“Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate, these poems are both abject and sweet as they repurpose loss into life and test the bounds of how much a poem can hold.”
– from Nightwood Editions
Tell us a little about the writing and publishing journey of Renaissance Normcore.
I started writing this book three years ago. As my first book was being published I very slowly started writing again. Things open and shift and I started to feel like my voice was getting a little more direct and playful. I think there’s still a lot of mystery and poetic frill here and there. But there was this trying to strip down the language so it seemed more conversational, a little more bald , front-facing. And that was really exciting and fun to play with and also terrifying.
So I was working on the poems [in Renaissance Normcore] over the period of 2016 to early this year. Which was also a really interesting time culturally! And I feel like in my lifetime our conversations around abuse and trauma have shifted a lot and gone from being something you never ever talk about, and something you repress and sweep under the carpet, to people wanting to talk about it, which is good, but also very terrifying to me and my body and everything I’ve internalized. That shift happening rapidly was kind of fascinating, and terrifying. So I think the book deals with those tensions in direct or indirect ways, I think I was wanting more complicated, ambivalent language to articulate things that are actually still hard to articulate. There still is a bit of coyness, but that directness and coyness is my way of holding that cultural moment and my relationship to it.
Sweat, Woman – Adèle Barclay
My mother writes to tell me
she had a dream in which we swam
in a turquoise lake with orca whales.
There’s a woman who wants
to leave my body through the skin.
At every sweaty turn she plots escape.
I lie in bed too late most mornings.
I carry faith in a bowl of milk
like a maid in a Vermeer painting.
I carry it down halls of white fluorescence
where the wives of wrong men
stand joyless. I seal an eggshell envelope
under the architrave with blood
wax, without ceremony, while awful
light scrambles in shadows. Open
your hands and give them a shake.
Reprinted with permission from Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay (Nightwood Editions, 2019).
In this time period, you’ve also had many jobs: interviews editor at The Rusty Toque, a Poetry Ambassador for former Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, critic-in-residence at CWILA, poet-in-residence at Arc magazine, editor at Rahila’s Ghost, instructor at UBC, you offer private mentoring and workshopping, and you were just named Kuldip Gill writer-in-residence at University of the Fraser Valley — congratulations! That’s a lot of work.
Yeah! When you put it like that…
It’s not the lifestyle, either of an academic or of a writer, that many people picture. It’s not just sitting in a beautiful room, thinking.
A lot of this stuff has been staggered, fortunately. Being a writer and emerging from a PhD program, it was like, oh I do have a bunch of skills in addition to writing such as editing, grant writing, critical writing, teaching . . . I think that for the last couple of years I’ve been a writer but what is under that is a ton of editing, a ton of freelancing, and finding these gigs here and there. Poetry can really work with that, because I think I write poetry best when I am toggling through things and being really stimulated. I think balancing that with prose writing has been a little more tricky, and because of time. Not that poetry isn’t time-consuming, it just has a different time scale. I can go away and do something for a week and come back to it whereas with prose you kind of have to show up every day.
Do you have a prose project at the moment?
I’m working on some essays… sort of all over the place. I’ve been doing some cultural journalism for The Tyee, but that’s a little different, and then writing personal, memoir/cultural essays that just need a lot of work! They need a lot more tending to cause the ideas are a little more slow or figuring out how I feel about things takes more time. Trying to figure out how to have this more direct, looking-at-the-camera, so-this-is-going-on approach. Poetry being the avant garde short film, like, I think I know what’s going on…
The poems in Renaissance Normcore are underpinned by such specific and individual logic structures, and it happens so fast because they’re mostly short. It’s like you have a series of private islands and you helicopter people in for a second, and then kick them off. It takes a moment to get re-acclimatized. You don’t realize how deeply and quickly the poem has affected you with its logic, and how complete its world is. I wonder if that has something to do with the toggle state you’re talking about, or maybe because of the toggling it’s a strength of yours, like an adaptation.
The sort of immersive experience, but it’s quite short. Thank you for that, I really love that description.
You basically own an archipelago!
It’s like, We’re going in! I think that — the toggling — is how my brain works. I’m not super linear, I multitask — I always have multiple burners on. I try to do something from start to finish but things get staggered, and overlap.
This also connects to the “Open Relationships” series [a series of poem in Renaissance Normcore with titles like “Open Relationship with the Sun,” “Open Relationship with the Moon,” and “Open Relationship with the Fire in My Body That Keeps Me Up at Night”] — separate, but overlapping, and you’re managing it all.
Yeah, I like that idea of intentionality, of building those poems and those worlds with care. We’re probably gonna go somewhere intense, and I’m gonna build in a few different tones, like maybe the despair is countered with humour, or joy. I think that for me is closer to the experience of things, I never just feel one emotion at once, things are alway peppered in between. Also a lot of the time [the things] I’ve been focused on are just hard to hold. That’s what I’m finding with nonfiction, having to sustain it over time doesn’t dilute it but it’s harder to stay there. With a poem, I can get into an intense state, write it quickly, knowing I can come back to edit it later, and that moment grips me, I’m there, but that intensity is hard to sustain over 10, 20 pages.
excerpt from Open Relationship with the Sun – Adèle Barclay
. . . this woozy feeling
isn’t jealousy
more like confusion
over time zones
and how it’s snowing
in the mountains
as thirty-degree temperatures
smother the coast
bodies become bodies
unfurling for the sun . . .
Excerpted from “Open Relationship With The Sun,” reprinted with permission from Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay (Nightwood Editions, 2019).
The intensity, and the precision of language… you are an expert at placing hyper-specific details into your poems in such a way that they stand in for something universal.
Weirdly, the more specific you get, the more zoomed in, even if people don’t have those experiences the poem gets more relatable. When poetry tries to be more general, I find a lot of resistance. When poets get specific I feel like, yeah, I don’t share your experience but there’s something about that particularity that makes it more human or more connecting. Particularity can be a real strength but it can feel scary.
You have a lot of knowledge of astrology. Do you think the book has a sign, and if so, what is it?
I guess technically its publication date was October 5, which would make it a Libra. And I feel like I probably started writing during Libra season three years ago, so I feel like that points to Libra. But then my Vancouver launch was on the first day of Scorpio season. So I’d say it’s Libra with some Scorpio energy. Which I like, because I have a Scorpio moon and Libra rising. Libra rising is a people-pleasing sign, and a beautiful sign, so that’s why the book looks so good.
So is Scorpio sort of the logic, or directness…
Or just being at home with the darkness and not batting an eye.
Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch, Fog Machine, The Puritan, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, (Nightwood, 2016) was nominated for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection of poetry, Renaissance Normcore, was published by Nightwood Editions in October of 2019.
Find Renaissance Normcore at your local independent bookstore or click here to buy.
Click here to listen to the Renaissance Normcore playlist on Spotify
Adèle is hosting a poetry workshop in December. Click here for details.