Open Book: Ontario is celebrating the 24th Annual Trillium Book Award with The Trillium Ten/Trillium Dix interview series. Find out what this year's Trillium Book Award finalists were doing when they heard the news about their nomination, where in the province they most love to write, who their favourite Ontario authors are and more by following our series. Winners of the Trillium Awards will be announced on Friday, June 17th.
Toronto-based poet and editor Paul Vermeersch is nominated for the English-Language Trillium Book Award for The Reinvention of the Human Hand (McClelland & Stewart), a collection of poetry of the human body's experience in a world of metals, plastics and electronics.
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Open Book:
Tell us about your Trillium-Award nominated book.
Paul Vermeersch:
The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a collection of poems about transformation, evolution and loss. And gorillas. There are a couple of poems about gorillas in there, too.
OB:
What gave you the idea for the book that received this nomination?
PV:
Well, the poems in this book are about a lot of different things, and the ideas came from a lot of different places. The title poem, for example, was inspired by an experimental medical procedure that a loved one of mine underwent. It restored partial use of her arms after being paralyzed from the neck down. Other poems were inspired by Warner Brothers cartoons, cave paintings, video games, deformities, cell phones, visits to the dentist, all sorts of things.
OB:
What were you doing when you received the news about your Trillium nomination?
PV:
I was informing Jeff Latosik about his nomination for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, which I heard about first. I'm the poetry editor at Insomniac Press, so I found out about Jeff's nomination before my publisher, McClelland & Stewart, had a chance to tell me about mine. Also, Latosik and I are roommates, so needless to say it was quite an exciting morning around our house.
OB:
What book would you give to a visitor to give them a sense of Ontario?
PV:
Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy.
OB:
What spot in Ontario most inspires you to write?
PV:
When I first started writing, it was Brights Grove. That's where I grew up, so the roots of my experience were there. Now, I suppose the Toronto Zoo and the Art Gallery of Ontario have far more influence over me.
OB:
Who is your favourite Ontario-based author?
PV:
That's not fair. There are far too many to choose just one favourite, but if I must name just one, and since the first book of poems I ever read (or had read to me) was Alligator Pie, I will say Dennis Lee.
OB:
Do you have a favourite quote about writing?
PV:
Yes, this:
"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all. Books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." — Franz Kafka
OB:
What distracts you from writing?
PV:
Everything. Facebook. The internet in general. I'm a sucker for useless information. Did you know Neil Patrick Harris was born in Albuquerque?
OB:
What are you reading right now?
PV:
There are so many incredible Canadian poetry collections this season:
Earworm by Nick Thran.
Dance, Monster! by Stan Rogal.
Folk by Jacob McArthur Mooney.
Civil and Civic by Jonathan Bennett.
Campfire Radio Rhapsody by Robert Earl Stewart.
All fabulous.
OB:
What can you tell us about your next project?
PV:
Another collection of poetry, most likely. I've been writing about the end of human civilization lately, so that's probably the focus of the next book.
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Paul Vermeersch is the author of three previous collections of poetry and the editor of The I.V. Lounge Reader and The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology. His writing has appeared frequently in the Globe and Mail and been featured on CBC Radio. His poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States and Europe. He lives in Toronto, teaches at Sheridan College and is the poetry editor for Insomniac Press.
For more information about The Reinvention of the Human Hand please visit the McClelland & Stewart website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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