What are you working on?
I just published my second book, Flyway (Turnstone Press), which is a long poem that’s occupied me for the past four years. I’m not entirely sure what’s next. I do feel energized, though, writing discrete little poems again and seeing where they take me.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I return most often to: Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Louise B. Halfe Skydancer’s Blue Marrow, Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems, Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral, Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills, and a whole bunch of Mary Oliver, Camile Dungy, WS Merwin, Nikki Giovanni, Don McKay, Dennis Cooley, Di Brandt, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maggie Smith, and Ada Límon.
One of the best things that happened to me this year was discovering that Ada Límon hosts a poetry podcast called The Slowdown. Each episode is five minutes long and involves a briefly framed reading of one poem. Another easy route to renewal: subscribing to the League of Canadian Poets’ “poetry pause” email blast which sends out a poem by a contemporary Canadian poet every day at 10am.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
To me, there’s something primal, basic, and immediate about poetry. Maybe I like that poetry most closely mimics how I think the mind works: simultaneously full of uncertainty and conviction, offering non-linear narratives, juxtaposing disjointed experiences and images in wild and hopeful attempts to make meaning. I like that poetry can be bewildering/bewildered and also urgent, concise, true.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
In a talk at the University of Saskatchewan, Tim Lilburn introduced me to the idea of “poetry systems” which unfold over a number of books and occupy decades of a writer’s life. Ongoing preoccupations. Life-long poems. Thinking about my writing like that helps me let go of one poem and move into the next, trusting that each effort connects to some larger network. I can allow each individual piece to say some of what I hoped to say without needing it to (impossibly) accomplish everything.
It also helps to put poems away, pull them out some time later, read them out loud, and listen for what sings. What can be pared back? How can I clarify an image or idea? At some point, the thing starts to sound more true, less terrible. At some point, I’m satisfied enough to feel that it’s done.
How did you first engage with poetry?
My first encounters with poetry happened in church, with hymns and scripture as the points of entry. I remember, during congregational singing, being struck by figurative language—how it can give shape to abstract ideas or amplify the enigmatic—and wanting to repeat certain lines over and over. “Let Thy goodness like a fetter / bind my wandering heart to Thee,” for example, made me excited about simile and how good a verb can feel.
The first poets I engaged with on the page were ee cummings and Di Brandt. Poems so passionate they eschewed the rules of punctuation appealed deeply to my teenage sensibilities! Brandt’s questions i asked my mother, that slim, bright, potent book, also opened the idea that maybe I could write poetry.
