Photo by Matilda Fraser
Gregory Kan is a writer and developer based in Pōneke/Wellington. His new collection of poetry is Clay Eaters, published by Auckland University Press. His first, This Paper Boat, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry in 2017. Under Glass, his second collection, was longlisted for the award in 2020. He was the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow.
Do you remember the first thing that you wrote?
Haha not really. I can more readily remember drawing or trying to draw things. I vaguely remember early writing exercises at school. I do remember writing a haiku for a primary school poetry competition, about a coconut tree or something. I did not win. I didn’t really write much as a kid, beyond school exercises.
What books were influential in your childhood?
My family had quite an eclectic collection. Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. Tintin and Asterix. Calvin and Hobbes. Goosebumps, Animorphs, The Hardy Boys. Dad had some stern literature like John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, which had a big impact on me and that I don’t think I had any business reading at that age, traumatising me early on. Also pulpier, more popular stuff like Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, which would also have been ambitious and inappropriate reads for a child. I also read a lot of encyclopedias and things like Reader’s Digest and National Geographic.
How did you come to write poetry?
At the very beginning, it evolved slowly out of my teenage fantasy of becoming a musician. I was learning the guitar, and trying to make songs. I loved reading lyrics in the sleeves of my favourite CDs. I loved The Smashing Pumpkins. After I left high school and was in the army, I drifted further towards just writing, and further from the guitar. The army itself was an important period for my writing. We spent plenty of time just waiting around, whether in camp or in the field, and we each had standard issue notebooks I would often scrawl in. Sometimes I would write just to stay awake during boring lectures. To be fair, there was a significant superficial, aspirational, performative dimension to this. I just wanted to seem cool and interesting. But I was also forming a real, deep connection to the activity. It was becoming a way for me to cope with what was happening. The army also gave me a lot of time to read. I would carry a small anthology of Emily Dickinson in my equipment vest. I don’t think I really knew what poetry or writing really was to me then, but it was a start.
You are also a developer and have made a (wonderful) text manipulation app called glass.leaves. You have spoken before of the similarities and differences between poetry and programming, but what opportunities do you see in this intersection for creative practitioners?
It’s cool just to see them as radically different manifestations and dimensions of language. I think it is a powerful provocation for being open-minded about what is possible with writing, and language. There are endless different ways of constructing and disclosing worlds. There are many different modes of mimesis. Writing isn’t just representational, like a photograph; writing can do and move things all on its own.
Writing as data that can be processed in many different ways. Or writing as programs to process data. Sometimes I see poems as little algorithms, our minds, the operating systems that run them, and the world, data.
There is, of course, plenty of potential and fun in using programming to process writing for generative and analytical purposes, like glass.leaves.
On the scarier and more divisive end of things, there is the evolution of AI that we have all been recently oversaturated with. It’s a field I’ve been interested in for a long time. Is AI not the first instance of all our writing being externalised and folded onto itself? Ghost, angel or demon?
I don’t know where that is going, and I am as afraid as anyone else.
Clay Eaters is your third collection of poetry. How do you see your writing having evolved since your first?
I don’t know how well I can answer this one. Too many distinct thoughts, but I will have a go.
I think I’ve become more and more process-driven, and more confident in that process. I worry less about the output until the draft is more mature. Writing has become more deeply interwoven with the way I process the world, the past, the people around me and how I live.
Each book, I think, has been driven by a desire for discovering or learning something, and I experiment with the means of encouraging and facilitating that underlying curiosity. I’ve continued to experiment with different forms and arrangements, while also strengthening my sense of what’s been effective for me in the past. I also think each successive book ‘contains’ the previous one, in a way.
I try to explore new tones, registers, voices, worlds in each book, which I think is just part of growing, and part of the fun.
Alison Wong writes ‘Clay Eaters haunts us, just as Kan haunts himself’. How do you see the act (or art) of haunting playing out in your work?
I think writing is always a form of haunting. Writing is a way of leaving traces of ourselves, of externalising ourselves. It allows some part of us to transcend time, death and finitude. A work can take on its own agency. In a way it implicates our corporeality.
As beings, I think we are also always already haunting and being haunted. Our past and future are always folded onto the present. This strange sense of being ‘in and out of time’, I think, is one of the key conditions of our experience.
I am obsessed with memory, and the archive. I think about what we carry with us and what we cannot (or will not) carry. What we hold and what we try to throw away. Loss and finitude are conditions of the living. There is often a sense of elegy running under the poems.
