How do you know when a poem is finished?
I tend not to. I am an editor by trade and by instinct. Learning when to let a poem go is an ongoing struggle for me. I don’t believe a poem is ever finished, really. Not only may it eventually be adapted by the author again, it will certainly be adapted, in how it is seen and heard and interpreted, by every person who eventually reads or hears it.
Honestly, I don’t think any art is static as long as there is a person who may still stumble across it and bring it back to life by engaging with it.
Monday 30 April 2018
Sunday 29 April 2018
Shannon Bramer : part five
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
I’ve
been writing poems for decades, since I was a child. The hardest part is still
just sitting down to do it. Writing involves sitting with my feelings,
memories, ideas, fears—my confusion, my muddle. So it can be painful and
exhausting! Also, finding the confidence to let the language loose, to let the
poem off its leash and let it go where it needs to go. To let the poem be its
own thing and somehow not mine anymore.
Saturday 28 April 2018
Friday 27 April 2018
Sanita Fejzić : part four
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry is a neighbour to thinking and language, according to Heidegger. He did not say prose; poetry is a neighbour to thinking and language—but why? It may be because poetry is heightened, experimental, musical prose—it is prose come to life, departing from the conventional, in the process of expanding our thinking and language. Poetry is the creative use of language. Poetry is always already in prose and other forms of writing such as playwriting. You recognize it in moments when prose becomes self-conscious or is no longer thinking about the traditional pillars of fiction such as narrative. When prose takes off into uncharted territories with words, punctuation, space and form, it enters the domain of poetry. I do not know if poetry wants to accomplish (or compete with) other forms; I would rather say that poetry is intimate with other forms.
Poetry is a neighbour to thinking and language, according to Heidegger. He did not say prose; poetry is a neighbour to thinking and language—but why? It may be because poetry is heightened, experimental, musical prose—it is prose come to life, departing from the conventional, in the process of expanding our thinking and language. Poetry is the creative use of language. Poetry is always already in prose and other forms of writing such as playwriting. You recognize it in moments when prose becomes self-conscious or is no longer thinking about the traditional pillars of fiction such as narrative. When prose takes off into uncharted territories with words, punctuation, space and form, it enters the domain of poetry. I do not know if poetry wants to accomplish (or compete with) other forms; I would rather say that poetry is intimate with other forms.
Penn Kemp : part seven
When you require
renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular
author?
Yes, books by friends who live far away but whose words I
treasure. See above. These are women
writers I admire and share new poems with.
Thursday 26 April 2018
Kyle Flemmer : part five
How do you know when a
poem is finished?
I’m
not sure that I ever know a poem is finished, as in “complete” (I can tell when
a poem is finished as in “dead”), and I’m always ready to open up a poem for
further tinkering. I resist the idea that a poem has an absolute terminal, a
Nirvana at which it arrives perfect and whole. That said, I often define
constraints or parameters for my writing. These help me decide when a poem is
sufficiently developed to start sharing, itself an experience which almost
always pushes the poem to grow further, beyond where I thought the conclusion
should be based on its parameters.
Wednesday 25 April 2018
Manahil Bandukwala : part four
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I love reading chapbooks and books by people in my community, or people whom I’ve personally met. Readings and launches are a great place to find poetry books by people whose work you enjoy. Lately I’ve read Ayesha Chatterjee’s Bottles and Bones and Conyer Clayton’s For the Birds. For the Humans.
I love reading chapbooks and books by people in my community, or people whom I’ve personally met. Readings and launches are a great place to find poetry books by people whose work you enjoy. Lately I’ve read Ayesha Chatterjee’s Bottles and Bones and Conyer Clayton’s For the Birds. For the Humans.
Tuesday 24 April 2018
rob mclennan : part five
What poets changed the
way you thought about writing?
For years, my go-to was George Bowering, a poet I’d first
encountered during my high school years. Influences were multiple during my
twenties, from John Newlove, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood and Barry McKinnon
to bpNichol, Artie Gold, Robert Kroetsch and Judith Fitzgerald, among so many,
many others, but Bowering was always my anchor. From him, I learned a
consideration of writing my local, and the importance of reading (and
supporting) my contemporaries. Every time I read any of his essays, or picked
up an anthology he’d edited, it sent me off into dozens of other directions in
my reading, which I’ve very much appreciated. Through him, I discovered TISH,
the Kootenay School of Writing, the Vehicule Poets, Coach House, Talon, Quebec
writers in translation, etcetera. The field was ever-expanding, and seemingly
had no limits.
