Thursday 11 March 2021

Jessi MacEachern : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

My consideration of poetry is still changing. I’ve always been drawn to reading and writing about women’s lives, but my early education had led me to believe there was a singular avenue for that and it was melancholic at best, suicidal at worst. In graduate school, my writing teachers (Stephanie Bolster, Sina Queyras, and Gail Scott) pointed to new and bold examples of how to master the craft, interrogate feminist politics, and mobilize the line or sentence for radical means. Today, as the teacher, I find my students reorienting my attention toward the emotional centre of a poem, or its story. I am often deeply resistant to narrative, but perhaps the classroom will make a storyteller of me yet. 

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