Jim Johnstone: Bait and Switch

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards, including the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry's Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, he curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Windsor’s Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. His most recent books are Bait & Switch, a collection of reviews, essays and conversations on poetry, and a collection of poems, The King of Terrors. 
Bait and Switch was published by Porcupine’s Quill. The King of Terrors was published by Coach House Books. 

 Poetry Magazine Summer 2025

Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to All Write in Sin City, a podcast about writers and writing in the Windsor-Detroit region. Your podcasters today are Sarah Jarvis, former bookseller, publishing rep, and literary festival chair. Kim Conklin, Windsor-based writer and filmmaker. And me, Irene Moore Davis, author, educator, and local historian. Our featured guest today is Jim Johnstone. Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He's the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Relit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards, including the Bliss Carmen Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blazer Award, and Poetry's Editor's Prize for book reviewing. Currently, he curates the Ann Strother Books imprint at Windsor's Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave, an anthology of 21st century Canadian poetry. His most recent books are Bait and Switch, a collection of reviews, essays, and conversations on poetry, and The King of Terrors, a new collection of poems. Welcome, Jim. Thanks for having me, Kim. So you engage with the Canadian poetry community in a lot of ways, as a poet, an editor, and as a reviewer. How do each of these roles support your growth as a modern man of letters? I don't know if I've ever been called a modern man of letters before, but you know, the whole of what I do feels like it's linked. I would say that I feel like all the different roles that I play have made me a stronger writer over time. I think particularly writing criticism and looking deeply at books and asking, you know, sort of asking myself what I want from books. And I'm not sure I took enough time sitting down and writing them early on. I didn't take enough time sort of questioning myself and asking what I want from my own books. So these things have helped, you know, becoming an editor and learning how to edit has helped me edit my own work. And it gets you familiar with what's happening in a community and across, you know, and across a country, in my case. And I think that is also helpful. Sort of, it keeps you in the zeitgeist a little bit, seeing what people are writing, and you see trends come and go. In Maiden's Wish, you write about your early days at the University of Toronto, immersing yourself in poetry, and especially Canadian poetry, when you were supposed to be apparently studying biology, which is great. What did that immersion give you that contributed to your work? The immersion in science, you mean? Or all of the extra poetry and Canadian poetry on the side? Yeah, I mean, it's true. Yeah, it had always been an interest, you know, it was something I had been interested in since I was a kid. And I found an anthology that my parents had, which was a poetry anthology that it belonged to Alex Zivinovich, who was, became Alex Lifeson of Rush. My father used to go to their garage when they were teenagers and hear like the early iteration of Rush practice. It was not his thing, apparently. But you know, I had this poetry anthology with, you know, Alex's signature in it, and I would, I just devoured it. It was sort of my way of learning history as a kid, you know, as a sort of a preteen, you know, reading, you know, Renaissance poets and the Romantics and the Victorians. And then in the back, there was some Canadians. And interestingly, like those poems resonated with me the most. Those were poems that I could sort of see and feel and understand. They were more modern, of course, than most of the material in the book, but they also felt like they came from the place that I was living in. And so fast forward to university, you know, I always had written and loved poetry, I was just doing something else. But there was an impulse in me that I kept coming back to that kept distracting me from what I was doing. And that pull, you know, ended up being so strong that I ended up making a life in literature, which is not something that I had planned for that I expected when I was a young man. So what qualities in a poem draws you to it as a reader? And how does that change or maybe remain constant when you change hats to become the poet, the editor or the reviewer? Well, I mean, you know, I like the thing that only poetry can do as a form of writing. And that is that form informs content, and that form can help you enact meaning in poetry. And that's unique to poetry. And that's the thing that I look for in the poems that I love. In Bait and Switch, I write about the first poem that I can remember stumbling upon, which is a Margaret Atwood poem called This is a Photograph of Me. And that poem does that. It formally, you know, it's about a person looking at it in a lake. And the photograph is of a lake, they're looking at this photograph. And