Some of my staples over the past decade or so include
Pattie McCarthy, Rosmarie Waldrop, Margaret Christakos, Sawako Nakayasu, Alice
Notley, Julie Carr, Susan Howe, Jennifer Kronovet, Marcus McCann, Kate
Greenstreet, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Erín Moure, Jordan Abel, derek beaulieu, Ryan
Murphy, Cole Swensen, Gil McElroy, and pretty much anything translated by Norma
Cole. Amelia Martins had a first book I couldn’t put down for a very long time.
Layli Long Soldier should have won every award going for her first collection. There
are far more names to list, but I suspect we haven’t infinite space.
Really, the way one thinks about writing is constantly
mutable, and evolving, or at least should be. Just about anything can change
the way one thinks about writing, even a poem I might not necessarily find
terribly interesting, discovered in the middle of some literary journal, might
have some small kernel of “oh, what’s that?” in it; something I might want to
consider including in whatever I end up doing next.
Annick MacAskill : part one
Annick MacAskill’s debut collection is No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Grain, Literary Review of Canada, Versal, Room, Arc, and The Fiddlehead. Originally from Ontario, she currently lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Photo credit: Heather Kirk
How did you first engage with poetry?
As a child, with little awareness of what I was doing. I think my mother called my writing “poems” before I thought of it that way, but the word felt right immediately.
Photo credit: Heather Kirk
How did you first engage with poetry?
As a child, with little awareness of what I was doing. I think my mother called my writing “poems” before I thought of it that way, but the word felt right immediately.
Monday 23 April 2018
Anita Dolman : part one
Anita Dolman’s poetry and fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies throughout North America, including Canadian Ginger, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Matrix Magazine, On Spec, Grain, PRISM international and Triangulation: Lost Voices. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, and was a finalist for the 2015 Alberta Magazine Award for fiction. Her debut short fiction collection, Lost Enough (Morning Rain Publishing) was released in 2017. Anita is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and co-editor of Motherhood in Precarious Times, an anthology of non-fiction, essays and poetry (Demeter Press, 2018).
Photo credit: John W. MacDonald
What are you working on?
Right now, I am expanding a short story that wants to be a novella, and am doing promotion for the Motherhood in Precarious Times anthology (Demeter Press, 2018), of which I am co-editor, along with U.S. professors Barbara Schwartz-Bechet and Dannielle Joy Davies.
I am also starting on a longer fiction project that may or may not grow to be a novel, and am searching for a publisher for a collection of my poetry. New poems still also seem to keep happening in between all of these things.
Photo credit: John W. MacDonald
What are you working on?
Right now, I am expanding a short story that wants to be a novella, and am doing promotion for the Motherhood in Precarious Times anthology (Demeter Press, 2018), of which I am co-editor, along with U.S. professors Barbara Schwartz-Bechet and Dannielle Joy Davies.
I am also starting on a longer fiction project that may or may not grow to be a novel, and am searching for a publisher for a collection of my poetry. New poems still also seem to keep happening in between all of these things.
Sunday 22 April 2018
Shannon Bramer : part four
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I’m
not sure poems are meant to accomplish anything except to change how something
is seen or understood or felt. Poems are meant to go around touching souls. In
a tiny space a poem evokes a universe. The form is simultaneously direct and
mysterious. You can’t tell a poem what to do; after you make it has to keep on
moving, living, breathing, weeping on the page. Poems love the mundane world as
much as they love beauty, horror, injustice, history, swans. Poems want to do
everything and nothing at the same time.
Saturday 21 April 2018
Shannon Quinn : part five
How important is music to your poetry?
Rhythm and sound are very important to me and the piece will dictate that on its own, I just need to follow. If I catch myself defaulting to the same rhythm over a couple pieces I need to stop and have a long think. In terms of actual music…not so important…I write in silence.
Rhythm and sound are very important to me and the piece will dictate that on its own, I just need to follow. If I catch myself defaulting to the same rhythm over a couple pieces I need to stop and have a long think. In terms of actual music…not so important…I write in silence.
