V125 PC: Nikki Reimer Interview

At the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference I had the pleasure of interviewing poet Nikki Reimer. Reimer read her poem, “as long as you’re not doing anything wrong,” which both brings together and breaks apart different accounts of the death of Robert Dziekanski at YVR on October 14^th 2007.

Listening back to the interview recording, I’m struck by Reimer’s voice: resonant, measured, and clear. This transcription does not do it justice.

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Carmen: So we’re here on Oct 20^th, Thurdsay, 2011 at the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference. I’m interviewing Nikki Reimer. She’s just given a talk at the 9:15 panel, and she did a reading of a poem, which was called…

Nikki: “as long as you’re not doing anything wrong”

Carmen: Which was in three acts?

Nikki: Yes. Yeah, three versions.

Carmen: Three versions, and with some [content] which was redacted which I thought was really interesting.

So my first question for Nikki is to do with paratexts. Because [“as long as you’re not doing anything wrong”] is a poem where there is a lot of paratextual stuff that would aid us in knowing what’s going on in the poem but you chose not to précis it with anything. So you didn’t begin with an anecdote, you didn’t give us any tools for understanding other than the poem itself. Why?

Nikki: That’s a good question. I…and often I do—when I read I often do provide a lot of contextual information—it was for some reason important to me for this poem that the poem just speak for itself. And I think what I was trying to do in the poem…is point to and represent and recreate the failures of language.

Specifically, as was discussed yesterday—one of the panelists, they were talking about trauma, and how…you represent trauma in poetry—so my poem was talking about a traumatic event that occurred where a man died. But what I was doing with the language was messing it up, remixing it, rejigging it…

Yeah; a bit like language poetry, starting with language-as-language…

The first version is really quite language as language, the second version I had taken what the official report was of simply the facts of this event and remixed that so that still is language-as-language but you’re maybe getting a little bit closer to the event that I am trying to talk about. And then in the third version, that was my own writing, which I remixed and rejigged trying to look at nouns and verbs and how they’re operating but…I don’t know whether it matters in the end of it or not whether you know the story or not, I’m not sure.

Carmen: I think that’s an excellent point. I’m often struck by [the work of] poets who embed in their poetry or in their paratextual elements telling people how to read. So there’s more freedom when you don’t, I think.

But my second question for you is: how much work should the reader be expected to do?

Nikki: Right. That’s a good question, I’m not sure that I know the answer. I think that the work should have enough within it that it gives you something, right. I don’t think that readers should be lazy, on the other hand. The reader is perfectly knowlegable and educated and capable of looking up references if there are references that they don’t know. But I don’t necessarily think that you should need to have an essay next to the poem in order to understand the poem, right?

I think that essays after the poem can be quite interesting, it can be quite generative and fruitful and interesting to look at the work afterword but as side-by-side, as an explanation, I don’t think so.

Carmen: Related question: how much work should the critic be expected to do?

Nikki: Ah, I think the critic should be expected to do more work [laughs] than the reader, yeah. I think that the critic should educate themselves about the work of that particular writer so that they have some sense of what the writer is in effect trying to do, and can align that writer’s work with [that of] other writers, and compare and contrast and…yeah. Yep. The critic’s job is hard.

Carmen: My last question is if you could say in one word what your poetry is about?

Nikki: In one word?

Carmen: In one word.

Nikki: Failure.

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Reimer is author of [sic] (Frontenac House 2010) and the chapbooks haute action material (Heavy Industries 2011), fist things first (Wrinkle Press 2009), with that stays news forthcoming from Nomados Press. She chronicles the East Van Cats and edits Van City Kitty on VancouverisAwesome.com. Reimer divides her time between East Vancouver, New Westminster and nikkireimer.com.