Lauren Carter : coda

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When it is as good as I can make it at the time. When it is ready to step out the door and find a place in the world. This doesn't mean I won't lick my thumb and wipe dirt off its chin in the future but it does mean it is now its own thing.

Lauren Carter : part five

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

I return often to Mary Oliver because of her ability to weave together all aspects of the human experience with the material qualities and landscapes of the natural world without sentimentality, cliche, or staleness. Also Sylvia Plath for the courage of her bold, unflinching work and her searing imagery. I also read a lot of fiction and turn to T. C. Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Louise Erdrich.

Lauren Carter : part four

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

Poetry and metaphor are how we encode the human experience. The things that cannot be explained matter-of-factly or within prose - death, grieving, heart-break, profound joy, transcendent experience - can be given a home in the incredibly flexible form of poetry.

Last week, while backcountry camping, I witnessed a dragonfly exit its nymphal form, a miraculous happening that is so very, very strange: this ethereal creature with its glass-like green body and iridescent, glimmering wings climbs out of the plain-looking, slate-coloured, cockroach-like shell. There are even little threads, as if the dragonfly has been held inside the nymph form with a harness.

While watching this, I thought of its similarity to poetry with its ability to enrich the ordinary happenings of a human life with profound, transcendent meaning.

Lauren Carter : part three

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 am and always have been a very solitary writer. I think this comes from growing up in a small northern Ontario town, in a dysfunctional family, and spending a lot of time on my own, staring out at the blank horizon line of Lake Huron. I began writing in isolation and, to a certain degree, that's what I'm most comfortable with.

Having said that, I now live near Winnipeg where there is an incredibly vibrant, vast, and supportive community of writers, and I'm beginning to learn the value of both receiving and offering critique - although the first few drafts of anything I write are mine and mine alone, to write, revise, and tinker with in solitude.

Lauren Carter : part two

What are you working on?

2019 is a two-book year for me: my poetry collection Following Sea came out in February and my second novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, comes out in September. So I’ve been really busy with that aspect of the life. Nevertheless, I feel most sane when I’m writing so I’ve been working on a novella-trying-to-be-a-novel and am continuing to work in fits and starts on a collection of poems currently titled Furrow that explore the destruction of the tall grass prairie and my brother's suicide.

Lauren Carter : part one

Lauren Carter is the author of four books: the poetry collections Lichen Bright and Following Sea and the novels Swarm and This Has Nothing To Do With You (forthcoming September 7, 2019). Her long poem “Island Clearances” won first prize in the 2014 ROOM Poetry Competition, and she has twice been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her prose has won the Prairie Fire fiction prize and been selected for Best Canadian Stories (ed. John Metcalf), longlisted for CBC Canada Reads, and nominated for the Journey Prize and the Giller Award. She blogs regularly about writing and life at www.laurencarter.ca

Photo credit: Jason Mills

How did you first engage with poetry?

My parents both trained as high school English teachers and were readers, so we had a lot of books in my house, including a fat, clothe-bound, blue hardcover book containing the big names of The European Canon. Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, etcetera.

I would read these poems to myself, often out loud, and loved the truly romantic, moody lyricism and sense of them. The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas...

I started writing my own poems in imitation but then, one afternoon, I cracked open a book in my high school library to discover Susan Musgrave. I wish I could remember what poem of hers I read that day but the imagery floored me.

It made me realize that so much more was possible in terms of using poetry to build an evocative sense of emotion. It was almost like it gave me permission to tell the truth. The floodgates opened and my first poem was published in a now-defunct Saskatchewan literary journal located through the Writers' Market when I was 18.

Some of those early poems, written in my late teens and 20s, I still think of as my best work.