Friday 20 April 2018
Sanita Fejzić : part three
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 have a special relationship with the will to poetry, that is, with the creative linguistic drive to word new wor(l)ds. Poetry comes to me of its own free will, my job is to be receptive and radically open to it. When I channel the will to poetry, I try to be as unconditional about the process as possible. The more I try to control the writing process, the harder it becomes to hear the music, rhythm and essence of poetic will. I am very private about the process of writing and do not share my work ideas with others until I am ready (or forced to), either because I’m stuck or because I want feedback on my work-in-progress. Writing is rewriting; writing a collaborative act.
I have a special relationship with the will to poetry, that is, with the creative linguistic drive to word new wor(l)ds. Poetry comes to me of its own free will, my job is to be receptive and radically open to it. When I channel the will to poetry, I try to be as unconditional about the process as possible. The more I try to control the writing process, the harder it becomes to hear the music, rhythm and essence of poetic will. I am very private about the process of writing and do not share my work ideas with others until I am ready (or forced to), either because I’m stuck or because I want feedback on my work-in-progress. Writing is rewriting; writing a collaborative act.
Penn Kemp : part six
What other poetry books
have you been reading lately?
Daphne Marlatt’s Intertidal
(Talonbooks, 2017) and her Reading
Sveva. All of Susan McCaslin and
Sharon Thesen.
Thursday 19 April 2018
Kyle Flemmer : part four
What other poetry books
have you been reading lately?
Last
year I completed the 95 books challenge, and in my hurry to fit in that many I
read a bunch of slim volumes. This year my goal is to read thirty books 300
pages or longer, in hopes of committing myself to the practice of sustained
reading. I’ve targeted several collected works and would like to revisit a few
of the classics I skimmed through in university. Presently I’m embroiled with S O S, Amiri Baraka’s collected poems.
It’s been extremely rewarding exploring his oeuvre more fully, especially in
seeing how his politics develop and mesh with his art over time.
Wednesday 18 April 2018
Manahil Bandukwala : part three
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
The In/Words writer’s circle and the Emerging Writer’s Circle at Carleton have really helped shape my work as a writer. First drafts are usually bad, but I feel comfortable taking bad first drafts to these spaces. I’ve known some of these people for almost three years now and my writing has really grown thanks to them. My sister is also a great critic. If I’m writing a poem about growing up in Pakistan or being a person of colour, she’ll help me steer the poem away from clichés and such.
The In/Words writer’s circle and the Emerging Writer’s Circle at Carleton have really helped shape my work as a writer. First drafts are usually bad, but I feel comfortable taking bad first drafts to these spaces. I’ve known some of these people for almost three years now and my writing has really grown thanks to them. My sister is also a great critic. If I’m writing a poem about growing up in Pakistan or being a person of colour, she’ll help me steer the poem away from clichés and such.
Tuesday 17 April 2018
rob mclennan : part four
Has your consideration
of poetry changed since you began?
Very much so. I’ve spent the past decade moving through the
sentence very differently, having shifted from the line and breath break of the
lyric staggering across the page (which made up the bulk of my poetry during my
twenties and thirties) to the allure of the lyric sentence, working almost
exclusively in the prose poem.
One might argue that that is less of a change of
consideration than simply an evolution of structure.
I’m far more aware, now, of many of the tools of poetry,
from allusion and collision to breath and sound, yet there are still moments in
my reading where I catch something that I hadn’t considered previously,
something that I wish to consider incorporating into my own work (I presume
every active writer goes through this process life-long, right?).
In certain ways, I am still writing what I have always
written: poems that attempt to capture particular moments through condensed
language; moments that contain meditations upon my immediate, including
geography, family, friends, reading and thinking. Over the years, I’ve worked
very deliberately to reduce the “I” in such poems, but I don’t know if it is
possible to erase such completely, at least in certain types of poems. Even the
invisible eye still remains.
And yet, I know I’ve been attempting to incorporate more
political elements into my writing the past couple of years. One doesn’t wish
to sound false by referencing something political, so the challenge becomes in
how to speak of something in a way that is not only appropriate, but
appropriate to the poem. I’ve always envied Milan Kundera for his equal
considerations of social, political and personal throughout his fiction; one
element doesn’t exist above any other. I’ve also been prompted by seeing
particular works by Christine Leclerc, Jordan Abel, Stephen Collis, Layla Long Soldier,
Eve L. Ewing, Shane McCrae, Morgan Parker and so many others that are doing
absolutely incredible and essential writing (something I’ve been seeing far
more over the past decade, as well), and I wonder how I can engage in my own
ways. I think we are moving past the point where one can simply ignore the
political when composing literary work.
