Tuesday 5 February 2019

Shazia Hafiz Ramji : part one

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s first book, Port of Being (Invisible Publishing), received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was one of CBC's best Canadian poetry books of 2018. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The Humber Literary Review and Quill & Quire, respectively. She will be a writer in residence with Open Book in March 2019. She lives on unceded Coast Salish land (Vancouver) where she began the Intersections Reading Group and where she works as a publishing consultant and editor for various presses across Canada.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I know a poem is finished when I feel something similar to the feeling of telling someone else what you think of them honestly, and then still being accepted by them for who you are and what you think.

Sometimes, when I look at a poem a week or so after writing it, I wonder how I wrote it. I take surprise as a good sign that it's finished. If I can find my way back into the poem, it's not finished.

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