Paul Vermeersch, "NMLCT: Poems" (ECW Press, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Holly Gattery
Guest: Paul Vermeersch
Episode: Paul Vermeersch, "NMLCT: Poems" (ECW Press, 2025)
Date: December 21, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode of the New Books Network, host Holly Gattery interviews poet Paul Vermeersch about his new poetry collection, NMLCT: Poems (pronounced "Animal City"). The conversation explores how fables and fairy tales intersect with the digital world, artificial intelligence, and the question of what is real in an increasingly simulated, post-truth society. Vermeersch discusses his creative process, the symbolism throughout his work, and how his poems evoke the blurred boundaries between the synthetic and authentic, inviting readers to dwell in uncertainty and wonder.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis of "Animal City"

• Vermeersch describes NMLCT as building upon his longstanding interest in the boundary between the human and the artificial (03:55).
• The collection responds to modern anxieties—AI, algorithms, misinformation—by experimenting with what feels real in a machine-dominated world.
• The poems aim to probe the experience, not merely represent it:

  “The world keeps changing. So the writing has to sort of keep up with the world … There's the personal challenge of always wanting to develop your art form and take it places you haven't gone before.” (05:29, Paul Vermeersch)

2. Symbolism and the Title

• The title "NMLCT" (Animal City) intentionally fuses the concepts of nature and digital, with its spelling evoking both the natural and the algorithmic (06:02).

• Animals in the book serve both literal and metaphorical roles, representing reality and natural authenticity, in contrast to the synthetic (07:04).

• Vermeersch reads and unpacks the poem "Cubic Wolf," which encapsulates this tension: a wolf both real and geometric, existing in unsettling duality (07:53).

  “It's impossible to know what's real. And that's sort of the problem I'm asking on a larger scale about digital culture and artificial intelligence … the ability to sit with this doubt, and to sit with this sort of illogic and to sit with this mystery is part of the wonder of what poetry is capable of.” (10:00, Paul Vermeersch)

3. Geometry and Form

• The book is permeated by shapes and geometric imagery—cubes, dots, matrices—which function as “meta-forms” representing the synthetic, contrasted with animal/organic forms representing the real (12:28).
• Vermeersch intends these geometric elements to manifest the clash between the digital order and the chaotic richness of the natural world:

  “These shapes are meta-forms … They represent the unnatural world. They represent a kind of limited, synthetic, human-made world... and by comparison, revealed to be flat and lifeless.” (13:50, Paul Vermeersch)

4. Book Cover (COVID) Art and Collaboration

• The book’s cover features a sculpture by David Altmejd, selected for its visual and thematic resonance with the poems (15:33).
• Altmejd’s sculpture, described as a “jackrabbit astronaut,” blurs the line between organic and artificial, echoing the book’s central tension (20:18).
• Vermeersch shares how both the cover and the collection unintentionally converse as parallel explorations:

  "It's nice to have an image on the cover that's not merely decorative, but enters into a kind of dialogue with the writing." (17:36, Paul Vermeersch)

5. Fairy Tale and Fable Motifs

• Fables and fairy tales, especially the recurring image of the wolf, are woven throughout as both familiar and subverted elements (23:01).
• Vermeersch reads “an endless field of identical green dots,” a poem that acts as both a rewriting system for forests and a meditation on the failure to fully capture or engineer the wildness of nature.
• Throughout, fairy tales are recontextualized in digital and geometric spaces, raising questions about authenticity, narrative, and childhood morality.

6. Avoiding Moralizing and Fostering Ambiguity

• Vermeersch is intentional about refraining from explicit moralizing:

  “I want my writing to create an experience... not to be commentary. I think moralizing in a poem has a way of backfiring, or it has a way of eroding the poem's effectiveness.” (29:36, Paul Vermeersch)

• The collection invites readers to inhabit uncertainty and ask their own questions about the boundaries between real and synthetic, rather than offering clear answers.

7. The Power of Play and Experimentation

• Holly praises Vermeersch’s sense of play, particularly in the physical arrangement of poems and in pieces like “Shapeshifter” (a cento).

• Vermeersch explains the cento form—a poem created by collaging lines from other poets—and how it reflects the book’s themes of authenticity and human creativity in contrast to AI.

  Notable Reading:

  “I can make a wolf with my hands and a lamp on the wall. I was a child until I was old. A wolf began my death. I was a boy just once in a little dark house in the woods. I was a powerful, beautiful boy. And I could call down thunder and lightning, you know, if I really wanted to.” (36:47, Paul Vermeersch, reading from "Shapeshifter")

8. Process of Writing and Editing Poetry

• Vermeersch’s poems commonly undergo 30-50 drafts:

  “The real work of writing is rewriting, revising, editing… I try not to have a too definitive picture in my mind of what the finished poem should be. I like to get the raw materials down, then really just move them around until they feel satisfactory.” (46:07, Paul Vermeersch)

• Patience and openness are central to distilling extraneous language and letting a poem “reveal itself.”

