Tim Moder : part two

What do you find the most difficult about writing poetry?

Understanding the rules regarding rhyme scheme, meter, etc. is very challenging for me. I went to one semester of college in 1990, so I have no formal training in writing.  I have read a lot of poetry, but I don’t know much about line breaks, phrasing or what kinds of poems there are. I’m not even aware of all the things about writing poetry that I don’t know. But I know they exist. I bought Jorie Graham’s Sea Change a while back and I remember thinking “You can do that?” The way the lines are formatted. I haven’t tried it, but I was blown away. I never learned about feet and meter, so I just wing it. 

Bruce Whiteman : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I do a lot of book reviewing, mostly for quarterlies but also for newspapers. So I read a lot of poetry, both Canadian and American, for review. I recently reviewed Margaret Atwood’s latest book of poems, Dearly, and Don McKay’s new book, Lurch, both of which I liked a lot. I reviewed Steven Heighton’s Selected Poems for a newspaper review last spring, and found much to like in it as well. I often get assigned the poetry chronicle in The Hudson Review. They send you thirty or forty poetry books, from which you choose four or five, and there are often pleasing discoveries among them. Most recently, I thought Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere accomplished and high-spirited. Ken Norris’s South China Sea is a fine book.

Deborah Rosch Eifert : coda

What are you working on? 

Bodies - My husband has epilepsy, lung issues and Parkinson’s, and I have considered creating a microchap with poems I have written about our journey with that. I have two more manageable chronic issues (migraine, in particular, affects my quality of life); I also have had my body encounter a lot of coerced invasions – rape, sexual abuse, and a very minor cancer brush.  I am thinking of doing a chap or collection about being embodied, about bodies, caring for them, healing them, accepting them, struggling with them. I just had a piece in Feral, Issue 9 called “History of My Relationship with My Reproductive Tract.”

Elizabeth M Castillo : part one

Elizabeth M Castillo is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, indie-press promoter. She lives in Paris with her family and two cats, where she writes a variety of different things under a variety of pen names. In her writing Elizabeth explores themes of race & ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, loss and grief, and a touch of magical realism. She has words in, or upcoming in Selcouth Station Press, Pollux Journal, Revista Purgante, Lanke Review, Streetcake Magazine, Fevers of the Mind Press, Melbourne Culture Corner, Epoch Press, among others. Her bilingual, debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras is available for preorder/sale on amazon and through her website www.elizabethmcastillo.com. You can connect with her on Twitter or Instagram as @EMCWritesPoetry

What are you working on?

At the moment of writing this interview, I'm putting the final touches on my first full poetry collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras. It's mostly formatting and marketing at this stage, as I'm self-publishing. It's a bilingual English/Spanish collection that came together almost entirely by itself, and is very close to my heart. Each poem in the collection is the expression of a feeling or an experience that needs to be felt, but in time will also need to be put away in a drawer or box (or Cajoncito, incidentally) in order to move on with life. I think we all carry a few of those...

Although I initially wrote most of these poems as my own personal form a therapy, soon I had enough for a chapbook, then a full collection, and people started to respond to the pieces that were picked up for publication here and there. At that point I had also begun writing in Spanish, which isn't my mother tongue, and three clear themes of love, loss and madness started to take shape. In the end it's been incredibly satisfying, cathartic even to have people tell me they find something of themselves in these extremely personal poems, and to see that there are in fact so many ways to love, so many ways to lose, and so many forms of madness that make up the in between. 

Arden Hunter : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

This is going to be different depending on who you ask, but what it really comes down to is I think it is finished when I’m happy with it. If I read it, whispering under my breath, and at the end find myself giving a little nod of satisfaction, then I’m finished. If something is still niggling at me, it’s not. I know that’s not very helpful, but poetry is so subjective and there is no wrong way to write it, so you can’t say, ‘oh when there are X amount of words,’ or ‘when there are X amount of metaphors.’ It’s a gut feeling, I think. Part of it is, ‘Does this say what I wanted to say?’ From a more pragmatic point of view, I do spend a lot of time over the endings. Those last lines are often the ones that linger in other people’s minds, so though of course I take care over the whole poem, once the last line is crafted to my satisfaction I’m usually done. 

Perry Gasteiger : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Usually my work first comes into the world as an overly excited message to my sister or my partner saying, “YOU WANNA READ WHAT I JUST WROTE???” haha… But yes, I believe that having a solid group of people that you can go to for soundboarding, editing help, idea generation & development, and just a fresh pair (or two, or three!) of eyes is extremely important. Having a community helps build everyone’s skills and work.

Saba Pakdel : part one

Saba Pakdel was born into a family of artists in Tehran, Iran. Growing up in a home of theatre, literature, and cinema, Saba breathed in the quality air of arts from an early age. She completed her BA and MA in English; attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays in Persian journals before leaving her home country to Canada in 2017. Once settled, she continued her studies at Simon Fraser University where she worked with Dr. Stephen Collis, Canadian poet and professor. She is currently studying her Ph.D. in English at University of Victoria under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Ross, modernist scholar and professor.

Photo credit: Hossein Pakdel

What are you working on?

My current project is my sweet struggle with the composition of a bilingual book of poetry that gives equal space to both English and Persian languages. The thesis is to use both languages semantically while I strongly intend to avoid exoticizing Persian as an unreadable language in an English environment. The tricky concept here is when a language is unreadable to some, it is ornamental, decorative, and objectified. I started thinking through conditions of possibility for a project as such after attending Summer Writers Session 2021 at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last summer which included one-on-one sessions with Dr. Jordan Abel and Kaie Kellough. Also, I am currently working on my PhD project which overlaps with the idea of language stuck in a state of in-betweenness in migration theories. Hopefully, the two projects on both sides of research and poetry meet somewhere in the middle to help me with that struggle!