A.W. French : part five

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Most of what I appreciate about poetry is its depth-in-brevity, the sense in which a poem can communicate so much in such a short space. That being said, I love a good long poem as well. Poetry is also, at least in a contemporary sense, not necessarily bound by the rules of language. When somebody writes prose, they are writing in the same way that prose has been written before – one word after the other, all in a line, so on and so forth… but when I write a poem, I can break all of that if I want to. There’s a space for those fractures of form and there’s a space for more conventional poems, depending on what you want to do. I guess the various options you have as a poet just excites me, and I want to keep trying new things.

I also feel poetry to be more meditative than other forms for some reason. There’s something about it that lets me dwell on things in a healthy way, and that’s just helpful for me as a person, regardless of the quality of what I produce. I’ve written myself through a lot of difficult times in my life, and I’m sure there will be more to come. I can’t imagine doing the writing that I have about the tougher subjects I’ve faced in any other form, for me it has had to be poems. I love writing poetry, and as much as I’m sure I’ll try other forms down the road, this will always be home.

A.W. French : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes, immensely. I began writing poems that I actually wanted to share about three or four years ago, and I saw it then as this isolated practice where it was just me in my room writing stuff down. Some publications helped me to see that other people were writing too, but when I moved back to Vancouver from Ontario in 2018 I started to try to engage with the writing community here, and that’s blown my mind. Starting my podcast, Page Fright, has helped me meet some of the people I look up to in my writing, people I really do consider as literary heroes. The fun thing about contemporary lit is that the people behind books are out there, and they want to talk to you about their writing… that took me so long to figure out.

Now that I’m talking to my favourite writers semi-regularly, I view writing as way more connected than I could have imagined it. Writing is a somewhat competitive thing, but the community is so friendly, and everyone seems to know each other. I remember literally writing a whole (failed) chapbook manuscript in my room in Ontario, whereas now I need to get out and write in response to other writers regularly in order to create something I like. I want to continue to work my way into the literary community, but more importantly want to create spaces for people who haven’t entered that community yet, and to allow them a chance to have their works seen and voices heard.

A.W. French : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

It’s usually Al Purdy, or at least it has been for a long time. I love Purdy’s writing, and it was one of the first things that drew me to poetry. His collection Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets was one of the first books of poetry I bought, if not the first. I like to return to that book because it reminds me why I started writing, and sometimes that can help get my mind up-and-running. Leonard Cohen is a writer I have a similar relationship to, since he was an early influence. Oddly enough, I started with Book of Longing, which is Cohen’s second-last book of poems. I bought a copy when I was in Bath, England writing a chapbook manuscript, and it’s one of my favourite books on my shelf.

Lately, though, I’ve been looking at Matthew Walsh’s book These are not the potatoes of my youth when I need something to give me inspiration. Walsh’s writing is weird, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. It addresses its subjects with such a delicate transience that I aspire to achieve in my work. It took me a long time to read Walsh’s book, because every poem I read seemed to beg me to reply to it with a crappy draft of my own. I got, and get, a lot out of Walsh’s writing, and am super thankful to them for their creative work, as well as to those who recommended it to me initially.

A.W. French : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Finishing a poem is always tough for me. I have so many halves of poems in my notebooks, it’s crazy. I feel like my inspiration usually comes in the form of a line or two, and then I’m left to draw the rest out on my own. It’s that drawing-out process that has been tripping me up lately, but every now and then I can get into a rhythm and produce more than just a line or two that is really inspired by the experience I’m trying to capture in my writing. I think it’s also difficult for me to call any of my poems ‘finished’, since they come from my life and are always susceptible to change as a result of that origin. Maybe if I have a book out in the world some day, my poems will feel more concrete and unchangeable, but I can’t say that there’s much that I’ve published so far that I would consider “finished.”

I also struggle with cliché. I think a lot of first drafts of mine are filled with super cliché lines mostly because I try to write in the language I know and use, and those clichés express a multitude of things quite well. My work is the most fun to create, and I think is at its best, when its playing with common turns of phrase and subverting expectations. That’s a tough thing to achieve, and I don’t think my work does it as well as a lot of other writers, but I like to play with colloquial phrases in my titles especially. I’d like to work more on this, though, because working in my own vocabulary often results in the emergence of cliché.

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’.