How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that still resonates?
Probably like so many others, I came to poetry through school, with rhymes at first then more conventional poems later. What still resonates for me is the alchemy of words, how you can take ordinary words, the kind that you hear spoken every day, and re-arrange them so they speak something new to you, and to others.
How did publishing your first book change your writing? What have the differences been since?
Publishing a first book affirms there are others who think that what you write should be preserved in print. The difference is that you can see yourself more as a poet than as an apprentice to poetry, though we remain apprentices long after the fact.
How does a poem begin?
Poems begin many ways. Sometimes it is an impression or memory that you want commemorated in print, or an image that you want to build words around, or reading a poem and wanting to use the energy that the poem generates in you for fuel.
Do you see your work as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
Looking back, I see that certain ideas draw me in and generate their own poems. For example, Viewing Tom Thomson, A Minority Report, was my focus on Tom Thomson as a painter and what it means to be Canadian when viewed through the eyes of a visible minority. Shawn Micallef, in the newest edition of his book, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, noted that my book deals with the urbanization of the myth of Tom Thomson as a symbol of the Canadian wilderness. Toronto commuters ride the Yonge Street subway downtown and, just north of the Rosedale Station, pass right by The Studio Building where Thomson had a shack and painted. Another example of finding a focus is my collection The Tantramar Re-Vision which was inspired by the literary landscape of poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack. My next book, Evacuations, coming out from University of Alberta Press in Spring 2026, again coalesces around one topic: the internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War Two.
Have you a schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I try to set aside time each day to write though it does not mean that I create poems every day during that time. Joy Kogawa recently said it wonderfully: she always shows up though sometimes the poetry may not, but at least she was there on her part. I do find it much easier to write once I find a specific focus.
What are your favourite print of online literary journals?
Of course, talking about strawberries all the time, but I would also put a good word in for Grain Magazine, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Ricepaper Magazine, The Fiddlehead and PRISM International.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
This
list is always changing but I think of the poetry collections Forest of
Noise by Mosab Abu Toha, Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris, and The
Size of Paradise by Dale Martin Smith. Each is a haunting collection that holds
the reader with its eloquence and depths.
Kevin Irie won Grain Magazine’s 2024 poetry contest, took second prize in Prairie Fire’s 2024 poetry contest, third prize in The New Quarterly’s 2024 poetry contest, and Honourable Mention in Grain’s 2024 Hybrid Contest for Experimental Writing. His book, Viewing Tom Thomson: A Minority Report was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and The Toronto Book Award. His most recent, The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) was picked by the CBC as one of the Spring Poetry Books 2021 and by Quill and Quire Magazine as part of their 2021 Summer Reading Guide. He is in the anthology The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Press, US, 2025). His next book is Evacuations (University of Alberta Press), due out in Spring 2026. He lives in Toronto.
He
has work in the sixth and thirteenth issues.