Beth Gordon : part two

How did you first engage with poetry? 

As a child, reading Mother Goose nursery rhymes. I am fortunate enough that I do not remember a time in my life with books and poetry.  I started writing poetry almost as soon as I could write. My engagement with poetry as an adult(ish) began in college and I’ve been fortunate more recently to engage with the wider poetry community that is online, including social media.

Ellen Chang-Richardson : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I was 15 years old and in love with the world of classic literature. I discovered an anthology of poems by John Donne and it went with me wherever I went.

Lauren Carter : part one

Lauren Carter is the author of four books: the poetry collections Lichen Bright and Following Sea and the novels Swarm and This Has Nothing To Do With You (forthcoming September 7, 2019). Her long poem “Island Clearances” won first prize in the 2014 ROOM Poetry Competition, and she has twice been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her prose has won the Prairie Fire fiction prize and been selected for Best Canadian Stories (ed. John Metcalf), longlisted for CBC Canada Reads, and nominated for the Journey Prize and the Giller Award. She blogs regularly about writing and life at www.laurencarter.ca

Photo credit: Jason Mills

How did you first engage with poetry?

My parents both trained as high school English teachers and were readers, so we had a lot of books in my house, including a fat, clothe-bound, blue hardcover book containing the big names of The European Canon. Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, etcetera.

I would read these poems to myself, often out loud, and loved the truly romantic, moody lyricism and sense of them. The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas...

I started writing my own poems in imitation but then, one afternoon, I cracked open a book in my high school library to discover Susan Musgrave. I wish I could remember what poem of hers I read that day but the imagery floored me.

It made me realize that so much more was possible in terms of using poetry to build an evocative sense of emotion. It was almost like it gave me permission to tell the truth. The floodgates opened and my first poem was published in a now-defunct Saskatchewan literary journal located through the Writers' Market when I was 18.

Some of those early poems, written in my late teens and 20s, I still think of as my best work.

Tolu Oloruntoba : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

For showing a path to the mystical in writing: Okinba Launko, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amos Tutuola, Eduardo Corral
For showing that I can craft a personal mythology, or recombine what is taken for granted: Pascale Petit, Yusef Komunyakaa, Safiya Sinclair
For bringing balance into chaos with a difficult-to-imitate stillness: Rainer Maria Rilke, Mark Strand, Lorna Crozier, C.K. Williams
The Council: Wole Soyinka, Dionne Brand, Gregory Pardlo
For showing a path to the scientific in poetry: Adrian Matejka, Sally Wen Mao
For permission to embrace my weird: Jim Johnstone, Shane Neilson
For broadening my visual field: Kaveh Akbar, Solmaz Sharif 
For eloquently describing the anguish of the exile: Esiaba Irobi
For teaching me that being less opaque does not have to sacrifice quality: Kimiko Hahn, Maggie Smith
For calibrating my ear to the way poetry is supposed to sound: Chris Abani
For bringing the fire: Terrance Hayes, Saeed Jones, Kamau Brathwaite
For refusing permission to choose despair as the logical end of (my) poetry: Ross Gay, Eve Ewing

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan : part four

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

I always go back to Meditations in An Emergency by Frank O’Hara. That’s my book. It’s taken me through madness and back. It truly is my meditation. However, I also go back to District and Circle by Seamus Heaney, my collected volume of Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. And my Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English, my first introduction to Filipino writers.

sophie anne edwards : part five

How does a poem begin?

Poetry almost always begins with my feet. I walk. A few words walk with me until they begin to string out into something/else. Sometimes I have a strong visual idea but no words, and sometimes I have words, but no structure. I almost always have a fieldbook with me, or turn to it when I get back from walking. I make notes, I draw, I listen, I question myself. I have been known to stuff leaves in my nose and flower petals down my shirt. I find it hard to not walk barefoot on the quartzite. A poem begins with my feet and a question. The language and practice of fieldbooks comes from my training in geography influenced/encouraged by the brilliant scholar, mentor and friend joni m palmer). The walks, the writing, the notations follow some sort of query (even if I don’t always know the question); sometimes I am looking for the question and always seeking a deep observation of the ecosystems to know it better, to see patterns, to listen. This process is almost always inseparable from my own thoughts and state of mind. I am curious about the edges, the boundaries of language and writing, self and ecology.

james stotts : part one

james stotts is a poet and russian translator, living in boston with his son.  his first two books, since and elgin pelicans, were published by pen and anvil press.

what are you working on?

it never occurs to me until after the fact.  the work goes on, and if the small pieces have any affinity in retrospect, then that just becomes a matter of flower arrangement.  i’ve hardly ever been capable of a project.  in fact, the poems have been getting shorter, tighter, more opaque, nearer to a certain end.  my marriage, which was a wonderful but overextended realization of mutual exclusion—fourteen years—gave me a lot of material.  three books.  the next one is looking like a break-up album, with the upshot of a housewarming.