it turns out the person speaking is buried in the lake. And the last part of the poem is rendered in parentheses. So it sort of enacts a water burial and contributes to the meaning of the poem. And I think when I read that, you know, I was extremely struck by this was something unique. This is something I hadn't seen before. And, you know, I was an avid reader, mostly science fiction and fantasy. And I was really taken with the way the form and content merged in that poem as a first experience. And it's why I started reading poetry in the first place. So I still look for that. I still, as a poet, that's always my goal. I think the hardest part of writing a poem is finding the appropriate form for it, particularly if you're writing free verse poetry, because you're inventing form when you're writing free verse poetry, as opposed to choosing a preset form. So Bait and Switch is broken into four sections. There's the essays, reviews, conversations and views. And in your essay on the next wave, you say that you think the writers of this century, members of the selfie generation, think more globally than the Canadian poets of that Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Dionne Brand era. What does that shift in perspective bring to Canadian poetry in your view? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we can't help but be connected more globally today with the internet. I think even people that were looking at words in the 60s and 70s, you know, it was more difficult to see, right? You'd have to travel and spend time in places to get a feel for the pulse, but the internet brings everything to your screen at once. And it really collapses time and place in a way that's interesting. And I think that that had a large effect on writers and what's happening with writers. And I mean, as an example, you know, we can import, you know, poetry that's being created at the moment from different places, you don't have to wait for a literary magazine to cross the ocean. And, you know, special order that into a bookstore, or we're seeing things that are being written by poets, you know, overseas on social media instantly. And a lot of people are friends and having conversations with those people. So I think it's sort of collapsed some of the cultural boundaries, you know, we have more of a kind of a world culture today, than culture that's being formed in small places that still exists. But I think that, you know, we have more, I think, you know, global social concerns that are creeping into work. And I'd say the thing that I've noticed the most over time, is that young writers today, they don't subscribe to schools, they don't see barriers, they use whatever's at hand to make the work that they're writing. So they're not afraid of using something concrete in a poem, you know, they're not afraid of using an image in a poem, all things that might have marked you as a person in a specific school at a specific time, where like these boundaries weren't really crossed. When I first came into the community, people considered themselves, you know, with labels, you know, there was the avant-gardist, there was the formalist, there were, you know, after the modernists. And, you know, today, it just seems like people want to use whatever's effective. And there's this kind of a hybridity to the work, hybrid media, hybrid language, and people are sort of taking from everywhere. And it makes it very interesting and exciting. In another essay, you talk about an experience that's possibly every editor's dream. You found a kindred spirit in the slush pile. And that book went on to win both the Governor General's Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. How did your kindred spirit connection to Tolu Orlo Antoba impact the editing process and experience for you? Well, Tolu's work, you know, it really resonated with me. I mean, Tolu and I have a lot of things in common and a lot of things that we don't have in common. But certainly, as an editor, it was something that I was drawn to immediately. And I think that, and I like to say that I will read a poem about anything, if it's well written. A lot of times, I think there's too much focus on content in poetry, as opposed to, you know, whether you're actually writing a good poem. But I will say that with Tolu's work, you know, Tolu and I were writing about similar things. We were writing about anxiety, we were writing from the perspective of having both had a certain kind of scientific training. Tolu is a medical doctor, I have a Master's in Reproductive Physiology. And so, you know, it immediately stood out to me. And it's something that stayed with me after editing, it was the kind of book that I like to read. And it was something that had a real impact, the words had a real impact in my life, as I'd say, they helped me. And they were, you know, Tolu's book and Tolu's poetry is truly beautiful. And Tolu is three books in now, and I can't say enough about their work and what it means to me. It is awesome. Yeah, it's wonderful that you found each other. The heart of the book is the reviews section. Many Canadian writers, you're speaking of globally as well, we see everything, are reluctant to write reviews, because we know all know each other, right? But you take on the form with honesty, and you are frequently praised for your fairness. Why do you think it's