The following interview is part one of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
How It Works
Though I don’t know how planes work
I fly. This miracle, a thing we’ve made. Trust
is necessary or we crash. I thought love
was a thing, some thing I could touch with my hands
like a chair or a table; my sister’s knuckle, husband’s wrist
a miracle. But nothing is a thing. Not things, not thought.
Everything is motion, backwards or forwards, crashing,
recombining: my husband’s body beside someone
else’s now, sister’s in earth. I also lie beside another body,
beside a mind I can’t touch, one that knows process, being,
subatomic bits of matter, that understands how things work.
I want to say to this man: let your body trust me, tell me
about your loneliness, about the boy you fail to describe,
boy alone in the kitchen, spooning beans from a can
to his wanting mouth, hungering. Tell me why you’re bereft
if I turn from your body in the night – and yet you want
your loneliness untended, preserved. Trust, you say, is dangerous –
we know what people do. But we don’t need love to be a thing
we can put our hands on to trust. Trust me, you; believe
that we know the miracle, how it works.
Reprinted with permission from
Talking to Strangers
(Véhicule Press, 2024).
Rob Taylor: In the poem “God,” you write “I… wish to come back as [an eagle], / fierce, keen, above everything earthly, / but of the earth.” This wish seems to emanate from every corner of Talking to Strangers, which looks at hard divisions—between languages, religions, sexes, strangers of all walks of life—and aspires towards a knowingly unattainable unity. Would you say that’s true?
Rhea Tregebov: I like your phrase “knowingly unattainable unity.” It makes me think of physics’ “theory of everything,” unified field theory, the notion that there exists a theory that fully explains all aspects of life. I think that’s a deep longing in many of us humans, and the source of much dogma and, with it, oppression and slaughter. I’m sure I began life committed to that longing for unity but, as the world imposed its complexity on me, I’ve schooled myself to question the notion, to frame it, as you do, as “knowingly unattainable.” The poem itself refers to the time when, as a child, I smugly thought of Judaism a step up from pantheism, and it then questions the smugness of my adult agnosticism.
Taylor: I love how quickly we got to unified field theory! You write quite a bit about science in Talking to Strangers, and also in your 2012 collection All Souls’. In the notes for the new book, for instance, you mention that two of its poems were inspired by episodes of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks, a feat which I doubt any book has boasted before.
You approach the subject with humility, acknowledging all you don’t know or can’t know (“The simplest things / elude me,” you write in “Place”) as well as the smallness of humans against the vastness of space and time. In All Souls’ you write that “useless / though my own life has seemed” you wish for life to continue with all its “complicated contradictions,” a theme you pick up again in Talking to Strangers when you write of our “perfectly insignificant” nature.
I sense a productive tension, here, between two types of knowing—scientific and poetic—both of which you seem grateful for. Could you talk about the relationship between scientific and poetic knowing in your poetry?
Tregebov: I am definitely grateful for the access I have to scientific knowing, limited though it is. I am a fan of Quirks & Quarks and Nova documentaries as well as those long articles in the New Yorker on aspects of science. I hang out with a lot of scientists too; my family is chock-full of them. And they do indeed keep me humble.
I’ve been a science wannabe for a long time. Physics in particular was a love in high school. I am still drawn to the way physics breaks through subjective experience to something outside individual perception, outside of the way things appear. I guess the paradigm of that would be Galileo’s understanding that Earth goes around the sun and not vice versa. Science offers a point of view that is both larger and more accurate than our subjective experience. I see scientific knowing as less an alternate way of looking at the world than one that is complementary to poetic knowing. The way science breaks open our assumptions and certainties is a perspective I crave. And ideally science is always questioning itself, hypothesis replacing hypothesis, based on evidence. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an incredibly important book to me. Reading it had an enormous influence on my way of thinking.
I want poetic knowing to be, like Kuhn’s vision of scientific knowing, open to change, open to amelioration, engaged with both the human and the natural. I address this intent in both my ultra-short poems, which leave much unsaid rather than urging the reader to draw conclusions, as well as in my long and expansive poems, which are intended to hold multiple concepts, some apparently contradictory.
I doubted that I could successfully write something that was positioned on the brink of silence.
Taylor: Can poetry help us live with those contradictions?
Tregebov: That’s certainly one of my goals with poetry: to examine the complex and contradictory and be able to sit with questions that are unanswered and perhaps unanswerable but which lead to more and perhaps better questions.
Taylor: What’s poetry’s role in thinking through our insignificance in the universe?
