Shelly Harder : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Stripping away superfluity to leave on the page only what needs to be there. This process entails both a scrupulous probing of self, staring down what matters most to me so that I know the words are truthful, and careful abstinence from self-congratulatory performance. A verbal dazzle doesn’t matter. All that matters is what needs to be on the page. All that matters is that something that needs to be said is being said as truthfully as possible. This is hard to do.

Shelly Harder : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been savouring chapbooks from Baseline Press’s recent launch, including Nisa Malli’s Remitting and Síle Englert’s Threadbare. Other books that have grabbed me at the jugular and refused to let go are Kirby’s This Is Where I Get Off, Tom Prime and Gary Barwin’s A Cemetery for Holes, and Emma Healey’s Stereoblind.

Shelly Harder : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

I can feel and think poetry only as a form of music. Texture, dissonance, tension, rhythm, melody – not only in terms of the materiality of the words, taut plop and click on tongue, but also in terms of the progression of concept, narrative, emotion, image. When composing a piece, I’m always listening for the reverberations of sounds and ideas, the microtonalities, unexpected resonances.

Shelly Harder : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When I can no longer recognize it as a thing with which I’ve had much to do, and I’m able to enter it, and the space of it is a place I’d like to be.

Shelly Harder : part one

Shelly Harder hails from rural Ontario. A first chapbook, remnants, came out with Baseline Press in 2018. Find more of their work at hardershelly.wordpress.com.

How does a poem begin?

Fragmentary impulse, feckless endeavour, erratic outpouring. Whichever, when it happens that I’ve stumbled upon a configuration of words – it could be a brief phrase – that makes a demand, and I can’t ignore it, the words require a place that could be for them a home, then a poem is, at the least, attempting to begin.