Past CBC Poetry Prize winner Matthew Hollett reflects on writing poetry collection Optic Nerve
Matthew Hollett is a writer and visual artist in St. John's. He published his debut book, Album Rock, in 2018.
In 2020, Hollett won the CBC Poetry Prize for Tickling the Scar. Before that, he was on the CBC Poetry Prize longlist in 2016 for Merchant Vessel and Bomb Crater Behind Vimy Station;he also made the longlist for the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize for Painting the Curlew.
The 2023 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books. They will also attend a writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point, a cultural hub on Toronto Island. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems, up to 600 words in length. There is no minimum word requirement. The deadline to submit is Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Hollett employs wordplay and a specificplayfulness in poems about photography, perception and ways of seeing in the poetry collection Optic Nerve. He dissects the way we see the world, from perspectives such as the inside of an eyeball to the impact of a bomb crater.
Hollett spoke to CBC Books about how he wrote Optic Nerve.
Joining passions together
"I generally describe it as a book about photography and visual perception like seeing and colour andlooking at things closely. I have a visual arts background and I made art and exhibited art for a little while after art school. I've always been someone who writes and makes art.
"But I gravitated more and more towards writing over the past several years. That's my primary creative focus now. So the book is sort of a product of basically the entirety of my 20s and 30s.
It's about looking at things in a different way,with an artist's eye or with the photographer's eye, and tryingto examine the ways that we see things.- Matthew Hollett
"The book has got a lot in itfrom living in Newfoundland or Halifax, where I went to grad school, or Montreal, where I spent a couple of years during the pandemic. It moves from place to place and from different times in my life.
"But generally it's about looking at things in a different way, with an artist's eye or with the photographer's eye, and tryingto examine the ways that we see things. Or photograph things. It's also got a lot of poems about art."
The journey to publication
"I had always wanted to do a poetry book and then I started when I moved to St. John's. But the book has changed a lot since 2017. About half the poems in the book now are new and have been written since then.
"Through that process, a few months after I won the CBC Poetry Prize, which was a wonderful thing. It was a really amazing experience in lots of ways. One was that I got to do a lot of press and I got better at talking about my poetry.
"Basically, because of that, I was asked to submit the book to Brick Books. Then their committee looked at it and then a year later, they accepted."
Bringing it all together
"I take notes on my phone and then expand them later. I take photos too, because I'm a photographer. Those are also a different kind of notebook and it always helps because I'm a very visual person, so it helps to have something to look at when I'm writing.
I like putting little things together in ways that create meaning, like you might do with the sequence of photos or sequence of poems.- Matthew Hollett
"Poetry for me happens in little bursts.Something I like about both poetry and photography is it's a series of small things. I've also been working on a novel and the novel's this big thing. You have to get deep into it enough to understand the shape of it and you really have to devote time to it.
"I like poetry because it's like smaller bursts of writing. I like the concision of it. I like putting little things together in ways that create meaning, like you might do with the sequence of photos or sequence of poems, that really works for me. It's like, hey, look at this and then look at this. And then if you put them side by side, they resonate with each other.
"And how do you do that within a poem or with a sequence of poems or with the sequence of images or with an image in a poem? I love that kind of stuff."
The power of visuals
"Sometimes if I want to find something to write about, I have this folder on my computer just called Scrapbook, and there's about 1,000 images in there. Stuff I've saved from the Internet over the years: artwork and photos and memes, just anything really, but it's mostly artwork.
"I just dive into that folder and find something that intrigues me enough that I want to write about it.
"I love the cover of Optic Nerve;it's an image by Jon McNaught, who's a British graphic novelist. It's an existing image, he didn't come up with it for this purpose, it's from this series of lithographs called Puddles.
"He has this wonderful sense of colour and composition, and there's something very subtle in hisstories that are just meditations on small communities and rurality and looking at things closely at the little details that make up a place.
The book is largely about photography. There were a lot of references to photography cameras and scenes.- Matthew Hollett
"This image is a tree reflected upside down in a puddle, but the puddle is broken up by the sidewalk slabs and so you get this weird in between space. You're seeing the plane of the sidewalk and then the plane of the tree reflected. And the tree is a very simplified form that almost looks like nerves. And so itresonates with the title.
"The book is largely about photography. There are a lot of references to photography cameras.The camera captures images upside down because the light passes through the aperture orthe pinhole and it's reflected upside down on the film.
"And that upside down resonates with the idea of photography too."
Matthew Hollett's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
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