Samantha Jones : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

I love music and I think that music and poetry are intertwined and often borrow from and show up in one another. Music intersects with my work in several ways. Sometimes I write to music, typically instrumental or mellow electronic tracks or music in a language I don’t understand so I don’t get caught up in the story. I select music with pace and mood that match the tone of the project I’m working on. 

I’ve experimented with using music symbols in some of my work. I have OCD and I noticed that there was a rhythm to some of my checking routines. I wanted to document those “incantations” and used rests and other music notation in the text to instruct the reader. I also use music to conjure memories that inspire a lot of my work. Road trips to visit family were a summer tradition when I was a kid and listening to the albums that we played in the car, like Sade and Toni Braxton, bring me back to the people and places that were such an important part of my childhood. 

Subhaga Crystal Bacon : coda

I’ve been writing poetry since I was an undergraduate in the seventies, then did an MFA in my late thirties. So poetry has been a nearly lifelong pursuit for me. I’ve taken breaks from submitting work for publication a few times in my life but never from poetry itself. I think of Rilke’s question to his young poet: could you live if you didn’t write? For me the answer is probably! But not nearly as fully. 

S. T. Brant : part four

Why is poetry important?

It isn’t, which is why it is. I’ll divide my answer to this in a pretty banal dichotomy: to those that consider literature Life and those that don’t. For the latter, if poetry has any importance at all, it’s minor- which could still be admitting to some importance, sure, but the qualities that make it important are different than what make it important to other people and maybe even what the writers thought would be the important chords they played. I think if poetry can be even the least important and serve as a distraction from life and a path inward, then it has already done enough- and in fact is likely more crucial than is outwardly acknowledged. Poetry sneaks up on you. Reading may never be their seminal recreation, it may be a chore, it may not be something they spend their whole day and night contemplating, and they may not spend all their time in bookstores, or consider visiting all the bookstores in the places they travel to vacation-worthy: in which case, poetry isn’t Important, but it can still be important. In those cases, poetry does have to be sneaky; it has little time to operate, and in that time it has to garden quickly: something in it needs to take root, it needs to leave something within that invites that person back, back within, where maybe they don’t spend much time, and invite them to investigate, to get to know that dark interior. But that time in solitude, when someone spends time with themselves in a part of themselves unfamiliar and learns to be alone, kicking open a new dimension to themselves- this poetry can do and is why it’s important. Letting someone get to know themselves better and become a richer character. For those that deem literature Life- what’s to say? The model of Important is Poetry. I don’t like the whole ‘what can poetry do? ‘how necessary is poetry?’ ‘is poetry dead?’ yada, yada, yada. It’s always Nothing/Everything; No/Yes; Yes/No. The words and I are often in strife, which is probably as it should be, because they don’t need me, and the contest is to prove them wrong and force some admission on their end that I made some inroads into what’s possible with language that even they didn’t anticipate, when all is said and done. But Poetry is important in that regard to me and me only because that’s the battle. Maybe if I say the right thing and get the idea right and the poem comes out as I have a vision of it, then maybe it can become important to someone for whom poetry isn’t generally important, or even maybe to someone for whom poetry is life. But I really only care about how important Poetry is to me and make no bones about convincing others. Even with my students, my goal isn’t to lecture them into assent, but to, sneakily, by the end, hopefully have demonstrated, whether through example or some blossom blasting through the dry season of the year, that there’s power in moving and being moved. I probably didn’t answer this question well. It’s hard. I’ve rambled and landed back at the beginning that it’s important to me. There’s a million anecdotes of it being meaningful in the world and being nothing in the world, and I think that’s how it should be. It’s the shadow-king. 

Stephanie Henson : part five

How does a poem begin? 

For me, a poem begins with a feeling and then I build upon that emotion and layer it with different poetic devices. At the start of every one of my poems there is heart and intent. I may not know exactly where the poem is going when I sit down to draft, but I have a general idea of the trajectory as I am writing. I rarely plan out my poems ahead of time or what I am going to say. I don’t generally outline. I let the feelings guide me and then I expand/enhance the piece accordingly. When I write for kids, I often delve into my own past experiences and the lessons I wish I would have had at that age, and put it in poetic form. I pay special attention to the words I use when writing for children. It’s ok if kids do not understand every single word of the poem you are writing for them, but they should be able to follow along with the theme and get the overall point of the piece.

Sarah Ens : part one

Sarah Ens is a writer and editor based in Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, MB). Her writing has appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, The New Quarterly, Contemporary Verse 2, Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, and SAD Mag. Her debut collection of poetry, The World Is Mostly Sky, was shortlisted for the 2021 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the 2022 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Flyway is her second book of poetry.

