Pearl Pirie : part five

What poetry books have you been reading lately?

Short Answer: The joke of the same $15 making its way around the small circle and trade economy of small press fairs across Canada seems to fit here. I read what falls across my path.

Long Answer: I generally have a few dozen books on the go— science, essays, architecture books, novels (on a Catherine Asaro kick). Currently, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca Letters to a Stoic, and a few poetry collections, Shake Loose my Skin by Sonia Sanchez, Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar, 89 Objects of Happiness Arrayed in Ascending Order by Mike Finley (Kraken Press, St. Paul, 2017), The Deep End of the Sky by Chad Lee Robinson (Turtle Press, 2015), Different Conversations: Short Poems and Literary Fragments by Alexis Rotella (on Kindle), Nobody Move by Susan Stenson, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry ed by Valerie Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron (Frontenac, 2013). Upcoming: This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Mêmewars by Adeena Karasick, and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Also on tap, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit by Lynn Gehl, No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe, The Inner Life of Animals: Grief, Love and Compassion by Peter Wohlleben, Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery (Simon & Schuster, 2015). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, and What is Architecture and 100 other questions by Rasmus Waern and Gert Wingårdh, trans John Krause. Sample of the last “Uniformity can be incomparably handsome, but it has a kind of built-in insensitivity.”

Shannon Bramer : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

This is a favourite question of mine because it comes with a funny story. When I was in grade six we did a poetry unit in school that introduced me to the work of Canadian poet, Irving Layton. It was a poem called Song for Naomi, and this poem made me feel wild inside. We learned about literary devices using that poem and I vividly recall how I felt, trying to understand how it all worked, discovering how exciting language could be. But I was also really moved by the images in that poem too. I identified with the growing child; I was amazed by the combination of love and sorrow inside it. I wanted the poem to be mine so badly that I copied it down into a notebook and changed the title to Song for Shannon. I told my mother I was the author. It was after telling this lie that I started to try and write my own poems.

Shannon Quinn : part three

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

Poetry can evoke so many surprises. It can capture voice, sound and image in a unique way. Something happens in a poem, something unexpected and it can only have happened that one way the author chose…it’s not that other forms don’t do this but more that poetry has to have this pulsing throughout it. It asks us to be economical with our words but also to open up new places…it’s a magical contradiction sometimes.

Sanita Fejzić : part one

Sanita Fejzić is an Ottawa-based author, poet, playwright and scholar. Her novella, Psychomachia, Latin for battle of the soul, was published by Quattro Books. The Blissful State of Surrender, her first play, was workshopped by the National Arts Centre in March 2018. Fejzić has published numerous short stories and poems in literary journals and magazines across Canada. In the Nothing Left of Me, her first translation from French to English from Quebecois poet Sylvie Nicholas’s collection of poems, Le plus rien de moi, was launched on March 10, 2018.

What are you working on?

A hybrid text, The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies, which includes new words framed as encyclopedia entries on suffering and ecstasies alongside narrative prose poems, photographs, old letters and other media. The narrative poems tell the story of a young poet who has found a manuscript titled The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Suffering and Sublime Ecstasies from her diseased great-grandmother, a Bosnian woman who fled a violent husband during WWII and settled in Prague, where she died typing the unfinished text. As the young poet tries to understand who her great-grandmother was, she travels to Sarajevo and Prague to finish the encyclopedia and find the missing pieces of her ancestor’s mysterious life.

I’m also working on my first book of non-fiction titled The Will Of Poetry and The Will To Poetry for McGill & Queen’s University Press. This book of philosophic-poetic thoughts on the creative drive of language defines my concept of the will of poetry as the particular lexicon a writer is born into and is temporally related to writing the present and past, whereas the will to poetry is a future-oriented linguistic drive concerned with wording new wor(l)ds. This text emerges from the question: how can we create new wor(l)ds within a language, such as English, that is steeped in the syntax of heteropatriarchy, neo-colonialism and phallagocentrism?

Amanda Earl : coda

I become disheartened when I read negative comments from editors or renowned poets about what they feel poetry is or should be. I don’t think personal aesthetics have any place in an editor or an influencer’s role. One long-term editor of a literary journal recently said they didn’t like poems that they felt were cold and clever. This, to me, reflects a lack of a sense of adventure when it comes to the type of writing that the journal would be open to publishing and doesn’t really serve readers very well. A well-respected writer and thinker dismissed word play as not important. What these kinds of flippant comments do, in my mind, is to place limits on experimentation and exploration.

In my opinion, an editor should be open to all types of poetry, including forms they have themselves never made as a poet or dreamt of. They should be willing to expose readers of poetry to all kinds of variety and risk. If not on a printed page, then where?

Word play can be a way of mining the subconscious to reveal what has long been buried in the psyche. Also, not every poem has to make an important statement about the state of the world. A humble, playful poem by one person might inspire another person to create something and so on. I treat the derision and narrow-minded attitudes I hear about poetry as a challenge. Defiance of the status quo is one of the reasons that I need poetry, both as a reader/viewer/listener and as an artist.

Penn Kemp : part four

How does your work first enter the world?

Often through social media and my facebook groups like Gathering Voices/Pendas Productions.  I’m delighted to have poems published by online magazines www.tuckmagazine.com, because they put up new and pertinent work so quickly.

Kyle Flemmer : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

When I first started writing poetry I thought it must be a sort of rhyming sing-song about love or flowers or jabberwocks. A whimsical limerick was my idea of excellent poetry; metrical without being stuffy or sappy. Not that that isn’t poetry, but it took a long time for me to realize how poetry proper encompasses a vast territory of literary possibility, a territory that expands along with us as we discover new ways of thinking and being. I’m now interested in poetry that grapples with our understanding of the universe, experiments with form and material, or challenges socially accepted norms about what literature can and should be.