How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
My twelfth grade English teacher made us write a poem for an assignment, and I wrote something embarrassingly angsty that I still look back on fondly. But my first real introduction to poetry was a friend bringing me to Tree Reading Series shortly after I started studying English at Carleton University. I was in a fiction workshop at the time, and had already been writing sparse, experimental microfiction, so poetry came as a natural next step in my writing. I love bending rules around structure in my writing, and poetry allows for so much freedom in that sense.
How does a poem begin?
As fragments and scraps in a notebook (or my notes app) that eventually develop into something larger. I’ll sometimes sit on a collection of words for months before I fully flesh them out into an actual poem. Usually the fragments are a single image that become an entire scene by the time I’m finished with a piece.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
Definitely a series of threads, with some stretches of threads so tightly woven that they appear to be the same material. I tend to move slowly through phases of what I’m writing about, but that doesn’t mean I never go back to a former phase. One of my favourite earliest poems I’ve written discussed the concept of home, and I find I’ve been returning to that theme often lately.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I would love to have a daily schedule, but currently lack the stability in my routine to fit it in. I write whenever I have time to, as much as I can.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I love what Taco Bell Quarterly is doing. The absurdity mixed with their cult following is so intriguing, and they publish such good writing. Staircase Wit by Rhiannon McGavin, from their sixth issue, is one of my favourite poems of all time. I also read a lot of Canthius and Arc, they’re both doing wonderful things as well.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I recently read Love Is a Place But You Cannot Live
There by Jade Wallace, and it resonated so strongly with me. The All +
Flesh by Brandi Bird was also stunning. I loved andrea k bennett’s the
berry takes the shape of the bloom, and Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers.
I read andrea k bennett’s Like a Boy but Not a Boy shortly before coming
out earlier last year, and it is the most I have ever connected with a
nonfiction book. And Emily Austin’s novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday
Be Dead was one of my favourite fiction reads of 2023. I always need more
queer poetry in my life, and we’re getting so much of it in Canadian poetry
lately.
Abigail Rabishaw is a queer poet, writer, and artist living in Ottawa. They are the 2023 winner of the Lilian I. Found Award, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bywords, talking about strawberries all of the time, Sumac Literary Magazine, and Intertext.