Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up in rural southwest Saskatchewan, Canada. After working as a reporter for three years for The Lethbridge Herald, she earned an MA in English at the University of Victoria. She is the author of five collections of poetry. Short Haul Engine (Brick Books, 2001) won the Dorothy Livesay Award, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and Griffin Poetry Prize. Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005) was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize. Pigeon (Anansi, 2009) won the Trillium Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, FSG, 2014) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. The Caiplie Caves (Anansi, Picador, 2019; FSG, 2020) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott Prize. The Living Option, a volume of selected poems published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2013, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Karen’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and Australia and translated into eight languages. She is the recipient of the Latner Poetry Prize, the Canada Council Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has taught for writing programs and universities across Canada and in the UK, was the 2021 Jack McClelland Writer in Residence for Massey College at the University of Toronto, and the 2022 Holloway Visiting Poet for the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently a lecturer in creative writing with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Michael O’Ryan: With regard to The Caiplie Caves and the story of Ethernan, what was it about his moment of contemplation and indecision that felt catalyzing to you?
Karen Solie: It had something to do with where I was at the time, a period of transition. I felt very much between places, between times, between stages. It wasn’t a matter of seeking out Ethernan’s story, it was an accident of geography. I had been in Scotland in 2011 as writer-in-residence at the University of St Andrews, and had spent a lot of time walking on the coastal path between Edinburgh and Dundee, and came across the caves at Caiplie, which are very striking. They’re the remnants of a large cave system, only the back parts of them remain. And so I made some notes about it, the way you do in your notebook. I was working on The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out at the time, and shortly after discovering the caves, I went back to it. After that book was done, I returned to Scotland to start research on this thing that had intrigued me. And as I was thinking about it and looking at some of my notes, it all just kind of fell into place. I knew I wanted to make the Ethernan figure the center of a book-length project. I hadn’t thought about a book-length project before. I had nothing against them or anything like that, but had not planned on writing one either, so it was kind of a surprise. I stayed in Crail, a little fishing village on the coast near the caves. Many of the poems were written there, or began there.
The thing with Ethernan is that he was trying to make a decision, and so was I. He was staying in this isolated place, trying to decide whether to go forward into a life of service or to stay where he was as a solitary, and that spoke to me. He was prolonging and living in that moment of decision, which, of course, is also indecision—afraid of making the wrong choice, afraid of error—so that moment lengthened, as did mine. As I started to research further into what exactly his decision entailed, what I found began to speak to me inside a larger framework of attempting to decide whether to be a public or a private person with regard to where your work is going to lie. It grew beyond just me and my things.
MO: The poems seem to progress organically as they exist chronologically in the book. To the point about not having worked within the conceptual framework of a book-length project previously, I’m wondering what the process of sequencing the collection entailed. Is it the case that the poems are roughly placed in the order they were written?
KS: Yeah, it’s weird because—and there are some exceptions, of course—but the poems in the book appear roughly in the order in which they were written, which had never been the case for me before. The epigraph that begins the book, from Horace, was the first note I made in my notebook in 2011. The poems took off from there, and, again, it was a surprise. The order is just one of the many things about the book that seemed, potentially, like a bad idea, but it stuck.
MO: There are a series of Ethernan poems comprised of right-justified monostitches. What was it about this form specifically that felt an appropriate conduit for working in persona?
KS: I had thought about several forms for this series of poems. Initially, I had envisioned it as a long piece, and that the titled poems would appear as events, in a way, inside that structure. But it was too dense. It was just exhausting, so that went by the wayside. And then I had to figure out what sounded like what I heard when I thought of the Ethernan voice, which is an amalgam of several voices. I tried many different forms and none of them sounded right. As you probably know, it’s a strange thing to put something on the page, have the content there, have the line there, have the language, but not hear it. I tried something a bit more open, a bit different than what I’d done before. Once I shifted the lines to the right side of the page in a last-ditch attempt, it was the closest I found to what the voice sounded like to me, as though there’s someone off to the side who’s speaking. It was like, finally, I placed him on the right part of the stage.
