Monday, April 11, 2011

Encore Lit Interviews Norm Sibum



I pointed out a few weeks ago that Norm Sibum has been keeping a blog for some time, and that Thirsty readers might want to check it out on occasion. CNQ contributing editor Michael Carbert interviews Norm today over on his online magazine Encore Lit about the blog and just about everything else it touches on:

More than one literary commentator [Ed. note: Messrs. Wells and Starnino] has expressed surprise that Norm Sibum now has a blog. Author websites are common, but blogs where the posts are both daily and lengthy, not to mention written in a truly idiosyncratic style, are not typical. One sees from the posts themselves that you’re surprised to find yourself pursuing this project. Why a blog?

Yes, I am somewhat surprised to find myself ‘pursuing this project’. I knew at the outset I was taking leave of my senses and felt quite ridiculous for the first month or so writing up my ‘posts’. But it passed. The fact that it passed perhaps ought to trouble me. So why a blog? I don’t know, to be honest. Any number of reasons recommend themselves. To keep my hand in somehow, poems coming more slow; to hear the sound of my voice rattling on — dreadful thought, that one; to organize my thinking, if at the expense of the long-suffering reader. The thing is, a number of people tell me they follow the posts on a semi-regular basis, so I have some excuse to continue. I give it a year, at the end of which I will assess whether or not the posting has been a good or truly rotten idea.

Your posts ground themselves quite deliberately in a specific locale, with detailed references to the restaurants and terraces you frequent and the people you encounter, while simultaneously discussing geo-politics and events happening around the globe. Is this juxtaposition primarily an aesthetic one, or do you sense that developments in Washington or the Middle East do resonate in your corner of things here on Sherbrooke Street West?

Resonate is a word that renders me exceedingly nervous. One hears it used so often that one wonders, what with just about everything resonating, if we can expect rolling blackouts sometime soon. I am doing in the blogs what I have always done in the poems, just that I am permitting myself to be awfully chatty and, well, prosy. The blogs may lead in the end to better poems; then again, look out, wretched bit of verse at 3 o’clock—To further treat with your question, one’s street corner is always ‘the world’ to some extent or another, and time is fluid. The poet Hesiod wrote his verse a long, long time ago and yet, I know at least one Hesiod out in the Townships who is just as cranky and as red-necked as the poet was. This man, as he listens to his Mahler and Beethoven, vents continuous, unrelenting streams of bile. In that sense, these juxtapositions you speak of in my writing do not reflect an aesthetic position on my part; it just seems a quite normal state of affairs.


For the rest of the interview please go here.

1 comment:

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