above/ground press author spotlight #4 : Jason Christie

, launching his latest as part of the 32nd annual anniversary event, August 7th in Ottawa,

Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and two children and no pets. His published books include Canada Post (Invisible), i-Robot (EDGE/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). He’s wrapping up a new collection that he wrote with/against/for AI.

He is the author of nine chapbooks with above/ground press: 8th Ave 15th St NW. (2004), Government (2013), Cursed Objects (2014), The Charm (2015), random_lines = random.choice (2017), glass language (excerpt) (2018), Bridge and Burn (2021) and glass / language / untitled / exaltation (2023; second printing, 2023), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award, as well as PSA (2025). He launches his latest above/ground press title as part of the above/ground press 32^nd anniversary reading/launch/party at RedBird Live on Thursday, August 7, 2025 alongside further launches by Monty Reid, Beatriz Hausner, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas + Mandy Sandhu (and possibly others)! Tickets are now available via RedBird.

You’ve published nine chapbooks so far with above/ground press. How do you see your work progressing between titles? Were these titles deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units, or part of larger, book-length manuscripts? How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?

9 chapbooks! Wow. That’s incredible. Thank you for being so patient and a welcome home for my work over the last two decades!

I approach chapbooks in different ways. Sometimes they are fully realized projects like Heavy Metal Litany from model (pdf download), or Bridge & Burn from above/ground, and sometimes they are more exploratory. I love the chapbook format so much. I find it very liberating, like it is so close to the moment of composition whereas most presses are warning authors that their submission backlog extends beyond 2030. With chapbooks, you can comment on things that are actually happening. I think they can let me also find out whether people even like the poems, like a prototype of sorts.

How important is that connection in how you approach manuscripts? Would you alter or jettison work if you felt a general audience wasn’t responsive, or is it more specific than that?

The response helps me lock onto a subject or tone. For example, I was working on the poems that ended up in my book Canada Post and I had a handful that were about robots. I kept reading them to audiences and publishing them mixed in with the non-robot poems. People kept telling me the poems about robots were their own thing. The response convinced me to pull all the robot poems out and focus on them which lead directly to i-ROBOT. I ended up publishing both books in the same year which was wild.

Despite the warm reception for the cut-up and script-generated poems in several of my recent chapbooks, most notably in glass/language/untitled/exaltation which you published and which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award, I have a manuscript of them that I will probably never publish.

So, I don’t know? I guess the reception is important, but at the end of the day it is all down to whether the poems are working.

Why might you never publish that particular manuscript?

Well, I got really excited about it and did a bunch of visual treatments to the poems. I don't know, maybe it isn’t such a difficult thing to handle. Chris Turnbull, who is the absolute best, said it might not be too tough to go from messed up manuscript pages to properly laid out book pages, but I feel bad for whomever would have to try! Maybe I'll send it somewhere.

I’m curious how your visual treatments, as you call them, have evolved over the years. It seems as though your approach to visual work is really woven into the ways in which you approach text itself, as though the two not separate, but parts of a larger framework. How do you see the two elements interacting with each other in your work?

I mean, I love to play with syntactic regularity in surprising ways. The poetry I return to often usually meanders between making and breaking sense. I love the interplay where something is familiar, approachable, comforting, then out of nowhere it switches up and takes you off in another direction entirely.

Fred Wah said poems should always be doing at least two things. That has stuck with me. I think there's the expository layer or what the poem appears to be about, then the sonic layer if you were to read the words out loud, and then the visual layer where your eyes trace the letters, the emotional layer, the formal layer. Writing poems where there are rhymes or associations in and between more than one layer fascinates me. Politics happens on all of the levels, not just where it seems most obvious.

So, the visual treatments are a way to break the fourth wall a bit, to let air and light and sound detach from words, to relieve words of their utility and let them not mean anything for a spell. Page as a field, language as material, garbage as nature, slipping the noise so to speak, a detournement in ludic delire. I also love making things messy and not being too serious.

Having said all of that, I will also say that as we discover that AI can replicate poems easily where the lines make sense and correctly amount to an emotional whole, that AI has revealed the lockstep way in which language, even surprising juxtapositions, operate, my brain turns more and more toward nonsense and play as a pressure relief valve.

With AI we are being shown a mirror and we are delighted by how similar the mirror is to reality. We can wave to ourselves endlessly and we'll wave back every time. The magic of AI is really the discovery en masse that meaning is made, in the mind and in the experience of reading, not in the act of writing.

AI can write plausible, passable sentences but there is no meaning in them until they are read. The sentences are the output of a massive predictive engine that benefits from completely standard and extensive language use. AI is the logical endpoint of language as a system.

Are there no poems after AI, then?

I don’t know, but it is worrisome! The ease with which we can generate all kinds of art shines a glaring light on the commoditized nature of it. What are we buying when we buy a book of poems? The identity of someone who reads poetry? The pleasure of reading poems? The labour of the people who made the book?

To return to an earlier question, I look to the small press, and local poetry as a way to circumvent some of the commoditization. The values are different and there’s often literally no money, so it is love and support for each other, and curiosity that allows us to sidestep a lot of the bs.

