How did you first come to writing poems? What is it about the form that resonates?
This isn’t glamorous (and it’s particularly funny to think about now that I’ve transitioned), but I first picked up the desire to write poetry after reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in my early teens. I think the sheer, sort of preposterous energy of his work was the first thing I encountered that really alerted me to the sensory possibilities of language. To this day, those possibilities are still what attracts me to poetry specifically as a medium. Once you develop an eye and an ear for them, the visceral qualities of language at the micro level--the sound and look and feel of a phrase, of a word, of two words woven or slammed together--are literally endlessly fascinating.
How does a poem begin?
For me it’s variable. When I was writing the pieces that became my chapbook Drawings From Before The Red Year, the impetus was always a visual scene and the immediate impressions that it made on me. More recently some of my poems have begun as emotions, usually intensely negative ones--I wrote a lot last year about watching my loved ones suffer, and I guess in those cases it was a way of displacing the pain of not being able to ameliorate the situation. At other times poems have begun with the sudden appearance of a phrase or with a formal premise. I think that, because poetry as a form is so malleable, a poem can more or less begin anywhere.
You’ve published poems in numerous journals. Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of disconnected threads?
I think in my case it’s in between--a series of extended projects, or of threads tied together by the same underlying impulse. I’ve written about a lot of different subjects and with different goals in mind, so to speak, but the overall contours of my writing are very unified. My impression of myself is that I am very perceptive and not especially imaginative. As such when I write I think I’m almost always trying to communicate something I noticed or felt, something subtle and ineffable except through the poetic approach.
How has publishing chapbooks changed your writing? What have the differences been since?
Having Drawings From Before The Red Year published with Anstruther was a tremendous milestone for me, one for which I will always be incredibly grateful. Since that chapbook came out I think my approach to writing has been less frenetic and antsy--I’m at least marginally more assured. One of the main concrete changes is that I’ve been working at a slower pace, which maybe isn’t ideal since I wasn’t exactly prolific to begin with, but in the long run I think it’ll mean work of a higher quality, which is certainly the most valuable thing in my eyes.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
While I can absolutely pull through when it’s at all urgent, in some crucial respects I am a deeply undisciplined person. I do not have a daily writing schedule, or even a daily sleep schedule, and I’m not sure there’s a single thing that I do at the same time every day. In addition to my writing practice, my main activities are my editing work with filling Station, my work with the TRESSPASSING art collective, my suspiciously tight-knit friend group, and reading nonfiction about horses. So long as I can continue actualizing all of those things, I’m happy to live in the sort of laughably erratic way that I do.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
If I had to pick a favorite literary magazine it would definitely be THESE DAYS out of Ottawa. Jeff Blackman has put together a zine and associated artistic community that is endlessly vital and utterly free of pretense or affectation. I had the honour of guest-editing an issue back in the fall of 2023 that was themed around the Breeders’ Cup horse racing championships. I think that APOCALYPSECONFIDENTIAL out of the states and Bad Lilies out of the UK are both doing phenomenal work in terms of online mags. I also really love Common House, the new online journal out of the University of Ottawa.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I promised myself like a
year ago that if I ever gave an interview anywhere I would shoehorn in this
statement, so here goes: Pajamas Concrete and Holly Ricky Galluppp are the best
and most exciting artists in the country right now. We’re featuring some of
their work in the next issue of filling Station and I literally could not be
more excited. For Calgarian poets, I’m really excited by the work of Lee Thomas
and Olivia Van Guinn, and of course I’ll always admire the poetry of Weyman
Chan. On a more obscure note, I recently became obsessed with a hunting memoir
called “HOUNDS FIRST!” by the late H.C. Pyper. His prose is emblematic of the
dry, almost languid, perfectly attuned and controlled style employed by a
certain kind of unfailingly polite, horrifyingly evil British man of the
twentieth century. He was a strange guy, and we definitely would not have
gotten along, but his writing was legitimately masterful.
Ethan Rein Vilu (she/her) is a poet, editor, photographer, and horse racing enthusiast from Mohkínstsis/Calgary. Her chapbook Drawings From Before The Red Year is currently out with Anstruther Press. Ethan currently serves as managing editor at filling Station Magazine.
Photo credit: Juliet Bader
She
has poems in the sixth, eighth and thirteenth issues.