How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
Poetry has been with me since Shel Silverstein in grade 3. In my teens, I snuck out at night to hold candlelight readings with a friend in the forest. My English Literature 12 teacher bought me a copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience and she called me a mystic in her inscription. I took creative writing courses in my college years and was lucky enough to take a course with Roy Miki at SFU who invited Rita Wong and Freh Wah to read for the class. I was starstruck. Yet, it was not until 2019 that something awakened and I saw a local call for A Journey Across New Westminster by Word: A Poetry of Place. The poem I submitted was accepted, which encouraged me. I can’t not write now. It doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore.
For me, poetry is an outlet for otherwise inexpressible angst and awe. It has saved me from destructive behaviour by channelling my creative energy through it. So has reading. Poetry accesses emotions my brain is skilled at compartmentalizing and draws my intellect away from academic thought. Poems slow time down enough to capture moments I feel only other artists notice. I love to be in their community. Poetry teaches me how to see and reminds me how to feel.
How did publishing your first chapbook change your writing? What have the differences been since?
Perhaps identifiable to other poets, I felt that my writing had already grown by the time the chapbook was published. It was then I fully realized writing poetry is a continuous process. Because my chapbook essentially was anthologized along with Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky, the launch and the chapbook’s afterlife reified for me how wonderful it is to celebrate poetry together. We were all delighted when Kevin Spenst gave intent on blooming a spot in subTerrain’s “Chuffed About Chapbooks”. Because of the chapbook, I’ve made friendships I wouldn’t have otherwise, and to me, that is the most fulfilling.
Writing the chapbook around the theme of scale, I got my first taste of how a central focus can drive a series of poems and I am bringing that to my subsequent, full-length manuscripts.
How does a poem begin?
A poem begins when an urgent feeling arises that you must act upon to capture an ecosystem of thought-feeling-image. Anything can start a poem so long as you are listening.
Do you see your work as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
Writing poetry will always be an extended project in craft for me with room for digressions. I wonder if the poet’s work is an evolving thread of poetic concerns while allowing for experimentation, breaking tendencies, changing course, and widening scope. My full-length manuscripts—one being queried and one in process—are certainly linked because geology and physics work within them like ontologies. At the same time, I am taking several different formal approaches. Perhaps these two manuscripts will become a trilogy. I like to have a vision for where my work is going while keeping an ear out for poems and projects coming from expected places.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I set aside several hours on Fridays and most evenings if I don’t have marking and lesson planning. I work on poetry in some way every day, whether it is drafting, editing, stopping to write lines in the middle of cooking dinner, scribbling in a notebook waiting for my child to finish trampoline, or dictating something on a walk. Aside from my long power-walks (resulting in long poems), I walk over 5km every day instead of driving. It feels like writing when I’m walking.
Importantly, I reserve as much time as possible for reading poetry first. Poetry as a conversation is also important in my work. For the last year, I’ve been exchanging prompts via post with the most stellar poet, Dale Tracy. When her prompt arrives in the mail, it gives me carte blanche to set aside time to draft that night, if possible.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
The many journals I read/subscribe to is foolishly ambitious. For online, talking about strawberries all of the time is bread and butter. I love so many of the poets on the site and enjoy reading their reflections on writing, all in one place. Frequent online journals I turn to include Pinhole Poetry for its impeccable balance of image and word and the revived New Poetry in my inbox. I also read RHINO Poetry’s archive, Radar, Arc, Chestnut Review, Stone Circle Review, Terrain, and The Ex-Puritan. I miss Juniper: A Poetry Journal. Rest in peace, Lisa Young. For Canadian criticism, I check in with periodicities and The Woodlot.
As for print journals, my regulars are Geist, subTerrain, The Malahat Review, Touch the Donkey, Fiddlehead, ROOM, and CV2. Im a first reader for EVENT and sit down with each issue the day it arrives. (At their annual book sale, I picked up some issues from the 2000s that were incredible). Last, I encourage people to check out Edmonton-based Funicular to pick up a copy too. It’s a great magazine with poetry often as striking as Canada’s bigger journals.
Who are some of the artists you have engaged with lately that most excite you?
Perhaps I can start with my last two reads. Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s brilliant Crow Gulch struck me by its multiple levels of narration, perspectives—feeling and fact—around place, race and culture and the poems are still sitting with me. The unflinching observations and captivating poetics in Farah Ghafoor’s Shadow Price (read mostly on a huge rock in the middle of Alouette River) made me excited about her future work.
Within the last year or so, essential texts for me are: Hari Alluri’s Tabako on the Windowsill, Kayla Czaga’s Midway, Jane Hirshfield’s lecture “Making the Invisible Visible: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Science,” Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe, Don Domanski’s Selected Poems, Cecily Nicholson’s Crowd Source, Neil Surkan’s chapbook Ruin, and Russell Thornton’s The White Light of Tomorrow and Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain.
As
for the future, I have pre-ordered Randy Lundy’s new collection Something for the
Dark (University of Regina Press) and am incredibly impatient to get my
hands on it!
Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet and teacher. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and she has an English MA (SFU). Jessica is an editorial director for SAPP | a poetry + art zine and a director at Royal City Literary Arts Society. You can read her recent/forthcoming poems in Contemporary Verse 2, The Malahat Review, Crab Creek Review, QWERTY, and Canadian Literature. Jessica lives on the land of the Halkomelem-speaking Peoples (New Westminster, BC) with her little family and large dog. jessicaleemcmillan.com
She has work in the twelfth and fourteenth issues.