Lenea Grace : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Music drives and influences almost all of my work. In the crown of sonnets I’ve been writing, I’m talking JD Souther, Linda Ronstadt.  I’m talking 70s Texas music: Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark. The poems aren’t about them – spoiler alert, they’re about me – but they loom large in my psyche.

Lenea Grace : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Bluets by Maggie Nelson. 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri. And I just revisited Eileen Myles’ book Inferno, which is not a book of poetry, but may as well be.

Lenea Grace : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Michael Ondaatje, Maggie Nelson, Leonard Cohen, Rachel Zucker, Al Purdy, David Lehman, and though he’s not a poet per se, Martin Amis, who creates sentences so exquisite they are nothing if not poetry.

Lenea Grace : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I had some outstanding teachers who first exposed me to great writing – I would say both my sixth grade language arts teacher Mr. Levine and my AP English teacher Mrs. Langston profoundly influenced my literary sphere.  Then, at McGill, I took a modern Canadian poetry course and discovered Michael Ondaatje, painted his poem “White Dwarfs” on the bathroom wall in my apartment (embarrassing, but true, and definitely without the landlord’s permission), and you know, felt things deeply. Or rather, learned you could feel things deeply without exceedingly flowery language or vague metaphors or empty abstracts.  All that said, I didn’t start writing my own poems until I was about 24. It’s amazing what heartbreak and living by yourself in rural Nova Scotia can do for untapped creativity!

Lenea Grace : part one

Lenea Grace is the author of A Generous Latitude (ECW Press, 2018) and her work has appeared in The Walrus, Best New Poets, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Lenea is the 2017 winner of The Walrus Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award for her poem "Echo". She lives in Gibsons, BC.

What are you working on?

In particular, I’ve been labouring over a heroic crown of sonnets – a series of 15 sonnets linked through first and last lines. The last sonnet is comprised of the opening lines of the first 14 sonnets. It’s a long, winding, non-linear fever dream with a whole lot of Texas, Linda Ronstadt, push and pull.