A.W. French : part one

Andrew William (A.W.) French is a poet who was born and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia. French holds a BA in English from Huron University College at Western University and is pursuing an MA in English at UBC. His poems and book reviews have recently appeared in Train: a poetry journal, The Lamp, The Hamilton Review of Books, PRISM International, and a number of other journals across North America and the UK. French grills his favourite emerging and established writers on Page Fright: A Literary Podcast.

How important is music to your poetry?

I came to poetry through hip-hop, which was a weird way for me to fall into the form. I’ve always been really into writing, but when I listened to the spoken-word that some of my favourite rappers had done, it got me into poetry. I spent a lot of time as a teenager trying to write bad spoken-word that never showed up anywhere because I wanted to emulate those rappers, and that slowly took me to writing page poems. From that experience I took a sense of rhythm I still consider integral to my work. I learned how to use words more creatively and started to develop a sense of humour in my writing as well from writing in that style. Humour is something I see as being important for my poems, especially given the heavier topics I tend to tackle with what I write.

I do write in a way that most people, I think, would consider independent of music, and I think that’s important to note here. Just because music brought me to poetry doesn’t mean my poems are pulsing with musicality. I like to think I can find some sort of colloquial musicality in the way that I write, but that’s a tough goal to achieve, and I don’t know if I’m actually anywhere near there yet… that’s for the reader to judge. I’d like to write more about music and the songs that have influenced me, and I frequently listen to instrumental music while I write, but I think it would be a bit of a stretch to call my work inherently ‘musical’.