Interview with Jon Paul Fiorentino

Jon Paul Fiorentino spoke with Small Press Exchange's Daniel Sendecki via email March 24, 2006.

DS: Describe Jon Paul Fiorentino as a twelve-year-old. What about him would have predicted he'd be a writer?

JPF: I was always very shy and very dopey. I would daydream for hours. I always had an active imagination and I remember constantly making up new words and nonsense songs. The teachers and authority figures in my life thought I was either gifted or special needs. I think the jury may still be out on that.

DS: Your title is a direct nod to Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class in which he contends that things such as manners and etiquette were nothing but practices of conspicuous leisure with no practical value. What are the practices of a "conspicuous loser"?

JPF: Playstation? Xbox? Poetry? Poetry is the most conspicuous practice. I don't provide a real theory of the loser class. I'm more interested in the music of Veblen's rhetoric than in any sociological study. But I think that, like Veblen was with the leisure class, I am as guilty as my subjects.

DS: Did Veblen's theory provide a framework for a loose collection of poems or did you set out with the intent of writing a collection grouped around this theme?

JPF: It's a three section book. There are narrative threads to the book. Themes of technology, retail culture, pop culture link the poems. And Veblen's language haunts the poems.

DS: "Rapidcycler" —which appeared in the February 2006 issue of Walrus —contains the line "Montreal has made a fool of me / for the second last time." How important is geography —be it Montreal or Winnipeg or elsewhere —to your poetics?

JPF: Very important. I think my poems are often structured like a dialogue between Montreal and Winnipeg. But to be honest, whenever I read that poem to a crowd, I always change the city to match the city I'm in. So the line will become "Fresno has made a fool of me / for the second last time" and everyone will cheer for their hometown.

DS: What is understood as confessional poetry today does not have much in common with the particular triumphs of its original practitioners. The term "confessional poetry" is now slightly schizophrenic. Would you consider your poetry part of the confessional tradition?

JPF: Sometimes I indulge in confessional moments. But I feel that I have to earn them. I'm not interested in promoting a single received tradition. I follow my interests. I would like to be more like Robert Kroetsch and Margaret Christakos.

DS: Charles Olson wrote that the line is "the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control". Do you lend any credence to Olson's assertion? Is this evidenced in Theory of the Loser Class?

JPF: The line is an important part of Theory of the Loser Class, so is rhetoric, sonic qualities, prosody, but I think the only baby of these poems is me.

DS: Your poems are quasi-objectivist in the sense that your perceptions juxtaposed so that one perception leads directly to another, but the connection is not always obvious. Is this a condition of your poetics? Is this what you meant when you said, in a previous interview with Nathaniel G. Moore that "a good poem conceals as much as it reveals"?

JPF: Yes. I think that's what I meant. I discovered that I write first drafts of poems in complete sentences. And transition, connectivity, logic are all there in the first draft. Then I have to rewrite and de-syntax the poem in order to invite the reader to participate more actively in the poem. I shouldn't be so prescriptive though. This is only one strategy of revelation/concealment.

DS: CBC Radio personality Noah Richler, preceding on the assumption that there must be a "Canadian creation myth" unifying canlit suggested that our myths —the stories we tell to understand ourselves —almost invariably involve failure and disappointment. Are we as Canadians responsible for positoning ourselves in some kind of loser class?

JPF: It's important when trying to understand literature and nationhood, that we continue to look to our radio personalities.

DS: Any reading material on the back of your toilet?

JPF: I don't use the toilet.

DS: Let's do a list — give me your favourite greatest all-time losers.

JPF: Bob Newhart, Morrissey, T.S. Eliot, Jerry Lewis, Philip Larkin, Thorstein Veblen, Grand Moff Tarkin. Note that they are all men.

DS: What's up next?

JPF: I have decided to step back from my writing for a while. I am very pleased with The Theory of the Loser Class and I would like to work at a less feverish pace. I have started a small poetry press called Snare Books. So what's up next? I would say bankruptcy.