Meg Kearney : part five

How does a poem begin?

Every poem has its own origin story. Some begin with a title, some with an image, others with a phrase or even a whole line. Some begin in response to a poem that has come before, or they are born of dreams. I often compare a poem with a trap. The trick, I think, is to lure readers into the trap with the title; then the first line has to capture their attention and lock the door behind them. The poem’s trap needs to be so well constructed that the reader stays “in” it until the last word—if the poem has a weak spot, that’s a potential hole through which a reader might slip out and turn the page or go make a sandwich. And if the trap is good enough, readers—even if they’re not exactly sure what the poem was about—will want to go back to the top and enter the poem again. And again.

Elena Bentley : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent by Liz Howard; Girl running by Diana Hope Tegenkamp;  Phantompains by Therese Estacion; The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett; and Side Effects May Include Strangers by Dominik Parisien. 

Magpie Ulysses : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I had to write terrible rhyming poems in school. My parents both love to read and we grew up memorizing Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee. There were always poems around and we had a very large library in a closet in our house. When I was 13 my dad gifted me a Rumi book and then the Leonard Cohen anthology Stranger Music. After that I spent hours upon hours alone in the library poetry section sitting on the floor reading. Between my parents and the library I found my biggest first influences, Yeats, Lillian Allen, Keats, Rumi, Brautigan, Rilke, Lorca, Gibran and on and on it went. When I was in grade 11 I put together an entire show, for a project in Drama class, of poems from the holocaust. I failed English 5 times in High School. I moved to an Alternative High school in grade 12 and my teacher there encouraged me to make a book of poems to be read out loud. I started performing them at school fundraisers and at 17 I fell into a really great group of weirdo poets at a reading series at a local coffee shop.  Somewhere in there, I fell hard into a spoken tradition in my own work.

Michael Lee Rattigan : part five

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

By pushing at the limits and finding a language worthy of yearning, poetry can do much. It needs to stay keen, nimble. A salutary reminder of the multi-directionality required can be gleaned from a reading of Heller Levinson and Will Alexander’s ‘Dialogics’.

Charlie Petch : part four

Why is poetry important? 

As a spoken word artist, I know our strength is in telling the truth. In creating something bite sized that can illuminate the listener. As so many of us fall into a kind of social media hypnosis, I find poetry is thriving because it doesn’t demand a long attention span and so much of it has become instrumental in bringing forward the idea that we need to really decolonize our minds and embrace our shortfalls as starting points for learning. Once we really move away from the more academic parameters of poetry, it really becomes a tool of the people. They don’t call them three minute power poems for nothing. 

One of my favourite spoken word pieces, “Whitey on the Moon” by Gil Scott Heron, recently got a lot more airplay after Elon Musk started taking fellow billionaires to space. I’m a huge lover of the power of satire, and that poem is just devastating in it’s effectiveness. I’m big on horrifying and funny as a political tool.

The act of writing has helped me to process so much of my long indoors of the past few years. Writing keeps me from stagnancy, keeps me from silencing myself, and being able to produce during this time has really helped with my mental health. Here I can imagine myself an earthworm, a multiheaded alien, a person who can just be free to wander, at least in my mind. It is dreaming while awake, and when the landscape is bleak, it can really fill it with emotion and resilience. 

Neil Flowers : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

''The idea that music and poetry can be separated,'' Ezra Pound wrote, ''is an idea current in ages of degradation and decadence when both arts are in the hands of lazy imbeciles.'' I play blues piano and I know the history of African American music pretty well. In addition, I grew up with jazz and classical music. My father loved the former; my mother was a Wagnerian soprano; my brother, Bruce, plays some of the standard piano repertoire. 

These musics find their way into my poetry, sometimes literally, as in “Skag Line Blues” and another, “Slow Drag Funky Butt,” the verses of the latter poem built on a straight ahead twelve-bar blues structure though more complex verbally than most blues and structured in stanzas rather than call-response. I generally ground my poems in quotidian reality like the contexts of the blues or old English/French/Scots ballads or WCW’s poetry. No music is more grounded than early blues and it speaks in the vernacular. I abjure overly academic or oppressively intellectual poetry, though as I say this I confess to a lifelong addiction to Ezra Pound’s work, and, as much as I am circumspect about T.S. Eliot himself, The Waste Land, which I read when I was pretty young, provided a first model for how poems could incorporate disparate voices, snatches of song, change directions, be non-linear, be structured mosaically. Blues, jazz, classical: Their examples exist as possibilities, swirling in my head, when I’m working on rhythm or development. The example of dissonant music is important to me. Poems can squawk, bleat, dance around crazy, spill this way and that, dash off to somewhere else honking and horny.

Robert Hogg : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Luckily, I’ve already partially answered this question in the course of answering questions above. And of course one goes on reading, admiring, and learning throughout one’s life. If I had to narrow this answer down to a few poets, I’d probably say: Yeats; Williams; Pound; Olson; Duncan and Creeley. There are of course dozens of others, maybe most particularly Beat poets like Ginsberg, Corso and in his prose, primarily, Jack Kerouac. All of the above have freed me from previous constraints and ideas of what poetry could or could not do. Pound and Olson had the greatest effect on my notion of theory in writing, while Williams and Duncan had the strongest effect on the way I would write, and in the case of Duncan, the ways I would have to force myself not to write. I fell for Duncan’s melodious verse from the moment I first heard him read in December 1959 when Warren and Ellen Tallman had him up to Vancouver to read to a few interested poets and lovers of poetry in their home. Frank Davey famously dragged me in from my family in Langley, where I was in my final year of high school, saying something like, you don’t have a choice, you’re just coming! Duncan read from his yet unpublished The Opening of the Field and his poem “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” was the piece that sealed for me the need to listen, read, write and become a poet. What I heard during that reading I could not then have put into words, but it set me afire inside, and I’ve been burning ever since.