How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that
resonates?
I remember
asking my father for a notebook when I was seven years old. I would spend hours
penciling poems in that notebook – silly, trite, infantile pieces, but poems,
even then, that I took very seriously. At seven, my writing of poetry closely
coincided with my learning to speak and write in English (my family immigrated
to Canada from Ukraine when I was five). Poetry, then, coincided with my
acquisition of language. I think because of this my poems are often concerned
with language. Sometimes my poems are nothing more than a fascination with the
way words touch and resist one another on the page.
For me, the form of poetry – open, pliable, unrestrained even in
constrained forms – allows for this exploration of language. Poetry’s form also
allows for exploration of the non-linguistic: spacing, silence, visuals, etc. I
find the compression of poetry fascinating – the dance between what is said and
what is not said. A poem does not need to explain itself. It does not need to
make an argument. As the great Claudia Rankine notes, “poetry has no investment
in anything besides openness. It’s not arguing a point. It’s creating an
environment.
How does a poem begin?
Since I have already confessed my obsession with
language, it won’t come as a surprise that a poem, for me, typically begins
there: with a word or a line, which I weigh on the tongue, then on the page. A
word like thumbprint or earmarked, for example. The sounds of
these words. Occasionally, when I am lucky, I wake out of language, meaning I
have dreamt a line that I remember well enough to write down.
When I read or listen to a conversation, I sometimes wonder how people grasp
language, how they hold its slippery body, how they write or say anything. I
think that thrusts me back into the feeling of learning this language, of
looking at it with fresh eyes. I often look up words in the dictionary, even
when I know their meaning. I don’t trust myself around language. A poem begins
there as well.
Between your text and visual work, do
you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that
occasionally weave together to form something else?
My first
collection of poetry, now long out of print, was a multimedia text combining
photographs and poems. I am deeply interested in photography, because, like a
poem, a photograph has the potential to frame and open, document and question. When
I can, I continue this conversation between photographs and poems, between
visuals and text. I think the answer to your question is both: the visuals and
text are both one, extended project and separate threads. Although the visuals
and text speak their own dialects, they also speak to one another; they
collaborate; they ask similar questions. For instance, in my visual work, I am highly
attentive to light: its presence, its absence, its colour, its meanderings. I
am currently working on a collection of poems about memory. And isn’t memory
also about the play between light and dark, about what we shed light on and
what remains in the shadows?
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in
between other activities?
The answer
to this question constantly shifts for me. I sometimes keep to a daily or
weekly schedule of writing for months or even a year, but other times, especially
after finishing or (to use Paul Valéry’s term) abandoning a certain project, writing
becomes a more passive activity; I write words and lines nearly daily, but I
receive them more than I seek them out.
I once heard a writer quote Lynda Barry’s instruction to “touch the work every
day.” This can be a large or small gesture: altering a word or re-reading a
poem, for example. For many years I have kept these words on a notepad on my
laptop. When I am at my best, I am touching the work every day.
What are your favourite print or
online literary journals?
In
addition to talking about strawberries all of the time (of course! Does everyone say this?), I
admire Arc Poetry Magazine, The
/tƐmz/ Review, Parentheses, Hamilton
Arts & Letters, The Puritan, Room, CV2, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Waxwing Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review,
among others. There is so much fantastic writing being printed in literary
journals, and I am in awe of the labour and care of the editors of these
journals.
Who are some of the writers you are
reading lately that most excite you?
I just finished reading Anne Michaels’s Fugitive
Pieces, which is truly breathtaking. It’s a novel, but it feels like an
extended lyric poem. Among more recent works, I am excited by Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf
Republic, Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, Valzhyna Mort’s
Music for the Dead and Resurrected, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping
Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, Madhur Anand’s This Red Line Goes
Straight to Your Heart, and Kate Siklosi’s gorgeous visual poems in leavings.
I am also excited by the work my creative writing students produce – it is a
privilege having a front row seat to the growth of new and forthcoming poets.
A selection of her work appeared in the eighth issue.