important to write reviews of poetry collections? And how do you select the reviews that you wanted to include in this book? I mean, first of all, the book is sort of restricted to writing about Canadians. And that is simply, you know, a choice to sort of narrow things down and theme a collection a little bit, right? I think that if, you know, I was writing about poetry from all over the world, that's a different book. And it's a much wider book. I enjoy writing about poetry, the way I approach reviews, and the way I approached, you know, reviews, when I wrote them for this book is that I like writing about books that surprise me, books that I am passionate about. It's hard to write a review on spec. And most of these books were things that I sat down and wrote for myself and published later. I'm not the kind of person that can, you know, take on an assignment at a magazine, I was sort of uninterested in writing about things, you know, that weren't striking me. So that's how I chose the reviews in the book, I thought that I would write about some of my favorite writers, you know, even some of those writers are written about negatively, because not everybody's perfect. And, you know, my favorite writers release books that I don't like to sometimes I would task myself with writing a review of a book of that was coming out by one of my favorite writers, and I didn't like it very much. But in most of the reviews, you know, there's really an opportunity for me to talk and think about poems. And, you know, that's how I'd like them to read. And I respect poems, and I respect the people who write them. Well, you're kind of leading right into the very next question. The title piece of the book bait and switch is an in depth review of Christian books, the Zenna text book one. This book of poetry is cross disciplinary, and it combines science and poetry. But you weren't always sure that the poet was successful in what he set out to do. Why did you choose this review as the title piece for your book? And how does it represent or inform your view of recent Canadian poetry? Right, so, you know, simply by virtue of what it is, the book is a little bit of a miscellany, right? There's essays, there's reviews, you know, as you said, there's conversations. So I use the term playfully to title the book as a bait and switch, you know, just when you're getting used to one thing, I write about something else. You know, in terms of writing about Christian's project, I mean, I think that Christian maybe even misunderstands his own gifts as a writer. The parts of that book that were interesting to me were his translations of Virgil. There's a lot of things going on in that book that are wonderful, that are sort of more akin to sort of classical poetry and a grounding and foundation in poetry, which Christian has, than the scientific concept underlying the book, which didn't seem necessary to me. And I know that he would argue that it was incredibly important that he did complete that, and was successful in doing so and, you know, has encoded his poem in an unkillable bacteria. And I'm much less interested in that than the poetry itself. And so, you know, that my criticism of the project was sort of on that end. It seemed like a scientific experiment that was not needed, at least to keep my attention, because some of the poems in that book were fantastic. In your conversation with Shane Nelson, you continue to discuss poetry and science. One of the concepts you talk about is the purity of an equation, and how it can be unpacked to produce a zip drive full of data. How does that concept in your mind apply to writing poetry? Yeah, I mean, I've always been fascinated with equations. There was something that clicked in me in school when, you know, when math started becoming a little bit more complicated, that these things were sort of beautiful forms that were perfect. You could feed numbers in, and you could, you know, remove numbers at the back end, and you could have a right answer. And in school, I was much more drawn to doing that than writing a poem, say, because, you know, whether a poem is good or not is a very subjective thing. It depends on someone's enjoyment. But when you're handing an assignment into a professor, you know, there's either a right or a wrong answer on a math test. So that always appealed to me. But I started to think about equations in different ways, in sort of poetic ways. And that is that when you really look at science, science uses metaphor, it poeticizes to teach you about these things, right? So if you look at something like the Doppler effect, and the Doppler equation, they always give you a traditional example. And that example is of a train passing by, and how the pitch shifts, and you hear the sound differently as the train passes a listener. And I thought about that. And I thought, you know, like there's a lot of, you know, the Doppler effect doesn't depend on that. But, you know, it's rarely taught in any other kind of way. So I wrote a poem that was about that scientific example. And I poeticized the equation in a little bit of a way. So just making it a little bit more human. Okay, we're going to switch to your poetry now, and talk a little bit about The King of Terrors. Your most recent poetry collection, The King of Terrors, also deals with science in a much more personal way. Many of the poems deal