Meg Kearney : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

As I draft a poem, I read it aloud. So my first listener, besides myself, is my dog—he’s nonjudgmental and quietly attentive! But I’m mostly crafting with sound and music in mind, so hearing the words as I write them is essential. My mentor, William Matthews, said that the poetic line is like the bar in music, and “one composes by the phrase.” This is often in my thoughts as I work, as is Stanley Kunitz’s complaint that many contemporary poets aren’t “testing” their poems with their ears. “They’re writing for the page,” he said, “and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.”

Elena Bentley : part one

Elena Bentley is a disabled, bi, Métis/settler poet, writer, editor, and book reviewer who lives near Saskatoon. She is a Citizen of Métis Nation-Saskatchewan. She holds an MA in English from the University of Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in the anthology apart: a year of pandemic poetry and prose; in untethered, Arc Poetry, spring, and Kiiyaanaan Aykwaa: Us Now magazines, The Malahat Review, and antilang; and is forthcoming in Room Magazine and PRISM international. Most recently, she was a finalist for the People’s Choice Award in CV2 Magazine’s 2-Day Poem Contest. Elena is the poetry editor for untethered magazine. @_elenabentley_

What are you working on?

I’ve got a few projects on the go right now: two poetry collections (one that examines disability and the other that explores Métis/settler identity); a YA murder mystery novel (set in Toronto); and a children’s book (about a pickle named Dilbert). 

Joel Robert Ferguson : part five

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

Oddly enough, when I’m feeling burnt out on poetry my go-to reads are the prose works of poets, be they essays and fiction. Especially the short stories and critical writing of Roberto Bolaño, his prose writing is consistently playful, snarky and inventive in ways that usually get me writing poetry again.

Michael Lee Rattigan : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

My understanding of what it can do, as opposed to other forms of verbal attack, certainly has. Poetry isn’t merely prose with aspirations, but a foray on the ineffable, a leap in the Kierkegaardian sense of not resting on the pre-determined or pre-determinable. It isn’t just born, in Yeats’ phrase, from “the shock of new material”, but from the propulsive shock of entanglement. There is an imaginative collapsing that inevitably takes place, from Blake’s well-known “world in a grain of sand” to Will Alexander’s “galvanic shock of the cosmos”. Interesting that I’ve used the same word – in considering poetry – three times here, telling. I’m also aware that my “consideration of poetry” simultaneously is and isn’t everything that it is capable of being up to this point.    

Charlie Petch : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I recently read Tenille K. Campbell’s nedi nezu (good medicine), Arsesnal Pulp Press, so hot and steamy, and honest and funny, it paired well with Molly-Cross Blanchard’s Exhibitionist which is also raw, real and erotic and published by Coach House Press. Also the legendary Lillian Allen’s Make The World New, a selection of her poetry from Laurier Poetry Series, a real masterclass of spoken word and Jamaican Dub. So happy for this much overdue collection of her iconic poems and some new ones. I’m pretty intentional on whose work I read with whose, I always have a few books on the go, because of my distracted mind, but you want the right ingredients in that cocktail. 

Neil Flowers : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

WCW. Ezra Pound. WWE Ross. Raymond Knister. Shakespeare. Camus. Browning. Blake. Melville. Robert Creeley. Keats. Olson. Coleridge. Daphne Marlatt. Villon. Rimbaud. Bob Dylan. Sharon Dubiago. Chaucer. Powwow singers. James Agee. Wallace Stevens. Robert Johnson. Memphis Minnie. Phyllis Webb. John Newlove. Lorca. Basil Bunting. Lao-Tzu. Frank Davey. Michael Ondaatje. DH Lawrence. Ron Hansen. Pessoa. ee cummings.

A couple like Camus and Hansen are not per se poets, but still. Ron Hansen’s novel about Jesse James is a prose epic, with poetic style. Bob Hogg was my most important mentor. I mention him here, above, in the first question. He introduced me to the work of WCW, EP, the Black Mountain poets, Daphne Marlatt, the TISH poets, and Basil. In fact, Bob introduced me to Basil himself when he came to Ottawa for a reading. We went to dinner later, an unforgettable evening. Basil told me, to the effect: “When you write a poem, put it in a drawer for a year, if you can still read it then without wincing, go ahead and publish it.” Every poem in my new book, Polyphonic Lyre, has been in the drawer for at least a year, some for several. George Bowering taught a class at SFU in Vancouver in which we read modern and contemporary Canadian poets in depth. No one in Canada should receive a degree in English without having taken Bob and George’s classes. Those seminars were utterly invaluable to me as a writer. What they taught, and their own examples, and their unabashed Canadian perspective without being rah-rah nationalistic, pointed the way. 

Robert Hogg : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

One’s consideration of poetry comes as much from reading as from the practice of writing. Perhaps I should have said, “as much from the practice of reading…” since it is how we read, and why we read, that largely determines how we will compose our own poems. From very early on I had some inkling that I was a poet, and that I could learn to write expertly. But to do this, I had to pay close attention to what I was reading—how it was written, how it sounded to my ear, how it forced me to pay close attention—or if not, why not? That critical sense of reading is germane to any qualitative ability to write well. Of course, one is always limited, and thus it is useful to have teachers in one’s life who themselves show a deep consideration of the written word. Some of these may be friends, or they may be university professors with a keen ear for the music of poetry and subtleties in composition and effect. I was lucky to encounter Warren Tallman at UBC who was all of the above for myself and many poets of my generation who studied with him, however briefly. Warren made a habit of reading the poems under discussion in his classes out loud. So whether he read a sonnet by Wyatt, passages from Pope, Lapis Lazuli by Yeats, or a contemporary poem by Robert Creeley or Robert Duncan, poets he personally knew, he inevitably read the poetry as he personally heard it, and articulated every sound and syllable present. It was that attention to what was on the page that made one consider what had been written, what was being said. That was decades ago, now. But in some way that ‘learning to hear’ has stayed with me and remained forefront in my current reading and in my own composition. And of course I chose along with my contemporaries to write in free verse and to experiment with form without the constraints of our forebears in the practice. And yet…, and yet…, in my own case, and again in that of many others, I’ve chosen to apply constraints on my style for most of my career. I am more at ease writing quatrains, probably, than any other particular stanzaic pattern. But just as often, I will begin a poem in couplets or as a single narration, and then later, when I come back to it, break it down into one or another specific pattern. In my earlier writing, I often experimented with line breaks and stanza structures, breaking them up and seldom following through with a single pattern. Recently, I’ve tended to maintain a discrete series of quatrains or tercets, particularly in longer poems.