9. Future Projects and Thematic Evolution

• Fresh from "Animal City," Vermeersch has just begun probing ideas for his next collection, considering an updated version of the pastoral tradition—“anything that takes place offline is the countryside of the 21st century” (52:31).

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Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On literary uncertainty:

  "Can we accept that, even in the logic, the internal logic of this poem, that this creature is both a real wolf and a geometric three-dimensional shape? … Is the doubt I am asking the reader to sit with and accept..." (10:00, Paul Vermeersch)

• On making poetry, not polemic:

  “If you're a poet and your aim is to be ‘good enough,’ quit. Because we are not here to be good enough. We are here to be better.” (49:19, Paul Vermeersch)

• On poetic patience:

  “There's one poem in this book that took me 20 years to write … it wasn't until this book that it finally came together.” (51:21, Paul Vermeersch)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Main Theme & Introduction: 02:27 – 03:55
• Genesis of Collection: 03:55 – 06:02
• On Animals and Title: 06:02 – 07:53
• Reading "Cubic Wolf": 07:53 – 11:55
• Geometry & Shapes: 12:28 – 14:25
• Book Cover Art Discussion: 15:33 – 18:27; 19:57 – 21:32
• Fable/Fairy Tale Motifs: 23:01 – 28:41
• Avoiding Moralizing in Poetry: 29:36 – 32:43
• On Play & "Shapeshifter" Reading: 32:43 – 39:17
• Craft and Revision Process: 46:07 – 52:31
• Plans for Future Work: 52:31 – 54:45

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Conclusion

This episode offers a profound exploration of poetry as a vessel for negotiating the boundaries between nature and technology, reality and simulation. Vermeersch’s NMLCT: Poems is at once playful, unsettling, and full of wonder; it asks readers to experience uncertainty and ambiguity, to engage with poetic forms old and new, and to reflect on what it means to be genuinely alive in a synthetic age.

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Recommended Action:
This conversation pairs well with a slow, attentive reading of Animal City. As Holly says, "First of all, get the book in front of you. Buy this book!" (41:56)

Transcript

[Marshall Poe]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.

[Holly Gattery]

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[Paul Vermeersch]

Episode is brought to you by McAfee.

[Holly Gattery]

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[Paul Vermeersch]

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Paul Vermeersch]

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[Holly Gattery]

Wait, I got a security alert from McAfee. It flagged that message as a scam. McAfee's scam detector automatically spots and alerts you to suspicious texts, emails and deep fake videos. Learn [e-mail] Online Protection welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone and welcome to mbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and today I'm excited to be joined by poet Paul Vermeersch to talk about his really exciting and for me, provocatively unsettling new collection of poetry, Animal City. Or I guess you could read it, or nmlct collection of poems. They're really fun and like I said, a little bit unsettling and disturbing. And I was all there for it because that essentially sums up how I feel about the world right now. Paul, welcome to the show.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Thank you, Elia. I'm glad to be here.

[Holly Gattery]

So good to have you. Here, fables and fairy tales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn't, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by the algorithm in a post truth society rife with simulations, misinformation and computer generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from machine city to animal city where the promise of real life still exists. Paul Vermeich is a poet, multimedia artist, educator and literary editor. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He's also the Editor Senior Editor at Wools Ackerman Publishers, where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buck Writer Books. He lives in Toronto. Paul, I want to get right to the first question, which is where did this tasty little brain nugget come from of poems? Because I've read a lot of your other work and while it feels there are similarities there, I think about your Wiley Wile E. Coyote. Wile E. Coyote Poems. There we go. There was also something that was really new and fresh and a little bit more sinister in this collection.

[Paul Vermeersch]

