Michael Nardone Interviews Cecily Nicholson in Tripwire: 'The Red Issue'

The new issue of Tripwire is out, and one of the epigraphs frames the contents nicely: "Poetry everywhere. Justice nowhere. —Nathalie Quintane." While all therein demands attention, ours has been caught, firstly, by this interview with Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, conducted by Michael Nardone. Nicholson's most recent book, Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017), writes Nardone, "thinks with the fugitive movements and networks of black diaspora and Indigenous displacement so as to establish a ground for convergence, for communion, for chorus." An excerpt from their conversation:

MN: I think it’s an issue in Canada where poets who are committed to exploring diasporic and internationalist affinities and commitments in terms of poetics and politics simply don’t have a place in the cultural apparatus here, which is vehemently nation-centered. They may have their singular site, their city, but if they want to be read outside of it, there has to be some kind of network forged outside of Canada.

CN: Yes, and things are shifting right now for me in that way. I am spending more time south of the border, and embracing my own personal history in terms of ancestry and forced migration and displacement, and feeling some deep affinity with works in the US. I recall you introducing me to Fred Moten’s work years back, and as Mercedes Eng and I head to New York in the spring to visit him and community there, I think on new friendships. I think of friendships in Detroit. And in the Bay Area, Tongo Eisen-Martin, such a lightning bolt. Meeting him felt like meeting new family. I think of Aja Monet and Jasmine Gibson. I appreciate Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, who have made space for me and my work. It’s an odd shift as my work these days finds more resonance perhaps in those directions as opposed to central Canada, even though I grew up in rural Ontario. Then again, the conversations continue. Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand were in town from Toronto recently and somehow I ended up at the same table for a moment or so. I mean, I’ve been reading Dionne Brand since I was a kid, terrified, coming to Toronto in my teens, sitting with her 70 poetry on the Greyhound bus to the city, it was critical for me. And all the brilliant work, Katherine McKittrick, Robyn Maynard, I mean the kind of practices that black women intellectuals are doing right now and that we’re able to access in this moment, is moving. That shift isn’t just a mainstream push or pull around literature. It’s a resonance from multiple communities foregrounding experiences of blackness, embodied—we’re using different language, we’ve multiple locations, influences, and affinities, we are global in our relations and I also belong to this.

MN: I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to in Detroit and Windsor while you’ve been writing Wayside Sang.

CN: The book runs through Windsor to Detroit. The cities are twinned in a way, but it’s always been about Detroit for me. I’ve been going there for decades now. When I was young, I went just a couple times, but later, kept getting called to visit. Part of that evolves out of limited narrative I have around my birth father’s movement. He was a travelling musician, among other kinds of work, and he was often crossing that border, at that place, although I didn’t know that until later in my life. I’ve needed to think about and spend more time in that space to gain a better sense of it, and of myself there. 

Find the full interview at Tripwire: "The Red Issue."