Tanya Standish McIntyre : part three

How important is music to your poetry? 

Poets once were bards - there must always be music in poetry. To me, it is requisite that a poem reads with musicality. My first love was music and song, and I am extremely drawn by the heart and depth that lives in ballads and folk music in particular. In all genres of music, the best examples are doors to an experience of the world that is immersive on all levels of being. Music is empathy, which poetry is as well - they are two streams which pour into the ocean from the same mouth.

Sarah Ens : part five

What are you working on?

I just published my second book, Flyway (Turnstone Press), which is a long poem that’s occupied me for the past four years. I’m not entirely sure what’s next. I do feel energized, though, writing discrete little poems again and seeing where they take me. 

Matthew Kosinski : part five

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes with a ghost, sometimes with a joke. Although before that, before the immediate inciting incident, there is a slow and steady accumulation of fragments: overheard phrases, unbidden ideas, resonant texts, facts that scream to be made into metaphors. I spend my time moving through the world and collecting these little fragments, jotting them down in notebooks, suspending them from the rafters of my brain where they can sway and sing together.

And then, the inciting incident: A hypothetical question about eating your clone, for example. That gives the fragments something to coalesce around. It gives them a shared premise. It illuminates their similarities, heightens their differences. They all begin casting light and shadow on one another, melting into one another, gesturing toward other fragments, morphing into strange new entities with many faces. It’s all quite chaotic. 

So what you need to do, then, is find that line or phrase to anchor them – like binding a spirit to a cursed object. That’s the first line – maybe not sequentially in the finished poem, but temporally in the poem’s life. And the rest of the writing process is about cultivating that line so that it twists and grows and ramifies into the poem, with branches of the right length and heft to support the constantly shifting weight of all those fragments.

Sara Henning : part three

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

Poetry, to me, is the intellectual and aesthetic counterpart of the human heartbeat, and as such, I believe that poetry is the genre most connected to the body and to the physical expression of life. Poetry is tied to the body in the same ways as music, for poetry and music share the same genetic origins. In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily, who dies in childbirth, returns to experience life on her twelfth birthday, during which time she understands, with horror, the extent to which people take life for granted. When she asks Stage Manager, "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?,” he replies "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.” Poetry takes as its interest the life which pulses under each moment—its philosophy, its gratitude, its song, its psychology, its fierce yearning.  Poetry is my deepest love and my mother tongue.

Diane Tucker : part two

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

I meet with a small group of poets on a sort of ad hoc basis, every few months, to share new work. It’s a great bunch, perceptive and encouraging! Covid restrictions have made it difficult – we did meet on Zoom a couple of times – but we’re working on meeting together again in the flesh soon!

I spent a long time in a local writers’ workshop in the nineties and early 2000’s and fell out of the habit of it. I thought those days were done, but this more recent group that formed slowly through poets Daniel Cowper and Emily Osborne is giving me a good kick in the pants again.

Tanya Standish McIntyre : part two

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

Wallace Stevens "The Idea of Order at Key West" never fails me. Oh blessed rage for order, pale Ramon!

Tennessee Williams, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Clarisse Lispector, Rabindranath Tagore, Dylan Thomas, Hermann Hesse, R.W. Emerson, Owen Barfield, T.S. Eliot....any of the above do the trick - these are just the ones that come to mind immediately...of course there are more.

Sarah Ens : part four

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

I return most often to: Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Louise B. Halfe Skydancer’s Blue Marrow, Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems, Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral, Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills, and a whole bunch of Mary Oliver, Camile Dungy, WS Merwin, Nikki Giovanni, Don McKay, Dennis Cooley, Di Brandt, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maggie Smith, and Ada Límon. 

One of the best things that happened to me this year was discovering that Ada Límon hosts a poetry podcast called The Slowdown. Each episode is five minutes long and involves a briefly framed reading of one poem. Another easy route to renewal: subscribing to the League of Canadian Poets’ “poetry pause” email blast which sends out a poem by a contemporary Canadian poet every day at 10am.