How did you first engage with poetry?

My first encounters with poetry happened in church, with hymns and scripture as the points of entry. I remember, during congregational singing, being struck by figurative language—how it can give shape to abstract ideas or amplify the enigmatic—and wanting to repeat certain lines over and over. “Let Thy goodness like a fetter / bind my wandering heart to Thee,” for example, made me excited about simile and how good a verb can feel.

The first poets I engaged with on the page were ee cummings and Di Brandt. Poems so passionate they eschewed the rules of punctuation appealed deeply to my teenage sensibilities! Brandt’s questions i asked my mother, that slim, bright, potent book, also opened the idea that maybe I could write poetry. 

Matthew Kosinski : part one

Matthew Kosinski is a poet, socialist, and occultist from Philadelphia. Alone in the White Marble City is available from New Delta Review. Your Human Shape is available from Broken Sleep Books.

What are you working on?

I’m working on a couple of things right now. The first is a series of poems grouped under the tentative title of I Want to Eat My Clone. The idea arose out of a discussion I had with a couple of friends a while back. Some years ago, there was a somewhat famous internet story about a man who had his foot amputated following a motor vehicle accident. On a lark, he and his friends decided to cook and eat the amputated foot meat, figuring it was their once-in-a-lifetime shot at trying some ethical cannibalism. 

My friends and I were discussing this story, considering whether we, too, would eat the foot if we were in that scenario. I’m pretty confident that I would, and I said as much. So one of my friends decides to escalate. He asks us, “Okay, you’d eat the foot. But how about this: Let’s say one day you woke up and walked into your kitchen and there, on the ground, was the deceased body of a perfect clone of yourself. Would you eat it?”

I’m less confident that I’d eat the clone, if only because that’s a lot more meat than a single foot. But I like the thought experiment. 

At the time I was also reading a lot about quantum mechanics – specifically, Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird – and I was really interested in John Archibald Wheeler’s “it from bit” theory, which basically proposes that the universe exists, at a fundamental level, as information. The physical world we inhabit essentially arises from the process of observing and interpreting that information. I’m greatly simplifying here, but under Wheeler’s theory, one can consider the human body a great big observational instrument: It moves through the world recording data, processing it, and rendering it legible as a physical environment. 

And so when my friend proposed this thought experiment – eating one’s clone – I thought about it in light of the “it from bit” theory. If the human body is an observational instrument, then perhaps by eating it, one could gain access to the raw universal data it’s been processing. That data has to be stored somewhere, right? Like eating a computer to learn what’s on its hard drive. 

Thus we have I Want to Eat My Clone, a series of poems about an amateur scientist discovering his own clone and deciding to eat it, piece by piece, in order to access the raw universal data it might be hiding. Each poem in the series corresponds to a different body part: eyes, heart, fingers, lungs, genitals, etc. 

The other project I’m working on is what I’m calling the “poetic equivalent of a Metroidvania.” For those who don’t know, “Metroidvania” refers to a genre of two-dimensional platforming video games that emphasize exploration. A Metroidvania takes place in one big connected world, and you, as a player, have to explore that world, filling out a map as you go along. 

I love these games for the way they tell stories through environmental cues and flavor text rather than narrative exposition; the player is an active participant in uncovering the story as they scour every inch of the world for hidden treasures, secret passages, and new areas. I’m thinking about, for example, Ender Lilies, where the player learns more about the protagonist’s origins by stumbling upon a secret laboratory. Or Blasphemous, where every item you pick up has an attached bit of lore that sheds some light on the post-apocalyptic world you’re traversing.

So I’ve become a bit obsessed with translating that kind of experiential, fragmented, exploration-heavy storytelling into a poetic framework. I can’t say I’ve figured out just yet how I’ll do it, but I know it’s going to rely on the visual composition of the poem. I want the poem to feel like you’re filling out a Metroidvania map as you move through it. And I’ve got a loose narrative right now, something revolving around a dystopian internet jail called the “paranet.” But all in all, this one’s still a bit embryonic.

James Davies : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Not really. I’ve long considered poetry to be rich in its possibilities, a really exciting place, not just biography or triviality in lineated form, or something dragged out at weddings and funerals. A lot of people’s conceptions of poetry is based on the stuff they read at school. And in the UK most of the twentieth and twenty-first century stuff is really the study of the topic of the poem and the spot-featuring of the poetic devices – that is to say that poetry’s not given a fair shot at school because of the selection of poems on the syllabus. I was lucky enough to come across/be directed to poetry that breaks the mould early on and see its connection to the wider picture of innovation in the arts.