MO: The other poems in the collection are quite varied with regard to their distribution of lineation and movement across the page. Where in the writing process does the form of a poem become evident to you?
KS: Sometimes it takes a while, it takes some playing around. I do a lot of revisions, and formal experiments are often among them. But at other times, I hear early on a rhythm, a cadence, a modulation and duration that suggests to me tercets, for example, or couplets, or quatrains, or one long stanza. It really is a matter of the individual poem and a combination of how quickly it wants to move—or how quickly I’d like it to move—and what the atmosphere is, how much and what kind of silence feels important.
MO: On the topic of revision, you’ve mentioned it’s generally an extensive process for you. To what extent do your poems transform between the first draft and the final draft? And does that primarily entail working with the form of a poem in the manner you just described, or more linguistic elements, such as syntax?
KS: A lot of it has to do with syntax. I tend to tell students to just get something onto the page to work with, but I’m not like that. I inch along word by word. It’s often a process of getting closer to what I mean. The word “meaning” is tricky, but whether it’s image or rhythm or form, revision can be a very gradual process of achieving clarity, even if it’s the clarity of “what it sounds like is what it means” – that iconicity. Sometimes it’s about image scape and making sure the poem has figurative integrity. Sometimes it’s about questioning an inclination toward syllable-heavy lines that I might find interesting and rhythmically fun, but which I have to realize may not fall on the reader’s ear the same way. And sometimes in the process of dealing with technical elements, the poem changes in surprising ways, in that what I had intended is not necessarily what the poem ends up doing, and I like that. People come to revision in different ways, and my window is technique and mechanics, which can open possibilities.
MO: The poems read as carefully considered and calibrated syntactically. How much of arranging the language in a poem feels like a technical exercise versus an intuitive one? Are the two inextricable?
KS: I can’t find a way to separate intuition from technique. And I don’t really think there is a separation. The more closely you attend to the technical elements of anything, the more intuitive you become about that discipline. It’s like being a musician. The more you practice, the more possibilities open to you in how you might write songs. As a mechanic, you get in there, you start tinkering with a machine. It’s like, this doesn’t sound right, or, this doesn’t feel right, you know? But you don’t know that until you know how the thing works. It’s those little adjustments that are syntactical, that are grammatical, that are matters of punctuation or of lineation. When we read a poem, we might think, oh, that’s magic, and I don’t even know entirely what it means. As Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That effect is the result of technical choices.
MO: I’d like to call attention to the series of hyper-short poems in the collection titled “Song”. What was the compulsion behind these, and how did you see the backslashes in the poems functioning?
KS: The Songs are partly about atmosphere and mood, partly about setting and detail, and partly about structure in the manuscript. I was alone in Crail for long stretches of time. In addition to what my research uncovered about May Island or the Bass Rock or St Andrews or the coast of Fife and the villages along the coastal path, when I started to hang around those places I remembered, oh, well, such-and-such happened at that place in the 10th century. And this other thing also happened there in the 17th century. And it begins to seem that these things all start to happen at the same time. It becomes palimpsestic. This inflected what sorts of modes and atmospheres and images and rhythmic elements of poems were in the air. The first Song, which imagines the forest turning to ships, was written unusually quickly, and included the backslashes as a way to hear it, to score the lines, so to speak. It seemed, then, that other Songs could possibly provide transitional interludes between sections. The backslashes, I felt, approximated bars in music, created a time signature.
MO: So in a sense, it was an attempt to syncopate the collection?
KS: Yeah, yeah.
MO: Can you talk about what materials and places you looked to in order to conduct research for the book with regard to archives, museums, and historic sites?
KS: I spent a lot of time in the University of St Andrews libraries, a great wealth of information about the area and its history. I didn’t find much, understandably, from the 7th Century, Ethernan’s time, but Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was a place to start. I read many accounts of saints and holy people and hermits of that area, Fife was crawling with them in the early medieval period. But I wasn’t very methodical. There are, I think, at least three modes of research. There’s confirmation of a detail – I need to find out what the name of this plant is – and then you find out. And then there’s the less targeted kind – well I’m researching plants of Fife, and so I’m going to get a bunch of books on local plants and see what I can find. And then there’s the research where you just head off in a direction and see what happens.
