Matthew Kosinski : part four

Why is poetry important?

For me, poetry – and all art, really – is about possibility. It’s about expanding possibility in the world by introducing new forms, new ideas, and new experiences. I’m not really interested in poetry as a form of self-expression; I’m interested in it as a site of ongoing public cultural and intellectual invention. A site of communal, continual meaning-making. 

I have this concept of something I call “the beyondward.” It’s essentially a metaphorical, metaphysical realm representing all the possibilities and meanings that exist beyond our immediate realities. We are hemmed in by a capitalist economy, by sham democracies, by debt and alienation and ideology. Mark Fisher called it “capitalist realism,” the sense that there is no alternative to the world we’ve constructed.

But I think there is an alternative, and it exists in the “beyondward” – the epistemic space that houses all the other ways we could arrange our lives. And I don’t just mean our personal lives – where to work, who to spend time with, what matters to me – but also our public lives – how to arrange the economy so everyone’s needs are met, how to build a truly free and fair system of governance, what matters to all of us together on this planet. 

I think poetry is important because it’s one of the ways we can all contribute to the beyondward, to the stock of possibilities and meanings available there. By playing with language and pushing it to new places, we can create opportunities for ourselves to encounter the world in new ways. We can invent forms that help all of us think new thoughts and feel new things and arrive at new meanings. Those new thoughts, those new encounters, can expand our horizons of possibility. And then it becomes easier, bit by bit, to believe that the world could – and should – be different, better. 

Look, I’m a socialist, and that heavily informs my ideas about art and poetry. And being a poet informs my politics, too: It is because poetry pointed me toward the beyondward in the first place that I began to think a transformative politics was possible. 

But I need to emphasize that I don’t think poetry is important only because it serves a political project. Rather, I think it’s important because it – and all art – is one of the ways in which we human beings build a shared intellectual world together – i.e., my “beyondward.” It’s important to have that world and to tend it carefully. The more thriving and full of possibility our beyondward is, the more thriving and full of possibility our own lives are.

Samantha Jones : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been engaging with poetic audiobooks. There is something really special about listening to the poet narrate their work. I recently listened to The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand and Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith. I love the audiobook experience because I can hear the intended emphasis in the poet’s own voice. It’s magic to be able to push a button and have Dionne Brand read to you. I’m also reading a few paperbacks—Tend by Kate Hargreaves, which I am loving. I’m always in awe of poetry that can rile me up and then make me laugh on the next page. I have Victoria Mbabazi’s FLIP on my side table. I was hooked on Mbabazi’s work after reading chapbook and look forward to reading more. I’ll be lined up for all future work by Mbabazi.

Sara Henning : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began? 

Without a doubt, my consideration of poetry has changed since I began writing. As I teach my creative writing students at Marshall University, one cannot develop a serious writing practice without simultaneously establishing a serious reading practice. Over the years, reading taught me crucial things about the field of poetics: its historical trends, its contemporary uses. I believe that if one does not evolve with one’s poetry, one is likely writing the same book (or the same poem) over and over again.

Diane Tucker : part one

Diane Tucker is a poet, editor, fiction writer, and playwright from Vancouver, BC. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in more than seventy journals in Canada and abroad. Her first poetry collection, God on His Haunches (Nightwood Editions, 1996), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Nostalgia for Moving Parts is her fourth book of poems.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I have a strong memory from when I was about seven years old of hearing Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain” and being struck by the phrase “clouds in my coffee”. I thought of how my parents’ coffee looked when they put milk in it, how it billowed out and did look like clouds. The connection fascinated me, this triple-layered metaphor. I felt so drawn to this idea of one thing being another thing in that way, like magic!

Tanya Standish McIntyre : part one

Tanya Standish McIntyre is a poet and visual artist based in North Hatley, Quebec, Canada. Her debut collection, The House You Are Born In, published in McGill-Queens University Press’s Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series in December '22 has been called “a stunning debut by a promising new poetic voice, haunting and uplifting in equal measure.” Winner of the Carmen Ziolkowsky Poetry Contest in 2022, as well as the Dr. William Henry Drummond Prize, her poems appear in numerous anthologies and journals across North America.

Visit her website at tanyastandishmcintyre.com.

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Having enough hours in the day to take note of all the words, lines, that want to come through; the time it takes to transcribe from pencil and paper onto the computer, given I never learned how to type; keeping adequately organized with a zillion Word files.

Sarah Ens : part three

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

To me, there’s something primal, basic, and immediate about poetry. Maybe I like that poetry most closely mimics how I think the mind works: simultaneously full of uncertainty and conviction, offering non-linear narratives, juxtaposing disjointed experiences and images in wild and hopeful attempts to make meaning. I like that poetry can be bewildering/bewildered and also urgent, concise, true.

Matthew Kosinski : part three

How did you first engage with poetry?

I like to tell this story because it’s probably the least romantic poet origin story you could have. I was 14 and depressed. I felt I had nothing going for me. I looked around at my peers, and they all seemed to have things they cared about: sports, music, dance, acting, whatever. They were all doing something; they were active participants in the world: chests burning with exertion, minds humming with activity. They were contributing. 

Me? I was nothing but a consumer, a pudgy nerd who spent all his time reading books, playing video games, merely devouring the things other people made. I made nothing of my own.

And so one day, on the bus home from high school, I decided: Fuck it, why not write some poems? I liked reading, and writing seemed to be the active counterpart of that pastime. Writing made something tangible happen in the world, the same way that my more athletically inclined classmates made something tangible happen in the world when, say, the bat cracked against the ball and sent it flying beyond the farthest reaches of the field in gym class. 

To put it bluntly: I started writing because I sucked at sports. 

We had been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in English at the time, and it didn’t seem that hard to write fourteen lines. So I did – I wrote my very first poem on that bus ride, a terrible sonnet that had much more in common with the melodrama of third-wave emo (think: Fall Out Boy, Northstar, the Blood Brothers) than Shakespeare. But, hey, I enjoyed it. And ~20 years later, here we are.