An Interview with Kaie Kellough
An online exclusive
By Joel Deshaye
Kaie Kellough is a bilingual poet, editor, educator, and performer in Montréal. He has performed solo and with jazz accompaniment from coast to coast and is currently recording spoken word with jazz arrangements. His most recent project is his book, Maple Leaf Rag, which will be published by Arbeiter Ring Press in Winnipeg this spring.
Joel Deshaye: You published your book Lettricity with Cumulus Press in Montréal in 2004. Were you publishing in magazines or recording and broadcasting your work as spoken word before the book came out?
Kaie Kellough: – This is an interesting question because it touches on how artists get their work out to the public. When I first became interested in publishing my writing, I submitted to magazines across Canada. The experience was trying. Periodicals got back to me several months after I’d sent my submission. If they published the work it might appear in another four, six, nine, or 12 months. Periodicals had their literary preferences and priorities, and these priorities often coincided with the circles in which the editors moved. Some magazines offered such finicky, petulant submission guidelines that I wondered whether they were actively trying to discourage submissions.
J.D.: They probably were. They get so many….
K.K.: Performance was different. Its results were instant. At a reading or a spoken word event, my writing could be exposed to between five and 100 people. I could get immediate feedback, and I could meet publishers, editors, radio personalities, musicians [and] other writers who would encourage me and inquire about collaboration.
J.D.: That’s what Leonard Cohen did: lots of readings (also with jazz accompaniment in his early years) and very few publications in journals. He helped to make poetry really popular. How much do you think that spoken word is doing for the popularity of written poetry?
K.K.: I don’t know how others feel, but seeing spoken word makes me want to read.
I think there are many people who gravitate toward spoken word because it is performance: sound, movement, body and voice. There are people who enjoy spoken word because they can experience the poem in ways other than what the page allows. The written poem represents one part of the overall performance. Unlike a performer, the written work can’t observe your reactions, note that your attention seems to be wandering, and adjust its tone and volume to pull you back. The book remains aloof.
J.D.: Lettricity has a lot of photos of urban spaces that contrast with the text. There’s graffiti but also an à louer [for rent] sign, a spiral staircase and transfer tickets for the bus and metro. You’re interested in the politics of urban space. What are you saying about how text and the sound of poetry fit into the city?
K.K.: When I first moved to Montréal (in the fall of 1998), I would ride the metro and hop off at randomly selected stations. I remember getting off at Papineau because it sounded like Papillon, and going all the way out East to Cadillac simply because it was called Cadillac. I felt that when moving through the city–and this could apply to any city–a person who is interested and attentive reads his or her surroundings. This implies a kind of urban language that is made up of the city’s shapes and sounds and varied experiences. I wanted to include the city in the book, so that the reader could experience this sense of ‘reading’ the city.
J.D.: Your style is bebop-inflected, especially when you perform your poetry. Were you listening to other poets who were borrowing rhythms from bebop, or were you mainly getting your style straight from the music?
K.K.: I liked Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker for their rapid flurries of notes that sometimes challenged coherence but were fascinating for precisely those reasons. I loved the sense of unpredictability that they nurtured–a listener never knew where they would take a particular melody. Dizzy and Bird never failed to surprise me. I wanted to write that way. I wanted to challenge coherence with odd patterns of vowel and consonant sounds, by breaking up words and aggressively forcing the sound and rhythm to the fore of the poem, so that the “sense” of the poem was almost overwhelmed by the suggestion of sound. I also wanted to give the impression of spontaneity and improvisation, which is very difficult to do, because the written word (as I write it) is edited obsessively, and is anything but improvised or spontaneous.
J.D.: Are there poems in your book that can’t be performed in your style? I guess I’m wondering if you have poems for the page and poems for the voice that can’t always be for both. Would you ever want to publish everything online where text and sound can be manipulated together?
K.K.: The only poems I can’t perform are the ones that are too long. I like brevity. I may perform a section or two of a long poem, but I try to keep each performed poem under four minutes, otherwise it becomes too tedious.
My process has always been this: I write the poem first. When I am writing it I am writing it to be read off a page or a screen. The poem is first and foremost a literary contraption. The second stage is the adaptation to voice and to performance. A cadence is discovered, repetitions and sound-effects and other devices are inserted, a structure is created for the delivery, so the performed poem will seem very different from the written poem.
I’d love to publish online in a way that could include text, images and sound. I’d also like to try layering the voices. When a poet is on stage he or she only has one voice. I’d like to have two or three or four voices at once.
At Montréal’s Blue Metropolis Lit festival, I was in an event that combined words, voice, and an online interface. Johannes Auer, a text-and-tech artist from Stuttgart devised a way of using an algorithm to manipulate 64 adjectives and nouns selected from Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Audience members could step up to terminals and type in their own words too, and these words would be churned through the algorithm. What resulted was a text that was composed on the spot. I was interpreting the text as it was being projected onto a large screen. The event was simultaneously being filmed and broadcast online.
J.D.: What can you tell us about your next book? I’m especially curious about how it’s going to be different from Lettricity.
K.K.: My latest book of poems is titled Maple Leaf Rag, after the famous ragtime tune composed by Scott Joplin. It is more economical that Lettricity, and its focus moves beyond Montréal to New Orleans, Calgary, Vancouver, Birmingham (England), Philadelphia. The collection experiments with different types of writing (prose poems, blues, written scores for spoken-word poems that involve rapid rhythmic spelling)… overall the collection is more directed in its exploration of different types of writing. I found that I was able to say what I wanted more succinctly in this collection.