Sanita Fejzić : part five

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

Virginia Woolf, though regarded as a great modern novelist, essayist and experimental writer, is one of my favourite prose poets. I am especially drawn to A Room of One’s Own; it is a formative text for me. Renewal is an elastic process, moving toward the future and novelty, but also walking back into remembering why we are writing in the first place. A Room of One’s Own allows me to remember why I’m doing the work of writing. I also turn to Anne Carson for the movement forward inherent in the process of renewal, although that process, for Carson as for me, is always already in relation to the past, especially the ancient past. Currently, I dwell in Carson’s experimental book/interactive art object, NOX (“night” in Latin), which is a eulogy she wrote for her deceased brother, Michael. The book is a prime example of writing as a never-ending process, without finality. Non-arrival can be very exhilarating and freeing. NOX is a text that holds the paradox of grief and celebration, seemingly incompatible affects. It is a long love letter, a sculpture, a performative and textual resurrection. Very importantly, NOX is an example of writing as a technology for self-care. Renewal, I think, is akin to self-care.

Sanita Fejzić : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is a neighbour to thinking and language, according to Heidegger. He did not say prose; poetry is a neighbour to thinking and language—but why? It may be because poetry is heightened, experimental, musical prose—it is prose come to life, departing from the conventional, in the process of expanding our thinking and language. Poetry is the creative use of language. Poetry is always already in prose and other forms of writing such as playwriting. You recognize it in moments when prose becomes self-conscious or is no longer thinking about the traditional pillars of fiction such as narrative. When prose takes off into uncharted territories with words, punctuation, space and form, it enters the domain of poetry. I do not know if poetry wants to accomplish (or compete with) other forms; I would rather say that poetry is intimate with other forms.

Sanita Fejzić : part three

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 a special relationship with the will to poetry, that is, with the creative linguistic drive to word new wor(l)ds. Poetry comes to me of its own free will, my job is to be receptive and radically open to it. When I channel the will to poetry, I try to be as unconditional about the process as possible. The more I try to control the writing process, the harder it becomes to hear the music, rhythm and essence of poetic will. I am very private about the process of writing and do not share my work ideas with others until I am ready (or forced to), either because I’m stuck or because I want feedback on my work-in-progress. Writing is rewriting; writing a collaborative act.

Sanita Fejzić : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

The way I engage another human being, with humility, curiosity and care. Each word, line and poem has its own aura, living in its own country. Some poems are inviting, friendly and warm. Others are reserved, hermetic and extremely private—to enter into relation with them, you need time and space. There are poems will never give themselves to us, and that’s as valuable of an experience as encountering an open and generous poem we can return to over and over again for nourishment.
 

Sanita Fejzić : part one

Sanita Fejzić is an Ottawa-based author, poet, playwright and scholar. Her novella, Psychomachia, Latin for battle of the soul, was published by Quattro Books. The Blissful State of Surrender, her first play, was workshopped by the National Arts Centre in March 2018. Fejzić has published numerous short stories and poems in literary journals and magazines across Canada. In the Nothing Left of Me, her first translation from French to English from Quebecois poet Sylvie Nicholas’s collection of poems, Le plus rien de moi, was launched on March 10, 2018.

What are you working on?

A hybrid text, The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies, which includes new words framed as encyclopedia entries on suffering and ecstasies alongside narrative prose poems, photographs, old letters and other media. The narrative poems tell the story of a young poet who has found a manuscript titled The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies from her diseased great-grandmother, a Bosnian woman who fled a violent husband during WWII and settled in Prague, where she died typing the unfinished text. As the young poet tries to understand who her great-grandmother was, she travels to Sarajevo and Prague to finish the encyclopedia and find the missing pieces of her ancestor’s mysterious life.

I’m also working on my first book of non-fiction titled The Will Of Poetry and The Will To Poetry for McGill & Queen’s University Press. This book of philosophic-poetic thoughts on the creative drive of language defines my concept of the will of poetry as the particular lexicon a writer is born into and is temporally related to writing the present and past, whereas the will to poetry is a future-oriented linguistic drive concerned with wording new wor(l)ds. This text emerges from the question: how can we create new wor(l)ds within a language, such as English, that is steeped in the syntax of heteropatriarchy, neo-colonialism and phallagocentrism?