Dale Tracy : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Recreating a feeling that doesn’t have specific content.

Dale Tracy : part four

Why is poetry important? 

Poems make structures graspable by the eye.

Dale Tracy : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

At first I knew I was playing with language to make ideas I didn’t have yet. Now I know that writing poetry for me is writing theory, which means that I’m more active about following how ideas I find out in poetry re-shape ideas I already know.

Dale Tracy : part two

What are you working on?

I’m organizing a manuscript focused on the feeling of being a broken-down machine tethered to a fence that is, however, also broken-down.

Dale Tracy : part one

Dale Tracy is the author of With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017); the chapbooks Celebration Machine (Proper Tales, 2018) and The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground, 2020); and the chapoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky, 2016). She received an honourable mention in Kalamalka Press’s 2019 John Lent chapbook award contest, and her poems have appeared in print and online publications like The Goose, Touch the Donkey, The Week Shall Inherit the Verse, Gatherings, Dusie, and Chaudiere.

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

When I write, the ideas come from me and the world as I live in it. But they belong to the poem. The poem’s the one talking, not me or any version of me—except as that version of me that is me as a poem talking.