Jérôme Melançon : part one

Jérôme Melançon writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the author of a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup (August 2020), two books of poetry, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, and one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He teaches Francophone studies and philosophy, and even sometimes creative writing, at the University of Regina. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram through @lethejerome.

How does a poem begin?

A desire to stop what’s happening around me and render a moment fully. Not unlike taking a picture. There’s something I know I’ll want to remember, there’s something happening in that moment, emotions attached to things that I want to take with me. I’m not much of a photographer so I can only really account for a moment through words. This swelling feeling often just disappears as I write and the poem falls flat. At times though there’s a line or two that will stick, and I can build the rest of a poem around them.

There’s a struggle between what I’m trying to get across then, the aesthetics of it, and the desire to be in close communication with readers. This writing might also just be me saying “you’ve got to see this!” I haven’t thought too much about what communicating beauty means; it’s just a given for me, I have this desire. I haven’t felt the need to interrogate it, or to question it. And more recently, like in the book I just finished, it’s moved to the beauty in responses to what isn’t beautiful, the aesthetics of what has an aesthetic impact, without necessarily being beautiful.