Interview #13: Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Sy Albright interviews Ryan Quinn Flanagan   ----- poet & author

 

 

SA: I noticed a number of Canadian poets have an almost beatnik view of the world. It reminds me of America from the 1960’s. But in this manner, you still retain a sense of social conscience. The combination makes for an interesting artistic result. Is there something in Canadian society or artistic history that fosters this atmosphere?

RQF: I think Canadians are always a little behind the times on most things and don’t really have a problem with that.  We also tend to be quite timid and courteous so that is probably why a social conscience is still retained.  Most of all, there is this strange thing that Canada and Canadians do not define themselves by what they are, but rather what they are not.  And what they are not is American.  Beyond that, I don’t really think Canadians have a sound fleshed out idea of who they are as I noted in my poem Canadiana:

Canadiana

 

is a funny thing

 

not at all

like Americana

 

which knows what

it is

 

and confidently champions

the cracking of the bell

bride to banner,

 

Canadiana

simply knows it is

not Americana

 

and defines itself

solely by that

 

(by what it is not)

 

without ever knowing

 

or even wanting to know

what that could

 

actually mean.

 

 

SA: towards this pain

I can no longer run

from.

These lines are from your poem, Gasoline Pavement, Ariel Chart published July 2018. Please elaborate on the deeper meaning of the verses.

RQF: I suffer from mental illness and wrestle with that reality each day.  Those lines are about my need to confront some of the deeper causes of that pain and my struggles with mental illness that have resulted.  In truth, I still run from some elements of the aforementioned because colliding head on with certain things in their entirety would likely lead to another relapse which I cannot allow to happen.  The mechanism of writing has been a most helpful form of therapy for me.  I feel free to express things that I may not otherwise in everyday life.  But yes, those lines are about confronting a very real and devastating personal pain that is always with me.

 

SA: I have spoke to writers who began writing while in early school while others only started a few years ago. I noticed it made no difference to the quality of writing –either you are committed to tell a tale or not. Tell us a little something about how you got into writing.

RQF: I also believe it does not matter when you come to writing whether it be early on or later in life.  For me, it was an early start.  I wrote my first poem when I was ten and had to recite it many times for classroom audiences at my school as well as the Lion’s Club.  It was an awful poem, of course, but it was an original work by a ten-year-old, so people took an interest.  It was even published in the local paper.  After that, I just kept writing.  I never kept a diary like many others, I wrote poems instead.  I grew up most my life in a small town where sports were god and the arts were not supported much at all so all the writing I did during this period I pretty much kept to myself.  When my family moved to Toronto, an English teacher took an interest, which was the first positive reinforcement I had received since I was ten.  But life got in the way and I dropped out of high school for a time and couch surfed with friends in a different city.  When I later finished high school and went first to college and then university and grad school, I kept writing the whole time.  Basically, writing is a compulsion for me.  It was just something that was a constant when life was always in flux.  I don’t think I really found my own voice until my mid-thirties.  I just turned forty in August.

SA:  Curious I find it that poetry doesn’t call for outside editing and the poet will labor for weeks, months and potentially years to perfect its form and language but with prose there’s this strange necessity to hand over to outside eyes. What are your thoughts on this subject?
 

RQF: I hadn’t really thought about this until you mentioned it, but it is very true.  The poet is expected to also wear the editor’s cap and often labours alone in this endeavour while prose writers search out as many eyes as they can for their work.  Although I fall into the former category and tend to just work away without any other eyes, I do think the latter approach is likely most helpful.  As many eyes as you can get for a given piece and helpful constructive feedback probably aid greatly in both honing one’s craft and streamlining the editing process as well.  I think more poets are reaching out with their work now with the internet because they can still remain at distance while getting feedback for their work as well.  If that built in distance was not there, I don’t know if as many poets would be as willing to put themselves and their work out there as their prose brethren have traditionally been expected and want to do.
 

SA: There are many genres or versions of poetic structure out there. Most since old hat and out of modern connection. If you rhyme too much you steer yourself into Hallmark territory and if you shoot out haiku all day ---well most folks don’t have the time to decipher the mysteries of the universe in three lines. I inquire because Mr. Rossi once mentioned to me a poet who only knows how to write free verse is a carpenter with one tool. Agree or not – please explain?