Tregebov: I hope it can lead us beyond the narrow narcissistic understanding we’re sometimes stuck in so that we see our difficulties in the context of larger issues, but also that it provides us with some consolation that this personal experience does in fact have its intrinsic value. Being sentient isn’t for the faint of heart.
Taylor: Ha! On the theme of individual loss and consolation, my favourite poem in Talking to Strangers was the closing long poem for your sister, Lee Ann Block. Entitled “Behold: Notes Towards an Elegy,” the poem is both moving and striking in its minimalist delivery. As suggested by the title, the poem is broken into small “notes” (the first section is twenty words over six lines, the second thirteen words over four…).
In its sparse and fragmented nature, it feels distinct from your recent work, which usually sits somewhere between a sonnet and a page in length. Formally, the last time I saw you writing in this way consistently was in The Strength of Materials, the book of (often fragmented) elegies you wrote way back in 2001. Could you talk about coming back to this form?
Tregebov: Writing that poem was tremendously hard. My sister died very unexpectedly and very suddenly in February 2022 and I was just flattened by her loss. We were so close. I was very unsure about the poem, whether it could possibly work as a “proper” elegy. I was so overcome that I felt strangled as I tried to express what her death meant to me. And of course I was surrounded by people I loved who were also suffering. I was very afraid the poem couldn’t possibly honour her and their pain for her loss. I doubted that I could successfully write something that was positioned on the brink of silence.
The subtitle comes from “Stonecrop: Notes Towards an Elegy,” a poem from a much earlier book, The Proving Grounds, which was published back in 1991. This was an elegy for a friend, one of the first of my contemporaries to die, and I was at that time also so shocked by his death that I felt any response I had could only be partial. So the subtitle was helpful in addressing the gravitas and closure that the traditional elegy seems to require, at least the models that I had encountered.
With the elegies in The Strength of Materials, I was in part responding to Pablo Neruda’s odes to common things. He has an ode to his socks, to salt, to artichokes. I loved the idea of recognizing and appreciating everyday objects (in my case teacups, sparrows, mitts, the subway) but the elegy form or assertion was a way of acknowledging, as I praised, their transient nature.
Taylor: Yes, I certainly see the Neruda connection there. The elegies in The Strength of Materials were followed by a variety of themed sections in your subsequent collections. Often these sequences are similarly structured and titled, such as the series of “Family Dinner” portraits in All Souls’ (“Family Dinner: Gordie, Family Dinner: Accident,” etc.) or the sequence of interactions with strangers in the title section of Talking to Strangers (“Talk: Sidewalk,” “Talk: Tourists,” etc.). You’ve drawn in a similar structure running between books written 30+ years apart (“______: Notes Towards An Elegy”). Could you talk a little about your interest in themed sequences? Do you start with the themes and write to them, or do you write the poems and then find a way to gather them under a common banner?
Tregebov: I find that themed sections in books do help me maintain momentum in the composition of a manuscript; they also help me develop my poetic concepts in a more coherent and complex way. The “talking to strangers” poems in this book began with “Talk: White Night,” a poem that I started writing way back in 2011. I couldn’t quite get it finished in time so it just missed being included in my 2012 collection, All Souls’. (I should mention that I had the term “talking to strangers” long in advance of the 2019 publication of Malcom Gladwell’s book!)
As Talking to Strangers was in progress, I ended up writing another poem or two that were generated by these casual and yet intimate encounters. I realized it was an intriguing and fertile structure for a series, and then everything accelerated with the pandemic and its constraints against connecting with others.
This modified sonnet is quite a natural form for me, in part because it’s so familiar and beloved, but also because that’s often the way my mind works. I have an argument with myself or with the world that I want to think through…
Taylor: What drew you to write the “Tastes” section in the new book (“Bitter,” “Umami,” “Salt,” etc.)?
Tregebov: Those poems definitely began with the concept for which I then filled in the blanks. “Bitter” came first, in response to the predicament I witnessed in a friend, and I immediately decided I wanted to devote a poem to each type of taste. I made sure the poems came slowly, though, as I didn’t want them to be forced or contrived.
Taylor: You sometimes write in restrictive forms—Talking to Strangers features both a sonnet and a villanelle, for instance—and you can somewhat think of your themed sections as grand multi-poem restrictive forms. The poet James Pollock once said, of writing metrical, restrictive poetry, that “it’s like there’s a much better poet whispering suggestions in your ear.” Would you agree?