So, yeah, basically, everything is ghosts.
The fragment is a prominent device you have used across all three of your collections. What do you love about fragmentation?
As sharp as some of the details may be in the poems, equally sharp (I hope) is the sense of what may be absent or omitted or lost. I think a reader who is able to engage with the work will find themselves projecting their own imagination and feelings and experiences into that empty space. I think that certainly is a way in which the writing can ‘haunt’, like a Rorschach blot, or an afterimage that dances when you close your eyes. I think a fragment invites a reader to fill in the gaps.
But yes I’ve also enjoyed the adjacent concepts of limits, thresholds, excess, holes, gaps, leakage etc.
Absence is not merely absence but the potential of connection and transcendence.
From a formal perspective, I think of them less as fragments, and more as parts of a whole, each having its own autonomy, but also producing a cumulative effect when read alongside the others. I’ve always liked the freedom and permission of seeing it as a lost notebook or scrapbook. I think it creates a sense of a mind in process/progress. A sense that something is digesting. A sense that something is being digested. The poems are the traces of a mind (or stomach) at work? Or something.
What do you like to keep in mind when editing a poem?
Balance. That each element is playing its part. That the elements are in harmony. I sometimes like to think of a poem as though it were a dish. Are the flavours complementing or competing with each other? Which elements are meant to ‘star’, and which elements are playing more of a supportive role? They should not all be competing equally for attention. Are there too many sharp or overpowering flavours? Or perhaps there’s too much creaminess or fat, requiring a slash of brightness?
When I was younger, I fell into the trap of trying to make every single line a ‘banger’, whether in terms of image or rhetoric. Often this would produce a muddied flavour or tone, a lot of noise with little focus. It would also leave very little space for the reader to breathe or rest.
Literary constraints can often feel intimidating – where would you recommend writers start when looking to experiment with form?
On the one hand, you have the traditional ‘closed forms’ of poetry: sonnets, villanelles, haikus, that kind of thing. I think these can be useful if someone is just starting out, even just purely as exercises. Constraints can actually be quite freeing. Having to stick to syllable counts and metre and rhyme can actually be quite generative, and can force one beyond themselves, in a good way.
On the other hand, I think part of writing in our current time is realising that the possibilities for formal constraints and experimentation are limitless.
I think formal constraints are critical tools of creative practice, and can actually open up more possibilities, which may seem counterintuitive. I think it’s too vast a space for me to say anything too specific about.
I’d encourage people to look everywhere, especially outside of writing. Look at other forms of media like films, music, whatever. Look at other kinds of systems in the world. Look at other processes in the world (like cooking). ‘Literature’, poetry especially, has a lot of historical and cultural entrenchments, baggage, biases. I think it’s healthy to look elsewhere for inspiration and ideas.
The poems in Clay Eaters and your two previous collections are a mix of prose poems alongside more traditional verse layouts using line breaks. How do you know when to use the prose poem form and what do you think it offers?
Going back to the cooking analogy, I think prose is just another possible flavour. I enjoy the fact that prose allows for quite a different tone to that which is typically expected of poetry.
I sometimes love the relatively dry tone of reportage in prose. Or the simple diction of someone telling a ghost story by campfire. Or the kind of whispering intimacy one can evoke in a letter. Poetry often inhabits the realm of high drama, or even melodrama, and it’s nice to offset or counterpoint that with some prose.
It can also be fun to invert those expectations. To have more heightened, lyric moments in prose. To plaster dry statements of reportage or logic in a poem.
Writing in both modes allows me to play with the codes and expectations of both.
Further, the archival aspect of writing is one I often lean into. Prose moments allow me the space to report historical details that may seem too mundane or out of place in a poem.
This is a bit vague, but with prose it feels to me like there’s a bit more distance between me and whatever I’m writing about, like I’m floating above it. With (my) poems it feels more like I am inside a thing.
Are there other contemporary collections you admire that speak to the themes of echoes and ghosts so often present in your poetry? And whose work encourages you to push your own creative boundaries?
I just have my old favourites: Raul Zurita’s Dreams of Kurosawa, Anne Carson’s Nox, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, W.S. Merwin’s Shadows of Sirius. I’m sure I haven’t named them all, but those are off top of my head.
What advice would you offer your younger writing self?
It won’t be what you expect, but it will feel right. Keep digging, keep looking.
What’s next for you?
Trying to survive the book’s launch and its being out in public.