Monday 16 April 2018
Pearl Pirie : coda
Coda Q:
What do you need poetry for?
Short
Answer: Writing poetry
is a way to process. The constraints are tools and frames for seeing in
manageable size bits.
Long
Answer: With poetry as
folk medicine it can try to treat many things. A need to connect, to speak up
and out, to educate, to frustrate, to calm, to make beauty, to break beauty, to
narrate differently, to sort out ideas, to make a thing, to make fame or
immortality. (Though, I’ve never believed in the last 2.)
If delivered
well, and the right randomness to the right moment, it may make a pattern
discernible somewhere else or to someone else. It’s a way to publicly speak and
build a like-minded community. It provides closure and control to state
something which gives permission to let go. A book as a casket for thought and
all that. Or poem as a urn.
But what do
I need of it? Maybe nothing? “Necessity is an individual sport” said Matt Wiele. But an individual is in constant
change. What do I need now?
And is
poetry the best route or the practiced route? Real solutions can be self-talk,
frank dialogue, direct action, following one line of thought deep and long,
medicine, to retrain thinking to not gaslight oneself in solitude, to learn
physical skills, exercise, listening instead of speaking, confronting issues
within and without. Poetry can be like slacktivsm. Or a start, rather than an
end. A way to question, not with answers in hand, or to question to question,
but to get somewhere.
Sunday 15 April 2018
Shannon Bramer : part three
How do you know when a poem is finished?
A
poem is finished when it stops nagging at me to return to it. Sometimes this
takes a very long time. I don’t finish every poem. Some fall apart while I’m
working on them. For my last book I worked with an exceptional poet and editor,
Jennifer LoveGrove, for several weeks before feeling satisfied with the final
draft. Her eyes on the poems, her comments, her questions, all helped me grow
and refine the manuscript in ways I could not have accomplished on my own.
Saturday 14 April 2018
Shannon Quinn : part four
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
There are a few poets and poems that I go to when I need to remember the amount of possibility available to this form.
Song by Bridget Pegeen Kelley, Washing the Elephants by Barbara Rass, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s collection Islands of Decolonial Love, work by Don Domanski, Patricia Smith, Jen Currin.
There are a few poets and poems that I go to when I need to remember the amount of possibility available to this form.
Song by Bridget Pegeen Kelley, Washing the Elephants by Barbara Rass, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s collection Islands of Decolonial Love, work by Don Domanski, Patricia Smith, Jen Currin.
Friday 13 April 2018
Sanita Fejzić : part two
How did you first engage with poetry?
The way I engage another human being, with humility, curiosity and care. Each word, line and poem has its own aura, living in its own country. Some poems are inviting, friendly and warm. Others are reserved, hermetic and extremely private—to enter into relation with them, you need time and space. There are poems will never give themselves to us, and that’s as valuable of an experience as encountering an open and generous poem we can return to over and over again for nourishment.
The way I engage another human being, with humility, curiosity and care. Each word, line and poem has its own aura, living in its own country. Some poems are inviting, friendly and warm. Others are reserved, hermetic and extremely private—to enter into relation with them, you need time and space. There are poems will never give themselves to us, and that’s as valuable of an experience as encountering an open and generous poem we can return to over and over again for nourishment.
Penn Kemp : part five
Do you have a social
group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
See below.
Thursday 12 April 2018
Kyle Flemmer : part three
What poets changed the
way you thought about writing?
What
decent poet doesn’t? I see that as part of the job description. That said,
Douglas Kearney’s “Quantum Spit” was the poem which really brought my interest
in experimental forms to the fore. From its use of typeface and dramatis
personae in mounting a chorus on the page, to its publication as broadsheet liner
notes in a record sleeve, every aspect of the poem challenges the boundary
between image and sound. Many poets have blown my mind since then, and now
that’s the poetry I seek out in particular.
Aaron Tucker : part five
What are you working on?
