K.I. Press : part five

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

The book I return to is Kristjana Gunnars’s The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust. In it, the narrator reads Proust non-sequentially, by dipping in and reading random sections, and I am happy to say that The Rose Garden can also be read this way.

K.I. Press : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve recently read most of Karen Solie’s books, Kayla Czaga’s two books, Michael Redhill’s new one (Twitch Force), Alice Burdick’s selected (Deportment), and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World. Also, I supervised a student’s self-published poetry book recently, and I want to plug it: it’s called Dog Star by Kaelen Bell.

K.I. Press : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Finding a sweet spot between too much and not enough dot-connecting. I don’t think this challenge is at all unique to poetry; it’s one of the great difficulties of much communication, certainly of literature. We can’t see inside readers’ heads, and our own heads are too familiar a landscape to us. How do we make our own thinking strange enough to ourselves that when we write it, it’s new, with all the elements readers need to come to an understanding, but without holding the reader’s hand?

K.I. Press : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

In grade three, I had read the Alice books so many times that I realized that I memorized parts of them without even trying—especially the poems. So, I started memorizing poems on purpose: everything in Alice (I can recite “Jabberwocky” in both English and French and do a mean “Walrus and the Carpenter” to boot, though I’ve forgotten many of the others), then the poems in Roald Dahl books, then traditional ballads and Robert Service poems, Dennis Lee, and Tennyson and anything else that Anne Shirley might have recited. My mom was taking university courses by correspondence when I was in grade three, so I got a lot of my material from the Norton Anthology of Poetry (there was no bookstore in my small town, not a lot of poetry in the library, and this was way before the internet). I probably reached the height of my informal poetry recitation career in grade five or six, though in high school I got turned on to Shakespeare soliloquies.

K.I. Press : part one

K.I. Press is a writer in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her four books are Pale Red Footprints (Pedlar, 2001), Spine (Gaspereau, 2004), Types of Canadian Women (Gaspereau, 2006), and Exquisite Monsters (Turnstone, 2015). She has an MA in English from the University of Ottawa and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She teaches writing at Red River College in Winnipeg. kipress.ca

What are you working on?

I am working on a fantasy novel about theatre students who go to a Shakespeare world—not an Elizabethan world, but a world where everything plays out like it is on a stage. Time and space work differently, and the Shakespearean characters, though they are run amok by the standards of anyone who knows their stories, live with a profound sense of fatalism, because they know their outcomes are determined by a mysterious script. Also: pregnant action hero. (Of course, all this could change by the time I really finish the darn thing.)