David Bradford : part one

David Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), on the unceded territory of the Kanien:keha'ka Nation. He is the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021) and several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. 

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I don’t know that there really is that much poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t; I've kind of gone the hybrid camp that says (campily) it’s fiction, essays, poetry if you call it that. But I do think deciding something is poetry frees a number of things up. 

Unlike if you call it fiction or nonfiction, sending something out into the world you decides to call poetry is to send it out into a book industry convinced there’s no money to be made off it. Publishing, book distribution, book promotion, bookselling stuff and people and places often act like they’re pretty convinced in this matter, and I don’t really blame them, even if I think it’s a wrongheaded conviction. 

I think the old “poetry is economically unproductive” adage is untrue, but that it’s generally perceived that way is certainly true. Now, there’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work in a publishing world that makes that call (don’t try too hard to sell poetry books and poetry books definitely won’t sell too hard), sure, but it’s one which, for poets, sustains an opportunity we maybe take for granted. 

Poets and poetry get to work in the dark, maybe more particularly in the economic dark. Calling something “poetry” and bringing it to publishers as “poetry” is to lean into the fact it’s been worked out somewhere away from “will it $ell,” somewhere opportunities outside of selling are easier to get to. Whether that work is good or bad doesn’t really matter to what I’m saying: the potential afforded by the form’s unprofitability branding is, maybe, “poetry” getting to do whatever the poet wants it to. By contrast, the “big publisher dream” for prose writers amounts to thousands of tiny and not-so-tiny demands for changes in direction, style, tone, point—requests made in droves by agents, acquisition editors, publishers, etc.—before a manuscript even gets a yes. A poetry collection usually has to show up already cooked or it doesn’t get served; no publisher really has the time to invest in overhauling your poetic conceit or having you add five action beats to your book of poems. They’ll take the book because they like your choices or they won’t because they don’t.

This might sound bleak but it’s a better place to be as a writer than it seems, which is the magic of it, maybe. Call it poetry as long as you can. That’s our lot.