An interview with David Bradford

David Bradford is a founding editor of House House Press and the author of Nell Zink Is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017), Call Out (knife | fork | book, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Vallum, Poetry Is Dead, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Verdun, Qc, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, and his first book, Dream of No One but Myself, is forthcoming from Brick Books.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I started writing in the definitively solipsistic way as a lot of people do, I think—out of desperation. I wasn't one of these kids reading and writing lots (or at all) at an early age. I was 17, entering CEGEP, my first ever English school, commuting in from the farther-off suburbs on the South Shore of Montréal, feeling uniquely misunderstood, woefully under-appreciated, and generally angry and depressed, and had tons of multi-hour breaks to let all of it take me over between classes. And writing suddenly became this hyper-spacious place to grow through all that stuff and time. The way I remember settling into having faith in what writing would do for me (and in a lot of ways did do for me), was hours spent, most days of the week, at an all-day breakfast place across from the mall across from the school, and misusing words learned in a bad romanticism-and-the-novel class to scrawl on about isolation, fleeting affections and affectations, and the usual late teenage life and death stuff. Lots of beatific clouds and hermitic wanderer fantasies at my earliest. Largely misinformed by old literature I find mostly bad now, which was the only stuff being put in front of me for a while. Which is when I started sneaking around the library stacks, mostly unsuccessfully. And picking over the remaindered books table at the mall.

Happy to say my approaches, concerns and mannerisms have evolved, but what keeps me going is a bit of the same: it mostly works. It's an old adage, but writing keeps me sort of sane, as long as it's working to keep me challenged, or painfully engaged. With the way I work, every new project I'm finding I have to reach in that same desperate way for a means to cohabitate with particular impasses. Sometimes it feels like nerves fraying. Sometimes it feels like whole days, or weeks, most of a month, lost. But it always looks like dogmatically, irreversibly stubborn belief that I can make writing my means and ends, which it somehow continues to be.

Have you noticed a difference in how you approach writing now that you’ve published a couple of chapbooks? Do you feel your process of putting together a manuscript has evolved?

I think my approach is much more geared toward the project or inquiry, as opposed to the individual poem or unit, than it used to be. I think I saw that coming about in a smaller way with Call Out (k | f | b, 2017), and particularly fell into how natural it could feel to let the project tension my day-to-day writing work when I was first working intently on a first full-length book, Dream of No One but Myself, the book that The Plot (House House Press, 2018) is pulled and arranged from. If the first chapbook had a glimmer of a revelation about how I might work around the whole rather than the part, the first book was the kind of project that made that kind of process inescapable.

Now at the beginning (ish) stages of a couple of new projects, I'm realizing there's a different set of problems in my prioritizing the big over the small at every turn. I've been giving the individual bit the attention, but I need to get back to giving the smaller unit its due. I want to get back into basking in what the one-line-at-a-time tunnel vision can sometimes open up for me, at a process and project level. I want to let the smaller bit tell me its piece about what might become the bigger thing.

I think I'm starting to figure out that the kind of writer I am—like a lot of poets—every book will be figuring out how to write that book, starting from not knowing at all, studying every dead-end turn. I'm just getting started with figuring out how to engage that experience more than I let it fuck with me. 

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

A varied bunch of writers come to mind that have given me a jolt in one direction or another who I can't quite pass up namedropping: Danielle Pafunda, Heather Christle, Allison Titus, Paul Beatty, Nell Zink, Tyrone Williams, David Markson, Rachel Blau Duplessis, to name a few. Reading Fred Moten for the first time five or so years ago, particularly his poetry and lectures, got me feeling there was a place for me to start thinking about and writing poetry again, after years away from all that.

But thinking about where I've come to the last couple of years, I think about reading C.S. Giscombe, and the kind of rigorous shamble of a form he tends to prefer. That had a big impact. Same with Haryette Mullen, same with Renee Gladman. Anne Boyer, Stacey Szymaszek and Mary Ruefle's work have left a similar impression, but getting it from black folks—with Giscombe, Mullen and Gladman, especially, in such idiosyncratic ways, and in ways that so complicated black engagement with identity stuff—that was huge for me. I see how much that informed the way I tear away at form now. Something I could have used a decade and a bit ago when I was starting out.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I learned a lot about how far out my limits might be pushed, and about being an editor, from Dionne Brand, who was my teacher and advisor in the MFA program at University of Guelph. I got to see and feel what putting just enough pressure on a project could do—what rigour might come out of giving a writer big questions, problems, and projects to tackle while also giving them tons of purview to figure it out in their own way. And never more pressure than that.

You are the co-editor/founder of the chapbook publisher House House Press. Why do you feel this work is important, and what did you learn through the process?

There are some complicated answers I've given this question before, but I'm figuring out the main, main reason is by far getting stuff out there no one else can be bothered to get out there. At the outset that means Anahita Jamali Rad and I giving each of our writers somewhere to place the project, and the reassurance sometimes require to make it realer for themselves. At launch time, that means kind of ever-so-softly daring other publishers, editors and writers by just plainly following our noses, leaving the usual professionalized metrics out of it as best we can.

I don't think of the projects we put out as risky, but I was looking back at our first two seasons of titles and: not a single writer had published a poetry chapbook, and only three had ever published poetry in a journal. The endgame for us wasn't so much getting pat on the head for being bold, but just giving this stuff legs. Saying, "See, you can just print it!" And the greater part has been seeing young, weird, queer, mostly non-white poets rethinking what they do and can do, and grow the space they give themselves to be writers, particularly unusual writers.

Now we've got one writer pursuing a book-length project based on the out-of-thin-air project I developed with them. We've got another who had NEVER PUBLISHED anywhere who then started sending out to presses and has gotten a first book deal with a very well respected publisher. Successfully helping to make things happen for people we want better supported is the proof of this concept for us. I've been learning that's important enough.

What are you currently working on?

I'm trying to keep it all in my notes and in my head for a change, but I'll just say I'm working on my own off, odd attempts at decolonial pastoral poetry, and a project around my coming to terms with certain limitations of my own black radical viewpoint I need to better map, codify, and blow up. A kind of personal inquiry into and foreclosure on a "Talented Tenth" brand of intellectualism and politics, my part in both included.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I feel like half of the poets I mentioned here received next to none outside of their particular cubbyholes. Danielle Pafunda and Allison Titus I will repeat forever. But I'd add Ralph Kolewe to that list, as well as Nicole Raziya Fong and Dawn Lundy Martin, and Cecily Nicholson anywhere east of Banff.