Nathan Mader

“This is the room in my apartment in Yamashina Ward, Kyoto, where I read, write, and sleep. After several years of sitting on the floor in the Japanese style, I recently caved in and got a nice chair from a nearby shop—though I often find myself writing on the floor next to it out of habit.”

Readings

A book of poems that was important to you at a specific moment in your life (and remains important to you)

Emily Dickinson, The Pocket Emily Dickinson (Shambalah Pocket Classics, 2009)

I was working as a tar and gravel roofer when poetry really began to take hold of me and finding The Pocket Emily Dickinson (at Munro’s Books in Victoria, B.C.?) opened my eyes to her unblinking attention and unbounded imagination. We’re still catching up to Dickinson. What’s more, the miniature size of the book meant that I could bring poetry to work with me—reading lines like “The Zeroes—taught us Phosphorus—/ We learned to like the Fire” while taking cigarette breaks up on those high rises kept me in touch with the flame of Poetry itself, despite being covered in the dust and bird shit of the roof we’d just torn off. Though I finally quit smoking a few years back, I still keep the same tar-speckled, cigarette pack-sized Pocket Emily Dickinson close

A reading / book that inspired you

Ariana Reines, Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)

I first encountered Ariana Reines at a reading when she had just released Mercury, and I was immediately taken in by the voice of her poems. It felt both ancient and modern. Ecstatic and explicitly grounded in the entanglements of the moment. I’ll never forget hearing her vision of “A curtain / Of jerky / Spread over the world” (in “Truth or Consequences”) as she took us on a deeply psychological and linguistically playful journey that led to the stunning final lines: “… My secular life / If I ever had one is over.” I really felt that. Though a lot of the “popular” poetry at the time seemed to avoid visionary experiences in favor of ironic distance, Reines continues to inspire me to keep the Blakean openness to the invisible that drew me to poetry in the first place while not forgetting the stakes of the here and now.

A poet from before 1800

Hafez of Shiraz (1325-1390)

When I read Anthony Madrid’s killer book of ghazals, I Am Your Slave New Do What I Say, in around 2012, I fell in love with the form. How each couplet was like the “turn” in a sonnet, offering flash after flash of lyric thinking that created a visceral feeling of movement. This sent me to the Master—the fourteenth century Persian Sufi poet Hafez (or Hafiz). My version is the Collected Lyrics translated by Peter Avery, and you can flip any page open at random to find Plath’s “large charge,” that electricity that buzzes in great poetry: “O Lord, that self-regarding ascetic who only sees defects / Throw the smoke of a sigh onto the glass of his perception.” With his signature combination of wit, often humorous self-awareness, and genuine desire for self-transcendence, Hafez always reminds me how all-seeing the I of poetry can be.

A book of poems that was important to you when you started out as a poet and how that has shifted or remained constant over time

Don Paterson, Landing Light (Graywolf, 2005)

This was my introduction to Paterson’s work, and I can still remember the awe I felt when I read the opening stanza of “Luing,” the first poem in the collection: “When the day comes, as the day surely must, / when it is asked of you, and you refuse / to take up that lover’s wound again, that cup / of emptiness that is our one completion.” Here was a poet writing metrical verse and, in what seemed a radical gesture at the time, used end rhymes! I realised it was Paterson’s willingness to give a poem over its inherent form and rhythms, as opposed to prosaic “ideas,” that gave his poems their power. After finding Landing Light, I started to write with more of an eye on technique and started to listen more closely to where the poem itself wants to go. Though I’ve developed more of an open relationship with form these days, Paterson remains a touchstone.

A poet or book in translation

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies (1923), trans. Stephen Mitchell (Vintage, 2009)

I think this must be the poem I’ve returned to most over the years, and it reveals new mysteries to live by every time I enter it. While Rilke’s masterpiece is both endlessly readable and quotable, have we even begun to fully comprehend the voice in the wind that led Rilke to say “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror…”? At some point I started rereading The Duino Elegies aloud to myself as I walked in the woods near my apartment during the pandemic, and I eventually realised that I had the entire first elegy memorized. While metabolising this poem that dissolves our “too-sharp distinctions” between the living and dead has changed how I experience the world, I’d like to think it’s also opened up something my poems. I hope to one day have all ten of the Elegies by heart.

Writings

I Don’t Want to Be a Duino Elegy

What am I to do

with this lifelong

desire to dissolve

into landscape

the green mountains

of Japan the badlands

of Montana town-

ships sailing by

calling me calling

me to become

them I remember

seeing a lighthouse

at the far edge

of the mustard fields

in the borderlands

between the Boreal

forest and Cochin

Lake a beacon

a tourist attraction

I climbed the steps

to touch the tower

like the photo I

saw of Rilke stroking

the stone wall of

the Medieval castle

he completed the

Duino Eligies in

before his poems

swallowed him  

but I don’t want to

be a Duino Elegy

I want to climb

the tower to meet

the lighthouse

keeper I want

to keep winding

up watching rain

retrieve the lost

data of another

world within this

one the smell

of ozone and earth

everywhere nowhere

breath on a mirror

that isn’t a mirror

but the actual

surface of things

Pete Told Me Death

Pete told me death

Is a DMT trip

Neurons firing like signal

Flares across memory

“Machine elves” suspended

In a pure geometry

Of light and sound

I try to imagine it

But keep coming up against

The people in the park

Walking their dogs

Or not walking their dogs

While a thundercloud

Comes in fast over

The mountain I can’t

Tell if the cloud is God’s

Distant and imminent

Form or a phone call

From a stranger like

The time I worked in a call

Center at the start

Of this new century

And the manager said

To hang up if we heard

Heavy breathing on

The other end of the line

Because there were

A lot of lonely people who

Just wanted to hear

A human voice

Nathan Mader lives in Kyoto, Japan. He is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (fine period press). His work has been published in places like The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, and Grain, and he was included in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018. More can be found at nathanmaderpoetry.com