Geoffrey D. Morrison : part one

Geoffrey D. Morrison is a fiction writer, poet, and critic. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson, of the experimental short fiction collection Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). His work has appeared in Grain, PRISM, The Malahat Review, The Temz Review, Shrapnel, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in both the poetry and fiction categories of the 2020 Malahat Review Open Season Awards and a nominee for the 2020 Journey Prize. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory.

What are you working on?

Right now the main focus of my attention has been on revising and expanding a novel. That said, my approach to the novel as a form has been shaped pretty fundamentally by my earlier experiences writing and reading poetry. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. 

There’s a remark attributed, perhaps in error, to Paul Verlaine – he apparently said he could never write a novel because then he’d have to write sentences like, “the count walked into the room.” I suppose he meant that being a poet entails the use of language at its greatest intensity and with an allergy to the commonplace ways of saying things – what’s a “count,” anyway? what’s a “room?” what does it mean to “walk into” one? On a deeper level he might be saying that a poet questions the basic narrative choreography of going from point A to point B. 

At any rate that’s how I interpret his remark – if he did in fact say it – because that’s how I feel, too. I couldn’t write sentences like that without feeling immense pain, and my first efforts to write a novel were badly compromised by my feeling I was supposed to do it in a way that pained me. But on the other hand I was attracted to the challenge of the novel and to what it would allow me to do and say. So I began again, resolving that I would not write sentences about counts walking into rooms (so to speak). I would design my novel such that utterances of that sort would be impossible.   

As I did so, I found models. I noticed that many of them – and in particular Thomas Bernhard, Gerald Murnane, Roberto Bolaño, and Samuel Beckett – had also begun to some degree or another as poets. 

I think poetry gave them all something really important and I don’t think it’s the obvious thing. They don’t necessarily “write poetically”; that is, they aren’t necessarily using language at the level of its greatest intensity all the time. But they proceed with an attitude to narrative and to meaning that is closer to a poet’s. A poet is often building meaning with the reader, or giving the reader the tools to build the meaning, and these novelists do too.  

Gregory Crosby : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

For me, music is poetry, and vice versa (which is funny, as I have zero actual musical ability). I’m always listening for the music in a poem, for the rhythms, whatever they may be. I’ve always felt you have to be a little in love with language (or at least consider it your Best Frenemy Forever) to be a poet, and part of that is recognizing that language is, in fact, a musical language: even on the page, the aurality of poetry should rise up and seize the reader like James Brown’s horn section, or slip under your consciousness like Debussy.

Lillian Nećakov : part one

Lillian Nećakov is the author of six books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, broadsides and leaflets. Her new book il virus was published in April 2021 by Anvil Press (A Feed Dog Book). In 2016, her chapbook The Lake Contains an Emergency Room was shortlisted for bpNichol chapbook award. During the 1980s she ran a micro press called “The Surrealist Poets Gardening Association” and sold her books on Toronto’s Yonge Street. She ran the Boneshaker Reading series from 2010-2020. She lives in Toronto and just might be working on a new book. 

How does a poem begin?

With a headline, a scene in a film, a broken robin’s egg, a visit to the emergency room with one of my kids, a scent, a snippet of conversation overheard on the subway, a memory, a walk with my dog, a nightmare, a death, a birth, anything really. But what I am excited about is how/where the poem ends. Where you begin and where you end are often two very different places. The big themes, if you want to call them that, are always there, in your sub-conscious, and even though you begin with a line about a magnolia tree or your son’s broken clavicle, that’s not what the poem is ultimately about, that’s not where you end up. I don’t usually sit down and think, “okay, today, I am going to write a poem about climate change, or my father’s funereal”. Those things might become woven into the landscape of the poem as I write. That journey is what I find so satisfying about writing poetry. And sometimes I end up surprising myself.

Jared Beloff : part five

How does a poem begin?

Please let me know. If I knew this secret it would be much easier to start. I am much more comfortable with the landing of a poem, that tension and release of a final line. My poems begin with description and I have to work to whittle them down. I don’t always know what I’m writing when I set out to write and the revised finished product never looks like what I thought it would when I started. I’ve tried several times to start with the particular curl of the snake plant on my window sill and ended up writing about my grandmother making pie or performing dissections in high school biology class. Beginnings are just the start, so the poem doesn’t “begin” until I have the landing, then I can figure out how to make it all cohere.

