John Elizabeth Stintzi : part one

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer and artist who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize, the Sator New Works Award, and has been shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Raymond Souster Award. Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and many others. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano (2022) and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. They live with their wife in Kansas City.

Photo credit: JES

How did you first engage with poetry?

I first engaged with poetry, outside of a class-setting, as any angsty teen would (particularly growing up around the heyday of emo music/style): writing terrible, fire-and-brimstone, hopeless romantic poetry. I think the poem that set me off, with its very dark tone, was “The Destruction of Sennacherib” by Lord Byron, which I read and didn’t hate in my English class. I feel like my apocalyptic hopeless romanticism (paired with my terrible use of rhyming) definitely sprung out from lines like “For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, / And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed.”