Brick Books and was named one of the season’s best collections by The Globe and Mail. She is a playwright in residence at Tarragon Theatre, and her play, After Akhmatova, was produced there in 2011. She is the artistic director of Stranger Theatre, and has co-created, directed and written eight plays with the company. She has also written a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror (Annick Press), which won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. Her poems and short stories have appeared in literary magazines across the country, and her first collection of short fiction, How You Were Born, will be published next fall. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two children.

Here is one of Kate’s poems.

Zola, Bravest of Leonardo’s Apprentices, Leaps from the Tower of San Francesco, Wearing his Master’s Wings


At night, my master dreams time and heaven.
I, his apprentice, dream nothing.

I am the mirror that gives him back, the sigh
breathed into his mouth at night, youth
that saves him from his age.
I am salvation. The angel beating
copper wings.

My body, strong as woven reeds, built
to remember his body when it is dust.
A splinter of memory lodged
under my heart, my shoulder blades, where now
the wings sprout madly, tied with silk, the harness
casing my skin, woven chrysalis. I leaped, I flew.

There was a moment of lift. I thought
I could veer left or right, soar between spires
past the reds and blues of cathedral windows, leave
the cracked ground. Leave him,
an old glitter-eyed man who imagines
luridly, carnally, all he cannot do himself.

Then I fell. Clutching at time, I went down.
A crunch of bones,
stone. Earth had the last word.

I did not die. He held my head, he prayed
for me, I sucked my life back
through his mouth,
his sigh saved me for my age.

Now we are even.


Kate and I both were invited to 2013 BookFest Windsor at University of Windsor. We had a panel discussion about allusion in our poetry. I was interested in her view of poetry and other writings, so I invited her for the interview. The following are her answers to my interview.

1. Your first book was a novel and you are a playwright. Now your first collection of poetry “When This World Comes to an End” was published, what is the difference for you in writing plays and poetry, which is more difficult?

I’ve been thinking lately that they are very similar! I used to feel that poetry was a reflective space, whereas drama was always a forward motion, a rush of action and argument rather than meditation. But now they seem much closer to me—both are about compression, economy, a cutting away of language to find a stern and precise impulse. Though the big difference is that poetry is extremely private for me—I imagine the reader as a single person in a room, much like myself, and that I speak to them directly, whereas of course in playwrighting you envision (and experience) an audience, a collective eye and mind. I think that’s why I often find playwrighting much more difficult—the process of development and production, and the audience, are all so crowded. It’s hard to judge what is your own impulse as a writer and what is coming from outside pressure (which is a gift and a good thing, but not always.)

2. When did you start writing and why?

I have been writing sporadically and un-seriously all my life. But I didn’t realize that I would need to give it proper time and craft and make it a focus until I was well into my twenties. That work of being serious is ongoing. I don’t know if I can point to a time or moment when I knew “this was it.”

Why: flip answer is I am not good at anything else. Less flip answer is that it is the only way I have found to make sense of the world, so I better do it.
1. When did you get your first poem published? When did you first know that you would become a writer?

In The Antigonish Review in 2005. Bless them. I was so proud.

I didn’t know coherently that I was going to be a writer. I came to writing slowly, starting as a theatre director, and it was more something I realized I was than something I thought I was going to be.

2. Who are some of the poets you admire?

In no particular order: Stephanie Bolster, Steven Price, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Atwood, recently James Pollock, Jan Zwicky, Audre Lorde, Paul Celan, W. H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, Mary Oliver, some of Sylvia Plath if she wasn’t such a monster, Wole Soyinka, Zbigniew Herbert, Keats, Shelley, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova.

3. The title of your latest book “When This World Comes to an End” sounds very serious? What is it about?

It’s from a folksong: “oh there’ll be signs and wonders/when this world comes to an end,” which is in turn from the bible. I wanted it to be taken in at least two ways. Both the end of the world in a literal and religious sense, and more broadly, all endings—a period in history, a life, a country, a love affair.

4. Some people say that all writing is autobiographical. What is your view of your writing? Is it autobiographical?

Never. Not at all. I admire people who can mine their own lives to good effect, but I just can’t. I’m at my most humourless and boring when writing about myself, so I try to avoid it. Of course I have my themes, my obsessions, the things I can’t get rid of, and in that sense writing is autobiography I suppose. But not literally, for me.

