Frances Boyle : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

My initial reaction was to say that (listening to) music is not important – I’ve never maintained a writing playlist and prefer to write in silence. However, I very often have one or more songs stuck in my head. Those rhythms will play out in my footsteps when I’m walking with my dog, and I’m certain they sometimes make their way into poems as I shape them, and read drafts aloud to myself. I pay attention to cadence and will rework a poem until it sounds ‘right’ to my ear.

Frances Boyle : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

The poetry books that I’ve read most deeply lately are two that I reviewed: Donald Winkler’s translation of Carole David’s The Year of My Disappearance (online at http://www.canthius.com/feed-2/2018/7/29/review-of-the-year-of-my-disappearance-by-caroline-david) and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (in the fall 2018 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine), both wonderful and deserving of the multiple re-readings.

I keep books I’ve recently acquired on a ledge beside my reading chair, and tend to dip into them for exposure to a multiplicity of voices. I rarely read cover to cover. In the current stack, among others, are Jenny Haysom’s Dividing the Wayside, Susan Gillis’s brand-new Yellow Crane, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Thin Air of the Knowable by Wendy Donawa, Late Style by Barry Dempster, Violet Energy Ingots by Hoa Nguyen and Voodoo Hypothesis by Canisia Lubrin. I’ve kept dark ecologies, a wonderful chapbook by Natalie Hanna, close at hand for nearly a year, and return to it again and again.

Frances Boyle : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

What I find difficult is being intentional about the poems I write. I have never been terribly successful in sitting down to write ‘about’ any situation or topic. It’s as though I need to trick my subconscious into letting things out. That’s why I find the timed writing we do in our poetry group so valuable. A prompt or a phrase from a poem may take me to some incident in my life that I’ve never thought to write about, or I may go to pure play with images or sound. And I’ve surprised myself by writing around or about a character, some kind of incantatory everywoman, whose experiences are very different from my own. As process, that can be effective. However, I have a handful of ideas that I’d very much like to put into poems and I’ve been frustrated that my efforts so far have felt forced or stilted. The other thing I find hard is to actually get around to writing poetry; I can be like a squirmy kid in a classroom desk, allowing myself to be distracted by all manner of other compelling activities.

Frances Boyle : part two

What are you working on?

I actually am working on a novel, of all things. I signed up for NaNoWriMo with the notion of expanding one of my draft short stories into a longer-form work. I almost certainly won’t reach the 50,000 word target for the month but I’m fine with that, and also fine if I never end up with a novel. My real objective is to get deeper into the world of my story —to know my character(s) better and find out what’s behind my rather sketchy plot. If the pages and pages of back story and internal musing I write in November help me craft a short story that’s ultimately richer, I’ll be more than satisfied with that. And, of course, I continue to germinate poetry, and to work on revisions of both my poems and my other short fiction.

Frances Boyle : part one

Frances Boyle is the author Light-carved Passages, a collection of poems, and most recently Tower, a novella from Fish Gotta Swim Editions. Her poems and short stories have won local and national awards, and been published in print and online journals throughout Canada and in the U.S. as well as in anthologies with themes as varied as motherhood, Hitchcock films and love poetry. A second poetry collection is due out in 2019. Frances lives in Ottawa, where she is part of the editorial team at Arc Poetry Magazine, and reviews for Canthius. Find her at www.francesboyle.com and @francesboyle19.

Photo credit: John W. MacDonald

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 have several fantastic writers’ groups who I rely on heavily. Two of them focus on poetry, and the third is for fiction. The Ruby Tuesday group has been meeting weekly for more than 10 years (!). It is not only the place where my work first enters the world, it is most often where poems are first generated since we do a 10-20 minute free-write each week, either a specific exercise / prompt or simply writing in response to a published poem. I very often go back (sometimes a very long time later) to find phrases or images from these timed writing sessions that I can use in shaping a poem. We also critique work that’s been brought to the group. The phrase “you’ve seen this poem before” is commonly heard and always welcome, since looking at revisions generates further discussion and new energy. Because we are a sizeable group, and we meet so frequently, there is no pressure to bring work every week. But most of us rarely let more than a couple of weeks go by without the urge to get feedback on new (or revised) poems. My other poetry group, sometimes known as the Other Tongues, meets monthly and we workshop one poem by each person. In all of my groups, we are not only first readers for each other, but also a support network and a source of close and continuing friendships.