A Conversation with Local Poet Michael Aird

Jennifer Aird, OP Contributor

Michael Aird is 31 years old and currently lives in White
Rock, where he works as a school teacher. He likes to walk
down to the pier on sunny days, and eat good Italian ice
cream with his good Italian wife. Back in the day,

when Michael was a young man, he liked to smoke a pipe
on the front driveway of our parents’ house while translat-
ing Latin witticisms and Beowo/f, or learning Italian; and he
also greatly admired classical music (which was in turn
forced upon me, but I don’t complain so much nowadays).
Although, he was a perhaps a bit unusual in his habits, he
liked poetry just like all the rest of the kids, and this is
what I recently sat down to talk with him about. It was, as

they say, poetry, pure poetry...

Other Press (OP): When did you start writing poems?
Michael Aird (MA): Let’s see, I started writing poems
when I was sixteen. Sexual misadventure, power over
women...

OP: That’s what they were called?
MA: No, those wete my motives, that was my motivation.

OP: So, who are some of your favourites? Both old and
new.
MA: J think I would start out with Yeats. I mean, I obses-
sively read Yeats for many years, but I soon came to realize
he’s pretty limited. And, I don’t know, I think it’s pretty
random. I wouldn’t say that there’s any one author that I
would take whole-heartedly as being...worthwhile, with the
exception of maybe Paul Celan; Paul Celan is pretty good.
I don’t know; it’s hard to say. Like if you say, “Who are

iis sort of,

ah
voOUur Initivences
Si *

Wat VOULTe WOreinto On. OF.
~ “ Pez na Tt

   
 

   
 

 

what randomly comes to mind. I mean you don’t like every
[piece of] music that every musician does. [But] there are
certain artists, they’re phenomenons, right, and so it
becomes more than just the work, it’s them. They’te insti-
tutions really.

OP: Do you think that these kinds of artists are aware of
this at the time?

MA: I don’t think so. I think you’re conscious of your
audience and the impact that you have. But I can’t say
Shakespeare, when he was sort of toiling away, putting on
plays and stuff, was thinking that he was going to be coin-
ing phrases that people were going to be saying 500 hun-
dred years later.

OP: Have you noticed since you began writing that there
has been a change in people’s attitudes towards reading
poetry?

MA: No, I don’t think so. Well, there was the exception of
Harold Bloom. He sort of helped to bring poetry to the
forefront for a while, and that was in the late 90s. He did a
lot, [and] he was pretty widely publicized for a while. So
maybe there was a bit of a peak, a bit of a spike in poetry,
but it’s pretty much the same. Generally, there’s a lot of
misconceptions around poems; people have some very
strange notions about [poetry]. They have an image of
some sort of weirdo, you know, sitting in a forest meditat-
ing on the bee going by, or, I don’t know, flowers. So
there’s that, and once that gets discarded, then people real-
ize that it’s a pretty serious intellectual undertaking and it
requites a lot of effort.

  

OP: Within your poems there are several recurring themes.
Is that intentional?

MA: I think there’s a bit of control, and, you know, you
write about what’s sort of sitting in front of you, but
there’s a bit of loss of control too. What you’re trying to
achieve, what you’re trying to do with a poem, it seems to
me, [are two] things. You know there’s sort of something
dark and mysterious about writing a poem, it’s something
like with any art. It seems to be something like a religious
type of experience you try and achieve. That seems to be
primarily where the power of the work comes from and
that’s sort of number one priority.

The nice thing about words is that there is meaning
there and so you can try and surprise by juxtaposition and
that’s where you do control the themes. Although what you
set out to do always takes its own path because as you try
and juxtapose ideas in a surprising way you take different
paths as you go through things. So, there’s those two things
going on; one is like you control the idea and it’s an intel-
lectual process, and the other is like a loss of self.

OP: I already asked you about your favourite poets, but do
you think you could list off your top five favourite poems?
MA: It changes from time to time to time to time, but...
1) Paul Celan: everything, or the one that begins with the
line “Coagula: Salvaging of all...”

2) Charles Olsen: Variations for Gerald Van de Wiele

3) Ted Berrigan: Sonnet LI and Sonnet XXXVI

4) Larry Eigner: Letter for Duncan

5) AR Ammons: Peak

6) Rae Armantrout: Up to Speed

OP: That makes more than five, but thank you Michael,
you are a gentleman and
a scholar.

Alpha Effect
By Michael Aird

after 3 numbers itself nothing magnetic
the anvil chatter also filled

your lungs apart

iced in you

for bending its halo flaw

the grey between cost them
shavings of warmth

in the room when you have one
I’m to transmit

no jaded stairwell

split eye, the biotic here

levers our push thoughts
suffered ahead

with the vaulted over

out of this screen-field and pivot

at last
you are one of us
ate not one of us