Aaron Tucker : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

As I write at the beginning of March, spring launches are fast approaching and so I’m thrilled to be reading a number of works: Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces (http://invisiblepublishing.com/product/surfaces/), Shannon Webb Campell’s Who Took My Sister? (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/who-took-my-sister-by-shannon-webb-campbell/),  Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (https://chbooks.com/Books/A/Anatomic), David Brock’s Ten-Headed Alien (https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/collections/all/products/ten-headed-alien), Susan Zelazo’s Lances All Alike (https://chbooks.com/Books/L/Lances-All-Alike), Dani Couture’s Listen Before Transmit (https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/collections/all/products/listen-before-transmit),  Cameron Anstee’s Book of Annotations (http://invisiblepublishing.com/product/book-of-annotations/) and Shannon McGuire’s Zip’s File (https://bookthug.ca/shop/books/zips-file-a-romance-of-silence-by-shannon-maguire/).

In terms of recently read, I loved Billy Ray-Belcourt’s This Wound is a World (https://www.frontenachouse.com/dd-product/this-wound-is-a-world/) and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (https://www.oceanvuong.com/books). They are two young poets that absolutely blow me away with their work. Beyond this, one of my favourite things is going to Knife Fork Books in Kensignton Market, Toronto, and asking Kirby to pull out a book or two for me – the store is amazing and he always has the best taste!

Manahil Bandukwala : part one

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and artist currently living in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in In/Words, Bywords, re:asian and ottawater, among other places, and she has work forthcoming in Room Magazine, The Puritan and Ricepaper. She is currently an editor for In/Words magazine & Press. Visit her website at manahils.com.

What are you working on?

My goal for 2018 is to put out a chapbook, or at least have a chapbook manuscript in the works. Earlier in 2017, I toyed with the idea of a themed chapbook and writing poems around that theme. I didn’t accomplish that, beyond producing a few regurgitated poems. I realize now that attempting to place those limits curbed my creative thought. Now I have enough good poems to go in a manuscript, and although I didn’t write any of those with the hopes of them fitting into a ‘theme,’ I find the poems do have a sense of connectivity (although not one I had previously planned).

rob mclennan : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’m not entirely sure. I remember seeing Dennis Lee on Mr. Dressup somewhere in the 1970s. I’ve always found the sounds and mechanics of words rather curious, and would play with sounds before I entered school. Discovering the word “me” in “home,” for example. I know I was a big reader, and somehow knew more French before I began kindergarten than I’ve ever managed since.

By the time I entered my pre-teens, I was attempting just about everything, from painting with acrylic and watercolours, to comic books (I sent a script attempt to Marvel at one point), to my years of piano lessons, and sketching out lines in notebooks. I had even entered the Kiwanis singing competitions, or whatever it is they were called, during middle school.

By the time I hit grade ten, I’d a social group that was engaged with writing, and I kinda fell into that, writing short stories and poems at a furious pace (some of that group included Clare Latremouille, Franco-Ontarian playwright Louis Patrick Leroux – we knew him only as Patrick back then – and musician Chris Page). During those high school years, my eventual partner and mother of my first child was also instrumental in supporting those early attempts at writing (as were others, but she was by far my most consistent supporter, even if she claimed she hated everything I was writing), offering me multiple books, and introducing me to works by Alice Munro, Margaret Lawrence, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findlay, Robertson Davies, John Newlove, George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Elizabeth Smart, Margaret Atwood, Richard Brautigan and others. “If you’re going to write, you have to read,” she said.

By my final year of high school, I’d managed to place first in the Carleton University High School Writing Competition for a short story (I discovered years later that Ottawa writer Wes Smiderle, who I became friends with somewhere during our thirties, placed first in playwriting the same year).

Sara Renee Marshall : part five

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

I’m not sure I go to poetry for renewal, unless renewal is activation. Literature doesn’t tend to soothe me; it stirs me. Agitates me, even. I guess those are renewals from boredom or complacency. Not all of these things could strictly be called poetry, but they are to me: I return over and over to Inger Christensen’s alphabet, the first line of which is scrawled permanently on my leg, Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities, Fred Moten’s B Jenkins, all of Lisa Robertson’s books but especially Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture and R’s Boat, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, L.V. Thomas and Geeshie Wiley’s version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean”, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and Barbara Guest’s poems “Safe Flights” and “A Reason”, both of which are perfect.

Pearl Pirie : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Short Answer: The editing is harder than the writing but it isn’t the main difficulty. It is hearing the pen or inner voice out respectfully and curiously.

Long Answer: One difficulty is finding new parts of world and self to observe more keenly, more compassionately and understand more deeply and then convey in a way that can be felt rather than giving a lecture of summary notes, but to be with the reader as an equal. Part of putting process over elevating self as an authority is trusting that readers will engage with what you express, to listen loosely when you speak loosely, to listen carefully when you speak with care.

It is difficult to express oneself in words but it is harder to live optimally for yourself and for community and for wider social duties. That is the hardest part and the part that matters. As Leonard Cohen put it, “I’m grateful to get a poem. I don’t question the sources too carefully. For me poetry is the evidence of a life and not the life itself. It is the ashes of something burning well. And sometimes you confuse yourself and try to make ashes instead of fire.” (15:00, Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen)

Shannon Bramer : part one

Shannon Bramer (photo credit: Linda Marie Stella) is a poet and playwright. Precious Energy (BookThug, September 2017) is her fourth book of poetry. Her plays (Monarita, The Collectors and The Hungriest Woman in the World) have appeared in juried festivals across the country, among them: New Ideas (Toronto) The Women’s Work Festival (St.John’s) and Sarasvati FemFest (Winnipeg).  A full production of The Hungriest Woman in the World premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in December 2017, with PENCIL KIT PRODUCTIONS. Shannon also conducts poetry workshops in schools and is the editor of Think City: The Poems of Gracefield Public School. An illustrated collection of poems for young children, entitled Climbing Shadows, is forthcoming from Groundwood Books in 2019.

What are you working on?

I am rewriting an important section of a play (The Hungriest Woman in the World) that was recently produced at Theatre Passe Muraille with Pencil Kit Productions. Even though the show has been work-shopped and produced I still don’t feel finished with it. It involves the central metaphor of the play, a depressed octopus. It is like having a giant puzzle in front of me and there’s one large piece that just isn’t sitting inside it properly. I am also working on new poems and another play.

Kim Goldberg : part five

How does a poem begin?

With an instigating line, or an image, maybe a sound, a dream even. Or witnessing something so bizarre it begs for the slantwise approach of poetry to make sense of it. This morning I read an article (on the heels of another horrific school shooting) about a religious congregation in Pennsylvania coming to church in the hundreds for a mass wedding of all congregants. And they were toting their AR-15 rifles because they believe the AR-15 symbolizes the "rod of iron" in the biblical Book of Revelation. How can this not be the basis of a poem?

I often discover after I have written a poem that the reason I wrote it, the motivating force, was to try to understand or make some sense of the incomprehensible. Fortunately, I don’t see that when I start writing, or it would probably wreck the poem.