Kim Trainor : part five

How important is music to your poetry? 

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness..." It is central and technical. It is crucial.

Kim Trainor : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately? 

Jennifer Zilm, The Missing Field; Catherine Owen, Designated Mourner; Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field; Phil Hall, Killdeer; Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk; and some poetics: Matthew Zapruder's Why Poetry? (I want to write a book called Why Not Poetry?) and Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry (or maybe I'll call it Lyric Poetry as Whipping Girl).

Kim Trainor : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

When I first began to write poetry (an overnight conversion) it was like falling in love. Now I despair and give it up every month or so. I text my poetry wife, and say, "Lucie, I'm giving up poetry." And she texts back, "No you're not."

Kim Trainor : part two

How did you first engage with poetry? 

"Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead." In the nave of an Anglican church every Sunday morning: the language of the King James Version of the bible; Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. But my conversion came much later.

Kim Trainor : part one

Kim Trainor's second book, Ledi (Book*hug, 2018) narrates the excavation of an Iron Age horsewoman's tomb in the steppes of Siberia. She lives in Vancouver.

Photo credit: Kim Trainor

What are you working on?

After a year of writing a series of bastardized North American ghazals for a collection called Bluegrass, I'm working on some longer-line poems that seem to converge on climate change, Lurianic kabbalah, love, and sex. I might call the sequence "Wildfire."