Daniel Scott Tysdal : part five

How does a poem begin?

Pretty much like so.

Daniel Scott Tysdal : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

For this answer, I’d like to share what I have been teaching lately and what I will be teaching. There is nothing quite as sustaining as seeing how emerging writers learn from and are inspired by contemporary poetry. This term I taught Kirby’s This Is Where I Get Off and What Do You Want to Be Called?, El Jones’s Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry, edited by Jim Johnstone. Next semester, I will be teaching Jones again along with Randy Lundy’s Field Notes for the Self, Natasha Ramoutar’s Bittersweet, Rasiqra Revula’s Cephalopography 2.0, and Dani Spinosa’s OO: Typewriter Poems. Happily, all the poets who’s work I teach also visit our classes, so there are endless rewards and highlights each term.

Daniel Scott Tysdal : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I used to believe in some combo of “great poetry above all else” and “writing/reading poetry makes people better people.” Oops. I don’t know. I still really do believe deeply in the process. I really do believe there is something inherently valuable about the practices of attention, expression, imagination, and openness nurtured by reading and writing poetry. I guess it’s when we move from process to product, from practice to profession, that things go awry.

Daniel Scott Tysdal : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When I’m finished—done, toast, kaput. When I can’t bring myself to hardly even look at the thing, though usually, obsessively, I do read the poem over, and tweak, again.

Daniel Scott Tysdal : part one

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the ReLit Award-winning author of three books of poetry, the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press), and the TEDx talk, “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life).” His short films have screened at festivals in Canada, the US, Mexico, and Australia. Most recently, his short film Wave Form won Best Experimental Short at the Arizona Underground Film Festival and Frog Hollow Press published his chapbook, Mad Fold-In Poems. He teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Photo Credit: Katie Fewster-Yan

What are you working on?

I recently published a chapbook with Frog Hollow Press, Mad Fold-In Poems, and now I’m working on finishing a full-length collection of fold-in poems. I’m also working on a short sort of documentary/film poem about the chickadees I befriended in early autumn. Sadly, I no longer live where those chickadees live, and I miss them.