Alice Major interview on CKUA Bookmark

In case you weren’t near a radio Sunday at about 12:45 PM, here’s the audio of Ken Davis’s weekly program on CKUA—Bookmark—in which he interviews Alice Major. They talk at length about her latest book, the long narrative poem, The Office Tower Tales. In addition to teasing out a few literary allusions—Major recasts classic characters Pandora, Aphrodite, and Sheherazad within a Chaucerian frame narrative and a pilgrimage temporal rather than spatial—they explore how the poem came about. Major’s familiar light touches with rhyme and rhythm may only sound effortless to readers; she describes how difficult is was some days as she forged ahead on a poetry manuscript, which shares with Dennis Cooley’s Bloody Jack the distinction of being the longest ever published by the University of Alberta Press.

The delightful thing about The Office Tower Tales is how effortlessly readers can get into Major’s poetry. Rather than inhibit the narrative or draw undue attention to itself—as is often the intent with experimental or language poetry—Major’s prosody helps motivate and facilitate the frame narrative and those 17 distinct tales told by Sheherazad to her office mates. The poetry of The Office Tower Tales is the faint, complementary music you will hear in the background as you read each tale. These are tales after all, and it is astonishing how easily you may forget that you are reading poetry once you’ve lost yourself in this gathering of modern-day stories about life in bustling city.