Grady Chambers : part four

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

Well, one thing is that many poems are brief enough to be memorized with a bit of work, and then can be carried with you in their entirety, inside your mind, to be called up and shared or recited or re-experienced whenever you choose.

Alexa Doran : part two

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

Poetry offers a closer understanding of the world around us, one that isn’t obscured by plot. Plot makes life easier to conceive of but it’s a lie. The whole idea of beginning, middle, and end, which constructs so many other art forms, is pushed aside by poetry so that we can travel in the quick of it, where life is at its rawest.

Jay Besemer : part five

How does a poem begin?

Like an itch or sneeze. Or a craving for a certain food. Sometimes a small phrase, two or three words, will surface in my consciousness & I will begin there, finding the poem that wants to emerge from those words. Other times, with work that begins with a source text I've chosen to select words from, it starts with the discovery of a phrase or word on a page that seems to have special life & could lead somewhere. Or it might begin very literally with an image, a piece of video I've recorded that I center a video poem around or otherwise incorporate into the video poem.

Alex Manley : part three

Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I spent six years at Concordia University’s now-infamous creative writing program from 2007 to 2013, over the course of which I came to have a deep appreciation for the experience of workshopping poetry, of being in close contact with other poetic minds. The sensation of pushing and being pushed in new poetic directions is something that I’m not sure you can achieve by other means. I think you genuinely have to meet with other writers, consider their work, have them consider yours, and let the process take you where it may, maybe? That’s not to say that that experience is only available in creative writing programs, though. I’ve been lucky over the past two years to be a part of a small group of Montreal-based poets who meet every so often to consider each other’s writing, and the feedback from those writers has made me a stronger writer, a better poet and, I like to imagine, a more interesting person. (I also count them as my friends, or like, whatever.)

Daniela Naomi Molnar : coda

What are you working on?

In terms of writing, several in-progress manuscripts:

The Lost is an excavation. It’s the book I didn’t want to write but had to. Via poetry, narrative, and image, it tells the story of my grandmother Rosalie’s life, the intense traumas she experienced, and the way that trauma passes mysteriously and inexorably from generation to generation. Fundamentally, it’s about the way that the invisible/unknowable world that lies beyond the visible/ the known is ultimately more powerful than any known or visible thing.
Or: “The visible is thick but the invisible is thicker.” Brenda Hillman

Pry is an unapologetically furious collection of poems and images that confronts the heteropatriarchy, trying to expunge its hold on and within my own (femme, queer) body.

A third yet-untitled water-obsessed manuscript, including:
“  }  ”     : a long poem about the ocean and its birds and its trash and its power;
“WEB” : a series of visual poems which are about the varied, maddening, urgent, beautiful experience of being bodied on a dying planet;
“we woke up early so we would know how to survive” : a long poem about what I call the Misanthropocene and is better known as the Anthropocene;
“River notes” : a lyric essay which wades deep into my riparian obsessions.

I’m also working on videopoems, teaching myself the form haphazardly as I go.

And a poetic/critical/memoir on feminist chomophilia*.

And a poetic/critical/memoir on poetic space and its social/political/ecological implications.

And I’m working always, moment-by-moment, on staying awake — politically, emotionally, spiritually, physically, creatively — in a culture that constantly nurtures and coaxes us into the opposite — a sort of resigned, comfortable, complacent deadness. This awakeness is the precursor, for me, for any type of creative pursuit.

* Chromophobia, in the words of David Batchelor: “Colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture. … It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed and groomed. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia… [C]olour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. … Colour is the corruption of culture.” Chromophilia the opposite of the above. If an embrace of color is ascribed to a demeaned feminine “other,” chromophilia is an embrace of this otherness, a colorful confrontation.

Adam W. Burgess : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The tension between using a traditionally accepted form or not. The trend or habit in contemporary poetry seems to be to ignore the rules and, rather, feel your way through the poem by expressing it the way it intends to be expressed. “To go with the flow.” That’s appealing for a lot of reasons, of course, but I’m also drawn to the classical types, to sestinas and pantoums, to villanelles and sonnets. But some of these come with baggage, today, a level of formality that tends to turn off publishers and readers alike. (Okay, maybe not villanelles; I can’t say Dylan Thomas has gone out of style!)

Madeleine Barnes : part five

Why is poetry important?

I asked my Brooklyn College composition students this question recently to test the waters, as our class was not a creative writing class. A student’s hand shot up. He said, “Poetry is important because it gives people hope.” There was no hesitation in his voice. I feel super old saying this, but I think the younger generation gets it. As long as people are writing poetry there’s a chance that they're reflecting on their lives and on the world they inhabit. Poetry forces you to tackle bigger questions surrounding mortality and your inner life. Through poetry, we can encounter another person's thought processes and memories, and when that is accompanied by linguistic precision, musicality, and experimentation, this is an irreplaceable a gift. Or at least the right people will recognize it as such.

Another student followed up and said that poetry is important because it creates a community that capitalism can’t interfere with. Poetry readings give people a place to gather and share their creative work, and we need these supportive spaces more than ever under late capitalism. My student argued that poetry is a refuge, a way to channel pain and experience, and I could not agree more. Our class was full of secret poets. I will never forget them.