I’m launching my first novel Y (https://chbooks.com/Books/Y/Y) in the spring of 2018 and so I’ve
been occupied with that. But I’ve been really fortunate to move around the
world a fair bit over the last two years with a woman I love dearly and see
incredible art object after incredible art object, so I’ve been writing a long
poem, about half way done (I think) about that. There is a through line of
birds and I recently discovered Olivier Messiaen’s long piano piece “Catalogue
d'Oiseaux” and so I have been playing it on repeat as I move through it, from
Porto to Berlin to Toronto, back and forth. It is so different than my last book,
Irresponsible Mediums (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/irresponsible-mediums-the-chess-games-of-marcel-duchamp-by-aaron-tucker/)
which is a computer generated collection that translates the chess games of
Marcel Duchamp into poems – this poem I’m actually writing!
Wednesday 11 April 2018
Manahil Bandukwala : part two
How did you first engage with poetry?
I used to consider myself primarily a prose writer, and wrote poems on the side. When I moved to Ottawa, I discovered a vibrant poetry community. Around the same time, in a first year university class, we studied Modernist poets. Reading Leonard Cohen alongside poetry on Bywords, in In/Words and in presses around Ottawa, I started to shape my own work. Reading or listening to other poets’ work has always been my biggest influence.
I used to consider myself primarily a prose writer, and wrote poems on the side. When I moved to Ottawa, I discovered a vibrant poetry community. Around the same time, in a first year university class, we studied Modernist poets. Reading Leonard Cohen alongside poetry on Bywords, in In/Words and in presses around Ottawa, I started to shape my own work. Reading or listening to other poets’ work has always been my biggest influence.
Tuesday 10 April 2018
Monday 9 April 2018
Pearl Pirie : part five
What
poetry books have you been reading lately?
Short
Answer: The joke of the
same $15 making its way around the small circle and trade economy of small
press fairs across Canada seems to fit here. I read what falls across my path.
Long Answer: I generally have a few dozen books on the go— science, essays,
architecture books, novels (on a Catherine Asaro kick). Currently, Marcus
Aurelius, Seneca Letters to a Stoic, and a few poetry collections, Shake
Loose my Skin by Sonia Sanchez, Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh
Akbar, 89 Objects of Happiness Arrayed in Ascending Order by Mike Finley
(Kraken Press, St. Paul, 2017), The Deep End of the Sky by Chad Lee
Robinson (Turtle Press, 2015), Different Conversations: Short Poems and
Literary Fragments by Alexis Rotella (on Kindle), Nobody Move by
Susan Stenson, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry
ed by Valerie Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron (Frontenac, 2013). Upcoming:
This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Mêmewars by Adeena
Karasick, and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Also on tap, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing
the Human Spirit by Lynn Gehl, No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe, The
Inner Life of Animals: Grief, Love and Compassion by Peter Wohlleben, Soul
of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by
Sy Montgomery (Simon & Schuster, 2015). The Barnhart Dictionary of
Etymology, and What is Architecture and 100 other questions by
Rasmus Waern and Gert Wingårdh, trans John Krause. Sample of the last
“Uniformity can be incomparably handsome, but it has a kind of built-in
insensitivity.”
Sunday 8 April 2018
Shannon Bramer : part two
How did you first engage with poetry?
This is a favourite question of mine because it comes with a funny
story. When I was in grade six we did a poetry unit in school that introduced
me to the work of Canadian poet, Irving Layton. It was a poem called Song for Naomi, and this poem made me
feel wild inside. We learned about literary devices using that poem and I
vividly recall how I felt, trying to understand how it all worked, discovering
how exciting language could be. But I was also really moved by the images in
that poem too. I identified with the growing child; I was amazed by the
combination of love and sorrow inside it. I wanted the poem to be mine so badly
that I copied it down into a notebook and changed the title to Song for Shannon. I told my mother I was
the author. It was after telling this lie that I started to try and write my
own poems.
Saturday 7 April 2018
Shannon Quinn : part three
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry can evoke so many surprises. It can capture voice, sound and image in a unique way. Something happens in a poem, something unexpected and it can only have happened that one way the author chose…it’s not that other forms don’t do this but more that poetry has to have this pulsing throughout it. It asks us to be economical with our words but also to open up new places…it’s a magical contradiction sometimes.
Poetry can evoke so many surprises. It can capture voice, sound and image in a unique way. Something happens in a poem, something unexpected and it can only have happened that one way the author chose…it’s not that other forms don’t do this but more that poetry has to have this pulsing throughout it. It asks us to be economical with our words but also to open up new places…it’s a magical contradiction sometimes.
