Pamela Mordecai : part four

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

Poetry is formally concise, organic. If rhyme, rhythm, diction, word play combine to make a poem memorable, those same things, knitted together in a relatively small space, make a poem portable in ways that fiction never can be. The best poetry can bind like a spell, a chant, magic and so you remember it and carry it with you, like a talisman.

Jennifer L. Knox : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Absolutely, in almost every way. That may also be a good thing, process-wise.

Kaie Kellough : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

It has cooled into the long poem.  It has also shifted from registering experience on the surface of language, affecting a kind of sonic and linguistic agitation, to a quieter vigilance that observes how language can carry the weight of things in the world.

Jill Mceldowney : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Sarah Elizabeth Johnson’s Bone Map

Claire Wahmanholm’s chapbook Night Vision

William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind

Henry Wei Leung’s Goddess of Democracy

I read a lot of online journals too along with work from very small presses. Small and indie presses like Cotten Xenomorph, Dream Pop, Muzzle, and Tinderbox are truly publishing some of the most daring, innovative, risk taking work out there right now.

I’m always reading my friends' work. We are all either working on a full length, a chapbook, a thesis and are always sending each other poems.

Tracy Hamon : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music and the sound of a line are really important to my writing. I’m obsessive about line breaks, the sound of the word at the end of the line, the cadence of the line, the rhythm of it, and so on. The musicality of a poem, to me anyway, is how I hold the poem in my head. Each word has a sound and when you string them together, they create music.

Robin Durnford : part one

Robin Durnford was born in St. John’s and grew up on the west coast of Newfoundland. She is the author of three books of poetry: A Lovely Gutting (McGill-Queen’s 2012), Fog of the Outport (Jackpine 2013), and Half Rock (Gaspereau 2016). She now lives in Montreal.

What are you working on?

A collection called Gap-Toothed Girl about the gaps and spaces in my own identity (I literally have a gap tooth which I’m partly proud of and partly ashamed of). The collection’s about the parts that don’t seem to fit. When I look at other people they always seem so ‘together’ and whole and sure and fully formed. They are who they are. I always feel uncertain. My identity shifts all the time. One day I feel really feminine, the next I’m more masculine. Most days I’m Sam’s mom, but I don’t want that to be my whole identity either. I want to go out to dinner with my husband and have sex afterwards. My commie-pinko politics has mostly stayed the same for the last twenty years, but I don’t like checked box liberalism or leftism. I need to have the power to dissent, to disagree, to be cantankerous, but also to be loveable! The voice, though. I hope my poetic voice holds the poems, and so my self, together.

Micheline Maylor : part two

What do you find the most difficult about writing poetry?

            Self doubt. An author can tinker with a poem endlessly and the second guessing can become paralyzing. The precision of the language and the constructs can over-ride the feel of the poem at times. I can look at the same line and see three or four different ways to re-phrase the line either through language or grammar. At some point, you just have to let it go. There’s that famous quote by Oscar Wilde, “I was working on a proof of one of my poems all morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”