And so in the library I staked out a general area and pulled things quite randomly off shelves and wrote down and referenced what jumped out at me as I paged through them. Those notes, then, led toward additional research.
I visited local museums and museums and galleries in Glasgow and Edinburgh that hold collections of paintings and archival works and, for example, one of the original lenses for Stevenson’s lighthouse on May Island. A lot of research didn’t make it into the book. I really wanted to write a poem about that lighthouse after seeing the lens, but it didn’t happen. Research is a great comfort. I can do it when I don’t feel capable of anything else. Sometimes there are eureka moments.
MO: You’ve also mentioned the relationship between research and mood. Can you expand on that?
KS: Sometimes all the research offered was a sense of atmosphere. There’s a poem in the book, for example, about the witch trials in Pittenweem in the 17th century. Thinking about the poem began not by learning about the trials, but by encountering an article in a local paper about how the citizens of Pittenweem had recently voted against erecting a monument to those killed in the witch trials because they felt it would damage the village’s reputation. So that strange, centuries-old unease, guilt, shame, that’s what led to the poem. I researched, then, what had happened there. But the unease was the atmospheric catalyst for the poem. Some of the stories that adhere to place are bits of fact and a lot of fiction. The monks wrote fantastical stories about saints, I imagine, to pass the time. These stories became legend. Some of them are extremely weird. And that palimpsestic effect – not only events documented as history through the ages, but the fictional, the conjectural, the metaphorical, the magic, the misinformation – all of the fiction existing alongside and inside the historical documentation, that was part of it. Learning these stories really intensified, let’s say, my relationship with May Island.
When it comes to Ethernan, who knows how much of his story, such that there is of it, is even remotely true. I think he existed in some way, but he was confused with other figures for a while, and who knows, right? But as I imagined someone in the cave staring out at May Island trying to make a decision whether to go there, and die there, the island became an antagonist for me as well. Part of it was reading about some of what happened out there, most of it bad. That’s what I mean by atmosphere. I couldn’t look at features of the landscape without remembering the stories, and those stories gave rise to different suggestions, mostly about how violent and easily led people are.
MO: You’ve said the new project that you’re working on is a kind of return to the environment that you grew up in. Was it a natural consequence of writing a book like The Caiplie Caves, which focuses on an external figure, that’s led to pivoting back toward focusing more explicitly on personal subject matter?
KS: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but maybe so. We can write about anything as poets, and still we’re in some sense writing about ourselves, as it’s all through the lens of our own inclinations and whatnot. So, maybe it is, in a way, a moving forward in that the new poems are looking backward. It may be that the continual reevaluation of where we’ve been is what moving forward is. Part of that reevaluation, I think, is looking at things also through the lens of the current context, which involves, among many other things, climate crisis. Remembering my teenage years when gas wells first started appearing on the land, what it meant then and what it means now. And also wondering, how did I get to be this person? What happened? And I’m the age now where I’m losing people, so there’s that.
MO: Do you see this new collection as formulated through a specific conceptual framework, like The Caiplie Caves, or do you feel like it’s a return to an organic accumulation of poems that will naturally coalesce sans that degree of design?
KS: I hope it will naturally coalesce. I’m waiting for it to naturally coalesce. We’ll see. It’s not finished yet, but that’s the hope, I guess. It’s always so nerve wracking at this stage. There’s still some writing I’d like to do. There are certainly revisions I need to do, but the manuscript still feels at this point like a bunch of poems. I can see some centers of gravity, so to speak, among them. And I hope they will cohere in some way around what I’ve been thinking of as an idea of value. Considering income inequality, my background and formative years, having lost people and thinking of the dead, I’ve been trying to recoup an idea of value that is neither transactional nor evaluative. “Value” has become a word so heavily associated with capital, in whatever sense. Can we think about value as a dynamic idea rather than something that is accumulated and hoarded and then spent in whatever way to get something else? I’m hoping the poems in some way address this.
MO: Thanks so much for talking with me this morning.
KS: Of course. Thanks very much.
