Like An Absurd And Delicate Room
A Conversation with Lindsay Miles
OS Collaborator Lindsay Miles talks about her new digital chapbook, A Period of Non-Enforcement, available now from The Operating System.
Greetings!
Thank you for talking to us about your process today!
Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
Hello! My name is Lindsay Miles and I write and do community support work in Toronto, Canada, land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, The Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. I think one can learn a lot about a person from their stated goals so here are a few of mine: 1) to cook simple meals for people that I love on a regular basis, 2) to be radically kind and curious, 3) to be routinely identified by strangers and acquaintances as a Long-Haired Butch, and 4) to sometimes succeed in inhabiting language like an absurd and delicate room.
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
Such a difficult question! I think I’m a poet because I do not understand time and I want to swim inside moments, observing what climbs up out of them. I think I’m a poet because I’m hungry for a small measure of control. I appreciate the physical and emotional jolt of a good poem, and
I appreciate, with language, the endlessness of the project of precision.
When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?
I think I first used the words “poet” and “writer” for myself about five years ago while enrolled at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University on the West Coast of Canada. I was in the midst of several significant shifts at the time (I had recently come out), and I recall that both my sexual and literary identities worked together to solidify and situate my creative practice. They worked to ground this practice in collective and individual histories of experiment and refusal.
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway? What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
To me, a poet, writer or artist is in the business of failure. She tasks herself with a relentless series of contradictory assignments; she must simultaneously clarify and muddle. The artist must openly self-reflect. As for my own cultural and social role, I see it as nascent and, in many ways, yet-to-be-determined. That may be a cop-out, but I need more time.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?
A Period of Non-Enforcement was unusual for me in this regard. It began as one long piece of lyric prose, a kind of distracted and distractible essay. It was only later that I broke the text up, rewrote and rearranged it into a series of lyric fragments. One of my struggles, in this piece and more generally, is to trust my own curiosity, to give it sufficient space and time to be a gathering and guiding force in the work. I believe curiosity can be its own thread, supporting disparate pieces into a body of work that spins around its own logics and concerns.
Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing or making specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written / the work was being made? How or how not?
From the beginning with A Period of Non-Enforcement, I knew I wanted to write my own messy, pagan take on a prayer journal, inspired as I was by the prayer journal Flannery O’Connor wrote while at Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1940s. In this fractured text, O’Connor appears desperate, questioning openly, pining for the evaporation of everything in and around her that is not seen to be in service of a singular God. In her complexity, she cannot know. With such brazen and affecting examples of not-knowing in writing, I felt inspired to write into some of that deep doubt and mystery myself.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
There are too many people and environments to name, but: for the insertion of somatic rituals, CA Conrad; narrowing in on the materials of writing (my desk, a pen, the quality of the light), Betsy Warland; for a rigorous attention to the line, Dionne Brand; getting more and more clear, Kevin Connolly. A summer mentorship two years back with poet Heather Christle fed my love of prepositions along with long, writing-laced walks. I have a rotating cast of poems, sometimes upwards of fifty, taped to one of my bedroom walls, all in loose sequence, all in various
stages of revision. I mark up the poems in pen while taped to the wall. I take the inoperable ones down (or try to)!
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc.) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
“A period of non-enforcement” is one of the definitions of grace. I was brought to the word through this interest in the language of prayer. Of all grace’s definitions and there are several as I note in the text, “a period of non-enforcement” shared something for me with the practice of poetry, namely, the manipulation and suspension of time. I wanted the title to reflect one of poetry’s demands, which is creating and ambulating inside different arrangements of time. Generally speaking, I fear titles, struggling with their potential to prematurely define and constrict how a piece can be read. With A Period of Non-Enforcement, however, this wasn’t the case. It just fit.
What does this particular work represent to you as indicative of your method/creative practice? your history? your mission/intentions/hopes/plans?
This particular work bears some nostalgia for me. Writing my attempts at prayer represents an exercise in matrilineal inheritance, a process of connecting back to ancestral mechanisms of gratitude and acceptance. Writing these attempts represents one attempt to be well, one piece of a creative practice and intergenerational relationship to the unruly animals of self-doubt and self-loathing. I have written more than one piece that asks: what has Grandmother hidden in the language?
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?
A Period of Non-Enforcement does circular magic; it does nothing and in that way is busy constructing fragments, scenes in various states of emotional excavation. This book resembles a radio cutting in and out, attempting to hold multiple connections with self and world, the present and the past. A Period of Non-Enforcement is busy with its own limitations and puts that imperfect process on display.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
My hopes for A Period of Non-Enforcement are quite modest, namely that the book finds its way into the hands of a small group of spiritually lusty people, people hungry for more questions than they are for answers, those of eclectic and searching faiths. I hope the book can validate and encourage, in some small way for this small group of readers, those creative and spiritual practices most murky and peripheral. In terms of my own creative practice, as always, I hope to calm the chaos of my mind which is, in fact, not chaotic but remarkably patterned. So… I hope to break some of those patterns up and open with a widening array of syntactical encounters!
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social activism, in particular in what I call “Civil Rights 2.0,” which has remained immediately present all around us in the time leading up to this series’ publication. I’d be curious to hear some thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, privilege, social/cultural background, and sexuality within the community, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos.”
I think it is important that all artists, poets included, occupy a diversity of roles in terms of activism and community engagement, and I feel weary of my own attempts to excessively explicate or confine those roles. That said, I think poetry has a role to play with the introduction of alternate modes of sense, of alternate ways of attending that can work against oppressive cultural standards. Poetry can offer up possibilities of being present, of being differently and newly inside one’s body, which is itself a radical offering. When publishing across lines of systemic difference, I think this kind of alternate attending can expand our capacities to attune and listen which can, ideally, support more sentient, care-braced modes of action.
Is there anything else we should have asked, or that you want to share?
Not really! Enjoy the book! If you feel so inclined, please share it with your people.
LINDSAY MILES is among the winners of the 2017 Blodwyn Memorial Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry is Dead, Bad Nudes, Plenitude, The Maynard, Self Care for Skeptics and Emerge: The Writer’s Studio Anthology. With a Creative Writing MFA from the University of Guelph, Lindsay is the author of the chapbook, Aloha Motel. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
ABOUT THE COVER ART:
The Operating System 2019 chapbooks, in both digital and print, feature art from Heidi Reszies. The work is from a series entitled “Collected Objects & the Dead Birds I Did Not Carry Home,” which are mixed media collages with encaustic on 8 x 8 wood panel, made in 2018. Heidi writes: “This series explores objects/fragments of material culture- -how objects occupy space, and my relationship to them or to their absence.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Heidi Reszies is a poet/transdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, Virginia. Her visual art is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts CLARA Database of Women Artists. She teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and is the creator/curator of Artifact Press. Her poetry collection titled Illusory Bordersis forthcoming from The Operating System in 2019, and now available for pre-order. Her collection titled Of Water & Other Soft Constructions was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the Anhinga Press 2018 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry (forthcoming in 2019).
Find her at heidireszies.com
