Transcript: Michael Lista

An interview with the Canadian essayist, investigative journalist and poet

The Lean Out podcast has covered lots of books in recent years. We have never covered a poetry book. But all it took was one read of a striking new collection of poems for me to know that I had to have its author on the show. The Canadian writer Stephen Marche said it best when he described this collection: “Like supremely eloquent graffiti written on the wall of a magnificent palace, except the palace is the world, and the world is on fire.” 

Michael Lista is a Canadian essayist, investigative journalist, and poet. His new book is Barfly and Other Poems.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the interview for free here.

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TH: As I told you, I have never covered poetry at Lean Out. But I found Barfly striking. The voice is brash, defiant, a little roguish, a little nihilistic in places, undeniably masculine. And also exquisitely raw and vulnerable. There's this bravado, but just beneath it, a kind of grief of being human. And a kind of alienation. I wanted to start with this: I started my career as a hip-hop critic …

ML: What? Oh my God, that's amazing. You buried the lede before, when we were chatting. That's incredible.

TH: Barfly’s sensibility really reminded me of some of the rap that I love the most. Now, obviously this is not a sensibility that we encounter very often in the Canadian literature community, or even the Canadian poetry scene. To start today, talk to me about writing this volume of poetry — and what you were feeling, and thinking about, and ruminating on as you were writing it.

ML: First of all, I don't think there is a higher compliment than to say that it reminds you of some of the hip-hop you covered. Because I'm a huge hip-hop fan. My love of it was something that was kind of unbidden, just creeping into my thinking about poetry for a while.

Just to give you a little bit of context on where Barfly comes from: It's my third book. I haven't published one in 10 years, because I thought I was done with poetry, to be honest. I'm happy to go into it, but I used to cover poetry, and publish it, as well as write it. I had, I think, the only national poetry column in any Canadian newspaper, for about five years. I didn't angle to get a job like that or anything. Mark Medley, who was running the National Post’s book section at the time, reached out to me and said, “Hey, do you want to have a column where you can essentially write unmolested about contemporary poetry however you want?” And I was like, “Of course.” 

But in doing so, I made the mistake that I think a lot of Canadian journalists make, which is saying the quiet part out loud too frequently. And I kind of got run out of town. I pivoted to longform reporting, which I did for many years and continue to do. During the pandemic, I wasn't doing as much reporting, because it was just so much harder to get access to sources in the way that I wanted to. To the courts. Everything had just sort of ground to a halt.

I was fiddling around one night with this voice that was in my head. I was writing it just for me. I had no intention, unlike my other books, of having this be for public consumption. I just wanted to see what would happen if I started to write, combining a bunch of things that had been on my mind. I have been trying, for many years, to write a book about the state of masculinity, which I'm calling The Melting Mood, which is what Shakespeare called crying. I'd been wrestling with it. I was trying to find a voice for it, and I couldn't really find it. And with Barfly, there was this voice that was coming out — which I think you register — as being masculine, having bravado, but wanting to express that in a way that didn't necessarily read as conservative. Because I think a lot of the examples that we are getting of a traditional masculine voice read as conservative. I wanted to find a way around that. 

I wanted it to be wounded, aggressive. Not necessarily hostile, not misogynistic. But a sort of sound that I used to hear more. And that I hear in private conversations. But definitely not in contemporary Canadian poetry. I sent it to Biblioasis. Dan, my publisher, I can't believe it, he said, “We love it. Let's do it.” And now people are seeing my tinkering — which was supposed to remain private — out loud.

TH: Biblioasis has done some amazing books. It’s a brave publishing house. I'm thinking, for example, of the book that Elaine Dewar did on the lab leak hypothesis.

ML: Oh my God, yes. Before it was appropriate to really consider.

TH: I want to come back to masculinity in a moment, but first I want to touch on one of the opening poems, named for the nostalgic Scottish song, Auld Lang Syne. There's that theme of alienation there, and a mulling over of how lonely and isolating our society has become. The bar shuts down. Nobody is going to the movies or the baseball games. No one is calling you up and coming over for pasta and a dance. There's no plans and people and places to go. No work, no handshakes. And as you write, you “disappear into the year.” And you also write, “love was the first to go.” It's such a haunting poem. The Covid lockdowns in Toronto were some of the longest in the world. Talk to me about how you see that impacting this poem, this book, our city.

ML: My editor joked when I said that Barfly was a Covid book. She was like, “They are all Covid books right now.” I think for all of us, when it first happened, it seemed impossible that everything could just vanish. I was so panicked that things wouldn't come back the way that they had been. I realized suddenly that I had taken so much of it for granted. There were so many competing feelings. There was the “keep calm and carry on.” There was the panic from the right flank of our politics. There was the terror over our friends and family. There was this sense that this was some sort of honorable thing to be doing. All of that was true. 

