How did you first come
to poetry?
I first came to poetry by means of my voracious appetite for reading. My first encounters with poetry happened by process of elimination. I read all the prose and only poetry was left, so I read that.
Actually, let me revise my answer. My love of reading began with poetry; I did read prose voraciously, but poetry showed me how language could introduce more intimate relations between text and reader. I remember my parents shaking their heads as if in disbelief that I was not only reading but writing poetry, or attempting to emulate what I was reading, and taking pleasure in words. This was my first exposure to the idea that poetry was somehow by nature ‘difficult,’ which probably made me savour it more, because poetry also became an expression of difference (one that thrived in solitude – perfect for a lonely girl). I loved reading poetry collections and anthologies; a bit of an autodidact, I didn’t know enough to know where to start. My parents were voracious readers and were quite literary, but preferred prose, fiction; our house was filled with novels.
I was a lonely, melancholic, bookish child, growing up in a small, isolated (at times desolate) Northern city with famously aggressive winters, and poetry has often been a place where lonely, melancholic, bookish people go.
Poetry was part of the spectrum of my creative production, and part of the way I engaged with my surroundings (I also filled sketchbooks with drawings, eventually developing a rigorous studio practice, which I later abandoned in favour of writing). Because I processed a lot of my thinking by writing, I eventually began to write in response to my findings and queries. I would also transcribe shorter love poems in letters. Often love poems were epic in length and challenging to transcribe, so I would select a set of stanzas. My frustration with long poems drove me to write shorter poems, to amass a collection of my own shorter writings to share with admirers.
Very early, I was invited to share my work. This is because in the intellectual desert of my childhood, it was considered remarkable not only that I, a girl, wrote, but that I was willing to perform and publish my work. Without directly knowing or naming it, I was compelled by the spectre of feminine confessional poetry. Later, I preferred to – or learned to – cloak the confessional aspect in a concern for the conceptual and theoretical.
How did publishing your first chapbook change your writing?
Publishing my first chapbook changed my poetry in that, in needing to assemble individual poems into book(let) form, I realized that I was writing more serially than I initially believed. I write impulsively and without especial discipline, and was unaware that my poems were actually in conversation with one another.
Understanding the subconscious (inevitable) patterning in my writing teaches me about my self. It has also improved my approach to craft and discipline, both of which are important when writing for publication. Poetry remains an embodied activity for me, embedded in my academic performance of self, but thinking about the formal aspects of my writing and the ways that my ideas and thinking might circulate is improving my writing overall. I have a particular love of the chapbook form in that it often circulates according to more intimate, informal structures.
How does a poem begin?
A poem begins as an urge to record. And also, an urge to analyze and explore, or sometimes to explain. Poems are born of a desire to rationalize affectively.
Does your critical work interact at all with your poetry, or are they completely separate?
Poetry is part of my critical practice, though not formally. As an emerging scholar in the humanities, my critical practice is quite traditional, even if my ideas are not always conventional. Often I arrive at unconventional ideas by exploring the poetics of my more conventional academic research. Poetry also gives me a place to process the affect of thinking and being. I imagined that academic life would be utopian, but it is generally not that, and poems give me a place to work through the secret, often embodied complexities of scholarly reality/ies.
Often I find myself questioning the categories imposed on creative and critical work. My thinking and research are interdisciplinary, and this leads me to think of many of the objects of my study according to their poetics, so I think of photography, theory, and philosophy as poetic forms (none of this is revolutionary or new, although it’s often particularized and eccentric).
I recently lived in Germany, where I was a visiting university lecturer in Transnational American Studies. There, my creative practice as a poet (a hat I still wear with some incredulity) was the source of much intrigue, both with colleagues and with my students. The idea that poetry was a method for scholarly thinking was (apparently, as far as I could surmise) quite novel to them, but this led to a good number of requests to share my work and methods with students by means of guest lectures and performances. This led me to realize that my poetry actually is an important complement to my scholarly writing and teaching – to effectively believe my own arguments for the need to maintain the sense of parallelism I’ve developed between the two. It makes sense that a lot of the poets I study in my work also maintain critical praxes, and that one generally inflects and enriches the other.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I write daily, and sometimes this produces poetry. Often it does not.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
When I can, I read contemporary literary journals including Room, The Puritan, Brick, The Capilano Review, Canadian Literature (I recently co-edited a special issue – number 235, Winter 2017 – with Gregory Betts, “Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media,” and had the opportunity to work alongside poetry editor, Phinder Dulai), Poetry is Dead, Touch the Donkey, Train, and Jacket 2. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.
