Kristine Snodgrass : part one

Kristine Snodgrass is an artist, poet, professor, curator, and publisher living in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author most recently of Rather, from Contagion Press (2020) and the chapbook, These Burning Fields (Hysterical Books 2019) Kristine’s asemic and vispo work has been published in Utsanga (Italy), Slow Forward, Brave New Word, and Asemic Front 2 (AF2). Her work was just featured in the Asemic Women Writers Summer Exhibition Online. She is passionate about collaboration and her collaborations with De Villo Sloan have been collected in the book, WHISTLE (Asemic Front Series, 2020).

What are you working on?

I am working! Some of it is editorial, some vispo and asemic, including collaborative projects. Andrew Topel and I have been collaborating for a few months. It has been a nice challenge to work with his bold letters—he makes me plan which is odd because most of my work is very intuitive and organic. I am also collaborating with the asemic artist, Karla Van Vliet. Her ink pieces are so exquisite that it takes real care to work with them. I am often spiritually drawn to her work which does make it very intuitive and feminine in a lot of ways. Collaborating is so exciting because working with another artist is full of variables. That is why it is my love and I am writing about it now. I am also, hopefully trying to get some collaborative poetry I have done with Maureen Seaton out and about.  Solo-wise, I am still working in vispo and asemic—doing a couple of projects. I am also editing a book of asemic and vispo work by women artists that will be published by Hysterical Books in 2021. More on that soon! So far, that project has really blown me away. There are some real heavy-hitters alongside fresh and emerging voices. 

Melissa Studdard : part four

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I’m part of an accountability group called The Grind. It’s wonderful because it’s all about relentlessly producing something every day. We don’t workshop each other’s poems, and we rarely comment. It works well for me because when I’ve been in groups in the past that involve workshopping and commenting, I’ve become exhausted halfway through the month and barely made it to the end. Now that I’m in The Grind, which I choose to do or not do on a month-to-month basis, I spend eight months out of the year writing a minimum of either one new poem or one new substantial revision per day, and I spend the other four months of the year organizing manuscripts, submitting work, reading voraciously, and doing other writings. So, basically, I do two months on and one month off—that’s the pattern.

Darrell Epp : part four

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

Poetry can slow down time. It’s obvious that we are obsessed with speed. We want what we want, when we want it—we don’t want to hear there’s a delay. No matter how fat we get, we still want our food FAST. We want faster downloads, faster satisfaction. We want our pizza in 30 minutes or it had better be free. But it’s getting hard to ignore that, in our ever-faster race to the finish line, some things are being neglected and lost along the way…Reading a poem can provide a shocking reminder of what we have lost. In cinema, the ratio of narrated time to time of narration is 1:1. This means, it takes as long for you to watch the cowboy say “Let’s go that way” as it takes him to say it. This is part of what makes cinema so popular and thrilling, that immediacy, that headlong rush of time. It is also what makes cinema pretty lousy at delivering moments of transcendence, or spiritual truth, all exceptions, such as the films of Robert Bresson, duly noted. On the other hand, in a poem the ratio between narrated time and time of narration can be wildly skewed, until time dilates, and, if you’re lucky, stops. Simply put, you write a poem about a moment. You reader spends more than a moment reading it, more moments re-reading it, digesting it, pondering it, until this one moment that would otherwise have vanished, grows in stature and becomes powerful enough to haunt. Read or write enough poems, and a powerful message is sent. The message is: all these moments that make up the ligaments of your day, don’t let them flow past you without paying attention, they are worth savouring, giving thanks for, and being baffled by…

Tariq Luthun : part four

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

I think the unique thing about poetry is that it is malleable yet unwavering. That sounds like something out of a book review but, in all seriousness, I have seen poems serve in so many functions, and I have experienced so many things that I would dare to call poetry because of the ways I have been moved by them. A more salient example lies in how I approach my own work.