RQF: I am not overly familiar with too many poetic structures and tend to write a fair amount of free verse myself, but I have great respect for those that can rhyme well or construct beautiful haiku.  Basho is one of my favourite writers although I don’t write haiku personally.  I love his wonderful economy of verse and how he is able to say so much and so beautifully with such brevity.  I agree with Mr. Rossi to a degree that free verse can become limiting at length, as if working with a single tool from the tool belt.  I do like to stretch my legs at times with more surreal work both in form and content as well as stream of consciousness and concrete poems etc.  But personally, I find free verse the most assessable and honest form I can use when expressing myself.  It may be one tool, but it is my favourite tool and the one I always seem to return to.

 
SA: The publishing world has changed radically from just a generation ago. The same opportunities are no longer available today. Today writers have to wear many hats and be willing to do things no one thought about fifty years ago. Is this newly found freedom an advantage or disadvantage to today’s writers?

RQF: Both. The advantage is that the market has really been opened up and democratized so that basically anyone can create and publish work.  The internet provides new connections and exciting opportunities to work with other writers or artists from other mediums on projects that may not have been plausible back when there was a great geographical distance between where said artists lived and no way to traverse it.  The internet has also created many new online (as well as print) venues for editors and artists of all stripes to connect and share their work.

The disadvantage is that the writer today has had to become more of an entrepreneur if they wish to actively promote their work.  In many cases, they have essentially become their own editors and art and layout people as well.  Such an approach does allow for full creative control but results in the writers wearing many hats traditional writers did not have to if they wanted to get their work out and promoted.  A writer nowadays has to spend nearly as much time selling themselves and promoting their work as they do creating it.  In a way, they have become an integral part of the work or the face of the work rather than the work having to stand on its own accord.  The work can suffer in this respect if the personality is promoted instead of the work which should always come first but does not always seem to anymore.  Also, with democratization comes oversaturation.  The market becomes so flooded with new work and so quickly that the proper time and attention that works would otherwise be afforded falls by the wayside.  Attention spans shorten for the writer as well as the audience. 

Lastly, lovers of traditional print media are finding their beloved bookstores closing in record numbers as Kindle and other digital formats enter the market.  I love print and the smell of books and wandering through used bookstores for hours, so I feel the push as well from new formats.  That said, I think print media will always have a place and the future will be some mix of co-existence rather than complete print nonexistence.

 

SA: If I am wrong please state so but some writer’s have an emotional or artistic goal they strive for in their works. I sense that is the case for you as well. If it’s not too private maybe you can share a bit of what you are working toward through your body of material.

RQF: I usually don’t sit down with any single emotional or artistic goal in mind.  Writing is more of a compulsion for me, so I just sit down and do it without much thinking involved.  That said, I do often find I have expressed certain emotional or artistic things in my work when I am done and look at it.  So, the emotional or artistic drives seem to be subconscious for me.  I know other writers often set out to write from an overtly emotional place, but I don’t really seem to do that.  For the more surreal or experimental works, I will have an obvious artistic goal in mind just because of the nature of the form of that given work, but with the free verse work I don’t feel the process is as obvious or deliberate.  I can see certain aspects of my life being worked through with a large enough body of work, but individually, the works just seem to wander a bit as expressed in my poem Roam:

Roam

 

Old

buffalo

thoughts

roam

this

gathering

mind.

 

SA: Please list your past and present influences that help shape your writing.

RQF: Kafka is my favourite short story writer.  Other literary influences on my work are: Frank O’Hara, Leonard Cohen, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Basho (as previously mentioned), e.e. cummings, Poe, Jules Verne, Dostoevsky, Huxley, Orwell, Al Purdy, Knut Hamsun, Rimbaud, Cocteau, Verlaine, Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Roald Dahl, E.M Forster, Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, Jeffers, Raymond Carver and Paul Bowles.

              

Fine art is another large influence on my work.  Along with many philosophers such as: Schopenhauer, Kant, Sartre, Foucault, Bergson, Nietzsche, Sontag, Locke, Hobbes, Kierkegaard etc.

More present influences are many of the talented writers and fine artists I have met and connected with over the past few years.  In this respect, the future looks bright to me.