Victoria Mbabazi : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

In regards to books, I really love Neil Hilborn’s book Our Numbered Days but general poems when I’m really stressed I always go to Doc Luben’s 14 Lines From Love Letters or Suicide Notes or When A Boy Tells You He Loves You by Edwin Bodney. I just love the sounds of their voices and they’re very sad poems but their cadence is very soothing to me. Musicality is everything.

Victoria Mbabazi : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is the most important thing in my poetry. I think general media in general but music would be the starting point. I love writing poems with no punctuation and I also really love writing prose poems and sometimes the only ways to make those two work is just to have a good sense of rhythm. I always tell people the best way to learn how to write a poem is to listen to rap music.

Victoria Mbabazi : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I never know when a poem is finished. I just hope it is and then my trusted writer friends workshop it and tell me it isn’t.

Victoria Mbabazi : part two

How does a poem begin?

A poem usually starts with me when I get fixated on a sentence from an intrusive thought or something someone said to me. I tend to use conversations as prompts which sometimes makes me a bad conversationalist because I can be quite spacey. If I have no one around me to use for content I go to music and I try to find inspiration from the beats or the rhythm of the songs.

Victoria Mbabazi : part one

Victoria Mbabazi is a mental health major pursuing a double minor in creative writing and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her can be found in The Puritan, CV2, Feels Zine, Bywords, Untethered Magazine, and  Release Any Words Stuck Inside You Volume 2. Her poetry placed second in The Hart House Review contest and her work has been shortlisted in Plenitude's Flash Fiction contest and long-listed in Room’s Poetry contest. She’ll be doing an MFA with a concentration in poetry at NYU in the fall and is currently working on a poetry collection.

Photo credit: Cas Harwood.

What are you working on?

Currently, I’ve been editing both my chapbook and full length poetry collection. I’ve also been trying to write one long epic. What I really mean is, I’ve written nothing in weeks and I’m stressing myself out with all of these projects.