Jonathan Ball launches a new collection of poetry, The National Gallery (Coach House Books, 2019), on Sept. 17th at McNally Robinson, Grant Park.
Thu. Aug. 29, 2019
Jonathan Ball holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches literature, film, and writing at the University of Winnipeg. He has written for television and film and is the author of the poetry books Ex Machina, Clockfire, and The Politics of Knives, the co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Poetry, and the author of the academic monograph John Paizs’s Crime Wave. His first book is available freely for a limited time at www.jonathanball.com/freebook
Q: Could you please describe your new book for us?
The National Gallery collects poems circling around the question “Why create art?” and the different ways that, personally and nationally, we might interrogate that question.
Q: Where did the idea come from?
The visual poet Derek Beaulieu observed that I had written poetry books about books (Ex Machina) and theatre (Clockfire) and cinema (The Politics of Knives) and that my next one should be about visual art. I didn’t exactly write the book that Derek had in mind, but that’s when I started thinking about the metaphor of the poetry collection as an art gallery.
Q: Can you describe your writing process?
Every week, I schedule out the time when I will write and plan what I will work on and then I do it. I think writing is like digging ditches and you should treat it like any other job, where you plan what you will do and then you do it, whether you feel like it or not.
Q: Were there shifts or surprises for you in the project as you worked on it?
As I started delving into the personal reasons why people create art, and why I create art, two things I didn’t expect happened: I started to think more about how art has failed me, and also about my children and how I both want them to value and appreciate art but don’t want them to have to deal with the problems I have dealt with that led me to art. So it became a sadder and more personal book than I expected.
Q: Any tips you might share with other writers that you learned from the process of publishing this book?
If you’re writing poetry, you should reformat your page size in your writing software to approximate the width of a published page of poetry. I am used to writing prose poems and also poems with very short lines, but with The National Gallery I ended up writing a lot of poems with long lines, and very little prose poetry, and so there was a massive nightmare headache when the publisher designed the book and an incredible number of poems were total messes and looked horrible due to the lines being too long. As a result, I had to rewrite at least a third of the book in the proofing stage, when you should really never be doing that much work by that point.
Q: What will you be working on next?
I have a book of short stories called The Lightning of Possible Storms coming out in Fall 2020 from Book*hug Press and I have a Manitoba Arts Council grant right now to finish a novel called Kanada.
Also, to celebrate 10 years as a published author, I am giving away free eBook editions of my first book, Ex Machina, at www.jonathanball.com/freebook.