Jeff Latosik is the Trillium Award winning-author of Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, published by Insomniac Press. Today, Project Bookmark Canada will unveil a plaque for Latosik's poem "Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School" along the footpath on the east end of Mississauga Valleys Park behind the Valleys Senior Public School and near the intersection of Central Parkway East and Bloor Street in Mississauga, as part of Ontario: Read It Here.
Before the event, Jeff told the Ontario: Read It Here team about the place, the poem and his feelings about reading and writing--here in Ontario, and everywhere.
When did you write “Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School”? How long did it take?
I wrote it in 2007. I don't remember exactly, but probably a few days.
What inspired it?
The poem riffs on the familiar motif of finding things in fields (think Jeffrey finding the ear in "Blue Velvet") but inverts that to describe finding fields in other things. So, it's a poem about scale but also about internal experience -- how perception and emphasis change our relationship to what is perceived. In this way "a little scar on your neighbour's forehead" can become "a field." That's how inner life works: the same proportions of scale that are restrictive in the physical world (you can't walk across a field in the same time it takes you to walk across your room) don't apply in mental life. A tiny scar can be a field depending on how you attend to it. This strikes, to me, at the blessing and burden of having a mind.
What does Mississauga mean to you?
I'm not sure. It's where I grew up. I like malls. I like hydro towers. That probably couldn't have happened if I didn't grow up in a place like Mississauga. Other people don't like those things but I do. I like the band "Tears for Fears" because I spent a lot of time in Pharmacies and Zellers and that was the song that played (among others... I don't mean to paint some Kafka-like nightmare for non-fans).
Why did you choose it for this poem?
I don't write consciously in this way. I suppose it's because I spent a lot of time there.
What is your favourite place to write in Ontario?
Poetry is very portable and I think what that means for me is that I don't have a favourite place. I write on the subway. I write in cafes. I write in my room. The locus of it all is my desk. I made sure to buy a nice desk.
What is your favourite place to read in Ontario?
I suppose wherever the book is good.
Other than your own, what poem do you most closely associate with a place in
this province?
Dennis Lee's "400: Coming Home" makes me think of the long stretch of highway that connects everything here. It's the opening poem of Civil Elegies. That book took place in a larger sea change in Ontario, I think, where people were becoming more and more able to write poems set in Toronto. But the poem is all about the highway and how it weaves the urban and rural.
Is there a book and/or poem that you feel really defines Ontario for you?
No. It's too big and it's history is too diverse. No writer captures Toronto and, say, Elmira specifically. Maybe over the course of a career, as Alice Munro has done. But maybe there are Ontario "qualities": a working class ethos; a deferential politeness; a harsh but elemental geosystem; a collision of culture. Karen Solie's book Pigeon does a great job of conveying these themes.
What were your greatest challenges in writing this poem?
The challenges are always the same: Is it done? How could it be better? It's knowing when to stop.
This is your first book of poetry, and earlier this year it won the Trillium
Award for Poetry. What does it feel like to have your work honoured this way,
and to be so identified as an Ontario poet?
I don't think the award identifies me as an Ontario poet, which is to say I don't think "writing about Ontario" is a condition of eligibility for the award. But to answer the first question, it's helped me realize that writing is what I'm doing. It's not that I was ever unsure: I don't think I would have wrote it down, though, and in an interview? Never. But now?
Post new comment