How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
I love discussing and tracking the process of The Poem, by which I mean all poems, all things. Interlocutors are crucial for me as I write—if poetry could be a contact collaboration sport I would be totally on board. I always want to talk through The Poem and figure out how it happens, how it morphs and where it wants to poke through the membrane between page and reader. So much arises in the contact with a first reader that I cannot comprehend how people deny themselves the pleasure. Some people can write a piece and send it out to publication without other eyes and ears on it first, but that’s not me. I have a few trusted readers but keep the conversation about a poem with that one reader, as if that one person becomes a godparent of that particular poem. I learn about my own process by talking over pieces I haven’t written, too. That’s a huge and pleasurable learning world for me, and one I have been built into my day through directing Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program devoted to literary mentorship that I direct with Rachel Rose.
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