Friday 6 April 2018
Sanita Fejzić : part one
Sanita Fejzić is an Ottawa-based author, poet, playwright and scholar. Her novella, Psychomachia, Latin for battle of the soul, was published by Quattro Books. The Blissful State of Surrender, her first play, was workshopped by the National Arts Centre in March 2018. Fejzić has published numerous short stories and poems in literary journals and magazines across Canada. In the Nothing Left of Me, her first translation from French to English from Quebecois poet Sylvie Nicholas’s collection of poems, Le plus rien de moi, was launched on March 10, 2018.
What are you working on?
A hybrid text, The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies, which includes new words framed as encyclopedia entries on suffering and ecstasies alongside narrative prose poems, photographs, old letters and other media. The narrative poems tell the story of a young poet who has found a manuscript titled The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies from her diseased great-grandmother, a Bosnian woman who fled a violent husband during WWII and settled in Prague, where she died typing the unfinished text. As the young poet tries to understand who her great-grandmother was, she travels to Sarajevo and Prague to finish the encyclopedia and find the missing pieces of her ancestor’s mysterious life.
I’m also working on my first book of non-fiction titled The Will Of Poetry and The Will To Poetry for McGill & Queen’s University Press. This book of philosophic-poetic thoughts on the creative drive of language defines my concept of the will of poetry as the particular lexicon a writer is born into and is temporally related to writing the present and past, whereas the will to poetry is a future-oriented linguistic drive concerned with wording new wor(l)ds. This text emerges from the question: how can we create new wor(l)ds within a language, such as English, that is steeped in the syntax of heteropatriarchy, neo-colonialism and phallagocentrism?
What are you working on?
A hybrid text, The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies, which includes new words framed as encyclopedia entries on suffering and ecstasies alongside narrative prose poems, photographs, old letters and other media. The narrative poems tell the story of a young poet who has found a manuscript titled The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies from her diseased great-grandmother, a Bosnian woman who fled a violent husband during WWII and settled in Prague, where she died typing the unfinished text. As the young poet tries to understand who her great-grandmother was, she travels to Sarajevo and Prague to finish the encyclopedia and find the missing pieces of her ancestor’s mysterious life.
I’m also working on my first book of non-fiction titled The Will Of Poetry and The Will To Poetry for McGill & Queen’s University Press. This book of philosophic-poetic thoughts on the creative drive of language defines my concept of the will of poetry as the particular lexicon a writer is born into and is temporally related to writing the present and past, whereas the will to poetry is a future-oriented linguistic drive concerned with wording new wor(l)ds. This text emerges from the question: how can we create new wor(l)ds within a language, such as English, that is steeped in the syntax of heteropatriarchy, neo-colonialism and phallagocentrism?
Amanda Earl : coda
I
become disheartened when I read negative comments from editors or renowned
poets about what they feel poetry is or should be. I don’t think personal
aesthetics have any place in an editor or an influencer’s role. One long-term
editor of a literary journal recently said they didn’t like poems that they
felt were cold and clever. This, to me, reflects a lack of a sense of adventure
when it comes to the type of writing that the journal would be open to
publishing and doesn’t really serve readers very well. A well-respected writer
and thinker dismissed word play as not important. What these kinds of flippant
comments do, in my mind, is to place limits on experimentation and
exploration.
In
my opinion, an editor should be open to all types of poetry, including forms
they have themselves never made as a poet or dreamt of. They should be willing
to expose readers of poetry to all kinds of variety and risk. If not on a
printed page, then where?
Word
play can be a way of mining the subconscious to reveal what has long been
buried in the psyche. Also, not every poem has to make an important statement
about the state of the world. A humble, playful poem by one person might
inspire another person to create something and so on. I treat the derision and
narrow-minded attitudes I hear about poetry as a challenge. Defiance of the
status quo is one of the reasons that I need poetry, both as a
reader/viewer/listener and as an artist.
Penn Kemp : part four
How does your work
first enter the world?
Often through social media and my facebook groups like
Gathering Voices/Pendas Productions. I’m
delighted to have poems published by online magazines www.tuckmagazine.com,
because they put up new and pertinent work so quickly.
Thursday 5 April 2018
Kyle Flemmer : part two
Has your consideration
of poetry changed since you began?
