On Writing and Returning: Interview with Liz Howard

Liz Howard is the judge for the 2022 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry. Her debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was named a Globe and Mail top 100 book. A National Magazine Award finalist, her recent work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Literary Review of Canada, Room Magazine and Best Canadian Poetry 2021. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at McGill University, University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and The Capilano Review. She is the 2022 Jake MacDonald Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg and the 2023 Shaftesbury Creative Writer-in-Residence for Victoria College (University of Toronto). She serves on the editorial board for Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.

In this interview, Canthius managing editor Amy LeBlanc talks to Liz about writing, what she returns to in her work, and the possibilities of poetry.

To learn more about Liz, follow her on Twitter @ParabolicOcelot.

Amy: Do you often collaborate with other writers? Or is writing more of a solitary venture for you?

Liz: I have sadly never collaborated with another writer at least in the traditional sense. In 2015 I wrote a recombinative poem called “prosody of the citizen” that used source material from my own journals, Mat Laporte’s chapbook Bad Infinity, Emile Benveniste's essay "Hospitality," Henri Meschonic's "Rhythm Party: A Manifesto," and text from the Minutes of the Treaty of Easton, Pennsylvania 1758. This poem was written for inclusion in the Capilano Review folio on the Rhythm Party, a gathering of poets and students at Princeton University organized by Lisa Robertson in the spring of 2014. In a sense I collaborated with these authors, or at least these specific texts. In any case even this was a solitary endeavour. I work alone in the evenings, time allowing.

Amy: You received an Honours Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Do science and poetry intersect for you?

Liz: Both of my books emerged from a process of Two-eyed seeing, where both Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and Western scientific perspectives are engaged with and represented. In my first book I pulled concepts and language from a variety of scientific fields (archaeology, astronomy, environmental science, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology) and explored the Shaking Tent, an Anishinaabe rite for obtaining beyond-human knowledge, as a model for ancestral inquiry and connection. My second book braided Anishinaabe sky knowledge with Western cosmology to examine the ongoing impacts of contact and the possibility of another world. I probably needed another year or two with that book to make that more obvious.

Amy: One of my favourite poems from Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is "A WAKE" because it describes such an interesting process of returning. Are there topics or problems you find yourself returning to in your poetry?

Liz: Returning and the tension between its inevitability (as in repetition compulsion) and impossibility (you can never step into the same river twice) is always present in my work. I’m interested generally in recursion, of inputs feeding back into themselves, and this emerges as self-reference and “re-mixing.” I find myself revolving around the intersections of different “problem spaces” such as ecology, voice and form, liberation, personal and familial history, and abjection.

Amy: What is the last poem you read that took your breath away?

Liz: There are poems in Jake Byrne’s forthcoming Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (which I am editing) that certainly did! He has this great ability to marry horror and the exquisite within the same line with lyrical flourish and impressive risk.

Looking for more content? Check out a panel interview with Canisia Lubrin, Dani Spinosa, and Meaghan Strimas on Priscila Uppal and her legacy. Of course, don’t forget to submit your poems to the Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry by November 15!