How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
In my teens and twenties, I’d share stuff with friends, family, and teachers, and occasionally I slammed, which is one way to get an instant reaction (via score cards held aloft by randomly selected audience members). In the early 2000s, my wife and I spent four years in Ottawa, which proved to be a vital period for my poetry’s development; most of the material that made up my first three books was written there. We regularly attended the Tree Reading Series, hosted at the time by the novelist James Moran, and I would try out new poems at the open mic. That’s a decent initial editing technique: if the passage you’re reading is flat, you can feel the energy drain from the room; if a line is unwieldy, you’ll struggle to deliver it. These days, though, I don’t generally release a new poem into the world until it’s published. I figure if an editor wants it in a book or journal on their watch, it must be working somehow; if it finds no love there, I’ll retire it or haul back to the drawing board.
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