For me, it’s often a visceral experience. There is a twinge in my gut, a physical recognition that a line in another poet’s poem, in a piece of art, in a moment in nature, in an experience, in an exchange with a friend, or sometimes even just the usage of a single word, that signals to me that I have something to say, something that carries a sense of urgency and also potentiality, something that could be well expressed if I can meet the challenge and stick with the work until the “truth” or vitality or pleasure or pain of that moment is revealed.
Showing posts with label Maureen Hynes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maureen Hynes. Show all posts
Saturday, 15 August 2020
Maureen Hynes : part five
How does a poem begin?
For me, it’s often a visceral experience. There is a twinge in my gut, a physical recognition that a line in another poet’s poem, in a piece of art, in a moment in nature, in an experience, in an exchange with a friend, or sometimes even just the usage of a single word, that signals to me that I have something to say, something that carries a sense of urgency and also potentiality, something that could be well expressed if I can meet the challenge and stick with the work until the “truth” or vitality or pleasure or pain of that moment is revealed.
For me, it’s often a visceral experience. There is a twinge in my gut, a physical recognition that a line in another poet’s poem, in a piece of art, in a moment in nature, in an experience, in an exchange with a friend, or sometimes even just the usage of a single word, that signals to me that I have something to say, something that carries a sense of urgency and also potentiality, something that could be well expressed if I can meet the challenge and stick with the work until the “truth” or vitality or pleasure or pain of that moment is revealed.
Saturday, 8 August 2020
Maureen Hynes : part four
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry can work in so many modes and genres and topics– purely emotional, narrative or historical, scientific, biographical. But I think, at its core, and no matter its subject matter, poetry is a form that usually relies on cadence and sound and music more than others; that somehow manages to present some piercing truths or perceptions that get overlaid or overlooked in our day-to-day lives; and often –not with every poet, but many-- seeks to intensify by distilling or condensing language. That mysterious process of revealing more by saying less. Poetry can also be a way to play with language that other literary forms tend to make less use of.
Poetry can work in so many modes and genres and topics– purely emotional, narrative or historical, scientific, biographical. But I think, at its core, and no matter its subject matter, poetry is a form that usually relies on cadence and sound and music more than others; that somehow manages to present some piercing truths or perceptions that get overlaid or overlooked in our day-to-day lives; and often –not with every poet, but many-- seeks to intensify by distilling or condensing language. That mysterious process of revealing more by saying less. Poetry can also be a way to play with language that other literary forms tend to make less use of.
Saturday, 1 August 2020
Maureen Hynes : 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?
Yes, I have several long-term writing groups that I rely on for inspiration, attentive editing, motivation, and encouragement. These groups are a crucial part of my writing practice, and have broadened my poetic goals and sharpened my revision skills. And they hold me accountable: we each feel the responsibility to bring a new piece of writing, and if nothing else does, that gets us writing.
Over the past eight years or so, many of my poems have emerged in the reading/writing classes that Hoa Nguyen teaches; we write in response to, or alongside, the poet we’re reading (these have included Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, James Schuyler, Emily Dickenson, C.D. Wright, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker and so many others). I’m grateful to Hoa and the poets we have read because, through them, I think I’ve learned to “aerate” my poems a little more, to reduce their narrative density and to turn to allusiveness more.
But I also have several long-term writing groups that I also rely on for inspiration, editing and encouragement. These groups are a crucial part of my writing practice. In the 90s, I started out with a women writers’ group—we called ourselves The Miss Vickies (after the potato chips!)—where we simply sat and wrote in each other’s company. As time has gone on, I’ve helped form or joined a few other groups, each with a personality and purpose of its own. An important one has been with Barry Dempster, Maureen Scott Harris, Jim Nason and Liz Ukrainetz, each an accomplished writer and editor. Out of this this group grew a project, an interview that Maureen Harris and I did with Barry Dempster about his writing and editing career. (Parts of this interview were published online in The Puritan (http://puritan-magazine.com/muse-office-hours-barry-dempster/; the full interview will be published as a chapbook by Maureen Scott Harris’s Fieldnotes/MSH Press). Other regular groups that meet (now online through Zoom) to edit poems are “The Inconvenients.” and a large and experienced group that John Reibetanz facilitates out of Victoria University at UofT. And finally, for the past 8 or so years, four of us who stared writing together after breakfast in High Park’s Grenadier Restaurant now meets on Zoom (no breakfast, alas).
Each of these groups has provided invaluable support and learning, and as I said, motivation to keep writing.
