Elee Kraljii Gardiner : part one

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of two poetry books, Trauma Head, winner of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence and nominated for the Souster Award and serpentine loop, also nominated for the Souster Award. She is the editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living, a finalist for the Montaigne Medal and Hoffer Grand Prize, and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a City of Vancouver Book Award finalist. She founded Thursdays Writing Collective, a beloved non-profit organization, and through its ten years she edited and published nine of its anthologies. Originally from Boston, Elee lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Peoples, where she works at Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. eleekg.com

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Once, before I had published poems, I was talking to Fred Wah about his work. He was prepping his archives and gathering versions for Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. He made reference to how different the lineation and punctuation was in several iterations of the poems in various books, journals, or pamphlets. And he was fine with it—which opened my eyes to the inconstancy of poems. I thought publication fixed the poem, but Fred’s easiness with and curiosity about the mutability is mine now, too. Aren’t poems like people? Always changing and moving?