John Elizabeth Stintzi : part five

Why is poetry important?

I think a big part of poetry’s importance is that it is pretty unimportant. There aren’t many forms that take up space and time, jab out in surprising directions, and then disappear like the poem. A certain poem can certainly be sharply important to a certain reader, but I think it’s unpredictable and often a poem here and there rather than most poems, so I’d hesitate to say the form as a whole can be dubbed capital-I Important because of that. I do think, though, that a poem can often contain a certain uncertainty and inconclusion in a way that can feel more useful than an essay that purports to know something, which is good. (Though I of course distrust the poets who purport to know things, and anything I say that poetry doesn’t do someone is trying to do with poetry and proving me wrong—such is the form!) In that particular context—giving space for uncertainty—I suppose I could agree that poetry is important.

Neil Flowers : part one

Neil Flowers was born in Montreal.

His published works include Taxicab Voice, Suite for the Animals, Some Kinds of Earthly Love, A Signal through the Flames, and an account of a near-death experience that appears in Ostomy Canada, Summer 2020.

He is at work on a novel, Acts of Treason, and freelances as a screenplay doctor and editor of medical texts.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I had what you might call three firsts. When I was eight or nine, in our house was a copy of The Golden Book of Children’s Verse or one very similar. “The Owl and the Pussycat” was in it and “Jabberwocky.” I was a lonely kid. I sunk right into the worlds of those poems and that book. Imagining the characters in their pea-green boat with Owl serenading Pussycat, it was entrancing, funny. I read the Lewis Carroll poem quite a few times puzzling at the language, later enjoying the silliness. And there were colourful illustrations! The lyrics to “John Henry” were accompanied by a watercolour of this huge black man swinging a hammer with a steam locomotive in the background. When I was fourteen, I had my first encounter with canon poetry. Our grade ten English teacher taught us the form of the Petrarchan sonnet and had us read “Ozymandias” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” I remember that day with perfect clarity: The class room at Etobicoke Collegiate in Toronto where we read the poem; the teacher (Mr. Cooper), who was handsome but cultivating a short, dark widow’s peak; being riveted by both poems, one about the ephemerality of everything and the other about the glory of reading—big ideas in dense little packages; and turning from the poems to look through the windows at the sunny day and the football field outside. In that English class we also read Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, which had a profound effect on me in how a poem could consist solely of a character talking and that character damning himself. When I finally understood the irony, when I got the poem, I thought it was the greatest poem I’d ever read, which it probably was for me to that time, and it was about a narcissistic loathsome murderer. You can feel his obsequious, evil, pinched soul every time you read the poem. When I went to university in Ottawa, I had the very good fortune to take a class in modern/contemporary poetry from the Canadian poet Robert Hogg. We read the big Americans—Williams, Pound, Olson, Ed Dorn, Levertov, Creeley—and a bunch of Canadians like John Newlove, Daphne Marlatt, and Frank Davey. In terms of my own work, taking that class and reading those poets made all the difference. A poem could follow its own path, its own energy, whatever that might mean. “Who knows what a poem is until it’s THAR, it walks it talks it struts its green barazzo”, Olson says, summing up nicely what WCW and Creeley said about composition by field and that form is an extension of content.

Ae Hee Lee : part one

Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee currently lives in the United States. She holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021) and Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017). Most recently, her work Connotary was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her poetry can be found at Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, and New England Review, among others.

What are you working on?

Aside from writing more poems for a full-length that expands on my latest chapbook, Connotary, I’ve been working on spacing out more often.

Sara Moore Wagner : part two

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 always send every poem I write to my husband first and have for almost a decade. He is my first reader and reader of everything. Of course, he always just praises, so I then will send things to my closest circle of poet friends—Christen Kauffman, Rae Hoffman Jager, and Caroline Plaskett. We’re not really workshopping friends, more encouraging and questioning, but that’s what works for us. We love to talk through our ideas and passions! 

Tim Moder : part five

What are you working on?

This should be the easiest question to answer, but I keep changing my mind. I have a sizable stack of poetry notebooks. I dusted them off last January and started sending out some poems.  I guess the idea was to have some published. I have had a few accepted this year as well as some positive feedback on some of the rejections. I have been thinking about publishing a chapbook. Or two. Or a chapbook and a full book. I have about 100 that I think are finished. Of the old stuff. Most of it goes back 20-30 years. I also have about 20 new ones that I’ve written this year. My dream publication is any place that publishes poetry, so I send some to the big-name places, but I also send some to small presses, and universities. I am having a great deal of fun at the present time.

Kerry Ryan : part one

Kerry Ryan has published two books of poetry, The Sleeping Life (The Muses’ Company) and Vs. (Anvil). Her poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada. In 2020, she was long-listed for the CBC poetry prize. She’s currently at work on a new poetry manuscript and a novel. She lives and writes in Winnipeg.

What are you working on?

It feels wrong to admit this here, but right now I’m primarily working on a novel. Of course, I’m always writing poems – sometimes more actively than others – and I’m currently looking for a home for a new poetry manuscript that collects several years’ worth of work.

Morgan Harlow : part three

How does a poem begin?

It begins with a word. A thought. Notes. A line or more. Hours, or many months, years later, a poem.