In my college days, I was news reporter, editor, and editorialist, but I left those roles to create a more vibrant and accessible community for poetry on my campus. My peers and I achieved that goal, but though I left the news industry, I never felt like I left journalism behind. To me, the poetry I was writing was still about illuminating the real narratives I held dear or felt didn’t get enough play in mainstream media outlets. Being Palestinian, it’s difficult for our narratives to receive adequate attention; and when given attention, they are rarely done justice. Poetry was a means of reportage that allows me – and so many others – to distill our history, and offer texture to the reportage in the way that so many other mediums do not.

Ultimately, I think that poetry is able to help us craft new definitions for our feelings and thoughts; it offers us a way to resonate with something or someone in moments, where other mediums might take longer to engage us. From that craft, we are better positioned to envision new definitions for what the world can be. But, poetry demands our attention. You can not reap the benefit of a poem if you do not lend yourself to it or open yourself up to the possibilities of where it can take you in the few moments it has your time. In that way, it is unwavering. Poetry is built to move us in so many ways, but we have to put in a little work to be gifted that movement.

I think that’s where poetry accomplishes so much: the best, most moving pieces ask something of the reader in ways other forms may not.
 

Jacob Strautmann : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When I think it’s finished, I read the poem aloud. I append to the last line a word like, “Fucker”—as if the whole poem were addressed to some fucker over there.  If it feels true I’m done. If it feels forced, it needs additional revision.

Jérôme Melançon : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Not that long ago I picked up my copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 and realized just how much I owed him. Early on I was very much taken with form, and reading him and Kerouac’s prose taught me a lot about flow. Much of my writing until recently was an attempt to develop a practice that includes form and flow; reading it now feels like watching myself as a teenager move in a body that’s not fully inhabited, or that’s too fully inhabited. Being aware of this conflict is helping me find solutions to this problem of form and flow.

Later on, a few years apart, I read Yves Bonnefoy and P.K. Page. And here it’s their attention to the moment that struck me. They give you a sense of a whole room, of a whole event, of the depth and breadth of an emotion, without entering the realms of description or analysis.

And a couple years ago now I did a reading alongside Daniel Leblanc-Poirier. I didn’t know him, hadn’t read his work. Us talking after the reading, walking from St. Boniface to Winnipeg, and the way he read his prose at the reading, opened something up for me. Not that we talked that much about poetry or writing; maybe it’s just getting to know someone a bit, how that leads to look at what matters to them, at what they do, differently. He’s part of something of a movement in Québec that can be trashy, that can seem to look for shock for aesthetic reasons. Until then I saw this kind of writing as facile, and retrospectively that was immensely unfair and close-minded. And contradicts my admiration for Ginsberg. I don’t see myself as a part of that movement or aesthetic, but for the collection I just finished I did explore a change of tone, subjects that are tied to discomfort, that might create discomfort, and vocabulary that I might not have considered poetic before this meeting. And it’s a collection about the French language and its politics, so somehow that shift is fitting.

Beyond these few moments, since rob mclennan started Periodicities I’ve been reviewing poetry. That’s new to me. I try to do one a month, it gives me a break from all my other writing. It’s allowed me to really focus on a book, to keep it with me, because I tend to move on very quickly and not return to books after I’ve read them. To discard them unto my bookshelves. Some books give and give, they’re immense like that; and there are others that have quieter voices, that you have to take more time and adjust to. Writing about them has helped me develop an actual discourse on poetry, or poetries, perhaps, as opposed to only focusing on my own practice.

Mike Puican : part three

What poets have changed the way you think about writing?

Gwendolyn Brooks is a major influence. I was fascinated by how, sometimes with just few words, she could create characters who felt like real, complicated people you might meet anywhere, not just two-dimensional characters. I read as much of her work as I could find. I especially studied her great poem “In the Mecca,” and her novel, Maude Martha. My book, Central Air, is full of observations about people living in the city. I work hard to make them feel like real people. While our styles are very different, my work has been heavily influenced by what I learned from her.