I felt, I think for a long time my poetry has probed the question of the relationship between what it means to be human and the kind of the man made world around us and the dividing structures between life and machine or the real and the synthetic. And so this, this book builds on, on that sort of question that has been in my work for over a decade now, maybe since my fourth book, the Reinvention of the Human Hand, but this one, certainly this book takes it a step further and raises questions about sort of the digital world and cyberspace and artificial intelligence. And I want to be clear that none of this book was created with the help of artificial intelligence, although parts of this book sort of might act like artificial intelligence. All of that's just me. So I think this book is responding to questions I've been thinking about for a long time. But it's the world that keeps changing. So the writing has to sort of keep up with the world. And that's one of the things that makes this different. And of course there's the personal challenge of always wanting to develop your art form and take it places you haven't gone before. So that also makes this book different than things I've written in the past and of course I'm concerned with the question of what it means to be human, but also how do we have a livable society? And I think often those questions need to be asked together. And I think that's something I'm doing in this book.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. And I also enjoyed that there was still canine energy in this book for all the humanity. Like there was cubic wolf. And I was like, yes, good, you're getting in these animals there. And I want to talk about the title next. Animal City. Now, Cubic wolf. Specifically, I really enjoyed the fact that the non human and non animal, the non fauna. And again, it's something kind of unsettling because it's a wolf, but it's not a wolf. And then there's Animal City in the way that it's spelled, or I'm interpreting it, interpreting the title again for our listeners. Nmlct. It's something that brings to mind, if you say Animal City, this very lush, maybe smelly, chaotic in a very natural sense image, but the way it's spelled feels very digital. So there's like this mashup. So I'd love for you to talk about the title.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Animals have always been important presence in my work, and I think for a long time when I wrote about animals, they, they, they represented real animals. And in this book there's a question mark about am I writing about real animals or am I writing about something that is a symbol of something else? And I think in this book, animals are often symbolically just sort of representing the natural world or the real world in a more general way. And maybe I can read cubic wolf and then maybe talk about that more specifically.

[Holly Gattery]

That would be wonderful.

[Paul Vermeersch]

This is cubic wolf. They have built a cubic wolf. This is not a riddle. It can't be solved. It is a cube. There are no icons or markings on its sides. It is a wolf. All of its famine and all of its wrath are equally enclosed within the equal dimensions of the cube. Its savagery is there, distilled, and its glee at the tang of organs and its relentless hate for the inert, inaudible threat it senses deep within another cube. A rival for its status or a hunter bent on taking is an intrinsic wolf with an intrinsic howl that cannot be heard. It could be any shape. It is a cube. It could be any living thing. It is a wolf. And where is it? It does not know. It only knows it is a wolf. Do not ask how they have built a cubic wolf. What have they done? It is no mere symbol of a wolf. It is a Wolf. It wants what all wolves want, to endure on blood and love its young, but mutely unstirring, without ever breaking from its form. So I'm often telling students that I teach, don't just ask what a poem is saying, ask what a poem is doing. And I think one of the things that this poem is doing is presenting the problem that this creature that I'm writing about, the cubic wolf, can somehow both be a wolf, a real wolf, and a cube, an inert geometric shape, and that somehow it's both. And the presentation of this problem, this logical problem, is maybe part of what is at the root of this book, that it's impossible to know what's real. And that's sort of the problem I'm asking on a larger scale about digital culture and artificial intelligence and these issues as they occur, that it's impossible to know what's real. And can we accept that even in the logic, the internal logic of this poem, that this creature is both a real wolf and a geometric three dimensional shape? And if so, how can that be so? And that maybe the problem of having some sense of doubt deep in the pit of your stomach as you read this poem, that it could possibly have any truth to it, is the doubt I am asking the reader to sit with and accept and maybe live with for a while while they read the book. And it occurs to me that that might have something akin to John Keats's concept of negative capability, which he describes in a letter to his family as the poet's ability to, and I'm paraphrasing here, the poet's ability to sit with mystery and kind of illogic and multiple truths and not be trapped in some kind of sense of logic. And that the ability to sort of just sit with this doubt and to sit with this sort of illogic and to sit with this mystery is part of the wonder of, of what poetry is capable of. And so I wanted to present early in the book, and this is the third or fourth poem in the book, I wanted to present early in the book a kind of logical problem that would cause the reader to sort of carry a kind of sense of wonder and doubt with them through the remainder of the book, and that what it needed to be was a sense of doubt about whether the natural world and the artificial world could be the same thing.

[Holly Gattery]