What I felt was this profound longing. I was going through lockdown alone, too, so it was just me and my two cats. It felt like the world had sunk to the bottom of the sea. As I think we all remember. And what I hope comes out of Auld Lang Syne is that I suddenly realized how much I really loved the world. There is a lot of alienation in Barfly, but really, the being alienated comes from this real sense of love. To see it vanish so quickly … I mean, the old truism that the world dies one person at a time, and when that person goes, it's like a library burning down.

But this was something that no one had ever really seen. It's not like war. Say what you will about war, at least you're all together for it. This was being sent into a coffin and having to watch the world die. All its rhythms, its monuments, its little pleasures. So, the longing that I think is in Barfly comes out of love.

TH: That does come through, throughout the collection. There is this returning to hope, and returning to the small daily pleasures of life. Which I think is beautiful. There is also a rebelliousness to the collection, which I mentioned. I want to draw attention, for our listeners, to the poem, Traitorous Former Editors and Cultural Apparatchiks. What is that poem about?

ML: I wanted to write the kind of book that I wanted to read — and that I couldn't really read. One of the things that occupies the writer's life is the world of writing. We hear a lot in contemporary poetry, especially in CanLit, about the importance of community. Which always sounds to me like something the recruiter at a cult might say. I think a writer's job is ultimately solitary: Silence, interrupted by brief, unpleasant acts of socializing.

One of the things that you realize if you get to be a writer of my age — I'm 40 now, God help me — is that you are going to run across people who you dislike very seriously, for intellectual reasons. You know what I mean? Not even personal reasons. I lived through a lot of churn in the CanLit, publishing and journalism world, where there was some absolute childish behavior. Hysterical, childish behavior about what the Overton Window of what was acceptable to say was.

When you move over to the journalism side, say what you will about the profession, at least people behave in a much more adult fashion. And so, without naming names, I wanted the character of Barfly — which is very much like me, but it's kind of like an exaggerated version of me — I wanted to address some of those old assholes who did the wrong thing, thinking they were doing the right thing. And let them know that I still think about them every once in a while.

TH: There's a lot to unpack there. I do want to talk about CanLit. There's this line from the collection: “The scary thing about literature is it's dangerously close to talking to yourself.” This could also be a statement about our literary culture in this country. Which feels, right now, small and siloed, with diminishing audiences, stifling, conformist. Your friend, Jason Guriel, has a great essay about that. I've been disappointed with CanLit, and it's utter lack of courage — aesthetically but also politically. I haven't seen much defence of free expression and viewpoint diversity. I know you've also been a critic of CanLit. How do you think through the point that we are at in our literary culture?

ML: It's such an excellent question. For a while, I have been bemoaning certain aspects of it, many of which you mentioned. There's this combination of timidity and rancor — this combination of being politically siloed in a couple dozen different micro-communities while also talking about how important it is that we're all in it together. A terrible combination of a bunch of angry, atomized people without much of interest to say, who are also saying, “We're all in it as a team.” A real aversion to idiosyncratic voice. This has been something that's been in CanLit for a long time. The sense in which the person who tends to be most praised is almost like a sloganeer who is an impressionist of people who are already recognizable. We can resemble a group of mockingbird at times, repeating not just the same ideas, but the same sort of syntaxes over and over.

Part of why I wrote Barfly is because I wanted, again, to write something that I just had never heard. I'd never heard a sound like this being made in contemporary Canadian poetry. I wanted to remind the reader of poets who had come before — of sensibilities from hip-hop, from popular culture. You might encounter a voice like this on Twitter even.

There is, of course, a strain of contemporary CanLit which is enormously admirable. Some people are doing some of our best work today. You mentioned Jason Guriel. My God, the guy has written two books of YA adjacent Sci-Fi, written in heroic couplets. No one is doing that sort of thing. It's incredible. Luke Hathaway is doing some of the most incredible work we've ever done. There are lots and lots of incredible writers, across different genres.

The issue is, it often takes — and this is a story as old as CanLit — it often takes the Americans or the Brits to appreciate us before Canadians come around to it. Our domestic taste in our own work is really bad. And I think part of that is because our critical culture, our book pages, have totally collapsed. Essentially they collapsed because people ran them out of town. So, the only way one can be recognized now is with one of these silly prizes that are adjudicated by committee and have their own very specific internal politics. It creates this really bad feedback loop.

TH:  There's also this other issue that I've heard you talk about on a podcast before, which is that there's two conversations going on at all times. There's the conversation that is happening in public — very circumscribed — and the conversation that is happening in private, over drinks, over coffee. Part of why I left the legacy media was to try to join those two conversations together. It is maddening to see one conversation happening that you know is totally inauthentic. What do we lose when we have these separate tracks of conversation going on in our culture?