Souvankham Thammavongsa

I've been reading Souvankham Thammavongsa's books in preparation for a review. I'm digging her work far more than I expected to. She is the quintessential minimalist and my own predilections tend to be for the maximalist. But what she's doing is so damn precise and ruthless. I wasn't surprised to find, in various interviews, that she's very smart and has uncommonly keen insights into the hows and whys of her work.

Thought I'd share some of the fruits of my internet trawling. Below are choice quotations with links to the interviews whence they came. Below those, various links to her work in various formats on the web. Enjoy.

I don’t really like poets. They are awfully boring and not honest about anything at all. [From an interview in The New Quarterly, which is, alas, not available online]

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I don’t feel I’ve earned the right to call myself a poet and I’m not sure I have the right to say that, yes indeed, what I do is poetry. It is so grand and so beautiful, I’m not sure I could say I’m that grand or that beautiful. I do feel I’m still outside and looking in. I love the minds that are drawn there and the minds that are there. I want to be part of their looking, of their creating.

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Choosing favourites has less to do with fairness and more to do with pride. I think you should be proud of what you make. You should have favourites. Favourites are the result of having a standard, a sense of what you want your work to be. I am skeptical of writers who love everything they write. There’s something wrong [t]here. When I like a poem, it is the same as a carpenter knowing and seeing how well a table is built. I know and see all the things I did right. It feels sturdy and no matter what anyone does to it or says of it, it doesn’t wobble.

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I know that there are expectations for me to write a poor immigrant story or about my pussy or about making jam sandwiches by the window while staring out at the snow.

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ST reading at the Test Series

ST's austere desk space

ST's even more austere blog

Short talk about self-publication given by ST

Two poems of ST's (PDF)

Review of a performance piece by ST and others, with a link to a recording

Video adaptation of an ST poem, by Kat Burns

Another video poem

CBC audio interview with ST