Bára Hladík : part four

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

Poetry is deconstructivist and has a way of tearing down language and building it back together, often in a way that is healing or transformative. It’s power is to take narrative into multidimensional time, more like how we experience time than through a regular narrative. Poetry is a way to show a whole universe. I also love it because poetry is accessible. Poetry is an artform that can be with you anywhere, anytime, even if you don’t have a pen. Most people can jot down a few poignant lines on a napkin or swirl some words around their minds. For me, as someone who is chronically ill, a lot of my poems come from when I am in a space between waking and dreaming, when my body needs to power down for several hours, but my mind is still processing, dreaming, writing. I write a few words when I come out of my dream space, and slowly build a poem over time. I am able to create even though it looks like i’m dead asleep. I love that you don’t need instruments, tools or money to write poetry. Poetry is with you.

Aysegul Yildirim : part four

How does a poem begin?

I like it more when it gives me a nudge to begin, that I know it’s ready to jump out into the world. But it’s no magic and requires a great deal of preparation: watering, fertilising, weeding, providing shade or sunshine, etc. It might take months or years. Other times, when there is a great deal of ‘writing hygene’, quietude-plus-solitude, I let it flow. I might need to give it a nudge by reading, contemplating, etc. 

Joseph Fasano : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When a poem is finished, it banishes its creator.  For better or worse, there is no more the maker can do.  I imagine in this way a poem is not unlike the world. 

E.J. McAdams : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes and no.  I have always wanted to be a vehicle for a poem – to get E.J. out of the way.  In the beginning that was mostly through intoxicants. Since, I have tried chance operations, procedures, mediation, non-writing, somatics, citations/sampling, GPS, bird song, scientific techniques, prosody, etc.  Some have worked better than others, but the seeking remains.

Isabel Sobral Campos : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Ed Roberson teaches us about the wonders of semantic deferral. This deferral results in a surprising reconstruction of meaning – you think the line is heading in a particular direction but soon discover it both is and is not going where you expected. He’s a master of the line break and of the long line, but also of rhythmic variation. Many of his poems are oblique lyrics – flawless mixtures of the tangible and abstract.  

Kate Siklosi : part three

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

I’m not sure poetry “accomplishes” anything because to me that implies completion, and I prefer to think of poetry as a practice of leaving breadcrumbs or string to give us clues as to what came before and what comes after, but with no fixed destination. I live for that messy in medias res life, and ain’t sorry for it either 😉.

But I do think poetry does things other forms cannot, or does it differently. For me, poetry has a way of writing through the human experience without necessarily needing cohesion or precision—it is a way of suturing the gaps and absences of our individual and collective stories not to make them neatly whole, but to make their fragments and fissures sing, contrast, fugue. 

And, because I tend to work with precarious, decaying materials, I feel that poetry teaches us to listen and to let things be as they are without the need to over-narrativize them or fit them into something we think they should be. Like, for me, I can just let a leaf or a thing speak with the other objects I bring it into encounter with—it doesn’t matter if I or we recognize the language produced or not, or whether it forms a human-centric logic, but that it exists, it is as it is. There’s something very humbling about that. 

Matt Robinson : part one

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau Press, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau Press, 2016), as well as numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. Robinson is on the poetry editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey when pandemic restrictions allow. He really likes dogs and cats and sandwiches. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada), with his family.

What are you working on?

Right now? Well, as of now I’m just starting to write random poems again—the odd poem here and there—having just published a new book in Fall 2021. For the last while I was mostly revising and editing poems from that collection. Generally speaking, I work through times when I am mostly editing / revising OR mostly writing new poems. 

But in the last few weeks, having done my usual recharging—which involves a LOT of reading—I have started to cobble together some new poems. Shorter, lyrical pieces, mostly: which is also fairly normal for me.

If I’m being honest, I am not a particularly disciplined or “regular” writer. I don’t have a strict schedule of any sort. I write and edit in fits and starts. It’s always been that way. I suspect that will remain the case. As poems start to accumulate, I’ll eventually look at collecting them and organizing them in some fashion. In all likelihood, that’ll look like a chapbook manuscript at first. 

This is all to say in a round-about way that I don’t have a particular project that I am currently engaged in.