Jason Camlot is a Montreal-based poet and an English professor at Concordia University. Over the course of his formidable career, he’s published four poetry collections and several academic texts. Camlot’s scholarly research ranges from Victorian literary style to contemporary sound poetry. He runs SpokenWeb, a collaborative research project interrogating literary practices from an interdisciplinary perspective, and has recently published two new books, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings, and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. We spoke with Camlot about the intersection of research and creation, the meaning of the archive, and his many ongoing projects.
Interview by T. Liem with Ockert Greeff // Winner of the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award (No. 39)
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!
T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in “A Letter from The Sea” with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?
An Inked Shorthand of Marks
T.Liem: The Whole Catastrophe was a pleasure to read. With my pencil in hand, I was tracing ideas, underlining phrases, and noting recurring lines. There is also so much sound-joy in reading it aloud, hearing your patterns of assonance and slant rhyme. It is this musicality that lets readers draw themselves along the earth with your speaker. These are poems which also feel like invitations. Congratulations on this publication and thanks for taking the time to talk about it with me!
INTERVIEW WITH ROSIE LONG DECTER AND VALLUM CHAPBOOK-WINNER MAYA CLUBINE
From the Immediate to the Timeless: A Conversation with Maya Clubine
Life Cycle of a Mayfly chronicles more than the life of a river bug. Maya Clubine’s collection, winner of the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Award, takes mayflies as a departure point for thinking about ecosystems, interdependence, and the lessons that we pass down through generations. Clubine considers the growth of a fly from nymph to imago alongside changing seasons, bird migrations, a father’s passing, a daughter’s return. Along the way, cycles tangle like a fishing line. In this interview, critic Rosie Long Decter talks with Clubine about structure, repetition, and the relationship between the cosmic and the minute.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Gravitas / Poèmes deep: An Interview with Amy Berkowitz
Interview by Lauren Turner A contemporary study of the institution, Gravitas boldly explores academia’s tendency to tolerate gendered abuse. Amy Berkowitz lifts the veil on the ordinary violence that female students are subjected to — violence that goes so far as to interrupt their writing practices and distort their relationships to words and literature. Illuminated […]
Rosie Long Decter, THREADS OF A NETWORK: A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW JAMES WEIGEL
THREADS OF A NETWORK: A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW JAMES WEIGEL INTERVIEW BY ROSIE LONG DECTER This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Matthew James Weigel is an artist of many disciplines. His work includes poetry, visual art, and scholarly research, projects that he weaves together through explorations of colonial violence and acts of […]
A NONPARTISAN CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE | Interview by Henry Kronk
A NONPARTISAN CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE Interview by Henry Kronk Henry Kronk: You were just elected [or, as I should have said, appointed] to be the parliamentary poet laureate. Congratulations, by the way. George Elliott Clarke: Thank you, Henry. Merci beaucoup. HK: Would you have thought twice about [accepting] that appointment had Stephen Harper’s […]
LILAC PAINTED WALLS AND BLACK FABRIC: A CONVERSATION WITH MONICA MCCLURE | INTERVIEW BY JAY WINSTON RITCHIE
LILAC PAINTED WALLS AND BLACK FABRIC: A CONVERSATION WITH MONICA MCCLURE | INTERVIEW BY JAY WINSTON RITCHIE
Jay Winston Ritchie: When did you start writing poetry?
Monica McClure: I always wrote poetry …. I remember covering my lilacpainted walls one day with black fabric and writing very disparate poems on the walls. One was an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that was about the death of a friend, and not accepting that death. I loved the brazenness of it. It goes: “You have gone to feed the roses so elegant and curled but[…]A Conversation with Alexei Perry Cox, Author of FINDING PLACES TO MAKE PLACES | Interview by Natalie Podaima
A Conversation with Alexei Perry Cox Author of FINDING PLACES TO MAKE PLACES (Winner of 2019 Vallum Chapbook Award) Interview by Natalie Podaima Natalie Podaima (NP): Can you tell me a bit about the process of putting the book together—how did it come about? Alexei Perry Cox (APC): With skepticism and love. I mean broadly […]