by Holly Gordon

Interviewing a taxidermist may seem a peculiar activity for a poet. But for Aurian Haller — poet, musician and arts consultant for the Central Québec School Board — it’s simply part of the process.

“My first book tended to be very autobiographical — we’re told to write about what we know,” says Haller, of A Dream of Sulphur. “And in this last book, in the next book even more so, I’m more interested in the things I don’t know and am curious about. So I get excited about an idea, a concept, a setting, characters, and can’t let it go.”

Haller’s “last book” is the just-released Song of the Taxidermist (Goose Lane Editions), and part of the artist’s excitement includes exhaustive research — and interviews. The title poem, which is split in two parts and serves as the collection’s bookends, won a National Magazine Award for poetry in 2007 and sets the tone for poems that explore the body — be it before or after death, human or animal.

“I got interested in the independence of the body, so this is the body lasting beyond the self, or having some sort of, having its own story to tell,” details Haller. “And that’s what drew me to taxidermy because there were all these specimens that had all these fantastic stories and who were still inhabiting spaces in various cities and museums and shops and they all had stories to tell.”

Haller’s newest work is intensely visual. In the first part of long-form poem Song of the Taxidermist, the poet writes out the name and creator of a taxidermy work at the top of every page, with a page-long response in free verse. The first eight pages follow this form, while the second part of Song of the Taxidermist, at the back of the collection, is a response to French anatomist Honoré Fragonard’s L’Homme a la mandibule — a skinned cadaver.

This style of responding to visual work through poetry is something Haller says is new for him. He points to the art of ekphrasis — a vivid, word-based description of a visual art — as its basis, but since no descriptions of the taxidermy works appear in his poetry, he admits to twisting the form.

“Traditionally, one replicates the piece in question so that… I would describe it so well that you should have a clear picture in your head of exactly what that painting is,” says Haller. “However, now contemporary ekphrasis involves a lot more flexibility in what kind of work is possible. So that we no longer feel tied necessarily to reproducing the work, we play with it, more than we produce it.”

While Song of the Taxidermist has been previously published and awarded, Haller’s poems The Swimmers stand out from the collection. In The Swimmers, Haller cites Canadian visual artist Betty Goodwin’s swimmer paintings, created between 1980 and ’83, as inspiration.

“For me, it’s a piece that asks so many questions that need to be explored that calls you to produce something of your own in response, or in challenge, or even in contradiction,” says Haller, who later adds he’s been intrigued by Goodwin’s work for about two decades.

“So this ambiguity with the swimmers was something that influenced me to write about them.”

Haller’s response to The Swimmers varies from playful to macabre, often questioning the paintings’ intentions:

“Yours is the practice/of suggestion: you assigned your swimmers/the struggle between moving out or being pulled down./Since painting is an approximation we can’t afford/ourselves, should we drift out further/than we thought, not waving but drowning.”

As an artist who writes mostly autobiographical lyrics for his project The Aurian Haller Band, Haller says he’s unsure where this fascination with the visual comes from.

“For some reason,” he says, “lately, the visual has become more and more important, perhaps because poets spend so much time in the modern church — the art gallery — for ideas for inspiration, we cannot help but be influenced by the visual.”

For Haller’s next project, the art continues to be his muse. He’s working on The Diggers, a book of poems “that deals with the idea of the artifact up in the Canadian arctic.” And right now, it’s back to the research table.

“This past year I don’t think I’ve written a single poem — it’s the longest dry spell I’ve had probably in 15 years,” says Haller, laughing.

“I’m a slow writer. And I do research my subjects a great deal, so just the research takes a long time.”