Tanis MacDonald : part five

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I think when I started writing poetry I was looking for a language that would reach farther than I could. I felt small but the language felt ever-expansive. I don’t think I would have said it quite that way at the time, but in retrospect I can say that I wanted a bigger language or a broader canvas. That’s still true for me. The change is that when I first started writing, I would have called that desire for a bigger language merely a personal interest. Now I think of that “personal interest” as being necessarily tied up in the complexities of the world we live in. The personal is the everythingness. 

Tanis MacDonald : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I read Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s Trauma Head recently and love the way she uses language in that book-length poem to write about the experience of having a mini-stroke and recovering. Through this exploration, the book becomes a narrative of sense-making and dissociation, and is underscored by the protagonist’s navigation of the medical system. It’s a text that makes use of slippages and phonetic play of all kinds but still adheres to a narrative of injury and healing, so that a reader can follow the narrative while checking out the risky language use. Since I am always re-reading, I returned to Dionne Brand’s thirsty a little while ago, and was struck anew with how tender and fierce her writing is. That’s not a new thing to say about Brand, but after reading a lot of prose, returning to Brand’s rich and exacting poetics feels like breathing a different kind of air. Nobody writes Toronto the way Brand does; in thirsty, she calls the city “the feral amnesia of us all.” 

Tanis MacDonald : part three

Why is poetry important?

I was recently at the launch of Textile magazine, a new literature and culture mag based in Kitchener, and the readers for the night were almost all new writers. There was so much poetry was offered passionately, without apology, with a love for the form’s stretch and give. Fantastic to see and hear!

Poetry is important because it is inherently unreasonable, in the sense that it uses language differently than prose does and because poetry demands a different kind of attention, whether you are reading it or writing it. Poetry asks that readers or listeners think of this language as magnified (or amplified or stripped-down or voluble) or otherwise made noticeably different from everyday speech. And since it sounds and looks different, it can also challenge norms of all kinds. Prose can do this as well – in fact, it’d better! – but poetry attracts people with its strangeness. That’s really necessary, especially in smaller communities or places where people need to find what can be life-changing solidarity in all forms of artistic making.

Tanis MacDonald : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Short answer: when all the elements work together in the best ways that I can think of.

Longer answer: beginner writers ask me this all the time, and I think they ask because I talk so much about drafting and revising, and they are wondering when they can just stop working on a single poem. Where’s the finish line? 

It’s a good question, and one without an easy answer; it’ll be different for each poem and each writer. But since “finished” is so hard to define, I think it’s a good idea for a writer to pretend to themselves, temporarily, that the poem is finished and walk away for a day, a month, whatever. I find that if I do this and return to the poem, the meaning of “finished” has often shifted significantly.    

Tanis MacDonald : part one

Tanis MacDonald is the author of several books of poetry and essays, including Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. She is the co-editor of GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times (2018) and the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (2006). Her book, The Daughter’s Way, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian Literary Criticism. Her latest book is Mobile (Book*hug, 2019). She is the winner of the Bliss Carman Prize (2003) and the Mayor’s Poetry City Prize for Waterloo (2012). She has taught at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and in 2017 won the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award from the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs. Originally from Winnipeg, she teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Photo credit: John Roscoe.

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 wouldn’t have figured out a writing practice if it hadn’t been for my first writers’ group in Toronto in the 1990s. I was part of that group for about five years, and we met in person every two or three weeks to read each other’s work; that group was really important to me. I know that this won’t always be possible at all times and places, but I wish for all writers an experience – even just a brief one – in which they can be part of a group of supportive peers who are generous and smart and take care of each other. There’s nothing else like it. And for a long time when I was an emerging writer, I wouldn’t send anything out to a journal that hadn’t been workshopped with these poet friends. But then life invaded: I moved and moved again, to three different cities in a decade, and all those moves pretty much upset the system of small-group writer support I had refined up until then. Online connection is good, but I’m still pretty envious of folks who have writer friends who they can see all the time. I like using Skype (or even an actual telephone call – so old-school!) to stay in touch with writer friends who live far from me.