Yes, I have several long-term writing groups that I rely on for inspiration, attentive editing, motivation, and encouragement. These groups are a crucial part of my writing practice, and have broadened my poetic goals and sharpened my revision skills. And they hold me accountable: we each feel the responsibility to bring a new piece of writing, and if nothing else does, that gets us writing.
Over the past eight years or so, many of my poems have emerged in the reading/writing classes that Hoa Nguyen teaches; we write in response to, or alongside, the poet we’re reading (these have included Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, James Schuyler, Emily Dickenson, C.D. Wright, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker and so many others). I’m grateful to Hoa and the poets we have read because, through them, I think I’ve learned to “aerate” my poems a little more, to reduce their narrative density and to turn to allusiveness more.
But I also have several long-term writing groups that I also rely on for inspiration, editing and encouragement. These groups are a crucial part of my writing practice. In the 90s, I started out with a women writers’ group—we called ourselves The Miss Vickies (after the potato chips!)—where we simply sat and wrote in each other’s company. As time has gone on, I’ve helped form or joined a few other groups, each with a personality and purpose of its own. An important one has been with Barry Dempster, Maureen Scott Harris, Jim Nason and Liz Ukrainetz, each an accomplished writer and editor. Out of this this group grew a project, an interview that Maureen Harris and I did with Barry Dempster about his writing and editing career. (Parts of this interview were published online in The Puritan (http://puritan-magazine.com/muse-office-hours-barry-dempster/; the full interview will be published as a chapbook by Maureen Scott Harris’s Fieldnotes/MSH Press). Other regular groups that meet (now online through Zoom) to edit poems are “The Inconvenients.” and a large and experienced group that John Reibetanz facilitates out of Victoria University at UofT. And finally, for the past 8 or so years, four of us who stared writing together after breakfast in High Park’s Grenadier Restaurant now meets on Zoom (no breakfast, alas).
Each of these groups has provided invaluable support and learning, and as I said, motivation to keep writing.
Saturday, 25 July 2020
Maureen Hynes : part two
How do you know when a poem is finished?
A conundrum! Whenever I hear this question, I think of the poem W.S. Merwin wrote (“Berryman”) about asking John Berryman a similar question: “How can you ever be sure / that what you write is really / any good at all and he said you can’t // you can never be sure / you die without knowing / … if you have to be sure don’t write”.
Sometimes I feel a poem is finished when I write a satisfying final line; but that can be misleading, as I may later realize that line is a kind of summing up that the poem doesn’t need. I often feel I say too much in a poem, and could pull back, so that’s often a revision strategy for me. After workshopping and revision and massaging and re-ordering and fretting about word choice and line breaks and punctuation, the uncertainty doesn’t disappear, but it does diminish. If I’m lucky, there is a moment when I find myself physically nodding at the poem—a kind of greeting, a moment of recognition.
A conundrum! Whenever I hear this question, I think of the poem W.S. Merwin wrote (“Berryman”) about asking John Berryman a similar question: “How can you ever be sure / that what you write is really / any good at all and he said you can’t // you can never be sure / you die without knowing / … if you have to be sure don’t write”.
Sometimes I feel a poem is finished when I write a satisfying final line; but that can be misleading, as I may later realize that line is a kind of summing up that the poem doesn’t need. I often feel I say too much in a poem, and could pull back, so that’s often a revision strategy for me. After workshopping and revision and massaging and re-ordering and fretting about word choice and line breaks and punctuation, the uncertainty doesn’t disappear, but it does diminish. If I’m lucky, there is a moment when I find myself physically nodding at the poem—a kind of greeting, a moment of recognition.
Saturday, 18 July 2020
Maureen Hynes : part one
Author photo: Vivek Shraya
How did you first engage with poetry?
In my particular Catholic high school in the 1960’s, though there were contemporary Canadian poets in the texts we studied, they were often skipped over, not analyzed or even discussed, in favour of more classical poets—Keats, Spenser, Yeats, Spenser, Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and of course, Hopkins. I’ve kept these high school texts all these years, and it surprises me to find I’ve written out, on a separate piece of paper inserted into the book, John Mansfield’s poem, “On Growing Old” (“Be with me, beauty, for I am growing old,” it begins). I suppose it was the romantic idealization of beauty that appealed to me as a 16-year-old, rather than what I wanted to carry with me as I faced the prospect of growing old.
Somehow my friends and I discovered Raymond Souster’s Ten Elephants on Yonge Street, and that set me on a search for poets who were in writing in Canada at that very moment. I remember having a big twinge of jealousy, many years later, when Helen Humphreys told me that Margaret Atwood had come to her high school to read poetry; and that she (Helen) had always had the sense that poetry was a contemporary experience.
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