Biography
Neil Surkan was born in Penticton, BC. He is the author of the poetry collections Unbecoming (Fall 2021) and On High (2018), both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and the chapbooks Ruin (Knife|Fork|Book, 2023), Their Queer Tenderness (Knife|Fork|Book, 2020) and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous Canadian literary magazines.
Neil earned a PhD in English from the University of Calgary in 2021 after completing an MA-CRW at the University of Toronto and a BA (Hons) at the University of Victoria. He currently lives and teaches in Nanaimo on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples - the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation - with Luca, Edi, and Lloyd.
Neil loves poems that make the world feel unfamiliar and, therefore, more precious — poems that merge vibrant descriptions, startling observations and intimations, and bewildering approaches to form. Poets who're influencing him right now include Mary Ruefle, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carl Phillips, Craig Santos Perez, Diane Seuss, Ange Mlinko, Mark Ford, Sarah Howe, Michael Hofmann, Durs Grunbein, Tess Liem, A.E. Stallings, Tomas Tranströmer, Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Bill Knott, Natalie Shapero, Wendy Xu, Lisa Robertson, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Website: neilsurkan.com
Micro-interview
Not really. I was obsessed with playing in a band. We wrote our own songs — earnest pop horrors — and performed offensively long sets in creepy little cafes around the Okanagan Valley. I sang and played piano. Ocassionally, one of us would perform a spoken word poem while the others noodled around. I hope no recordings survive.
I started thinking about poems — about how hard writing poetry is, how poems are like nesting dolls — in my first year as an undergraduate. Around that time, I gave some poems to the professor of a Modernist Poetry course. He said, very generously, "I would wait to publish."
I never refer to myself as a poet, but I think about writing poems all the time and have since I was twenty or so.
Make everything in the world feel even more precious.
The first line [of "On High"] whizzed into my head and then I started thinking about how continuous, how whole, things (bodies, trees, rocks, lakes, etc.) appear to be. And yet, there is so much space in everything.
Matthew Zapruder's "Sun Bear." The first time I read it I felt astonished by how conversational it is, and yet how subtlely it moves from one subject to the next: the poem seems seductively easy to read, until you realize it's actually very weird and disorienting. It's like getting in an elevator only to exit into a different city. Or, like, finding out your airplane is a submarine. Especially because the poem isn't punctuated — and because it has no stanza breaks — I also feel very satsified by how amorphous it appears, on the one hand, and yet how clearly a particular line of thinking delineates (due to excellent line breaks) on the other.