5. What’s next for you?

I’m working on a play, The Bakelite Masterpiece, for Tarragon Theatre, which is in development at the moment. It’s about art forgery and war crimes. My first collection of short stories, How You Were Born, is coming out next fall with Pedlar Press. And I’m just starting work on a play for Zuppa Theatre in Halifax, very loosely based on Goethe’s poem The Erl King.
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

Kate Cayley is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. Her first collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End, was recently published by Brick Books and was named one of the season’s best collections by The Globe and Mail. She is a playwright in residence at Tarragon Theatre, and her play, After Akhmatova, was produced there in 2011. She is the artistic director of Stranger Theatre, and has co-created, directed and written eight plays with the company. She has also written a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror (Annick Press), which won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. Her poems and short stories have appeared in literary magazines across the country, and her first collection of short fiction, How You Were Born, will be published next fall. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two children.

Here is one of Kate’s poems.

Zola, Bravest of Leonardo’s Apprentices, Leaps from the Tower of San Francesco, Wearing his Master’s Wings


At night, my master dreams time and heaven.
I, his apprentice, dream nothing.

I am the mirror that gives him back, the sigh
breathed into his mouth at night, youth
that saves him from his age.
I am salvation. The angel beating
copper wings.

My body, strong as woven reeds, built
to remember his body when it is dust.
A splinter of memory lodged
under my heart, my shoulder blades, where now
the wings sprout madly, tied with silk, the harness
casing my skin, woven chrysalis. I leaped, I flew.

There was a moment of lift. I thought
I could veer left or right, soar between spires
past the reds and blues of cathedral windows, leave
the cracked ground. Leave him,
an old glitter-eyed man who imagines
luridly, carnally, all he cannot do himself.

Then I fell. Clutching at time, I went down.
A crunch of bones,
stone. Earth had the last word.

I did not die. He held my head, he prayed
for me, I sucked my life back
through his mouth,
his sigh saved me for my age.

Now we are even.


Kate and I both were invited to 2013 BookFest Windsor at University of Windsor. We had a panel discussion about allusion in our poetry. I was interested in her view of poetry and other writings, so I invited her for the interview. The following are her answers to my interview.

1. Your first book was a novel and you are a playwright. Now your first collection of poetry “When This World Comes to an End” was published, what is the difference for you in writing plays and poetry, which is more difficult?

I’ve been thinking lately that they are very similar! I used to feel that poetry was a reflective space, whereas drama was always a forward motion, a rush of action and argument rather than meditation. But now they seem much closer to me—both are about compression, economy, a cutting away of language to find a stern and precise impulse. Though the big difference is that poetry is extremely private for me—I imagine the reader as a single person in a room, much like myself, and that I speak to them directly, whereas of course in playwrighting you envision (and experience) an audience, a collective eye and mind. I think that’s why I often find playwrighting much more difficult—the process of development and production, and the audience, are all so crowded. It’s hard to judge what is your own impulse as a writer and what is coming from outside pressure (which is a gift and a good thing, but not always.)

2. When did you start writing and why?

I have been writing sporadically and un-seriously all my life. But I didn’t realize that I would need to give it proper time and craft and make it a focus until I was well into my twenties. That work of being serious is ongoing. I don’t know if I can point to a time or moment when I knew “this was it.”

Why: flip answer is I am not good at anything else. Less flip answer is that it is the only way I have found to make sense of the world, so I better do it.
1. When did you get your first poem published? When did you first know that you would become a writer?

In The Antigonish Review in 2005. Bless them. I was so proud.

I didn’t know coherently that I was going to be a writer. I came to writing slowly, starting as a theatre director, and it was more something I realized I was than something I thought I was going to be.

2. Who are some of the poets you admire?

In no particular order: Stephanie Bolster, Steven Price, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Atwood, recently James Pollock, Jan Zwicky, Audre Lorde, Paul Celan, W. H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, Mary Oliver, some of Sylvia Plath if she wasn’t such a monster, Wole Soyinka, Zbigniew Herbert, Keats, Shelley, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova.

3. The title of your latest book “When This World Comes to an End” sounds very serious? What is it about?

It’s from a folksong: “oh there’ll be signs and wonders/when this world comes to an end,” which is in turn from the bible. I wanted it to be taken in at least two ways. Both the end of the world in a literal and religious sense, and more broadly, all endings—a period in history, a life, a country, a love affair.

4. Some people say that all writing is autobiographical. What is your view of your writing? Is it autobiographical?

Never. Not at all. I admire people who can mine their own lives to good effect, but I just can’t. I’m at my most humourless and boring when writing about myself, so I try to avoid it. Of course I have my themes, my obsessions, the things I can’t get rid of, and in that sense writing is autobiography I suppose. But not literally, for me.

5. What’s next for you?

I’m working on a play, The Bakelite Masterpiece, for Tarragon Theatre, which is in development at the moment. It’s about art forgery and war crimes. My first collection of short stories, How You Were Born, is coming out next fall with Pedlar Press. And I’m just starting work on a play for Zuppa Theatre in Halifax, very loosely based on Goethe’s poem The Erl King.
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com