Kelley Jo Burke : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

I think all speech is music, and I am constantly aware of the musicality of whatever I am writing. I find I involuntarily score my life—waking up with songs that speak directly to what I need to be writing blaring in my inner ear—relentless until I get to the keyboard and address them. They are often obvious to the point of absurdity—during a current writing crisis, I had “Chasing Cars” (if you haven’t heard it, you should) on such relentless replay that I had to stop everything that I was doing, and write a prose poem that lived entirely in the emotion and respite of the song. I think I am music’s bitch.

Kelley Jo Burke : 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 work in theatre, which is a collaborative form. I also work in documentary, which again means steady interaction with others. So in my writing I am solitary to the point of misanthropy.

Most poetry I write starts as a part of my pre-writing for a larger project—a play or a documentary. It is an incredibly useful way to walk into the metaphorical language that the project will be rooted in—it also tells me a lot about setting, aural landscape and the dialect of characters.

I start with the phrase, I write ‘til I lose steam. Then I go back and start challenging what I’ve got down. When it seems to have living if by no means complete form, I share it with my one trusted reader. Who has made an art out of giving feedback without triggering my (endless) neuroses.

Kelley Jo Burke : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Because I have worked with some of the best poets in Canada, as a literary producer for the CBC, I have come to see the difference between the kind of poetry I write which is written to be heard and the kind of poetry that explores and experiments with the way words exist on the page, which are written to be read. I’m thinking about the kind of in-depth experimentation with syntax and semantics that you find in the work of real stunner poets like Sylvia Legris. That is quite simply outside of my skill set. I write speech. I write to be experienced sonically, and because in my mind my work exists solely in the air, I write to communicate, and whatever wit or complexity that I play with has to be accessible in the moment of hearing, and not require study on the page. I have no expectation of being re-read. What I make has to work in the time is has between utterance and reception.

Kelley Jo Burke : part two

How does a poem begin?

I am almost entirely sound dominant (which is unusual in the general population but very common with radio producers). Poems always begin for me with a phrase, said aloud. Not an image. Not an idea. A phrase that I say out loud, that seems true. When I am trying to work something out, because I am sound dominant and because I am an extroverted thinker—I really do not know what I think until I say it. I will hear myself say something, and there will be a sort of psychic “ping” like tapping good crystal if the phrase is true, and opens up a train of thought. And then I start to chase it. One of my favorite examples of this is a poem that starts “fat girls love to swim.”

I said that out loud—and ping—I had the poem quite quickly after that.

Kelley Jo Burke : part one

Kelley Jo Burke is an award-winning playwright, creative nonfiction writer, poet and documentarian, a professor of theatre and creative-writing, and was for many years host of CBC Radio’s SoundXchange. She was the 2017 winner (with composer Jeffery Straker) of Playwrights Guild of Canada’s l Best New Musical in Development Award for Us, which premiered at the Globe Theatre Feb 28 of this year, as well as the Sask. Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Leadership in the Arts, the 2008 Saskatoon and Area Theatre Award for Playwriting, and three City of Regina Writing Awards.

How did you first engage with poetry?

Shakespeare. My mother was an English teacher, who had attended a posh East Coast American college, and the house was full of what was English canon at the time. First and foremost was Shakespeare. Her gigantic volume of the collected works was held in significantly higher regard in our house than the Bible. I could recite passages from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet when I was six. I fell in love with iambic pentameter. It is dead easy to memorize verse that is in iambic pentameter, because it is the natural rhythm of speech. It came to me so naturally that the first real writing I did for theatre was actually poetry; Shakespearean-style verse, in iambic pentameter, that I wrote for a production by my young company. Everyone thought it was a little freaky that I could write verse, in Shakespearean dialect, and in that rhythm. I thought it was weird they couldn’t.