Shannon Quinn : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

A poem has to rest for a while after it has been written. I go through a few drafts, sometimes many. I’m pretty merciless with my editing process but at some point I begin to understand the truth of the piece. I ask myself…is it truthful, do I know it as such in my heart? This may be a response to the fact that I am a fan of magic realism so I need to make sure the piece has solid bones. I also need to read it out loud , ideally to more than just myself.

Amanda Earl : part five

How does a poem begin?

In myriad ways. Of late, a poem begins out of a frustration with the confines of convention. I often feel trapped by expected grammar and syntax.

Penn Kemp : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Often when the title comes to me.

Kyle Flemmer : part one

Kyle Flemmer [photo credit: Dean McClelland] is an author, editor, and publisher from Calgary. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Company in 2014, a small press and community of emerging Canadian artists, and is presently the Managing Editor at filling Station Magazine. Kyle's most recent poetry chapbooks are Astral Projection (above/ground press, 2017), Lunar Flag Assembly Kit (no press, 2017), and PRAY/LEWD (The Blasted Tree, 2016).

How does a poem begin?

A poem begins as an itch or impulse that appears at some mental crossroads. For me, the first step toward scratching that itch involves identifying which specific lines of thinking are coming together. The poem is an attempt to explain why using language; why am I at this crossroads? What brought me here? Until I can answer that sufficiently (at least to myself), the itch doesn’t go away.

Aaron Tucker : part three

How does a poem begin?

For me, poems (and writing in general) begins in reading. I find the poems of mine that I like the most are in response to other texts; those texts are not always poems but include essays, novels, short stories, newspaper articles, Facebook posts. I would attach to this fine art: paintings, sculpture, installations. Other people’s ideas and arguments are always the most stimulating for me and then I am trying to write in conversation with those exciting ideas, add something to what they are writing and acknowledge where my thoughts came from. I am always aware that my writing exists in dense networks of other writing and I try to utilize those networks as best I can.

Emily Izsak : part five

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

Mina Loy. Mina Loy. Mina Loy.

( http://themanygenderedmothers.blogspot.ca/2017/02/emily-izsak-on-mina-loy.html )

rob mclennan : part one

rob mclennan [photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] lives in Ottawa, where he runs a reading series three blocks away from where he was born. His latest titles include the full-length A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016), and the chapbook snow day (above/ground press, 2018). Household items, his second poetry title with Ireland’s Salmon Publishing, appears this spring. His author page exists at: http://robmclennanauthor.blogspot.ca/

What are you working on?

I’m not sure. I just spent the past two months working on a poem called “snow day,” which I recently produced as a chapbook through above/ground press. I usually produce some kind of handout for my birthday party, so I gave myself a deadline of that, once I realized, early on, that the poem was moving in a particular direction. With that done, I’ve been poking at a couple of “seventeen word poems,” after being solicited for such. I’m not sure what will happen with “snow day” post-chapbook, if it evolves into a larger manuscript or not. Given the prose poem elements of the work, my immediate impulse is to move in an entirely different structural direction with whatever might be added as a further section to assist it into becoming a full-length manuscript. Perhaps I’m channelling Susan Howe, wanting my prose section to sit beside something torn apart and restructured. I’m not sure yet.

Really, now that I spent the bulk of last year starting and finishing the poetry manuscript “the book of smaller,” I really should be getting back to those three short stories I attempted to complete last fall. I’ve another gathering of small projects to get off my desk first, including a scattering of reviews for the blog, and two different anthology projects, as well as the literary walks I’ve been building for Arc Poetry Magazine.

I suppose the real answer is: reviews.