Michael Edwards : part five

How does a poem begin?

For me, a poem begins on impulse. It’s become like an automatic or involuntary response, almost synaptic like a force of energy jumping across a void. This reaction often comes as a result of either being lost in some daydream or having paid attention to some detail, image, or moment, then parsing out that detail, image or moment into a pattern of language. This is language that finds form and accumulates as scrawl in my notebook, which is simultaneously etched somewhere in my cortical matter. Then the webs of neurons get to work. The excitement is to see where things go.

Michael Edwards : part four

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

I generally pickup a book of poetry that is new to me. The novelty, the discovery of new work is often enough to jumpstart the dead battery of my creativity. I also have four individual poems pinned up above my writing desk, pieces by James Tate, Wendell Berry, David Berman and Nelson Ball, all which I know by heart. Rereading those, reading them aloud, reciting them like an incantation, each very different from the other, often gives me some shift in perspective that I need to move forward. Usually it’s simply a reminder that a poem can be many things and anything.

Michael Edwards : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Shaun Robinson’s If You Discover a Fire, D.A. Lockhart’s collection of haiku and haibun, Tùkhone and Souvanhkham Thammavongsa’s Cluster.

Michael Edwards : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Seamus Heaney has always been a strong influence on my writing, in the way the lens of poetry can focus on many subjects, like family, upbringing, myth — His work reminds me that poetry is expansive. More recently Kayla Czaga, my extraordinarily talented mentor at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio, has heavily informed the way I think about writing, specifically poetry. She's helped me to explore other chambers in the poetic dwelling and supported a sort of redevelopment of my personal writing practice. Kayla also pointed me toward reading poets like Raoul Fernandes, Curtis LeBlanc and Rob Taylor, which has felt like a school of poets with which my own work is compatible. I’m constantly finding myself nodding in a “yes, yes, yes” to their aesthetic.

Michael Edwards : part one

Michael Edwards is a poet, writer, editor and busy dad living in Vancouver, BC on traditional, unceded Musqueam territories. A graduate of The Writer’s Studio Online at SFU (2020), he has been published in various online journals including Talking Strawberries, Cypress, Cabinet of Heed and Headline Poetry. Michael is also the founding editor of Red Alder Review, an online publication focused on building connections between writers and the wider community. michaelwriter.home.blog // Twitter: @michaelwrites1

Photo credit: Erin Edwards

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I think often about what Alice Notley said regarding the difficulty of ‘starting again.’ Each poem demands its own form, its own constraints, its own patterning of language. In starting again, there is a depth of mental resources that is pulled from, in a process that is at the same time labourious and effortless. It’s this kind of a paradoxical venture to write a poem.