He has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the Arc Poem of the Year Prize, The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and the Descant/Winston Collins Prize, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Pushcart Prize. Bloom (Anansi) tracks the last days of Louis Slotin, the Winnipeg born physicist who died in a fatal radiation burst at Los Alamos in 1946. Lista lives in Toronto.
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
What excites and terrifies me about readings is the way that my work changes the instant I start reading it for people. Sometimes it feels like I can actually hear the chemical reaction in the air as I read a poem for a crowd; you can feel some lines falling and some sticking. It’s easy as a writer — as a poem’s craftsman — to think that your poem arrives at a state of completion, a state of rest, when you publish it. But weird things happen when you let that poem out into a room, and at a reading I have the chance to get a glimpse of the catalyzing effect — sometimes good, sometimes not so good — that a poem can have.
2) What do you want people to know about Bloom?
It's a collection of poems about one of Winnipeg’'s own sons, Louis Slotin. He was a Manhattan Project physicist who helped design and hand-build the first atomic bombs, including the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
3) Will this be your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
This’ll be my third trip to Winnipeg. Quick story: In 2007 a poet friend suggested I send some of my Bloom poems to Border Crossings magazine. He had just published a poem with them and said I should give it a shot. So I sent the editor, Meeka Walsh, a clutch of them. About a week later I got a response from Meeka. She was astonished. It turns out that Meeka'’s daughter is married to a man named Louis Ludwig. And he takes his first name from his uncle, Louis Slotin.
The poems, which were the first from Bloom to be published, came out in their fall issue and in November I came to Winnipeg for the first time to meet some of Slotin’s relatives and dig around, do some research. When I was here I met the filmmaker Guy Maddin at a party at Meeka’s house. I came back to Winnipeg about a year later to do some cutting and pasting at one of Guy's collage parties. In January. It was like -40 the whole time. I really do like Winnipeg. I’m so exciting and honoured to be bringing Bloom to Slotin’s city, where he was born, where he is buried. And it'’ll be nice to see a bit of its gentler side come September.
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I've been going back through Yeats, Frost, and Berryman. The book of the season for me is Don Paterson’'s new collection of poems Rain. It hasn't strayed far from my desk for the past couple of months. I'm trying to read Dante in Italian to mixed results. In April I read Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare and in the chapter on Antony and Cleopatra he says that if he had to choose only one play of Shakespeare'’s to save from oblivion, to the peril of all the others, it’d be A&C. So I'’ve been reading it over and over all summer. Also Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and Trisan and Iseult.
5) Your first book was published this past spring. What's that been like? Roughly equivalent to handling the core of an atomic bomb with a screwdriver?
Writing the book felt like that. Publishing the book was the irradiating flash: intense and over in an instant. These days feel like the long wait after the accident, anxious of what changes may come.
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Michael Lista will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:
September 20 - Mainstage, with Carolyn Smart, Joan Thomas, Eva Wiseman, Richard B Wright
September 21 - Afternoon Book Chat, with Michael Lista
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Ariel Gordon has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press), and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She recently won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
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