How does a poem begin?
It begins with a problem, a feeling, an issue that boils around inside me.
I build a train track on the digital floor and tie the idea down.
Elsewhere, a form, constraint or proposal occurs: this is the train.
The poem is the collision and the aftermath.
Why is poetry important?
I don’t know why poetry has to defend itself—novelists aren’t asked to prove fiction’s worth but poets routinely have to speak to the relevancy of poetry. Who cares if poetry is or isn’t important!
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
e.e.cummings. A poem like somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond expands year after year, just like those petals in the poem. In other poems of his, the freedom in his lines and the unabashed exuberance of his loopy syntax just sends me. They feel so modern, and so out-of-time, too.
What other (poetry) books have you been (thinking about) reading lately?
Jordan Abel’s Nishga, Doireann Ní Ghriofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Joan Naviyuk Kane’s forthcoming Dark Traffic, and Fair Play by Tove Jansson.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
A poem can be tiny yet consume one’s thinking for years. A poem unfolds its angles and dimensions in a procedure that is never the same twice. That is very tricky. It’s a metaphysical shapeshifter!
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.
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?
