"How did froth-head and barm evolve clouds
overcast with winter's brume,
moulding Man to primordial word-slime.
Man the word-mime, jellied in woolpacks - gummed in
hazes, scuds.
Man the glue, cooked egg-white of hoots and cuckoo calls."
///Meredith Quartermain: Matter

I love Bookthug, not only because their catalog absolutely rocks, but because they've introduced me to amazing poets like Meredith Quartermain. When her most recent collection of poems, Matter, came into my possession, I became obsessed with her poetic voice; reading her poetry aloud on the subway, looking up the schemas she used, reading and re-reading in different configurations to explore her intricate perceptual fragments of being. The read (and subsequent re-read) welcomed me into the most dense 74-page collection of contemporary poems I've read as of late, with the order of the symbolic reconfigured and classified to move within the framework of physical being. As the recipient of the BC Book Awards 2006 Prize for Poetry for her collection Vancouver Walking, and the author of over 12 books/chapbooks, including Nightmarker (NeWest 2008), The Eye-Shift of Surface (Greenboathouse Books 2003) among others, Meredith Quartermain is one Canadian poet who possesses the ability to reach into the framework of the mind and apply relevant theory to her poetic and articulate observations.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Meredith about her latest book in digital characters, and her engaging musings on her most recent project were nothing short of fascinating.

Under a schema of scientific classification, Matter explores the symbolic as a realm of words as living beings. What theory/thinkers influenced/inspired your approach to language in this collection?

The source of the classification is Peter Roget’s classification of words, which he used to invent the Thesaurus. He classified all English words in 6 main categories: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition, Affections. I’ve been working my way through his taxonomies, writing a book on each major division.

Roget was a zoologist and his taxonomy of words is designed in the same way as biologists make taxonomies of animals and plants with kingdoms, genera and species; in Matter, I began seeing words as animals and species of animals.

Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome is a counterpoint to the hierarchical notion of such taxonomies – what they called the arborescent form of knowledge based on tree-like structures. In the rhizomatic way of knowing, every node is a small centre from which all other centres and experience can be known. In my case, this amounts to thinking of every word as a metaphoric or metonymic portal for the knowable. Hence the dedication of the book to the Deleuzian notion of matter as a maelstrom of spinning vortices (our words) that divide endlessly and touch each other in endless variety.

Their theory of organs and inorgans also appears throughout the series.

I noticed that the thematic trajectory of the collection leads from the base substance of the physical world to the intricacies of culture and the abstraction of thought. Did you finesse thematic polarities differently as you classified the words you used to describe them?

Since I was working with biological taxonomy, I also used as a source text, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. I cross-fertilized the words in the Matter subsections with language from Darwin, and I began to wonder about the merits of Darwin’s focus on species survival – his focus on system – as opposed to Roget’s focus on the words or birds for their own sake – the beauty of individuals alive today. I also wondered about classification itself – how arbitrary it is – how fundamentally irrational it is unless you are categorizing completely abstract mathematical notions. This is linked to the impossibility of separating perception from language’s idiosyncratic terrain.

The hinge between the non-word and the word is very present to me in all of these pieces. Words are not transparent windows to the non-word. Words have agendas of their own – often social or cultural agendas built into the language which we participate in willy nilly. However, a critique of social Darwinism as it is expressed in contemporary capitalist systems and in the poverty I see on city streets, became one of the themes of this series.

This collection is rife with social commentary. At the end "Matter 26: Do Sparrows Ask?", you seem to express a disillusionment, saying:

Why must we ooze the curdled mucus
of profit and usefulness?
Do we know the anti-matter to that?

How have your personal experiences as a writer in Canada contributed to your critique?

This poem takes on among other things the nature of human knowledge, suggesting humans are entrapped in utilitarian ways of knowing that assume our superiority over other life forms, assume that our purpose here on earth is to use as much as possible of it for our own selfish ends. I think my study of botany and ecology and my experience living and working in rural BC is behind some of this awareness.

As a writer I was exposed early on to Gertrude Stein: “knowledge is what you know,” she said, emphasizing that knowledge emerges as you write – it emerges in the rhythms and interlacings, the experience, of the words themselves rather than in the prepackaged knowledge of facts. I think this is a central part of my poetics. Then too, my Masters degree was in English language; making me highly aware of linguistic permutations and possibilities.

How does Matter fit in - in relation to your other works - to your growth as a Canadian poet in the post-millennium era?

My first book was Terms of Sale in 1996. That book contains both highly experimental, language-centred pieces and poems focusing on social class and gender issues in my home city. These threads continued in Vancouver Walking (2005) which won the BC Book Prize for Poetry. The writing of place was the main focus of that book; the poems emerged from a palimpsest of history and walked experience of the city. Between those two books were several chapbooks, two of which focused playfully on language and thought via sections of Roget’s Thesaurus: Abstract Relations (1998) and Spatial Relations (2001). The Eye-shift of Surface (2003) explored the nature of identity by molding text out of all the entries for the letter i and the word “eye” in the Oxford English Dictionary. A Thousand Mornings (2002) returned again to place – the oldest part of Vancouver where I live, but sound and word-quips are a strong element of it. Matter continues this thread, but as you have noted, involves critique of social issues. Nightmarker, my most recent book returns, again to my abiding concern with place; it records expeditions to various locales in Vancouver such as the courthouse, the police station, the museum, etc. But it also involves my earlier concern with humanity in relation to the supporting earth – a key issue of our time.

Check Out:

http://www.bookthug.ca/proddetail.php?prod=3255
http://www.sfu.ca/~pquarter/MeredithQ.htm