Raegen Pietrucha : part one

Raegen Pietrucha writes, edits, and consults creatively and professionally. Her chapbook, An Animal I Can't Name, won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition; her debut poetry collection, Head of a Gorgon, is forthcoming with Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2022; and she has a memoir in progress. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she was an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. Connect with her at raegenmp.wordpress.com and on Twitter @freeradicalrp.

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

There are a couple different angles to this question. For better or worse, there are poets one only knows on the page, and there are poets one knows in real life. And for better or worse, there is the work of poets that can change the way one thinks about writing, and there are the actions of poets that can change the way one thinks about writing. Experiences with particular poets in all these ways—both positive and negative—have made me think differently not only about writing but also about the poets themselves and the writing business in general. 

Systemic racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, ageism, etc., poison the world, including the writing sphere. There are people, fellow writers, who actively work to deplatform others, to silence what is perceived as “less than” or “different,” and sometimes even appropriate others’ experiences instead of giving others the platform and space to share their authentic stories. My deepest hope is that every underrepresented writer will persist, despite such people, if one is in a safe enough position to do so.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve had tremendous female poets both in my life and on the page who have guided me toward my voice and ultimately toward the publication of my chapbook, An Animal I Can’t Name, and my forthcoming full-length collection, Head of a Gorgon, with Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Louise Gluck’s “Mock Orange” was the poem that got me interested in not just reading poetry but actually writing it. Finding a speaker like the one in that poem who was brave enough to say things I had felt but had never articulated myself was one of my earliest and most profound experiences with poetry. From there, I found inspiration and insight in workshops with Mong-Lan, Luci Tapahonso, Dorothy Barresi, and Leilani Hall. And then I had the privilege of Larissa Szporluk’s mentorship in grad school, which was transformational for me not only as a poet but as a person. She encouraged me to write the book I wanted to read, and that’s pretty much when I abandoned the po-biz/academia edicts and did just that.

Jaclyn Desforges : part five

How do you know when a poem is finished?

There’s the first kind of finished, the moment in which I can’t bear to look at it anymore. On a small scale, this is when I think, “Good enough, whatever” and shove the poem in a drawer. On a larger scale: At this time last year I was on Toronto island for a self-directed retreat with a writer friend, the brilliant Sara Mang. I was finishing my collection, and after a few days of focusing on nothing but that, I knew that not only could I no longer look at these particular poems, but also that I had lost whatever spark it was that had made me think I could possibly be a poet to begin with. I thought I was done, that maybe it would be published and maybe it wouldn’t, but that my poet days were truly over. I sent the manuscript off to my editor, Jim Johnstone. Then I submitted a package of poems to The New Yorker as a last hurrah, then moved on to writing short stories.  

This week, I read my book of poetry for the first time since the island. And it really is a book. It feels like a book — something a real writer wrote — even though the last time I looked at it, it felt like twelve million wriggling, disparate parts that made no kind of sense, rational or fantastical or otherwise. I was too deep into it to be able to see it. It spent many months unseen in the drawer. Looking at it now, I feel like the book needed that time to cure and become itself. 

Now Jim and I are doing edits and the book is coming out in fall of this year. It’s like my poet self is waking up after a long hibernation. And funnily enough, as I’m coming to the end of writing my collection of short fiction, I’m feeling like I can’t possibly be a fiction writer, that it’s too hard, that this short story collection is going right into the drawer the second it’s done. And suddenly poetry seems like fun again.

Kelly Weber : part four

Why is poetry important?

It feels really important in all writing to have language that engages with, resists, challenges, troubles, lives inside the language of all the other discourses of our everyday lives. For me, poetry is a kind of wakefulness, a sensitivity, a tuning in. And it feels important, in the midst of so much functional writing, to have poetry be fire and birdsong in my mouth. It’s an alternative way of being in the world. It’s almost this whole other sense or life experience in addition to, and part of, the dailiness of my life. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the ways I think poetry is important, but those are some the reasons it’s important for me.