Elee Kraljii Gardiner : part four

What other (poetry) books have you been (thinking about) reading lately?

Jordan Abel’s Nishga, Doireann Ní Ghriofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Joan Naviyuk Kane’s forthcoming Dark Traffic, and Fair Play by Tove Jansson.

John Elizabeth Stintzi : part one

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer and artist who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize, the Sator New Works Award, and has been shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Raymond Souster Award. Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and many others. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano (2022) and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. They live with their wife in Kansas City.

Photo credit: JES

How did you first engage with poetry?

I first engaged with poetry, outside of a class-setting, as any angsty teen would (particularly growing up around the heyday of emo music/style): writing terrible, fire-and-brimstone, hopeless romantic poetry. I think the poem that set me off, with its very dark tone, was “The Destruction of Sennacherib” by Lord Byron, which I read and didn’t hate in my English class. I feel like my apocalyptic hopeless romanticism (paired with my terrible use of rhyming) definitely sprung out from lines like “For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, / And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed.”

Andy N : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I know not everybody does this, but I’ve got little A5 hard back books which contains every completed poem I have ever completed whether great, average or frankly dreadful and I know the first one was wrote in there when I was 10 (I’m now 49 which gives a clue of how books I have completed). 

I don’t remember where the first poem came from if I am honest but it would have being some kind of class exercise I can see from reading it (It was called ‘Colours in the sky’ and was quite a basic romp through all of the colours in the sky). It wasn’t very good. 

The second poem ‘The Kill’ which followed six months or so in 1983 just after I reached I wrote after a trip to Chester Zoo (A Zoo nearish my primary school). The day after the trip we got asked to write a poem about our trip to the Zoo, and I wrote one about the lions breaking out of the cage and eating one of the teachers. They didn’t like it a lot it had to be said and I got a weeks detention. I however, loved it and the bug bit there I guess.

Katie Schmid : part two

Why is poetry important?

As a practice, it’s like writing proofs or doing algebra. You build something based on some half-heard scrap of something that has its own rules, its own logic. You’re trying to delve into it, to come to the illogical conclusion. You work in concert with it, or let it lead you around on a leash to where it’s going to go. It has made me more sane to write this way. Frank Bidart in that famous interview in In the Western Night talks about using poetry to think his life, and knowing that if he could do that there was everything yet to be done. I’ve been listening to a lot of J. Krishnamurti recently and he has this beautiful thing that he says to his students or querents, “Don’t just guess! Go into it! Carefully!” That’s what I’m trying to do when I write a poem: I’m trying to go into it carefully, and then all at once, and come back with something that helps me understand myself and the world a little bit more. I think that’s really the only kind of peace I know outside of being outside or having sex. I mean peace in the sense that I’m not trying to escape myself, but am deeply, deeply present to myself.

J. D. Nelson : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Letting go of a poem can be very difficult. I often find myself thinking, maybe I should just hold onto it for a little longer and keep tinkering. I’ve learned to get better at recognizing when a poem is finished, or when it is time to let go of it. I find that this is a function of intuition; a poem just “feels right” when it’s time to let go.

Jane Zwart : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Very, I hope. But perhaps what I am after when I fit words into verse is something just shy of music. When I write a poem, there’s a lot of muttering the lines aloud; it’s how I test repetition, how I scoop out little hollows of assonance, how I arrive at echoes, how I figure out the poem’s tectonics. 

Muttering aloud is also the only way I can refine line length. Which must mean that rhythm does matter to me even though I’m terrible at scansion. Maybe it’s not feeling at ease with poetry’s music theory that makes me doubt my poems’ claim to music. 

Anyway: I do hope to keep learning, little by little, more about rhythm. And rhyme, too.

Tim Moder : part one

Tim Moder is an Indigenous poet living in northern Wisconsin. He is a member of Lake Superior Writers. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Penumbra Online and In Parentheses Literary Magazine. Find him on Twitter @ModerTim and Instagram @moder_poet_tim

How Does a poem Begin?

That’s really the question, isn’t it? The beginning could come from anywhere, an overheard comment, watching someone cross the street, a line in a song on the radio, organic natural life, what they call soft fascination. Something sparks a nerve, it gets your attention, it sounds different, or something you are more attracted to than usual. So you write it down. Sometimes just one or two words, or a sentence. On a napkin, a receipt, in a notebook. I’m in love with index cards. I use them for everything. So then when I get home I’ll add them to the notebook. THE notebook.  They go in there with all the rest and maybe get looked at again in a week or a month. Unless one comes all at once. But mostly the start is random.  Later comes all the hard work. Crafting it into a poem.  Initially it doesn’t appear to have very much to do with me at all. Then again sometimes I sit down to write a specific poem about something I’ve been thinking about.