How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
As a child I was lucky enough to have come across Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” in one of my mother’s poetry books. That encounter—mysterious and mildly frightening—still sticks in my mind. It’s a very good poem.
As I became older, I was drawn to the poetry of Canada, in particular experimental poets in Quebec and Ontario. It seems in retrospect that—in the 1990s—there was a brief fin-de-siècle renaissance in print culture (small presses in particular) that came before the digital deluge. The experimentalism of writers at the time—Daniel Jones, Nicole Brossard, Dionne Brand, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, the Four Horsemen, the Toronto Research Group, Christopher Dewdney to name just a few—inspired me to try to reach for the same creative heights they seemed to so easily attain.
How does a poem begin?
A poem has countless ways of coming into the world. Language, I think, like magma, is under great amounts of pressure. As a result fissures and strange configurations continually reach the surface.
There are “oviparous” poets, who lay an egg and carefully tend to it, and “viviparous” ones, who give live birth to works. I find it’s good for writers to experiment with both.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
Like most poets, I write around the economic necessities of working 9-5. I’m not convinced like Wallace Stevens that it builds “character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job”, but it gives hope that many others manage it.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
The Ampersand Review reliably publishes interesting and good writing from Canadian writers. The Capilano Review is another mainstay that I try not to miss. Yolk and Existere always seem to find vibrant and interesting works. The Sprawl Mag gets better and better with each issue.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I am reading books about rivers, so I’m currently enjoying Alice Oswald (Dart, Sleepwalk on the Severn), Penn Kemp (River Revery), Sarah de Leeuw (Skeena), Cecily Nicholson (From the Poplars), and Fred Wah & Rita Wong (beholden).
Beyond rivers, I enjoy Heid E. Erdrich a lot (National Monuments), and Douglas Kearney. Quaquaversal by Karen Mac Cormack is as sparkling as it is daring.
Reading Mina Loy and Hilda Doolittle is more exciting in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.
Etienne Marsolet is a poet and artist from Saguenay, Quebec. Previous works of poetry have recently been featured in Poetry Daily, Oversound, the Ampersand Review and talking about strawberries all of the time.
Marsolet has work in the fourteenth issue.