Razielle Aigen : part five

What are you working on?

Shifting into the land of concrete/visual poetry, I’m currently at work on a eco-poetic text-based installation, programmed to be showcased as part of a collaborative interdisciplinary event July 2020.

Razielle Aigen : part four

How does a poem begin?/How do you know when a poem is finished?

Disclaimer: This question will be answered with an unabashed overuse of the ellipses . . . my second favourite form of punctuation; the first being the semicolon.

A poem begins in the ether … and in some sense, you could say it never properly “begins” nor “ends”… rather, it exists as a continuum some-where in the metaphysical 4th dimension…That said, it is also very physical …very much of this world … beginning with a trace, the mo-ment you put pen to paper — literally: ink on the page! This is the po-em’s access point of entry into this reality… As for when or how a poem definitively ends, harder to say…

Razielle Aigen : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

John Cage, Agnes Martin, John Ashbery, Fred Wah, Virginia Woolf, Allan Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, Gertrude Stein, Clark Coolidge, to name a few… Not sure if all of these writers would technically be categorized as “poets” per se, but the poetics of their writings have significantly left an imprint on my craft.

Razielle Aigen : part two

How does your work first enter the world?

Hard to say. I really don’t know where poems come a from…the oracle speaks and I listen…

Razielle Aigen : part one

Razielle Aigen is a Montreal-born writer and artist. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, Light Waves The Leaves (above/ground press 2020). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Entropy, Deluge, Contemporary Verse 2, Bad Dog Review, Dovecote Magazine, Half a Grapefruit, Sewer Lid, Fresh Voices, Five:2:One, California Quarterly, and elsewhere. Razielle holds a B.A. in History and Contemporary Studies from Dalhousie/King’s University, and is an alumna of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

More of Razielle’s work can be found at razielleaigen.com and through Twitter @ohthepoetry.

How did you first engage with poetry?

Despite my challenge with setting things in chrono-logical order, I’d say my first poetic engagements started early …probably around age nine, when I first wrapped my head around the phrase, “Today’s tomorrow’s yesterday.” This totally blew my nine year old mind, likely creating channels for an appreciation of the circularity of language, carving out neural pathways for my mind to later appreciate poets such as Gertrude Stein and others whose language is enjoyably disorienting. This moment, or at least this crystallized memory of a moment, shaped the way I relate to the bendy nature of time. In that intuitive, nine year old quantum understanding, I came to realize that we are not necessarily linear beings in that “future-effects-the-past kind of way” — which is, I think, an essential component of the poetic mind’s ability to create disjointed imagistic and temporal mashups, that, despite all rationality, somehow, cohere at some level of intelligibility.

Then, as a teen, I’d say my sense of the poetic was awakened by Bjork. As her deafest fan, it was her lyrical surrealism that shaped the way I later encountered and embraced Breton and the Surrealists….I still think that surrealism is probably my signpost for the magic that signals those other worldly places we are transported to and by the poetry.