I most frequently read materials from online repositories like ubuweb and kswnet.org and back issues from journals (sometimes no longer in print), such as Open Letter, West Coast Line, Raddle Moon, Writing, and Sulfur, which I consult for my research, and also read for pleasure and inspiration.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I read selectively. I’m sensitive to ideas and patterns of thinking. Lately I’ve been wondering if I can sense cruelty in writing, if cruel writers write poems imbued with cruelty and bad affect. Let’s imagine they do.
I study Vancouver (or the region commonly known as “Vancouver”) poetry and local cultural production broadly, but I read more according to the broader networks of my poetry and artistic communities. There are compelling dynamics between larger cities and smaller centres for writing. I love the writings of established and contemporary poet-thinkers such as Dionne Brand, Annharte, Fred Wah, Margaret Christakos, Erín Moure, Sachiko Murakami, Jeff Derksen, Daphne Marlatt, and Lisa Robertson, but also attend carefully to more emerging voices, such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Domenica Martinello, Caroline Szpak, MLA Chernoff, Cassidy McFadzean, Canisia Lubrin, Gwen Benaway, Danielle Lafrance, and Noor Naga. I could name at least fifty more poets whose work preoccupies me. I love voices that, by means of their resistance to CanLit canonicity, disrupt and evolve what we think of when we attempt to imagine a national literature (the answer is that one cannot exist). I particularly appreciate poets who engage critically in the politics of community formation and make room for marginalized voices to be heard and published.
I first came to poetry by means of my voracious appetite for reading. My first encounters with poetry happened by process of elimination. I read all the prose and only poetry was left, so I read that.
Actually, let me revise my answer. My love of reading began with poetry; I did read prose voraciously, but poetry showed me how language could introduce more intimate relations between text and reader. I remember my parents shaking their heads as if in disbelief that I was not only reading but writing poetry, or attempting to emulate what I was reading, and taking pleasure in words. This was my first exposure to the idea that poetry was somehow by nature ‘difficult,’ which probably made me savour it more, because poetry also became an expression of difference (one that thrived in solitude – perfect for a lonely girl). I loved reading poetry collections and anthologies; a bit of an autodidact, I didn’t know enough to know where to start. My parents were voracious readers and were quite literary, but preferred prose, fiction; our house was filled with novels.
I was a lonely, melancholic, bookish child, growing up in a small, isolated (at times desolate) Northern city with famously aggressive winters, and poetry has often been a place where lonely, melancholic, bookish people go.
Poetry was part of the spectrum of my creative production, and part of the way I engaged with my surroundings (I also filled sketchbooks with drawings, eventually developing a rigorous studio practice, which I later abandoned in favour of writing). Because I processed a lot of my thinking by writing, I eventually began to write in response to my findings and queries. I would also transcribe shorter love poems in letters. Often love poems were epic in length and challenging to transcribe, so I would select a set of stanzas. My frustration with long poems drove me to write shorter poems, to amass a collection of my own shorter writings to share with admirers.
Very early, I was invited to share my work. This is because in the intellectual desert of my childhood, it was considered remarkable not only that I, a girl, wrote, but that I was willing to perform and publish my work. Without directly knowing or naming it, I was compelled by the spectre of feminine confessional poetry. Later, I preferred to – or learned to – cloak the confessional aspect in a concern for the conceptual and theoretical.
How did publishing your first chapbook change your writing?
Publishing my first chapbook changed my poetry in that, in needing to assemble individual poems into book(let) form, I realized that I was writing more serially than I initially believed. I write impulsively and without especial discipline, and was unaware that my poems were actually in conversation with one another.