Tregebov: I don’t think I’ve ever written a conventional sonnet. While I’ve often measured feet in a poem, I haven’t been consistent about how they’re stressed. I’ve never used end-rhyme. I really love writing modified sonnets, though, sometimes what I call “limping” sonnets, which are a line short of the required fourteen. This modified sonnet is quite a natural form for me, in part because it’s so familiar and beloved, but also because that’s often the way my mind works. I have an argument with myself or with the world that I want to think through, and fourteen or thirteen measured lines will just about do it. The restrictions that poetic forms require can in fact be freeing, by establishing a framework that contains the muddle of what we have to say. There was a time when poets expressed their allegiance or refutation of The Tradition by writing or not writing in traditional forms, but happily I believe that day has passed.
Taylor: Speaking of trends in poetry, in reading Talking to Strangers I came to think quite a bit about the confessional mode. In certain sections, the poet Rhea Tregebov and her inner life were almost entirely absent. In others she was right there, talking about specific details of her life. And in others, notably the aforementioned title section, she was the observer, looking out, listening, letting her life shape what was recorded but not pushing it to centre stage.
As a reader, I felt these different modes brush up against one another, each with its own strengths and limitations. I’m aware, though, that I’m only talking about the surface of things—biographical details, personal stories—and that the inner life of a poet presents itself in any number of indirect ways, sometimes more so in less “confessional” poems. Could you talk a little about your thoughts on confessionalism in poetry? Has the trend in the last decade or so towards increasingly confessional writing influenced how or what you’ve written?
Tregebov: I find myself a bit squeamish about the trend of auto-fiction, which is the next-door neighbour to confessional poetry. One reason is that I still have a strong desire for some form of privacy around specific elements of my life. But more than that, when auto-fiction plays with fact, there’s a slip there with truth, which is unsettling to me. Autobiographical elements in poetry, on the other hand, are a very familiar position and readers generally accept that there’s a distance between speaker and poet, sometimes farther away, sometimes closer.
In this book I was especially aware of the role of the speaker in the poem, especially when the “I” was used. I had a very deliberate goal to not have the book hemmed in by one particular voice at one particular stage of life. Claustrophobic books ask too much of their readers. So the “talking to strangers” poems were a relief, because their focus mostly was on other individuals, and the speaker was only glancingly present. Mostly as observer, as you point out.
I see scientific knowing as less an alternate way of looking at the world than one that is complementary to poetic knowing.
Taylor: You’re an Associate Professor Emerita in UBC’s Creative Writing program, having taught there from 2004 until 2017. In that time you shaped the writing of any number of students, including me and another poet in this year’s interview series, Estlin McPhee. I’m curious about the two-way flow of that relationship: in what ways did teaching your students help you to better understand and develop your own writing?
Tregebov: It was amazing having McPhee as a student. I was fortunate to be able to work with a number of truly extraordinary students whose work most definitely inspired me and spurred me on to adapt my own work. One element of the positive impact was the enthusiasm and freshness students brought to their projects. The great majority were working on their first book, and they were anything but jaded about what they could do as poets and what poetry could do in the world. Since I was teaching at such a high level, I really had to refine my lectures and criticism concepts and make sure they were coherent and well articulated.
There was a down-side, though. Having myself positioned as an expert for all those years, and working with students who got younger and younger as the years went by (I know this isn’t factual but that’s how it felt), left me in a situation that became uncomfortable. Of course I had students who questioned and challenged me, but the ego-gratification that comes with being The Teacher became worrisome. I didn’t and don’t want to become too much in love with the sound of my own voice.
Taylor: As someone who is starting on a similar journey in teaching, I understand both the plusses and minuses you outlined there—I hold a similar fear. I’m curious if, since retirement, you ever find yourself still being The Teacher, even if only for yourself. Is there a piece of writing advice you’ve frequently given to students which you remind yourself of while writing or editing your own work?
Tregebov: I find writing is such a balancing act between believing in yourself and doubting yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, in your work, it’ll be hard to be productive. And if you don’t doubt yourself at times, it’ll be hard to keep developing and expanding what you write. In the last couple of years I’ve fallen heavily on the doubting side, so it’s important to remember to have faith.
Rhea Tregebov is the acclaimed author of eight collections of poetry. Her most recent, Talking to Strangers, was published by Signal Editions/Véhicule Press in April 2024. She has also published two award-winning novels, Rue des Rosiers (2019) and The Knife Sharpener’s Bell (2009). Tregebov served as Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada from 2021 to 2023. Born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, she now lives and writes in Vancouver, where she is Associate Professor Emerita at the School of Creative Writing at UBC.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection is Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024). He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews on his website.