Regan Good : part five

What are you working on?

I am currently working on fourth and fifth poetry manuscripts simply by putting poems into two sliding and approximate piles.  There could be a sixth book between those two piles that I’m too dumb to see. I’m really not good at the “get your book in order” analytical work.  My heart hurts when I see workshops and the like offered on “How to order your manuscript.”  There is so much commerce around poetry right now, so much junk, I am deeply suspicious—really, I’m a big drag about it.  For God’s sake, just write your poems!  I think Dana Levin Tweeted something the other day like, “Can’t I just call my book, ‘What I Wrote from 2014 Until Today?’” A poem comes when it comes, you can’t make the writing of poems directed and expect good poems; you can not set out to make a product.  It’s all gotten very A+ student out there and A+ students are incredibly tedious and predictable, even those claiming experimentation.  I like some human smell left in a poem—problems, oddities, wildness, even a typo at this point is welcome.  At fifty-three, I am really only now starting to write well.  Or maybe I’m deluded.  I don’t know, life is a dream. 

Paul Pearson : part one

Paul Pearson is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul has since relocated to Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. Lunatic Engine is his debut collection.

Photo Credit: Oscar Pearson

How did you first engage with poetry?

I've always known that I wanted to be a writer though I always thought though that I'd end up in science fiction, my first love as a reader. I always liked poetry and did well in it in school but I always considered it something you studied, rather than something you read for fun or, God forbid, wrote. Then, in my first-year University English lit class, I stumbled into Patrick Lane, was struck dumb with "Mountain Oysters." Here was a poet who grew up in the bush in the interior of BC, like I did. Here were poems about people I knew: working people, mountain people, alcoholics and men like my father. I had no idea poetry could actually mean something real, something personal, something now. That was it. From that moment I was a poet. 

Vik Shirley : part five

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

I mainly write with the Russell Edson method of 'blank page and a blank mind', but to get me in the mood and my mind thinking in the right kind of way, almost as a portal to myself, before I start writing, I often surround myself with books I love and read a poem or two from each. Could be Edson, certainly Tate (so this would probably be the simple answer to your question), maybe Jennifer. L. Knox, Kennard, Waldron, Minnis, Kharms. It's a matter of feeding on poetry to make poetry, as I think many people do. If I just want to meditate and lose myself in poetry, then I go for Ashbery. The pleasure to be gained from each line, the juxtapositions, different feelings and atmospheres he creates. I still find his work incredibly moving and overwhelming, even when it's just funny. Its sheer brilliance, alone, can bring me to tears.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part four

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

Toni Morrison – it doesn’t matter what genre I’m working in, including my practice as a visual artist. Her writing and life continues to alter and to inform my own development and understanding of who I am becoming on the page and elsewhere. 

Dennis Cooley : part four

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

I find it hard to say, though I feel strongly that poetry offers experiences that other forms seldom can realize. I am struck by what Isobel Cunninghamm has said: “It lets air in between the dense and sometimes heavy ideas that are in the world.” 

Here’s what I wrote a couple of years ago in “19 Questions”:

But poetry. Poetry above all. Forget the embarrassing sales numbers, disregard the avowed aversions, set aside for the moment your own panicked flight when you were caught unsuspecting at a poetry launch. Poetry's the lucky terrain of what-ifs and just-supposings. It's in poetry that we speak most urgently, most eloquently, most pointedly, most succinctly to our unspoken selves. It is there that we happen upon anticipated or forgotten lives. When you fall in love you want a poem, you might even steal one and hope it will find favour, or at least speak for you. Else why the booming business for greeting cards? They perform a useful function, sometimes skillfully, but they are so generic that they immediately and everywhere become everyone's poem. Sometimes we want more, better songs to sing. When your spouse dies only a poem will do, and you wish you could find one or write one—a good one that says what for the rest of the time you cannot quite say or know how to say or bring yourself to say. No ordinary remembrance will do. You want, at least for yourself, a poem that can give contours to your loneliness and sound to your yearning. A poem to speak in wonder of what might touch you, or delight you, or bewilder you. In reckless moments you might even welcome a poem that challenges your understanding of what language and knowledge is, jolt you open to what strangely has been made and laid before you. You would like something to surprise you, with the sting of a mosquito bite, perhaps, to tip you into intimacies you had not quite realized were yours. When that happens you may feel a small shiver: yes, that's right, that's how it feels. Sometimes poems tell us what we don't know we already knew, and there's that rush of pleasure. Though you might not have said so, you have been waiting for a poem whose wit and rhythm rinses you with newness. You want lines, you hunger for lies, clever and unusual lies, that do not take as irrevocable what at our most tired and resigned and obstinate we suppose is the real and only world. When we are looking for something adequate to our desires we know that literalness and acquiescence won't hack it. We want to be alive to the world and stirred into something more. It's a more expanded and a more charged world we hunger for, even when we don't know it. That's why we secretly want the intensities and misadventures that we call poetry.
https://www.turnstonepress.com/aotm-author-of-the-month/aotm-dennis-cooley.html

Joyelle McSweeney : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The most difficult thing about writing poetry is not writing poetry. Reading about everything the Shelleys sacrificed to make their life entirely about art, thought, and writing, and everything that crashed into their life anyway,  has partly eased my anguish and self-blame. Even with my kids in school and on days which should feel 'free', I spend so much time on the phone with doctors and dentists, time sorting out health insurance, shopping for food, dealing with the foster care system, attending meetings, trying not to look and then looking at the unbelievably bad news crashing in at every orifice--

But I also know: to write is the real drug. To write is to break the law and get kicked out of the republic for whatever little intoxicating grain of time you can find. The more time I actually get to spend writing with any kind of dailiness, the more of that drug I get, and the more I want it, and the happier I am. 

 

Primessa Espiritu : part one

Primessa Espiritu: This person lives and creates in Montreal, Quebec.

How did you first engage with poetry?

Anonymously, through a young web. An online poetry community found me and pulled me out of my shell. It was a long time ago, in a trend far far away. That type of online forum was relatively new and it was wild. Our hearts were full of magic, connecting on many different levels while discovering our voices.