Aaron Tucker is the author of
the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los
Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of
Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines
(Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet
in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing
with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).
His current collaborative project, Loss
Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/);
he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games
into poems (http://chesspoetry.com).
Currently, he lives on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a
lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teaching
creative and academic writing. He will be beginning his doctorate as an Elia
Scholar in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University. You can
reach him atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca
How
easy was it to put together your latest collection?
My latest, Irresponsible
Mediums (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/irresponsible-mediums-the-chess-games-of-marcel-duchamp-by-aaron-tucker/),
translates the chess games of Marcel Duchamp into poems. It was built from the
work that Jody Miller and I did creating The ChessBard (chesspoetry.com),
an app that translates old chess games into poems, that also includes a
playable version. In terms of “writing” the book, since I translate, rather
than wrote, the poems of the text, it involved a lot of other types of writing:
there was the code we (mostly Jody) wrote; the 12 source poems I wrote; the
language templates I wrote; the poetic statement (http://chesspoetry.com/poetics/);
the grant applications; the social media posts promoting and explaining; the
emails to Jay and Hazel at Book*hug; the emails to Jennifer Shahade, who wrote
the excellent introduction to the collection; the emails to Derek Beaulieu to
make sure I got his own visual translations of Duchamp’s poems in the book. I
don’t think this web of writing is that unusual for any one book, but the
putting together of the disparate parts borne of that writing, all the games in
translation, the introduction, the poems was a large, exhilarating process.
By contrast, the book I’m working on now, tentatively titled Catalogue d’oiseaux after Olivier Messiaen’s solo piano piece
of the same name, involved actually writing the poetry part and not just
handing it off to my computer co-author. But in much the same ways, I did find
myself putting the different parts together: ostensively, it’s a long lyrical
poem, stitched together by travel, art, sex, birds, growing older and into love
outside your twenties, with all the events of two lives combining. While I’ve
just finished the first draft, and it’s messy, beyond messy, I was happy to
polish a small part of it from rob mclennan at above/ground for a chapbook (http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2018/04/new-from-aboveground-press-catalogue.html).
Your
first novel appeared recently. Are you able to work on poetry at all during the
composition of a novel?
I was! Typically, I’m the type of person that likes to have
parallel problems that I am working through, and most often when I shift into
the editing and revision stage of a manuscript, I find myself starting
something new to balance that a bit. So, as I moved into editing of Y (https://chbooks.com/Books/Y/Y2), a
novel about Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership at Los Alamos of the Manhattan
Project, I began to write Catalogue
d’oiseaux. For me though, I need to work steadily, daily if I can, on
things, and having two writing acts in parallel helps me to stay sane, but also
helps remind me that they are interconnected, and that the two feed each other,
mutate the other in strange and lovely ways. With Y, I think working on the poetry forced the novel, at the scale of
the book, out of a more traditional, straightforward bit of historical fiction
and into something more a-chronological and weirder; at the scale of the
sentence, of the word, the poetry work demanded a smaller focus, pushed the
sentences past a lot of their more natural breaking points, that tended to
morph the facts of Oppenheimer’s life into an amalgam of metaphor and those
facts. Likewise, editing the prose, extended the lines of my poems – they are
by far the longest, shaggiest lines I’ve written – but also encouraged me to
write one long poem, a continuing narrative, a poem closer to the scale of a
novel.
How
is the process of writing a novel different than writing a collection of
poetry?
I’m not sure if my next novel will be similar,
but Y, being historical fiction,
required a fair bit of research, ranging from biographies of Oppenheimer,
histories of the atomic bomb, writing on New Mexico, the poetry that he read
and loved, biographies of the women in his life etc. As such, I felt like I was
charging up for a much longer time, building all sorts of different images and
scenes and narratives, and mentally seeing how they might fit, then actually
planning out at least the first few chapters with broad signposts. It was work
start-and-stop than I was used to, and often the writing and editing of it
would be interrupted by my wanting to ensure the facts and timelines were
correct.
The poetry, while also involving a lot of
outside reading and thinking, in contrast, was something that poured out a
little faster, with a little less self-consciousness. I hesitate to say it was
easier, but it was definitely smoother, and I think it helped that it was all
one piece, with a series of movements, rather than a collection of parts I
would have to put together, like my previous punchlines (http://mansfieldpress.net/2015/03/punchlines-2/)
You
seem to approach poetry collections as projects. How did this process emerge?
That’s funny, yes, I hadn’t thought about it
like that. I think part of this stems from my tendency to start with big
questions and then work to answer them with some poetic gesture. For Irresponsible Mediums, it was “How can I
merge chess and poetry in some way?” For Loss
Sets (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/), an ongoing collaborative project with Jordan Scott, Namir
Ahmed and Tiffany Cheung, Jordan actually asked “Could we translate poems into
3D printed sculptures?” These lead to smaller questions, and it’s usually in
answering those smaller questions or problems that the actual work gets
produced. But I think working backwards from a large, semi-impossible looking
question, works best for me.
I think for Catalogue
d’oiseaux, the beginning question was “What would a love poem, at this
stage of my life, look like?” Looking back, I can see myself asking this
because I did want to write something that looked a little more what I used to
write, something lyrical, less conceptual and more emotional; I wanted to make
a pretty thing, rather than sort out some sort of intellectual concept.
How
important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically
assisted your development as a writer?
I have been lucky to have so many mentors and
great writers as peers, am still lucky to be able to have nourishing
conversations, often not about writing at all. In particular, I think of John
Lent, who lead my first creative writing workshop when I was in first year
at college; he taught me so much about sensitivity and kindness in reading and
writing, and then layering analysis and feedback on top of that. I was also
lucky to have Margaret Christakos as the writer-in-residence at the University
of Windsor when I was there doing my MA, and am lucky still get talk with her;
she encouraged me to look at language as operating on different levels (as
syllabus, as words, as lines, as stanzas, as poems, as books), and that poetry
can/should work on all simultaneously.
I have only recently completed a French
proficiency certificate at Ryerson, and I think my instructors over the last
few years have really taught me a lot about how language works. Once I got over
being the worst student in the room (and often having my former students in the
class, far exceeding my baby French), I found it eye opening. Sounding like a
child when speaking French, the frustration of that, pushed my writing in
English to actually be leaner, something I could have done without
understanding, in a semi-mechanical way, how a sentence works.
What
are you currently working on?
I recently finished the first draft of Catalogue d’oiseaux and am excited to
move forward with it with an editor – it needs it! I am also gathering things
for a second novel, set in Toronto and playing off the John Wayne movie The Searchers. The most immediate thing
I have been working on is a screenplay adaptation of Y. I’ve never written a
screenplay before and who knows if it will ever amount to anything, but I gave
myself the challenge and I am finding it really wild and energizing.
Can
you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?
There is a
lot of energy in Toronto right now, and it’s great to in the middle of it!
Jeff Kirby
is the saint of Knife Fork Book, and does everything there, including publishing
really lovely books. But! He’s also a great poet! (https://knifeforkbook.com)
