Jessi MacEachern : part five

How does a poem begin?

As Frank O’Hara writes of process in “Why I Am Not a Painter”: “a / whole page of words […]. Then another page.” In the poem, O’Hara describes the process of writing as one of days going by. My process is very similar. An idea may occur to me (a tiny architect in the palm of my hand) or I may go searching for one (in books, on a walk, by looking quizzically at a stray popcorn kernel on a velvet couch). It begins with words, then pages, written in a notebook. “Days go by.” Sometimes, years go by. Eventually those words, then pages, are typed up and form comes into it. And then it’s begun. Then it’s a poem, or it will be.

Jessi MacEachern : part four

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I meet with a group of writers — once in parks and living rooms, now online. It’s always an immense pleasure to receive a query by e-mail or text: “writing group this week?”. They’re an assortment of Montreal poets and fiction writers, fantastic individuals I am honoured to call friends, whose work I absolutely adore. Fortunately, they are also generous readers and sharp editors. Many of them appear in the acknowledgements of my book, for the poetry would not have taken shape without their insistence that there was, in fact, something there. 

In my advice to other writers, I am constant in this: you must have someone with whom you can exchange work. I have been fortunate to have so many kind individuals, in and out of university workshops, with whom this exchange has been mutual and thrilling. It is crucial that another pair of eyes helps you separate the good from the bad, the almost from the absolute, the pristine from the garbled. 

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. 

Jessi MacEachern : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

The only poem I’m certain is finished is the long one encompassed in my book A Number of Stunning Attacks. It is the result of an assortment of lyric poems I began writing nearly fifteen years ago. These were drastically expanded in order to become my Master’s thesis. Though the process of writing that creative thesis was hugely enriching, I was dissatisfied with the final product and spent nearly a decade un-weaving and re-weaving the poems therein. (I hope my next book won’t be fifteen years in the making.)

I recently had the experience of releasing another suite of poems as an online chapbook: Ravishing the Sex into the Hold (Model Press). I had thought they were finished until the publisher, Ryan Fitzpatrick, showed me the horizontal layout he was considering. Thrilled by the landscape available to my already long lines, I immediately reshaped the poems to luxuriate in the length of the page. So, I guess, given the opportunity, I’ll remake the poem to fit the occasion. Ultimately, I do not know when a poem is finished, but I do know I’m willing to finish it differently at different points in time.

Jessi MacEachern : part one

Jessi MacEachern lives in Montréal, QC. Her writing on the contemporary feminist poetics of Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, and Rachel Zolf has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature Canadienne and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, MuseMedusa, Canthius, PRISM, and CV2. Her first full-length poetry collection, A Number of Stunning Attacks, is forthcoming with Invisible in March 2021. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University.

What are you working on?

I don’t have a specific project in mind, I never do, the “project” is almost always discovered after the thing is completed, but I am attempting to write a poem a day in 2021. I say this at the beginning of the year, with full awareness that it is a terrible thing to make a public promise you are unlikely to keep. With these first poems, there is the undercurrent of our present tumultuous moment in time, it’s unavoidable, but I’m trying to come at it slant: an investigation into slow time or a foray into the interior lives of household objects.