When
I first started writing poetry I thought it must be a sort of rhyming sing-song
about love or flowers or jabberwocks. A whimsical limerick was my idea of
excellent poetry; metrical without being stuffy or sappy. Not that that isn’t
poetry, but it took a long time for me to realize how poetry proper encompasses
a vast territory of literary possibility, a territory that expands along with
us as we discover new ways of thinking and being. I’m now interested in poetry
that grapples with our understanding of the universe, experiments with form and
material, or challenges socially accepted norms about what literature can and
should be.
Aaron Tucker : part four
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
As I write at the beginning of March, spring launches are
fast approaching and so I’m thrilled to be reading a number of works: Eric Schmaltz’s
Surfaces (http://invisiblepublishing.com/product/surfaces/),
Shannon Webb Campell’s Who Took My
Sister? (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/who-took-my-sister-by-shannon-webb-campbell/), Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (https://chbooks.com/Books/A/Anatomic),
David Brock’s Ten-Headed Alien (https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/collections/all/products/ten-headed-alien),
Susan Zelazo’s Lances All Alike (https://chbooks.com/Books/L/Lances-All-Alike),
Dani Couture’s Listen Before Transmit
(https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/collections/all/products/listen-before-transmit), Cameron Anstee’s Book of Annotations (http://invisiblepublishing.com/product/book-of-annotations/)
and Shannon McGuire’s Zip’s File (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/zips-file-a-romance-of-silence-by-shannon-maguire/).
In terms of recently read, I loved Billy Ray-Belcourt’s This Wound is a World (https://www.frontenachouse.com/dd-product/this-wound-is-a-world/)
and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit
Wounds (https://www.oceanvuong.com/books).
They are two young poets that absolutely blow me away with their work. Beyond
this, one of my favourite things is going to Knife Fork Books in Kensignton
Market, Toronto, and asking Kirby to pull out a book or two for me – the store
is amazing and he always has the best taste!
Wednesday 4 April 2018
Manahil Bandukwala : part one
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and artist currently living in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in In/Words, Bywords, re:asian and ottawater, among other places, and she has work forthcoming in Room Magazine, The Puritan and Ricepaper. She is currently an editor for In/Words magazine & Press. Visit her website at manahils.com.
What are you working on?
My goal for 2018 is to put out a chapbook, or at least have a chapbook manuscript in the works. Earlier in 2017, I toyed with the idea of a themed chapbook and writing poems around that theme. I didn’t accomplish that, beyond producing a few regurgitated poems. I realize now that attempting to place those limits curbed my creative thought. Now I have enough good poems to go in a manuscript, and although I didn’t write any of those with the hopes of them fitting into a ‘theme,’ I find the poems do have a sense of connectivity (although not one I had previously planned).
What are you working on?
My goal for 2018 is to put out a chapbook, or at least have a chapbook manuscript in the works. Earlier in 2017, I toyed with the idea of a themed chapbook and writing poems around that theme. I didn’t accomplish that, beyond producing a few regurgitated poems. I realize now that attempting to place those limits curbed my creative thought. Now I have enough good poems to go in a manuscript, and although I didn’t write any of those with the hopes of them fitting into a ‘theme,’ I find the poems do have a sense of connectivity (although not one I had previously planned).
Tuesday 3 April 2018
rob mclennan : part two
How did you first
engage with poetry?
I’m not entirely sure. I remember seeing Dennis Lee on Mr.
Dressup somewhere in the 1970s. I’ve always found the sounds and mechanics of
words rather curious, and would play with sounds before I entered school.
Discovering the word “me” in “home,” for example. I know I was a big reader,
and somehow knew more French before I began kindergarten than I’ve ever managed
since.
By the time I entered my pre-teens, I was attempting just
about everything, from painting with acrylic and watercolours, to comic books
(I sent a script attempt to Marvel at one point), to my years of piano lessons,
and sketching out lines in notebooks. I had even entered the Kiwanis singing
competitions, or whatever it is they were called, during middle school.