I really, as you're talking, I'm thinking about your poem now, leading Machine City and or M C H N C T. It starts square, square, circle, square. And there are a lot of shapes in Your book. And I mean I, I really, I went through and I dog eared pages with shapes on them and a lot of the books dog eared. So I'd love for you to talk about shapes and this influx of geometry in this particular collection.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Sure. If we, if we maybe if we understand sort of the creatures in this book to be metaphors, that is, they are representative of some other idea, their images. The image of a wolf, the image of a bear, the image of birds. And these images are representative of some larger idea. We can maybe say the same thing about how I use geometry and shapes and colors in this book because there's a lot of, there's a lot of cubes and dots and kind of matrices that arrange shapes next to one another. And if the animals and natural imagery and plant life are metaphors for a larger kind of sense of reality and the authentic natural world, then maybe these shapes are meta forms and that geometrically, then they do similar work in a different way. And they represent the unnatural world. They represent a kind of limited, synthetic, human made world that they inhabit. And by comparison, then the dots and the cubes and the squares, when juxtaposed with the image of a wolf, the image of a bear, the image of a bird, are revealed to be flat and lifeless by comparison.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, really, I appreciated that. And I think that's what unsettled settled me so much, is that I already feel like so much of my life is controlled by, consumed by a very flat digital experience. And seeing it reflected to me in a distinctly non digital space was unsettling because, you know, I pick up a book and I wasn't expecting to be so thoroughly immersed in an experience I thought I had left when I put my phone down. And you create that sense of forms and worlds bleeding into each other. And I actually say that from the COVID And I mean, I know they say don't judge a book by its cover, but my next question for you is to talk about the COVID So from the COVID of the book I felt unsettled. It's. Maybe other people don't, but I wasn't settled. And when I say unsettled, I'm not saying that I was scared or there was fear. It was just kind of a shift inside of what I consider a comfort zone and then something that's moving me slightly aside from what I think I know. So I would really love for you to talk about the COVID if you would.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Well, on the COVID of the book there's a photograph of a sculpture by David Altmaid called Spirit in the Temple of Soul that I believe he made this sculpture this year or last year. It's a very recent work, and it's currently on right now as we record this. It's on display at a show in Montreal. And Altmate is from Montreal, but he lives in Los Angeles now. He's a very interesting sculptor whose work probes and interrogates a lot of the same questions that my writing does, especially my writing in this book. He's interested in the tension between natural and organic shapes and inorganic materials and how the presence of both of those things in the same work create a sense of discomfort or a sense of engagement. And that's what made his sculpture such an ideal image to put on the COVID of the book. It was speaking to a lot of the same things that the book speaks to. And so when I saw this sculpture, I follow David Altmaid on Instagram, but I've also become a real fan of his work as I've encountered it in galleries and museums here and there. And when I saw this particular sculpture, I was like, oh, that needs to be on the COVID of this book. So I just reached out and I asked if we could use it on the COVID And he wanted to read the manuscript before he approved it, and he read the manuscript and then gave his permission. So I feel that that really worked out. And I think it's nice to have an image on the COVID of the book that's not merely decorative, but that in a. In a. In a visual art kind of way, in a visual way, enters into a kind of dialogue with them, with the writing in the book, and. And this particular work does that. So I'm. I'm really pleased. It might be a bit too much to say that it's a collaboration, because I wrote the book without knowing that this sculpture existed, and Altmaid made this sculpture without knowing that my book was going to exist. But it's certainly, I think, a fortunate confluence of works that they're somehow together here.

[Holly Gattery]

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[Marshall Poe]

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[Paul Vermeersch]

I wanted to give something to the.

[Holly Gattery]

Fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close.

[Marshall Poe]

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[Holly Gattery]

Absolutely. You have this rabbit hair. I don't know what the right term would be for it here with these large ears with kind of astral dots on the top. And it's only the upper half of the body and it's in a. It's got human hands and it's in like a space suit or maybe not a spacesuit. There's some kind of.

[Paul Vermeersch]

I think it would be fair to call it a spacesuit. Yeah, there's. There's elements of science fiction and horror and fantasy all through Altme's work. And I feel that my own writing also makes use of the trappings of those genres as well, as well as fairy tales and fables and all kinds of things getting at the sort of the representation of the animal world in a new way. So yeah, this is a sculpture that's a sort of a three quarter bust of like an. Of a jackrabbit astronaut. But then there's also like evidence in the materials that it's sort of. It alternates between looking quite lifelike and looking quite artificial. And that tension between the lifelikeness and the artificiality of the work is. Is characteristic of all maids sculpture in a lot of ways. And I think it's that aspect in particular that puts it into dialogue with the work in the book.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, well, I enjoyed it. And it's one of those things that at least I can look at as a cover and keep finding new details and new aspects to mull over and wonder at and enjoy. Which felt also like, like your book. So one section of your book is called the Forest. And I felt that here's where we really dive into that fable, fairy tale, fantasy element. Although there was, you know, elements of that before too as well. But I'd love for you to talk about the fable element because, you know, I don't pretend to be any great scholar of fantasy or fairy tale or that, but, you know, I do have four kids, so I feel like, you know, you tell children fairy tales not just to entertain them and whatever, but they're supposed to be little nuggets of life lessons in there, and they're really, really dark. And you've taken that tradition, I felt, and subverted it and also placed it in a completely different time and place and space than we're used to having fairy tales occupied. I mean, a different form, too. I mean, I'm not saying that fairy tales aren't in poetry, but it's, in my experience, slightly less common. So I'd like for you to talk about the incorporation and the uprooting of fable and fairy tale and fantasy within your work. And when I say, what were you thinking to do with that? I honestly feel like I have my idea and I feel like my idea of what you're doing is absolutely correct. But I'd love to hear it from you.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Sure. One of the recurrent images in this book, and we've already covered it a little bit with cubic wolf, is the idea of the wolf. The wolf keeps coming back in this book again and again. And then there should be a hint that's detectable somewhere that the wolf is, in fact the wolf of Fairy tale, and that this wolf is. There are echoes of this character that we call the Big Bad wolf, which is emblematic of the fairy tales that we tell children. And there are also hints of Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks or other elements of fairy tales throughout the book. So I'll read. I'll read a poem just now that I think gets at that a little bit. And this also has this sort of geometric shapes in it. And it has a hint about the wolf in it and the forest as well. So all of those elements are here. And it should be pretty clear what I'm doing, but we can talk about it. Just bear with me while I find it. I've lost my place in the book.

