Kaie Kellough : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Recently:

Derek Walcott – For the rich variation within his repetition.  In his longer poems set in the Caribbean, familiar images – fronds, the sea, the horizon – reappear, but they change with each appearance.

Lisa Robertson – For her ability to sustain narrative movement while admitting noise and disjunction. 

Safiya Sinclair – For her explosive, sonorous language that never becomes ornamental, but sustains the poem’s development. 

Kaie Kellough : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

It has cooled into the long poem.  It has also shifted from registering experience on the surface of language, affecting a kind of sonic and linguistic agitation, to a quieter vigilance that observes how language can carry the weight of things in the world.

Kaie Kellough : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Performance extends the creative timeline of a poem.  If its passages can be rearranged, if it can be recorded or dis-assembled and improvised upon in live sound performance, then the poem avoids becoming a fixed, precious object. It can remain open, can persist in a state of incompletion.

Kaie Kellough : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

One early engagement: In about 1990, in a high school anthology, I stumbled upon the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem “Incident” by Countee Cullen, first published in 1925, confirmed my exact relationship to my city.  It was an extraordinary moment of surprise and recognition.

Kaie Kellough : part one

Kaie Kellough is a poet, novelist, and sound performer. His next book of poems, Magnetic Equator, hovers between South America and Western Canada, and will appear in 2019 with McClelland and Stewart.  

What are you working on?

Whether I’m working on poetry, fiction, or a sound performance, I try to address the way personal narratives multiply into collective ones, or conversely, how history narrows to a single life.  I am fascinated by those moments when obscure individual lives appear to shimmer with a broader pattern.