Posted April 21, 2025

The Interview – Endre Farkas

Endre Farkas

Endre Farkas was born in Hungary and is a child of Holocaust survivors. He and his parents escaped during the 1956 uprising and settled in Montreal. His work has a political consciousness and experimental bent. He is a genre-fluid writer who has collaborated with dancers, musicians and actors to move the poem from page to stage. Still at the forefront of the Quebec English language literary scene – writing, editing, and performing – Farkas is the author of eleven books. He is the two-time regional winner of the CBC Poetry “Face Off” Competition. He has produced videpoems that have been screened around the world. His collaboration with Carolyn Marie Souaid Blood is Blood won first prize at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. 

Endre, your family emigrated from Hungary to Montreal following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and that journey is reflected in some of your poetry and in your novels Never, Again and Home Game. Do you think that experience provides you with a unique perspective?

This is a timely question as I just returned from Hungary. Carolyn Marie Souaid and I were invited to lecture at universities about our most recent novels: Home Game and Carolyn’s Looking For Her. Although different both dealt with similar themes, we gave our lecture the title of “Home, Exile and Identity.”

First of all, my family didn’t emigrate, we fled; we were exiled. There is a big difference between willingly leaving your birthland and fleeing. We fled because the revolution in my hometown wasn’t only about freedom. It also had the dark underbelly of historical antisemitism. My parents, Holocaust survivors, hearing the midnight mob marching in the street shouting, “Kill the Commies, Kill the Jews” didn’t need to think twice before deciding to flee. That sense of not being wanted, of being hated by your people deeply impacted me, even though I was just eight at the time. So the looking for my home, identifying where and what is my home, has been central to a lot of my work. And, of course, who and what  am I is included in that. My first book of poems Szerbusz (1974) (pronounced“Serbus”)is about that.

My book Surviving Words (1994) also deals with that topic and theme. That book actually had its genesis with a performance piece Face-Off/Mise au Jeu in 1980. Surviving Words morphed into the play Surviving Wor(l)ds (1999). Even my 2003 poetry collection In the Worshipful Company of Skinners, which I think of as my “Canadian” book—based on an actual fur trader’s journal—deals withbeing a newcomer. Being an exile and a newcomer is really about Identity. Although I’ve lived most of my life in Quebec/Canada (which is another home-exile-identity crisis) a part of me is always from somewhere else. This has led me to think that the only nation I am a citizen of is the imagination. And if that is a unique perspective, then that’s what I have.    

You mentioned that you adapted your poetry collection Surviving Words into the play Surviving Wor(l)ds. Can you talk about that process? Did the work change in the adaptation process and if so, how?

I consider myself a “genre-fluid” writer. This is partly due to the times and the people (dancers, actors, musicians/composers, performance, visual artists) I was hanging out with. And that was because, partly, I was hanging out at Vehicule Art Gallery, which I will return to later.

I started out as a page-based poet. In these poems, I focused not only on conveying emotions and experiences but on the word as image, symbol, sound, rhythm, and the layout on the page. Then I started to collaborate with dancers. With them, I wrote text that “moved” and “breathed.” It meant focusing on “action words” (ie verbs), beats, and minimalizing text to maximize effect. When I “morphed” Surviving Words into the play, Surviving Wor(l)ds, I started thinking of the poems as “dialogue.” I do have to say that the play is not a “straight” play. In this genre, it was more about how I assembled the poems into scenes to give them a sense of flow/continuity. The poems themselves were thematically linked so it wasn’t a big stretch.

Drama depends on dialogue to tell/move the story, to convey feelings and experiences. I sometimes changed pronouns and tense and syntax but mostly it was the way they were spoken by different voices that made it a play. Hearing actors “speak” poetry is so different from having poets read their poems. They’re so much more nuanced. So I didn’t have to change much. They did it for me by the way they delivered the lines. I did make some changes after hearing them, to make it a bit more “natural” speech but not much. I do remember my director begging and threatening me to write some “entrance” and “exit” lines.  So I did write some.

The novel Never, Again was the “telling” as much “showing” the theme of home, exile and identity. There was a more obvious narrative, through-lines, and description. The novel was a broader canvas which allowed for and demanded more details and invention. I also had to think differently about how to make the reader want to read on.  I came up with a phrase and taped it to my computer, which helped me focus on the “action” in all its forms: “Every scene must make a scene.” 

Each form taught me more about writing. Each taught me to be more conscious of looking for “le mot juste.”

 Your video poem, “Blood Is Blood,” won first prize at the Berlin International Poetry Film Festival. Did the poem come first, or were the poem and the film developed simultaneously? What do you like about the marriage of poetry with visual elements?

The video actually began with Carolyn Marie Souaid and I exchanging e-mails. She is of Lebanese descent, and I am Jewish. We had been casual friends, having known each other through the poetry community in Montreal. A few years earlier we had collaborated on a reading/performance series called Circus of Words/Cirque des Mots. In July 2006, she emailed me about the most recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon: “There go your people again.” And so it began. We continued emailing back and forth and eventually, being poets, those emails turned into poems. Then, because of my collaborative instinct, I started to weave them into a series of connected poems. I started to see, hear, and imagine them as a two-voice poem. On a whim, I pitched the idea to CBC Radio. They went for it. So, the first incarnation of that piece was a two-voice poem for radio. Soon afterwards, we felt that something visual was needed and so we began working on it as a videopoem.