[Holly Gattery]

No worries. Paul, while you're looking, I just wanted to say for our listeners, I said earlier the section called the Forest, and there is that, but the Forest is a fairly actually short section. It just. It's a section that I marked as queuing me in through some kind of transition. Transition happening. And the Forest is very short poems that move into Animal City, the section called Animal City. And in that section is where I was really cluing into the fable. Like there's a poem called Sugar that begins the witch's house is always made of sugar. So we can immediately find ourselves in a fairly well known fable, fairy tale there with Hansel and Gretel and. Yeah, so I just wanted to make a small correction on something that I said earlier.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Oh, I don't think a correction is needed. Yeah, the poem the forest is sort of like a passageway between the first half of the book, which is Machine City, and the second half of the book, which is Animal City. But I think here's a poem that brings up the forest and brings up the wolf and brings up this tension between animal symbolism and geometric shapes. This is called an endless field of identical green dots. To begin with, no one could understand it. The first attempt to engineer the forest's writing system resulted in an endless field of identical green dots. Each dot a tree. A vocabulary of one word, the same dot and the same green, without any variation or grammar. A pattern arrayed like wallpaper. It was a failure. Introduce a yellow dot. Chartreuse, orange coffee. A blank space, a blue spruce. Introduce slight deviations in the size of the dots and. Or make some slightly more elliptical than others. Add a blank line between two rows of dots that represents a path through the trees. Dots for breadcrumbs and a sunken dot to mark the witch's house. The more the forest writes itself, the larger the page becomes, the wilder. And what at first appeared to be an endless field of green dots is now a language that has lost all sense of order. The red dot. The red dot. The red dot moves along the empty line between two rows of arboreal glyphs, followed by a furious circle of black scribbles. Care was taken to devise a writing system that would allow the forest to express its full vocabulary of inhabitants. Its vast topographical syntax. It required the illusion of repetition in a non repeating system. A tree. A tree, a tree, a tree, of course, of course, but not the same tree. Until at last it produced an endless field of identical green dots. So this is a poem about forests, about fairy tales, about writing itself and writing systems. And in a writing system, a letter, a combination of letters, are symbols, are glyphs that have to represent other things, sounds, meanings. And here I try to imagine if a forest had a writing system, what would it be like and what would it have to express? And if it's my forest, it has to express some kind of fairy tale. And so the red dot, the red dot, the red dot that moves along the empty line is Little Red Riding Hood. And she is between two rows of arboreal glyphs, which is the path through the forest, followed by a furious circle of black scribbles, which is the wolf. And so he comes back. And then ultimately, the poem is about how the attempt to engineer a writing system for the forest must fail, because the forest, if it's real, has too much to express, and if it's an illusion, has nothing to express.

[Holly Gattery]

I mean, I'm probably just reading my own, you know, crumbling morality, which I don't feel like my morality is crumbling at all. I feel like I've really entered my vigilante era. And your book made like what felt like at least a very big echo to what I feel. But interestingly, and this is something that delighted me, is that there's not. I didn't feel any moralizing in your book at all. And if I was talking about our digital world, if I was talking about AI, I fear I would fall deeply into moralizing. Tell me how you refrained. Consider this your lesson for me personally about how to refrain from moralizing in poetry. Because it's not that I don't feel that there is no morality here, but I feel like it's quite something that's going to be coming from the reader and their interpretation of your work.

