Hana Shafi : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

It's easy to get carried away in an abstract thought in poetry. Sometimes you get so deep into writing a poem, you don't even realize it's going completely off the rails. Something this is great; you can create something that's so out there, but that's such a gorgeous piece of writing. Sometimes, once you've left the high of writing it and you read it again, you realize you just wrote a page of gibberish.

Chuqiao Yang : part one

Chuqiao Yang received her Juris Doctor from the University of Windsor. Her writing has appeared in The Unpublished City, 30 under 30: an anthology of Canadian millennial poets, The Puritan, Ricepaper, Arc, Prism, Filling Station, Grain, CV2, Room, and on CBC. In 2011, she was the recipient of two Western Magazine Awards for a non-fiction piece, Beijing Notes. In 2015, she was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her chapbook, Reunions in the Year of the Sheep, published by Baseline Press, won the 2018 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Follow her on Twitter @chuqiaoyang.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I am not sure, but I think I know when a poem is unfinished and I know when I am done with the poem.

I know a poem is unfinished when it reads poorly, or if I am outright embarrassed by it.

I know when I am done with a poem when I able to separate my experience and emotions from the poem. It’s at that point that I know I am done with the poem, and that it may be on its way to becoming something else to someone else. In that respect, I’ve freed myself from the obsession, or experience that got me stuck in the mindset behind the poem. And that means I’ve recovered, processed, or healed, mostly, from whatever inspired me to write in the first place. So maybe the poem isn’t done but by that point, I am done with it, until, of course, the cycle repeats itself and I revisit it a decade later.

Metta Sáma : part five

How does your work first enter the world?

In my head. As visual fragments that are unconsciously stored away. Sometimes lines enter but I think of them as poem lines which inevitably means they will be willfully destroyed. In other words, anytime I imagine that a certain phrase or sentence is “poetic”, I immediately distrust and thus destroy it. For me, the poem has to be purely organic, unconscious, received. (I know this will piss some people off, particularly those who love to give advice and whose advice all ends with “Don’t wait for the Muse! There is no Muse!” and that’s fine for them, but it is not my way of construction.) One of my poet-teachers, Herb Scott, once said that he could see me “percolating”. We were sitting in a coffeehouse and I was surrounded, literally, by dozens of poetry manuscripts that I was reading for a book contest. Herb stopped by to chat with me about my own work, and as I sat there, smelling the coffees, feeling the art above my head penetrate my scalp, watching Herb’s scratchy voice enter my eyes, thinking about Aretha Franklin and how I had lived for so many years without a deep deep deep reverence for her voice, until then, tasting the metallic blue ink slipping from my pen, Herb said, “I can see you percolating” and I erupted into laughter. My professor had just called me a pot of coffee and I thought of that image for weeks. And yes, he was right about me, as Aquarians tend to be, I was percolating, I do percolate before I entrust one line to a page.

Brad Casey : part four

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

I always go back to Federico Garcia Lorca. I have his collected works. I often open to wherever, whatever page and start reading. His work clears my mind. I read about a meditation technique from Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist monk who studied under Chögyam Trungpa and is deeply involved with a monastery in Cape Breton called Gampo Abbey. She says that when your mind is wandering you can clear it by thinking the word “thoughts.” Say it in your mind. Thoughts. It can clear your mind, help you breathe slower. That’s what reading Garcia Lorca is like for me. It’s like a big, empty, quiet field.

Billy Mavreas : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I guess early on it was e.e. cummings. All and any of the concrete stuff I saw early on was a revelation of course. I enjoyed a correspondence with j. w. curry in the early 1990s that triggered a lot of thought. Serge Segay’s Zaum stuff blew my mind. John M. Bennett, Ficus Strangulensis, J. Lehmus and the other folks I met and collaborated through the mail-art network. They all showed me that really anything goes. And it could be fun and completely un-precious.

The two or three pieces I saw by Space Daisy also made me perk up as did a short lived correspondence I had with a now missing poet named Cameron Conklin who wrote under the name Dead Sarah. They sent original odd hand scrawled word plays to my university’s lit journal only to be completely ignored - what a bunch of boring twits. I was enamoured and wrote back, still have those precious papers.

I can’t not mention the anonymous writers and designers, the weather, the children, the accidents. Poetry is not solely the province of directed human intention. So much of it floats in these spaces where it’s never even seen let alone picked out and considered poetry by some wise guy like me.

Mark Antony Owen : part one

Mark Antony Owen is a syllabic poet writing in nine self-developed forms (occasionally, with variations). Though he has a handful of publishing credits – five poems in three journals, two of these online – he’s chosen to self-publish his digital-only poetry project Subruria rather than look to be published by either a new or an established press. Mark has been writing poetry for many years, but only ‘returned’ to it in the autumn of 2010. You can follow him on Twitter at @MarkAntonyOwen and @Subruria, and read his work at markantonyowen.com and subruria.com. Longer term, Mark aims to launch Advocate Poetry – a new kind of digital-first poetry press.

What are you working on?

Good health permitting, I’ll be working on the same project for approximately the next 30 years: my ‘magnum opus’ (too grand a term by far), Subruria. Troubled by the conceit of writing lots of different collections, all with separate titles but essentially cycling around the same themes, I wanted a broad concept into which all my work could fit. As I’ve lived most of my life in what I call ‘subrural’ places – areas where town and countryside meet – it made sense to me to write about what I knew. Further galvanising my resolve to do this, and to do it as a long-term, self-published project, was a Twitter chat with Adrian Slatcher and J T Welsch about Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This flicked on a green light in my head. History seemed to be saying it was okay for me to do my ‘collection’ my way. The first release of Subruria would later appear online from April 2018.

Kevin Spenst : coda

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Of late, I’ve been immersed in the work of BC poets. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work of Roy Miki in a huge collection of his work entitled Flow, which brings together his six books of poetry. There’s an intensity of thought that goes into the placement of each word in lines that flip through multiple meanings. Right now, the book is open to this line: “the rain renews all hollow/ pain that can’t be renewed/ by a drive down the street.” Lovely. Also, I’m slowly reading the poetry of Joy Kogawa “A Garden of Anchors” and I’m rereading Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Other books I’ve loved of late: Curtis LeBlanc’s Little Wild, Malory Tater’s This Will Be Good, Katherin Edwards’ A Thin Band, Russell Thornton’s The Broken Face, Onjana Yawnghwe’s The Small Way and Eve Joseph’s Quarrels. Yes, I’ve been on a reading bender this year.