Aaron Kreuter : part one

Aaron Kreuter is the author of the short story collection You and Me, Belonging and the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs. His writing has appeared in places such as Grain Magazine, The Puritan, The Temz Review, and The Rusty Toque. Kreuter lives in Toronto and is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. His second collection of poetry, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, came out this spring with Oskana Poetry and Poetics.

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

At the moment, I am not in a writer’s group, though I have been in them before and I believe they’re an important part of the writing community. That being said, the work of writing a new poem is similar to being in a writer’s group of one: every time I return to the poem I’m a different person, in a different mood, with different sectors alit, with different levels of chemical and linguistic attention. The goal, in some ways, is to work the poem again and again until all the various members of myself are pleased—or, at least, indifferent—to the poem. After that, I’m a strong proponent of sharing my work before I submit it; I’ll read it to my partner, my family, my friends, the dog, the plants, basically anybody who will listen. (I will also read a poem I’m working on aloud to myself many, many times.) If I can’t get something quite right in a poem, I’ll share a written copy to get feedback. My poetry writing process is one of repetition, of experiment, of play; of, in a word, rewriting. I just go and go and go at a poem until there seems nowhere else to go. Then I wait a bit, come back to it, and go some more.