[Paul Vermeersch]

More and more in my writing, I'm not interested in representing an experience or having some kind of discussion of an experience. I want my writing to create an experience. So if I'm making direct reference to some argument about digital culture or the dangers of AI, I'm not creating an experience. I'm referencing. I'm referencing something. But I wanted this book first and foremost to be an experience and not to be commentary. So that might be one way I avoided it. But also, I don't know. I don't know that polemics in poetry, making arguments within poems, are all that effective. And I think moralizing in a poem has a way of backfiring, or it has a way of eroding the poem's effectiveness. Because even if I'm reading a poem that has some kind of moralizing message in it, even if I agree with it, my eyes are rolling, you know, and it's not the experience that I'm after. Although maybe that's something I will more readily digest from a really good essay. But even an essay has to be subtle about making. Making an argument. But I try. I try to keep rhetoric out of my poetry, at least in. In this book. I. I have tried to keep the rhetoric out and and sort of just keep the imagery and the relationships between images. Let them tell the story. There's a moral to it, but it's really show, don't tell. And maybe I want the reader to be left with more questions than answers at the end of this book. And it's the questions that you're left with. And if you take those questions with you into your life, when you're finished reading the book and you end up applying those questions to other situations in your life, then the book will have done some good in the world. And it might just be that I want people who read this book to think. Not to think like me, but to think. So I guess I've avoided making any kind of explicit moral argument in the book, but I think I have portrayed scenarios that would lead a thinking person to arrive at a conclusion that might be similar to one that I might arrive at.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah. One of the things that I. I found just really delightful about your writing, and I do mean delightful, is that there's a lot of play in it. So, again, I agree, there's no point that you're moralizing. There's definitely an experience, but there is a lot of either implicit play, just with the way that the words and the poems take up space on the page. That is the stage of the poem. There's that kind of play, but there's also literal play. I felt on page 64, your poem Shapeshifter. This is one of my favorite poems in the whole book. And I felt like. I felt that the experience that it was showing me, the feeling that reflected it was something that had been that I felt reflected in me and my experience of the world. But there's a really great last line, too, and I don't want to read it myself because I'm hoping that I can do a little almost like poetry, karaoke, and ask you to read this for me. It's not karaoke. It's your own poem. If I read it, it'd be karaoke. But do a little like the Coca Cabana. And ask for a request here if you could read Shapeshifter for us. Sure.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Before I do, there's a few things I need to say about Shapeshifter. This poem is a sento, which is a poetic form that's like a collage. Most of the lines in this poem I actually didn't write originally. I have taken them from other sources and then arranged them into this poem, the same way that you would glue pictures that you cut out of magazines and books to make an Image in a collage. I'm really touched that you. You specifically pointed to the last line in this poem as being sort of special, because I did write that line, but I wrote it over 25 years ago, and it's from a poem from my first book, which was published in 2000. And I have taken that line out of that poem and repurposed it here as the final line of this poem. So this is a sento, and it's made up, and I won't read everyone's name, but it's made up of lines that I have culled from other poems by people like Ada Limone and Robert Haas and Patricia Lockwood and Seamus Haney and James Tate and T.S. eliot and Sarah Lindsay and Yusuf Kumanyaka and a whole bunch. And if you want the full list of sources, I have a very detailed notes. There's 27 poets that make up this poem, and I have detailed notes in the back of the book. But the last line is mine. So this is Shapeshifter. For months I was a cannonball. I was a thought, a dream, a fish, a wing. I was a child. I churched my hands, I steepled my hands and all the people were inside. A rabbit sitting quietly. The wolves must have looked so comfortable. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. I was never lonely. I was born funny. Born seeing funny. I'd learned by then I was a little boy that a thing can look like one thing on one day and another on another. I was weeping to say ghost. I was a butterfly caught by a fire. I was believed to be formed of frozen moonlight. I was chasing this blue butterfly down the road. I was a nuisance, tripping, falling. I was again the young wolf trembling in his blood. I was always hungry, bloody tongued. I was a coward carrying a wolf. I was still bleeding. To reconcile our pain, we made the stars into a bear. A bear at ease with his wide habitat. The shuddering bear in fractured atoms. I was a God of such strength they could not guess my name. I can make a wolf with my hands and a lamp on the wall. I was a child until I was old. A wolf began my death. I was a boy just once in a little dark house in the woods. I was a powerful, beautiful boy. And I could call down thunder and lightning, you know, if I really wanted to.

[Holly Gattery]

I just got goosebumps. I love that poem so much. And I've tried to write various sentos in my life. And it says very clearly, listeners, that is a sento by the way. But just being able to curate, I suppose the. The words of others to great effect is incredibly difficult. I've never actually written a successful sento. I've completely given up. But reading yours encouraged me to go play in the sandbox again. And I'm going to. And I've started it already.

[Paul Vermeersch]

I think they're enormously fun.

[Holly Gattery]

They are.

[Paul Vermeersch]

And I have many centos that are in my book from 2014. Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. And there's a whole section of sentos in that book. And that book is largely poetic forms that generate new poems from previously existing texts. So sentos were important in that work. And I wanted to do another one again for this book because generating a new text out of pre existing texts is what AI does. But making a cento like a collage is a very different and a very conscious act. And the way large language models and generative AI sort of cull language from pre existing texts and recombine it is not a thoughtful act at all. And I think that that was an important difference for me. And it's why this is sort of a poem that kind of ends the book, because I got to engage in that process in a way that felt human and in a way that felt that I could. And one of the great challenges of writing a sento is even though you are using other people's words and creating a kind of language collage or poem collage out of it, the challenge is to make it sound like your own voice.

