Kyla Jamieson : coda

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

The ocean is my favourite poem.

Kyla Jamieson : part five

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I have workshop burnout, so no. I think it can be detrimental to open your work up to too many sources of input. But I love to be in dialogue about ideas, and am lucky to have a partner who’s a writer and a generous reader, as well as friends who are great writers, actors, and artists. I also have an online post-concussion syndrome community that I’m deeply grateful for. I don’t know how I’d have made it to where I am without creative and disability community.

In terms of how I work poems, I typically do a lot of the writing and editing in the notes app on my phone. I’m not attached to this method, but I’m grateful that this was how I was working when I got my concussion, because since my injury my eyes have really struggled to follow a line of text across a page, and keeping my lines short on a narrow phone screen allowed me to read my own work.

Kyla Jamieson : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’m re-reading Sugarblood by Liz Bowen. It’s a gift of a book, a core text in my sick lit lineage that resonates in terms of both style and content. Bowen is a brilliant poet of the body, mind, and heart. Reading Sugarblood felt like finding secret staircases to all the towers of thought and feeling I had sensed but not yet accessed. (Clearly I am also re-reading Harry Potter.)

From Bowen’s poem “no small things”:

how can a woman tell
when her sex becomes hideous
is it in the shift
from caring
to needing care

She asks bold questions about care and gender and illness, and I love the ways her poems move.

Other books on my desk: I have to live by Aisha Sasha John, Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay, Women in Public by Elaine Kahn, An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton. I had Eileen Myles’ newest book, Evolution, out of the library but had to return it.

I often wish I could read more, but I’m also aware of how much pressure people feel to always be reading/consuming/thinking/processing the external. There’s a taint of ableism in such expectations. I’ve had difficulty reading, have been unable to read for periods of time, and wrote a lot of my book when I couldn’t read. And I just want to say, it’s okay not to read. It really is.

Kyla Jamieson : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

To echo Estlin McPhee’s response to one of your questions, I love how poetry can be almost anything. I think/hope that we have fewer ideas about what poetry can/can’t be than we do about prose. I’m thankful that it has become less of a “boys’ club” than, say, screenwriting. I think that says something about the relative accessibility of poetry—I appreciate that it can require very little time and few resources. And in terms of what poetry can accomplish, I admire its ability to hold both complex ideas and uncertainty simultaneously.

Kyla Jamieson : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Time and intuition. I tend to write quite quickly when I am writing, and by the time I reach the end of a poem it’s pretty close to its final form. Letting some time pass after finishing a draft gives me perspective and can reveal the possibility of evolution or recalibration, or bring certainty that the thing is done.

The passage of time also carries me away from the state in which a particular poem was created. I become someone new, and the poem remains the domain of the person I was, and there’s seldom anything I can do, or want to do, to it then. But time can also move in unlikely ways and shapes, in spirals or circles, and bring me back to a space or state of mind/being—for example, after finishing my book I went back and wrote a few new poems for the first section, which is mostly about gendered violence and trauma. In this case it “helped” that the patriarchy and white fragility never stop with their bullshit. It’s easy to follow their trails back to the triggered state I spent most of my twenties in, and write from that place, though it’s not a pleasant one.

Kyla Jamieson : part one

Kyla Jamieson is a poet and editor who lives and relies on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work placed third in the 2018 Metatron Prize for Rising Authors and was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, The Vault, GUTS, Peach Mag, The Maynard, Plenitude, The Account, and others. She is the author of Kind of Animal, a poetry chapbook about the aftermath of a disabling concussion. Body Count, her début collection of poems, is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2020. Find her on instagram as @airymeantime or on a rock next to a river.

Photo credit: Jeremy Andruschak

What are you working on?

I’m working through my editor’s notes on my first full-length collection of poems, Body Count, which is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in Spring 2020. I spent years writing and editing the book, and feel like these final steps “should” be easy in comparison, but they’re not.

I’ve been feeling the inertia and anxiety of disability-amplified financial precarity (being sick & broke) more intensely than usual over the past four months, and it’s possible that everything is feeling more difficult than it otherwise would. Or maybe self-doubt is a normal part of the process? I’m trying to think of doubt the way Ocean Vuong described it in an instagram story: “it means u respect what ur trying to achieve.”