John Elizabeth Stintzi : part five

Why is poetry important?

I think a big part of poetry’s importance is that it is pretty unimportant. There aren’t many forms that take up space and time, jab out in surprising directions, and then disappear like the poem. A certain poem can certainly be sharply important to a certain reader, but I think it’s unpredictable and often a poem here and there rather than most poems, so I’d hesitate to say the form as a whole can be dubbed capital-I Important because of that. I do think, though, that a poem can often contain a certain uncertainty and inconclusion in a way that can feel more useful than an essay that purports to know something, which is good. (Though I of course distrust the poets who purport to know things, and anything I say that poetry doesn’t do someone is trying to do with poetry and proving me wrong—such is the form!) In that particular context—giving space for uncertainty—I suppose I could agree that poetry is important.

John Elizabeth Stintzi : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Poetry is hard for me because I feel like I’ve got to be reading it to have my brain wired to write it, otherwise it can be quite a long time between writing poems. It’s hard to find time with life and my fiction “career,” particularly because fiction is an easier “day job” in the sense that I can more easily return to it day after day. I also find myself limited—and this is a me problem—by the idea that I need to have some sort of project in mind in order to bother to write poems. Finally, I think I’ve been struggling a lot with being “present,” which makes it harder for me to see poems emerging in my life, which when you are a lyric poet like I currently am, is pretty much the only way you’ll find them. But more than anything I think I just so easily fall out of the habit of reading poetry, which leads to my being unable to find them squirrelling through the world. 

John Elizabeth Stintzi : part three

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

It depends on the medium. I tend to send my (short) fiction to my writer friends, or my writing group here in Kansas City. I don’t really share as much when it comes to poetry or my novels. With novels it is partly that I don’t want to suck up so much of someone’s time, and I also don’t generally want so many different points of view on it either. With poetry, I think it may come down to the fact I’m not sure I care what other people think about them, because I am much more comfortable just writing and revising it to myself. I have some friends I share my poetry with, but part of the reason those who get the poems get them is that I trust they aren’t going to try and give me a bunch of feedback on it. They will just be like “this rules,” and that’s really almost all I need.

John Elizabeth Stintzi : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

It has shifted a few times, I think. Early on, as noted previously, it was a lot more self-hating and melodramatic, and in college (alongside continuing to be pretty hopeless romantic, but a bit more chill about it) my poetry shifted into pretty much writing—for lack of a better word—fictional poems. These included poems where the speaker simply wasn’t me (but may not have been hugely clear it wasn’t) to poems which were about absurd and more narratively fictional situations. One example of the latter I remember was a poem called “Lovesong for My Giantess,” which was about a very small person falling in love with a literal giantess in their microbiology lab in college. I suppose in that middle period I was most in touch with trying to be funny as well, or at the very least starting with a funny premise and trying to be completely serious, as I have found even what I consider my most serious work can make people laugh. As I was heading toward grad school, things began to get a little more solely lyrical/personal again, which I think because I started writing a lot more fiction, which tended to suck up a lot of ideas like that of the Giantess. These days, I tend to use poetry more as a lyrical space, in part because I have so many other venues for fictional work where I feel like those ideas can do better. Maybe one day I will return to that middle-space, though, reviving work like “Lovesong for My Giantess” or “The King of Antarctica’s Open Mic.”

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.”