[Holly Gattery]

And.

[Paul Vermeersch]

I feel like I got as close as one can get to writing a poem that kind of restates the thesis of this book that ties together some of the key threads of image vocabulary that run through the book. And that kind of puts a punctuation mark on whatever semblance of narrative arc there is from the beginning of the book to the end. And it brings it back to that. That sense of there being tension between what is, what is animal and what is human or what is natural and what is man made, what is authentic and what is synthetic. And what does it mean to be able to morph between all these things and still. And still be human and still be. And still strive for authenticity. And it's one of my favorite poems in the book as well, and one of my favorite ones to read to an audience. And I've been on tour since September with the book, and in almost all the readings I've done, that's been the last poem I've read.

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Marshall Poe]

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[Paul Vermeersch]

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Holly Gattery]

And I love that there's that. I think what makes it so powerful to me. I mean, for our listeners who may not have the book in front of them. First of all, get the book in front of you by this book. But also it. The. The part where that, you know, it's a sento is a footnote. It's at the bottom. So I actually read it without looking at the bottom first and. And realizing it was a sento. And it felt completely whole and organic and wonderful and natural. But the. The line that got me, that last line is, you know, I was powerful be. I was a powerful, beautiful boy and I could call down thunder and lightning, you know, if I really wanted to. Just that, you know, that conversational boyish wink is just like. Oh, like it was just beautiful. And it ended the book as one of the poems that end the book. It felt like where I'd been taken through this journey, through a very. Just what felt a very dystopian feel to me where I felt like I was, you know, dream even nightmarish in some parts. And then it ended with what I can only describe as a very Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin wink and seal of hopefulness and joy and play. Like I. I love that. Now, of course, other people probably might feel differently about the end, but that's how I felt at the end of the book, which I. Or near the end of the book since it's not quite the very, very, very last poem, but it's. It's close and I. I Enjoyed that a lot. And you've mentioned another book of poetry that you wrote. What was don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. And I just. Because I know the story behind that title, I would love for you to tell our audience about it.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Well, that. That is the phrase, don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something is reported to have been the last words of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. And that he was. He was wounded in a gunfight and he knew he was dying, and he wanted to think of something inspiring to say to his men to keep the revolution lit. And he couldn't think of anything. And so those were his last words. Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. And then that ended up being the title of that book because I used that line in a sento in that book, a cento that I made out of the reported last words of notable people. So the whole poem, instead of being lines taken from other poems, the whole poem is a cento, a collage poem, cobbled together out of the reported last words of notable people, from Beethoven to Pancho Villa to actors and singers and psychologists and prominent intellectuals and artists of all kinds. And that's also the last poem in that book. And the last line in that poem is, don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. And then that became the title of the book.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, I really love that. And like I said this. This whole collection has really invited me to play. Get Back in the Sandbox. Play fearlessly. But one of my penultimate question for you, my second last question is I want you to talk about, if you would, your process for distilling your poems. So, you know, sometimes I can read poems and I'm like, oh, I don't know where the editor was, or maybe the editor has a different vibe that I do, but I feel like there's. These are kind of clunky. But with your work, none of it feels clunky. It feels like there is no single word there that does not need to be there. So maybe for any poets listening. And again, just, you know, a little lesson for holiday even. What is your process for distilling? For doing away with extraneous language?

[Paul Vermeersch]

Almost all of my poems go through anywhere from 30 to 50 drafts. The real work of writing isn't writing. The real work of writing is rewriting, revising, editing. Almost none of my poems end up resembling anything close to what was written down in the first draft. It is a process of trial and error. And bit by bit, moving the materials around until they feel satisfactory, until they feel like they're in the right place. And I think that this is a creative process that works for all kinds of things. I think. I think abstract expressionist painters frequently work this way to sort of moving things around until. Until the canvas looks good. I try not to have a too definitive a picture in my mind of what the finished poem should be. When I start, I like to get kind of the raw materials of the poem down. And then I really just move them around and move them around and move them around until they arrive at some kind of satisfactory point. And often in that process, for me, there's a tipping point where I might not even know what the poem is gonna be until some point halfway through the process when suddenly it looks like something on the page. And I don't mean the shape of the poem or the length of the lines or anything like that, but the things that make a poem whole. Some kind of progress of imagery, some kind of implied narrative, some kind of music in the language, sounds and images coming together. And that at some point midway, some glimmer of what the finished poem is going to be suddenly comes into view, makes itself obvious. And from that point onward, the job changes. The job up until that point was to play around and to not worry about making mistakes. And to just move the raw materials around until they emerged as something. But once they emerge as something, the job becomes helping it settle into that final form and pushing it further in that direction once that becomes clear. And it might be as many drafts up until the tipping point as there is after it. I think the key to getting to that final point where the poem, as you say, doesn't have anything extraneous in it, is patience. I can't abide by an impatient poet who just needs to get something down and there, that's good enough. And I don't believe in good enough. I think if you're a poet and your aim is to be good enough, quit. Because we are not here to be good enough. We are here to be better. And I am always pushing my poem as far along to its final form as I can possibly get it. And if I can only get it so far, and it's sort of beyond my abilities to take it any further, then that might be where that poem has to end. And I will try to go even further with the next one. But the process is just to keep processing until it feels like it can't bear anymore. That any further changes to it would be a Diminishment. That might be as far as it can go.