By the time I hit grade ten, I’d a social group that was
engaged with writing, and I kinda fell into that, writing short stories and
poems at a furious pace (some of that group included Clare Latremouille,
Franco-Ontarian playwright Louis Patrick Leroux – we knew him only as Patrick
back then – and musician Chris Page). During those high school years, my
eventual partner and mother of my first child was also instrumental in
supporting those early attempts at writing (as were others, but she was by far
my most consistent supporter, even if she claimed she hated everything I was
writing), offering me multiple books, and introducing me to works by Alice
Munro, Margaret Lawrence, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findlay, Robertson
Davies, John Newlove, George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Elizabeth Smart,
Margaret Atwood, Richard Brautigan and others. “If you’re going to write, you
have to read,” she said.
By my final year of high school, I’d managed to place first
in the Carleton University High School Writing Competition for a short story (I
discovered years later that Ottawa writer Wes Smiderle, who I became friends
with somewhere during our thirties, placed first in playwriting the same year).
Sara Renee Marshall : part five
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I’m not sure I go to poetry for renewal, unless renewal is activation. Literature doesn’t tend to soothe me; it stirs me. Agitates me, even. I guess those are renewals from boredom or complacency. Not all of these things could strictly be called poetry, but they are to me: I return over and over to Inger Christensen’s alphabet, the first line of which is scrawled permanently on my leg, Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities, Fred Moten’s B Jenkins, all of Lisa Robertson’s books but especially Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture and R’s Boat, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, L.V. Thomas and Geeshie Wiley’s version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean”, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and Barbara Guest’s poems “Safe Flights” and “A Reason”, both of which are perfect.
Monday 2 April 2018
Pearl Pirie : part four
What do
you find most difficult about writing poetry?
Short
Answer: The editing is
harder than the writing but it isn’t the main difficulty. It is hearing the pen
or inner voice out respectfully and curiously.
Long
Answer: One difficulty
is finding new parts of world and self to observe more keenly, more
compassionately and understand more deeply and then convey in a way that can be
felt rather than giving a lecture of summary notes, but to be with the reader
as an equal. Part of putting process over elevating self as an authority is
trusting that readers will engage with what you express, to listen loosely when
you speak loosely, to listen carefully when you speak with care.
It is
difficult to express oneself in words but it is harder to live optimally for
yourself and for community and for wider social duties. That is the hardest
part and the part that matters. As Leonard Cohen put it, “I’m grateful to get a
poem. I don’t question the sources too carefully. For me poetry is the evidence
of a life and not the life itself. It is the ashes of something burning well.
And sometimes you confuse yourself and try to make ashes instead of fire.”
(15:00, Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen)
Sunday 1 April 2018
Shannon Bramer : part one
Shannon Bramer (photo credit: Linda Marie
Stella) is a poet and playwright. Precious Energy (BookThug,
September 2017) is her fourth book of poetry. Her plays (Monarita, The Collectors and The Hungriest Woman in the World) have appeared in
juried festivals across the country, among them: New Ideas
(Toronto) The Women’s Work Festival (St.John’s) and Sarasvati FemFest
(Winnipeg). A full production of The Hungriest
Woman in the World premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in December
2017, with PENCIL KIT PRODUCTIONS. Shannon also conducts poetry workshops in
schools and is the editor of Think City: The Poems of
Gracefield Public School. An illustrated collection of poems for young
children, entitled Climbing Shadows, is forthcoming from Groundwood Books in 2019.
What are you working on?
I am rewriting an important section of a play (The Hungriest Woman
in the World) that was recently produced at Theatre Passe Muraille with Pencil
Kit Productions. Even though the show has been work-shopped and produced I
still don’t feel finished with it. It involves the central metaphor of the
play, a depressed octopus. It is like having a giant puzzle in front of me and
there’s one large piece that just isn’t sitting inside it properly. I am also
working on new poems and another play.
Kim Goldberg : part five
How
does a poem begin?
With an instigating line, or an image, maybe a
sound, a dream even. Or witnessing something so bizarre it begs for the
slantwise approach of poetry to make sense of it. This morning I read an
article (on the heels of another horrific school shooting) about a religious
congregation in Pennsylvania coming to church in the hundreds for a mass
wedding of all congregants. And they were toting their AR-15 rifles because
they believe the AR-15 symbolizes the "rod of iron" in the biblical
Book of Revelation. How can this not be the basis of a poem?
I often discover after I have written a poem
that the reason I wrote it, the motivating force, was to try to understand or
make some sense of the incomprehensible. Fortunately, I don’t see that when I
start writing, or it would probably wreck the poem.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)