Pamela Mordecai : part five

What are you working on?

I am working on the last book of a trilogy on the lives and deaths of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. (It might end up as a quartet... I don't know yet.) I'm writing it backwards. Two books are already published: de book of Mary: a performance poem, the second book, appeared in 2015 and de Man: a performance poem, the last book,  appeared in 1995. The first book, "de book of Joseph," is the one I am working on. The three books are written entirely in Jamaican Creole, a powerful language for literature. I use it in both my poetry and fiction.

Pamela Mordecai : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is formally concise, organic. If rhyme, rhythm, diction, word play combine to make a poem memorable, those same things, knitted together in a relatively small space, make a poem portable in ways that fiction never can be. The best poetry can bind like a spell, a chant, magic and so you remember it and carry it with you, like a talisman.

Pamela Mordecai : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is very important to my poetry: rhythm inevitably drives it. Though I don't always work in traditional forms, my last two collections employ them throughout. Subversive Sonnets (TSAR, 2012) overhauls the sonnet form – subverts it, if you want, for I end up creating my own maverick version. Although it's in Jamaican Creole,  de book of Mary: a performance poem (Mawenzi House, 2015) is written in triplets of anapaests. It works very well, as does the Greek-style Chorus that introduces, comments on and ends the story.

Pamela Mordecai : part two

How does a poem begin?

A poem begins anywhere, with any prompt: an image; a location; the weather; a picture, photograph, phrase; a feeling, an impulse to bless or curse, rejoice or lament. Writing a poem is a kind of hunt. The prompt, whatever it is, alerts the poet to a poem lurking and after that the poet stalks the poem, sniffing, searching for  paw prints, for droppings, for the territory it has marked out – all the clues to its identity.  The poem arrives when the poet has caught her prey. She doesn't kill it though, and that's the joy. It's a new creature that lives forever.

Pamela Mordecai : part one

Pamela Mordecai's recent books of poetry are Subversive Sonnets (TSAR, 2012) and de book of Mary: a performance poem (Mawenzi House, 2015). de book of Mary is the second in a trilogy in Jamaican Creole on the life and death of Jesus that she is writing backwards, the last book, de Man: a
performance poem, having  appeared in 1993. She is presently working on de book of Joseph. Pamela writes long and sort fiction as well. Her debut novel, Red Jacket was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize in 2016. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

How did you first engage with poetry?

My father read us a poem every night before we went to sleep – ironically enough, from The Best Loved Poems of the American People.  I'm looking at the book as I type. When he was dying, I read him his favourite poems from the very same book. I also fell in love with the patwa poetry of the Hon. Louise Bennett Coverley when I was a child. I learned the poems by heart and would recite them as I roamed the house...Finally I took to Shakespeare early. I played Cobweb in Midsummer Night's Dream in a school [lay when I was quite young. So, Louise, Shakespeare and my pops.