[Holly Gattery]

That's such a wonderful answer. And I think it's wonderful because I think it's wonderful. But I also think it's wonderful because it justifies a position that I hold, which is a little bit silly, I suppose, but I always am saying that the poetry is. I don't feel like it demands much of me in terms of productivity. I have taken 10 years or more to write certain poems. I'm trying to think. I have my fourth book coming out, two more ready for public coming out in the next couple years, but only one book of poetry. And that's not because I don't want to write poetry. I'm always writing poetry, or at least trying to. It's because poetry will not be rushed in my experience with it.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Yeah, exactly. There's one poem in this book that took me 20 years to write. I've been writing this poem for 20 years and it wasn't until this book that it finally came together and then luckily also felt like it belonged in the book. So it's here. But yeah, it took me 20 years to write.

[Holly Gattery]

Can I ask what poem that was so I can go back and read it?

[Paul Vermeersch]

It's early on in the second half of the book and it's called Sometimes When I am Seated in a Darkened Theater.

[Holly Gattery]

Ah, yep, I had that one dog eared. Yep. So that's amazing. I will reread it again though. Yeah, I, I really appreciate that and I appreciate you justifying my position, especially when, you know, sometimes I'll see things or you know, see people that seem to constantly be publishing poems and I'm just like, how are they? How are they doing that? I just, I can't produce poetry at that rate. It is such. If I try to push a poem, it's like trying to move a parent, you know, it's just nothing is going to happen or nothing good is going to happen except me maybe hurting myself. So. Yeah, I really appreciate that response. My final question for you is what are you working on now?

[Paul Vermeersch]

I don't really know. Whenever. And this has probably been something I've been doing since. Probably since my fifth book. Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. Whenever I finish a manuscript, I usually often don't write anything for, for 10 months or a year when I'm finished the manuscript. So it's been, it's just been about 11 months now. And I've just started writing again in the last couple of weeks and I really don't know what it's going to be, but the general sense of things right now are that it's going to have something to do with nature and the pastoral tradition, which historically is about the countryside and shepherds watching their flocks and that kind of thing. If we go all the way back to the ancient Greeks. But I might try to update the pastoral tradition to be something like anything that takes place offline is the countryside of the 21st century. And I'm starting to gather together what might be a kind of the beginnings of the image vocabulary of that book. Like in Animal City, we were dealing a lot with forests and wolves and geometric patterns and architecture. And I'm starting to think of what might the image vocabulary of this new book be. And it might be some altered semblance of architecture and some altered semblance of animal imagery that might be the through line, but much more open or mutated in some way. And, and then there would need to be a kind of interrogation of, of what it means to, as the kids say, to touch grass.

[Holly Gattery]

What a great saying to be out.

[Paul Vermeersch]

There in the physical world. And maybe that's the new pastoral. And I think I might be working towards something along that set of parameters. But again, I have no idea what it's going to end up being. And it might resemble nothing like anything.

[Holly Gattery]

I've just said, which is part of the beauty of poetry and really any artistic pursuit worth pursuing, in my opinion. When you're talking, I was thinking about a, a video my kid showed me on TikTok and it was somebody who's talking about when they put down their phone for five minutes and then you see them dressed in like old timey gear, churning butter. And that's what they feel like when they're detached is that suddenly they're thrown back into some. And of course it's online, so that's ironic, of course, but I really love that idea. If you do follow through, I am so happy to hear more about it. No matter what you write, you know, I'm a fan of yours, Paul. I hope to have you back on the show to discuss whatever wonderful creation comes out of your brain net. So thank you so much for joining me today on NBN to talk about your marvelous book, Animal City.

[Paul Vermeersch]

Thanks for having me.

[Marshall Poe]

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[Paul Vermeersch]

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[Marshall Poe]

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