Every Year, Salty Ink launches an increasingly popular Judge-a-Book-By-Its-Cover contest to let the public vote on which Canadian book cover and summary piqued their interest the most. This year’s winner was Jamie Sharpe’s book of poetry, Animal Husbandry Today.
It was designed by the remarkable Natalie Olsen of Kisscut Design, possibly the queen of CanLit Book Design. Her work for various publishers, typically NeWest and Freehand, has been catching my eye for a while now. So I was not surprised to see she had 4 designs in this year’s contest: a record for any designer. You can read about her process here, and about her design for this cover in particular, here.
Jamie’s book of poetry is as equally dazzling and winning as Natalie’s design. It’s a flashy and structurally interesting collection, in which Sharpe’s sharp writing and experimentation with form never tires, from the first poem to the 85th. A fresh and jangling, fearless and exciting book of poems, quite unlike any book of 2012 poetry.
A Quick Chat with Jamie Sharpe …
Pick a poem from the collection for me to share:
“Each Fruit Contains its Seed”
The town was designed thoughtfully
prior to the memory of those you remember;
barbershop, pharmacy, grocery
aligned in pleasing rows
too straight to be coincidental.
Where as histories exist of our forefathers,
nothing shall be written on us.
We await the town showing our chosen path.
When Luke, the shopkeeper, passed
I began arraigning apples in requisite pyramids.
There is talk of erecting a bowling alley,
but if such a thing was warranted
surely it would be here already.
Explain how your title relates to the overall concept. Did you actively aim to write a collection of poems that fit this concept, or, did you select these from a grander list of your work, because they worked together?
The title, Animal Husbandry Today, is like my appendix: it’s always been there but I’m unsure what role it serves (or was it a blind alley from the beginning)?
The book’s blurb says I’m, “exploring an arranged marriage of the bestial and humane.” That explanation is reasonable—maybe even true?—but not every poem in the collection can be held by a single slogan.
I do like cross-breeding ideas, taking unlikely counterparts and forcing them together. Sometimes you get lucky and sire a poem with 20% more meat on its stanzas or a glow-in-the-dark metaphor.
Rumour has it, you started writing poetry after a guy showed you something in his trunk one night, after you and your wife went to a play. Care to elaborate?
It was a trunk full of books: beautiful books. The guy in question was an alchemist. He would go through old barns, thrift stores, garage sales … buying crummy, penny paperbacks to exchange for dollars of credit at secondhand bookstores. He’d then use that credit on decent hardbacks to trade at antiquarian bookstores for volumes he really wanted. In this way he built a golden library. Eventually, he taught me the art, which is why it’s hard to see the walls in my home. I owe a lot to that guy (thanks, Palmer).
Devour enough books and you’ll likely produce one.
Pick another poem from the collection and tell us something about it, anything.
“Poetry Today”
“A man comes to a reading to get a book of poetry signed. This volume is of particular interest to the man because he has read and enjoyed its copyright page immensely; a smile is brought to lips every time he sees the words “first edition” in fine print. As the author scrawls his name across the front free endpaper, the man is already imagining the fantastical bids it will receive when listed on the Internet. Yes, the man enjoys poetry very much.”
~~~
Books became a kind of currency to me. There were volumes I lusted after for their artistic wealth and others for their worth in cash. It’s rarely so direct as in “Poetry Today,” but I’m weary of the strange economy around the written word.
I worry we poets are coerced into building our resumes a $20 contest at a time (with free subscription) in the attempt to leverage auspicious journal publications into a chapbook, book, government grant, tenure track position… none of these milestones are bad in themselves (give them to me!) but do they, and not the work, become the payoff? I’ve addressed this topic previously, with the poet Jonathan Ball, when he mentioned ”Poetry Today” in an email.
What’s the last great book of poems you read?
Memory Glyphs, a collection of three contemporary Romanian prose poets (Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta & Cristian Popescu) translated by Adam J. Sorkin.
I was lucky enough to secure two poems by Andriescu for The Associative Press, a literature and arts journal I volunteer for. Andriescu has a way of fusing the colloquial and poetic—not that the two are necessarily at odds—in ways that are simple, divine, terrifying. His poems arrange Earth, Heaven & Hell on a level playing field, perhaps in a bar where poets gather to play ping-pong or at a tourist ghetto on the Black Sea. Great stuff: he’s a singular talent.