Not to say there aren’t problems and we would do to be mindful of the cult of personality that can stand in for making money, but generally the art of the smallpress, and the allowance there for being weird or trying new things or prioritizing creativity over marketability means the allure of the shortcut AI provides is less rewarding.

How do you see your work pushing to engage or counter some of these concerns?

We are at a strange time where we point to the fact AI can write poetry as evidence of its high-functioning and yet poetry is completely absent from the pie chart of public awareness of art. In a court case where Meta is defending its use of copyrighted material to train its AI models, they claimed that it was ok because the material held no economic value, especially at the level of an individual work. AI needs novel written content that is high quality so it can replace humans writing the very content it needs to grow. That’s an extinction spiral!

As a writer living through this time where what I do is simultaneously the most important thing but also the least important thing, I’m feeling a powerful cognitive dissonance. I think perhaps everyone is feeling it to some degree too. We recognize there’s something not quite right even as we gleefully update our avatars to look like they were drawn by Studio Ghibli and create podcasts from our banal project updates.

We are uncomfortable, on some level aware we are being manipulated by tech companies, and trying to appear like we’re not the marks on the midway. It’s clear that the economic benefits are in the hands of the individuals controlling the commanding heights. When we’ve been here before, the battle was over physical, material goods and industries in the real world – coal, iron, railroads, electrification – the difference now is that there is nothing physical at stake. The goal is the same: stockpile a commodity and maintain a monopoly, but what is the commodity?

The revelation of Social Media was that companies could get millions of people to work for them for free, doing the equivalent of marketing and lifestyle surveys every second of every day. The Faustian bargain for the simulation of limitless connection is that the companies own everything we create on their platforms. Totalitarian governments of the past would have loved to have a filter between their citizens and reality that was entirely within their control. We bristle at giving governments that power, yet hand it over so we can post pictures, shit post, and schedule events?

We are exhausted by constant propositions for attention, an ad, a post from our neighbour, a tweet from a politician, a repost by a frenemy that’s really just advertising in disguise. What do we look at? What do we respond to? What makes us stop? So far, sleep is our only refuge.

AI will become a little demon riding our shoulders, capable of recording every minute detail and processing it, mining it for valuable insights that will make it nearly impossible for us to avoid being exploited and targeted. We think we are tired now because every online interaction saps a small amount of willpower, but we are deliriously driving ourselves to a point where the only escape will be abandoning devices. This is possible now, but what about when we open our bodies to this?

It sounded far-fetched before something like Neuralink. We've slowly opened a path for marketing and technology to get closer and closer. Radio, TV, computers breaking the walls of the home, making the body the next boundary to overcome, our minds the last ad-free zone. Watches, VR headsets, earphones we screw into our ears to block the world, all lay siege to that last defense.

This is where the poetry I write enters the picture. I’m situating it directly in the widening gulf created by the ever-increasing poles of cognitive dissonance as they move farther and farther apart. My challenge is to find hope and not settle into a kind of smug regard. In attempting to illustrate the absurdity of what we consider acceptable, and highlight how hilarious it can be, I hope to avoid becoming didactic. We are all in this together!

How does this new chapbook fit into that particular trajectory?

In the new poems in the chapbook, and the manuscript they are from, I’m exploring my complicity in this system that exploits me. Not only as a consumer, but as a writer. I have a product I’m trying to get my audience to purchase (opening the idea of purchase to include reading, listening, talking about). Is it any different than a company trying to get someone to watch their new TV show, buy their candy, choose healthy pre-made meals?

I’m also trying to suggest that the idea that AI can beat us at chess and write passable short stories misses the entire point. If the goal was to have written something, then ok? If the goal is only winning, then mission accomplished, I guess? One thing that is uniquely human is creation from failure, the beauty of imperfection, the desire line defying the neat grid of paths we are supposed to take.

There is incredible power in creativity that doesn’t require augmentation. If there’s anything I’d like to leave floating above these poems, it is the mystery that will never resolve, the question with no answer, and the immense energy released as a result of refusing yet pursuing the ever retreating horizon of meaning. The potential between the saying and the said, between writing and reading, the unrecoverable productivity of that interstitial space is more important than anything AI will ever be able to do. The capability to sit in indecision, be comfortable with uncertainty, makes us human.

Although I don’t think I have figured this out in my writing, I’m looking for poetry that revels in denying easy resolution while embracing joy and not fear, pleasure not as a subject or representation but in the movement and appearance of the words or page or book, poetry that is not purposely obdurate, that doesn't hoard and hide meaning turning it into some kind of hero’s quest that confers membership into a men’s club of scotch drinkers smoking cigars around a campfire telling themselves they are the elite. I want poetry that is playful, silly, open, and resists authority by undermining itself.

Concrete poetry, especially dirty concrete, and sound poetry are often great examples of this. Surrealist poetry, thinking of the early 20^th Century but also Stuart Ross, provides moments of relief by opening into absurdity. I love the multi-poet approach of VII as well for how it situates authority as impossible to locate, irreducible to one person. It’s the dance into and out of sense that I find particularly alluring. I try to do that dance, but maybe it is better to continuously fail and frustrate that goal, to remain human and leave it to AI to perfect it?