with your brain tumor diagnosis. How did this life altering diagnosis influence your approach to writing this book? It didn't influence my approach at all. I think that if anything, the reason it was written about is because I continued to write poetry, you know, poetry is just something that is part of my life. And I actually tell writers today, you know, I'm often asked if I come to a class, you know, or mentoring someone, people will inevitably ask about writer's block. Or, you know, how do I keep writing? And the truth is that I actively avoid writing poems. But they just nag at me, you know, and eventually, I feel compelled to write them. There was a time when I practiced when I would write poems every day. And I think that I feel like I'm at a point in my life now where I'm, the poems sort of come, and it must be, you know, that muscle needs exercising sometimes. But when I got sick, I just kept writing poems. And you know, I was writing poems about, you know, my experiences in my life and what I was going through. And that was maybe a little bit unusual for me, you know, when I started writing poetry, I'd write in masks often, I didn't write very directly about the self. And, you know, it just felt like the right time to maybe open up and write those kind of poems that were a little bit more honest, a little bit more clear. And I felt like I had sort of the ability and capacity to write them at that point in my life. So yeah, that's how the book came together. I just kept writing through the experience. That's great, because things can be so tiring too, right? Which of the poems in The King of Terrors came the closest to meeting the ideals or, say, goals that you apply as a writer and editor of other poets' work? How do you think that that worked for that? Or did any do that? Yeah, I'm pretty hard on my work. I've always thought that if I really accomplished what I set out to accomplish, that I could quit, right? I could say, you know, look there, I wrote it, I wrote my masterpiece, I'm always striving. And, you know, the process of creation, I write because I love, I love the writing process. It's the most fun that I ever have. You know, the sort of unbridled exploration of the imagination is wonderful. And so, you know, when I write poems, you know, when you're in the middle of it, you feel like you're really on to something. And the poem could contain the whole world, because, you know, you keep going. And as soon as you put that period on the end and sort of deem it finished, it's always less than what it appears to be in your mind. So I don't think that there's, you know, I don't think I've done it yet. I don't think I've written the poem that I want to write, despite the fact that I'm very proud of the book and all the poems in the book. I think that's part of art, isn't it? Always chasing an ideal that's just out of reach. Yeah, I've known a lot of artists in different walks of life or different disciplines that feel the same way. So would you like to read from your work for our audience? Sure. Yeah, I'm happy. You want a poem? Which, it's up to you. So I was going to read something that's not not in the book, but something that's fairly new. It was in Poetry Magazine's summer issue. And it's a poem called Heaven, which is sort of the capstone of the writing I've done about being being sick. So this is a poem called Heaven. Heaven is just a garden, really. A plot of land where you might reach down to touch the snow and crystallize. I don't know this for a fact. Fact is, joy is as close as I've come to a second act. Maybe further. During a craniotomy, metal screws were used to refasten the wedge of skull that had been removed to expose my brain. The material, almost human. Materially shaped with flame and driven into the mind. Cybernetic, I can still pass through a metal detector without setting off an alarm. The fire, unharmed. Look through my head and see the great waffle iron of the garden glowing. From the window seat, you'll notice angels skiing. Don't take it from me. There's a God, right? I got that straight from the horse's mouth and those who'd inherited the earth decided they'd inherited idiom. A neurosurgeon will tell you that using metal to patch a skull is equivalent to picking up branches and placing them back in a tree. Decorating purgatory. In the air, cirrus, stratus, and alto imitate aspects of the healed. Non-stop shadows on the MRI. Launch me into the atmosphere and eventually I'll want to return to the field where I was born, despite the fact that it's burning. There's joy, even in hell. Artificial time, painted wreaths, the garden soaring, soulless, shaken like a snow globe. When I fly through a metal detector before joining the seraphim, no alarm, no end. Now I have a little more time with the flowers that interrupt the runway's lift. Thank you for this gift. Thank you for joining us and for sharing your work with us, Jim Johnstone. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to chat. Bade and Switch was published by Porcupine's Quill. The King of Terrors was published by Coach House Books. Thanks for joining us. Look for more episodes of All Right in Sin City wherever you listen to podcasts, or check out our website, allrightinsincity.com. For information and announcements of new podcasts, sign up to our email list or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.