We didn’t just want images to accompany the poem, we wanted the videopoem to be its own poem. I thought of it as writing the poem with the camera and sound/text as the pen writing a new poem. This implied tuning into another form of imagining. We also incorporated new text.

As you know, imagery is an essential part of any poem. We extended that notion to include actual/visual imagery. I liked the extra element. I think it enriched the poem.

As you mentioned earlier, you were part of Montreal’s famous Vehicule poets collective, a group formed in the 1970s. Can you tell us about the group and your/their work? How do you think the Vehicule poets influenced the Canadian literary landscape? How did it affect you as a writer and performer?

This is a long story. I’ll try to keep it relatively short. It began with a group of young visual artists in the early seventies, starting an independent art gallery artist. Claudia Lapp, one of the Vehicule poets and a life-partner of one of the founders, began a reading series at the gallery. Up until that time, most readings in Montreal took place at coffee houses (for Beat poets) or at universities (for academic poets). The gallery was intended for new, emerging voices. A year later, Artie Gold and I took over the series and started to present local writers every Sunday. Ken Norris attended one of these readings and became a regular, followed by Tom Konyves, Stephen Morrissey and John McAuley. These Sunday afternoon readings turned into a meeting place for these poets who ended up being called The Vehicule Poets. The name obviously came from the gallery, but it was used pejoratively as in “those weird, fucking Vehicule poets” by the more conservative poets in town to describe us as oddball poets who didn’t only do “straight readings.” Artie succinctly wrote in the introduction of The Vehicule Poets anthology: “Not as one, then, do we present ourselves, but, AT ONCE.”

Due to the influence of the visual and performance artists at the gallery, some of us started to experiment with non-page readings. Claudia chanted or sang some of her poems. Tom collaborated with video artists to create the first “videopoems.” Stephen explored multi-voice readings and installations, and I worked with dancers, actors, and composers. Basically, we were taking the poem off the page and putting it on “stage.”  In doing so, we pioneered performance poetry in Montreal. Ken, Artie, and I were the first editors of Vehicule Press. We published books with titles like “Vegetables” by Ken that had drawings of vegetables in it and a cover of seed packets. Honey, by Claudia, was an erotic series of poems that appeared on orange paper stock with blue type. Murders in the Welcome Café, my surreal, Chandleresque, serial detective poem, had chapter titles such as “It’s True Even If It Won’t Happen” and a typographic playfulness and layout.

We also started a mimeograph poetry magazine called Mouse Eggs. Each issue was numbered as One Dozen Mouse Eggs, Two Dozen Mouse Eggs, etc. We published on holidays like Valentine’s Day or Easter—or whenever we felt like it. We gave contributors mimeo sheets and then ran off 50 copies. We produced an album of experimental poems called Sounds Like. While we were having serious fun, we were also creating a poetry community.

We supported each other by collaborating, participating in each other’s performance pieces, and publishing each other, and even if we didn’t agree on something, the democratic dictum “Go for it” ruled. For a more detailed history, I recommend Vehicule Days edited by Ken Norris and published by Signature Editions (then known as NUAGE Editions,1993).

I’m not sure how we influenced the Canadian literary poemscape. I leave that to others. I know that, for us, it was a time to experiment—to make IT new. I still believe in that and in Stephen Morrissey’s one-line poem that I think of as The Vehicule Poets’ anthem, “regard as sacred the disorder of my mind.”

You’ve also worked in publishing, as a founding editor of Vehicule Press and, of course, as the original founder of the Muses’ Company. What are some of the joys and challenges of publishing poetry?

The joy is easy, the making of somebody’s poems that you believe in public. The challenges are many: getting the books into print, (the cost part), getting them into bookstores (harder and harder because of the chains), getting them reviewed (preferably positively) because places for reviews are fewer and fewer, enticing people to buy them (because of how little poetry people read at home, in school and in public spaces) and making a living as a publisher (impossible), yet still do it.

You have a quote on your website that says, “Humans make art/art makes us human.” How do you think art can help us through the current “interesting times” that we’re all living through?

Humans are the only creatures I know of who make art. It really is what makes us different and unique. I often wonder why we make art. If Darwin is right that each species develops skills to survive and thrive, how does the desire/need to make art help us do that? Why is something as useless as art so essential to our survival? Sometimes I think it’s because it is useless (in the utilitarian sense of the word) that it is essential.

We may disagree on what art is, but we can’t dispute the fact that we make it. All of us. Good or bad is not the issue. Just watch children sing, dance, or paint. For them, it’s “natural.” There is something in those activities that creates a feeling of joy that energizes and satisfies them. And that feeling is something we want/need to feel alive. Art makes us feel alive. Making art is about consciousness at the highest level. It is sharing our individual and collective quest to know what and why we are here.  Also, while making art, we are not making death. It is quite the opposite of oppression, hate, and killing. Art shows us that there is another way. Making art is a weapon against those in all past, present, and future “interesting times” who would turn us against each other and in a way, against ourselves. So make art and make yourself human.