Fresno Famous

Interview of Neil Aitken, author of The Lost Country of Sight, winner of the 2007 Levine Prize for Poetry

Neil Aitken was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and various parts of western Canada and the United States. He worked for a number of years as a computer games programmer before leaving the industry in 2004 to complete an MFA at the University of California, Riverside. He is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

His Poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Poetry Southeast, RHINO, Sou’wester, and Washington Square, as well as in the anthologies Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets and Homage to Vallejo. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, and Kundiman fellow, and three time Pushcart Prize nominee. The Lost Country of Sight is his first book.

Neil Aitken and Chuck Hanzlicek will read on Friday, Nov. 21 at 7:00 pm in the Alice Peters Auditorium, University Business Center, California State University, Fresno. Aitken is the 2007 winner of the Philip Levine Poetry Book Contest and Hanzlicek was the final judge who selected the winning manuscript. The winning book is now out from Anhinga Press, and both poets' books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

In a phone interview, local community journalist Marcus Chinn talks to Neil Aitken about his new book and karaoke:

So Neil, how does it feel to have your first book win the Levine Prize?

NA: I feel really excited about it I’ve always been a big fan of Philip Levine’s work. So it was exciting and rewarding to see that it resonated with the judge Chuck Hanzlicek and that it fit with what they envisioned the prize to be. I’m honored and excited about the whole thing.

I know one of the things they look for in the early readings is how a manuscript manages to have a range of individually compelling poems, but still form a unified book. How do you feel you managed to accomplish that?

NA: The process of writing the book took about 3 years and, originally, it was probably nowhere near as cohesive. In the version that got picked up, maybe only about 60 or 70 percent is what I’d set out originally to do. But I think the main way in which I tried to put it together was to think of the whole book as a unit. As I’ve tried to explain it to other people, it’s sort of like a tapestry—you start off and you have individual poems, but as you build the collection, you start thinking about the different ways [the poems] relate to each other and how you can set them next to each other to build sections, so they can kind of reflect off each other in interesting ways. At the same time, I kept trying to keep things interesting, kept trying to write the best I could on individual poems.

What would you say the overall goal or mission or obsession of your book is? And how do you accomplish or explore it?

NA: I started off originally obsessed with the idea of exile. The ideas of exile, home and return. And how there are places geographically, also within family, within beauty, within language, and even within faith in which we experience time—a part of, then separated from, and then returned to. So that seems to have been the governing obsession with exile, home and return. What happened at the end though, as I was finishing the book in 2007, was that it happened to coincided with my father’s decline. He was diagnosed with a terminal disease. So he was dying as I was trying to write and deal with that. At the same time, I was finishing the book and in some ways the ideas of exile, separation and return became much more personal as they related to family and to my own relationship with my father.

As I read through your book, I got the sense that place seems to have played an important part in the development of your poems and maybe even in your own development as a poet. Would you agree with that?

NA: I would definitely agree with that and I suspect that a large part of that comes from, first, having grown up in a lot of different places around the world and, secondly, growing up and spending a lot of my childhood in Saskatchewan, which is a pretty empty place. It’s very flat for the most part. Once you get out of the city, it is just you, land and sky. Land and proximity to place is inescapable. You feel very much a part of the place. So when you leave that, you can’t help but think of another place except in relationship to that.

You mentioned your father earlier and he actually shows up in a lot of your work. The book itself is dedicated to him. Several of the poems seem to be about him or your relationship with him. Could tell us a little bit more about your relationship?

NA: I had a very close relationship with my father, which I think in some ways this is different from other artists and writers. Often it seems they’re striving to be in competition with their father or their parents not understanding their desire to go into writing. But with my father, he was actually a librarian, and he was a family history genealogist, and he was a writer as well. He wrote mostly nonfiction. But he was incredibly supportive of my writing. When I left my previous career as a computer programmer to pursue my MFA and later my PHD, the first thing he said was, “Well it’s about time. Welcome back to the fold.” I thought that was incredibly generous because his greatest concern was not about oh, you’re leaving this great paying job, or what are you going to do with the rest of your life now that you are becoming a writer full time? He was more concerned that I was doing what brought me what I felt was the greatest joy, which was writing and teaching writing. I would say I had a very close relationship with my father. He was often the first person to read new poetry as I working on it. He was also one of my champions. He would always support and stand up for my right to pursue my writing. In that respect, that’s one of the tough parts not having him around anymore, is not having that feedback.

Ok Neil, so now we’ve come to the question that is the most important to me: if we were all at a karaoke bar at the end of the universe and you had to sing, what song would you perform?

NA: These are the toughest questions. I once got a question where the question was about a car ride and what person would you take on a trip across the country. You know I’m trying to think. Karaoke bar. What song? You know I’ve always been bad at karaoke. That’s one admission.

I might do anything by Journey.

NA: I’m trying to think what I would have done. Karaoke bar at the end of the universe. What can I say? I’m stumped. You’ve produced a problem posing question. [laughs]

Yes!

NA: Actually, you know what? I might do Every Rose has Its Thorn. You know that one?

Yeah. Thank you very much.

NA: Are you going to be there on Friday?

Yeah and I’ll get you to sign my book.