Understanding the subconscious (inevitable) patterning in my writing teaches me about my self. It has also improved my approach to craft and discipline, both of which are important when writing for publication. Poetry remains an embodied activity for me, embedded in my academic performance of self, but thinking about the formal aspects of my writing and the ways that my ideas and thinking might circulate is improving my writing overall. I have a particular love of the chapbook form in that it often circulates according to more intimate, informal structures.
How does a poem begin?
A poem begins as an urge to record. And also, an urge to analyze and explore, or sometimes to explain. Poems are born of a desire to rationalize affectively.
Does your critical work interact at all with your poetry, or are they completely separate?
Poetry is part of my critical practice, though not formally. As an emerging scholar in the humanities, my critical practice is quite traditional, even if my ideas are not always conventional. Often I arrive at unconventional ideas by exploring the poetics of my more conventional academic research. Poetry also gives me a place to process the affect of thinking and being. I imagined that academic life would be utopian, but it is generally not that, and poems give me a place to work through the secret, often embodied complexities of scholarly reality/ies.
Often I find myself questioning the categories imposed on creative and critical work. My thinking and research are interdisciplinary, and this leads me to think of many of the objects of my study according to their poetics, so I think of photography, theory, and philosophy as poetic forms (none of this is revolutionary or new, although it’s often particularized and eccentric).
I recently lived in Germany, where I was a visiting university lecturer in Transnational American Studies. There, my creative practice as a poet (a hat I still wear with some incredulity) was the source of much intrigue, both with colleagues and with my students. The idea that poetry was a method for scholarly thinking was (apparently, as far as I could surmise) quite novel to them, but this led to a good number of requests to share my work and methods with students by means of guest lectures and performances. This led me to realize that my poetry actually is an important complement to my scholarly writing and teaching – to effectively believe my own arguments for the need to maintain the sense of parallelism I’ve developed between the two. It makes sense that a lot of the poets I study in my work also maintain critical praxes, and that one generally inflects and enriches the other.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I write daily, and sometimes this produces poetry. Often it does not.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
When I can, I read contemporary literary journals including Room, The Puritan, Brick, The Capilano Review, Canadian Literature (I recently co-edited a special issue – number 235, Winter 2017 – with Gregory Betts, “Concepts of Vancouver: Poetics, Art, Media,” and had the opportunity to work alongside poetry editor, Phinder Dulai), Poetry is Dead, Touch the Donkey, Train, and Jacket 2. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.
I most frequently read materials from online repositories like ubuweb and kswnet.org and back issues from journals (sometimes no longer in print), such as Open Letter, West Coast Line, Raddle Moon, Writing, and Sulfur, which I consult for my research, and also read for pleasure and inspiration.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I read selectively. I’m sensitive to ideas and patterns of thinking. Lately I’ve been wondering if I can sense cruelty in writing, if cruel writers write poems imbued with cruelty and bad affect. Let’s imagine they do.
I study Vancouver (or the region commonly known as “Vancouver”) poetry and local cultural production broadly, but I read more according to the broader networks of my poetry and artistic communities. There are compelling dynamics between larger cities and smaller centres for writing. I love the writings of established and contemporary poet-thinkers such as Dionne Brand, Annharte, Fred Wah, Margaret Christakos, Erín Moure, Sachiko Murakami, Jeff Derksen, Daphne Marlatt, and Lisa Robertson, but also attend carefully to more emerging voices, such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Domenica Martinello, Caroline Szpak, MLA Chernoff, Cassidy McFadzean, Canisia Lubrin, Gwen Benaway, Danielle Lafrance, and Noor Naga. I could name at least fifty more poets whose work preoccupies me. I love voices that, by means of their resistance to CanLit canonicity, disrupt and evolve what we think of when we attempt to imagine a national literature (the answer is that one cannot exist). I particularly appreciate poets who engage critically in the politics of community formation and make room for marginalized voices to be heard and published.
Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator,
critic, and writer. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces,
Tripwire, Touch the Donkey, Fermenting
Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated
by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada
Anthology (WLU Press, forthcoming 2018), and other places. She has
published two chapbooks, Everything
will be taken away (2018) and femme (2016), both with above/ground press.
She currently lives in Toronto, and she is completing her SSHRC-funded PhD in
Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University.