An interview with Matt Robinson

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

There are a number of poets I really enjoy and who have – in one way or another – influenced the way I write. Likely too many to list, but I will try. I’ll also immediately think of others after the fact. I love John Thompson for his stripped down, almost sinewy lyrical attention and use of metaphor. I really appreciate Sue Goyette’s longer line lengths, especially in her earlier poems. Gerard Manlet Hopkins – yes, a Victorian – is also a favourite because of his play with lanaguge and image and sound. I also love Plath’s confessional tone. And Wallace Stevens’ almost cool analytical intelligence is also a strong nfluence for me. Then there are all the current folks out there who are writing amazing poems who influence me with each new book I pick up from my local indie bookstore.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you begain publishing full-length collections?

Not really? What I can say is that I’ve come to realize that I’m really – at my core -- a poet of individual poems, as opposed to a poet of larger collections. Aside from my very first book – which had its genesis as an MA thesis, and my one collection comprised entirely of hockey poems, I simply chug along writing individual poems that eventually get bundled up like a bunch of scattered sticks into a critical mass long enough for a collection. I come up with a poem here and there and gradually a critical mass starts to accrue. I think that sort of thought process and the nature of my writing is occasional in at least one sense of the word? After a while, I find there’s almost some kind of unifying theme or aspect of a certain group of poems that at least loosely hold them together as a “collection”.

You sit on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead. Why do you see such roles as important, and what have you learned through the process?

It’s mostly about community and conversation and fostering those two things. I’ve been involved with The Fiddlehead in various roles for years now and it’s amazing what you get to see and read. It’s also neat to follow folks from initial submissions to journals, to publication, to having collections out and such.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Mentors are always key, whether explicit or implicit. It’s tough to target just one person, but I’ll go with Ross Leckie. He has had a huge influence on me. When I was at UNB, he was a more senior poet I looked up to not only for his rigorous attention to and understanding of metaphor, but also for his incredible dedication to building up poets and poetry communities. He’s also really generous in helping poets become who they want to be, voice-wise, as opposed to trying to mould them into something they aren’t? Ross has had a massive impact on poetry here in Atlantic Canada and across the country as far as I am concerned.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

All of them, really! There are so many great voices out there, doing incredible work in so many ways. It’s hard to pick one. But I’ll stay hyper local: Annick MacAskill is a fabulous poet who just released another collection with Gaspereau Press: Shadow Blight. But there are others, too, like Nick Selig, a younger guy who hasn’t really even published a chapbook or book yet, who are also making great poems. Folks should just read as widely and as often as possible.

An interview with Meghan Kemp-Gee

Meghan Kemp-Gee recently published a prose chapbook called What I Meant to Ask. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Animal in the Room, is forthcoming from Coach House Books in Spring 2023.  She also co-created Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee. She currently lives somewhere between North Vancouver BC and Fredericton NB. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I majored in English and French literature in college, and I always enjoyed reading poetry. But I didn't seriously consider writing it myself until long after I graduated... I don't remember any particular thing that got me started. Then, like now, my instinct to write poems simply came from wanting to write something I might want to read. I guess I started to write exactly when I felt like I could write something I'd be interested in reading.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

The poets that I'm most aware of as major influences are the English Renaissance poets I studied in college, especially Shakespeare, Donne, Wyatt, Sidney, and Herbert. That was the first poetry I read seriously, and studied seriously, and loved seriously. I feel very nerdy admitting this! But I think those 16th- and 17th-century guys are always really with me, because they were the first thing I ever read that showed me how poetry works on the human body, how poems could work like little rooms or little machines.

Louise Glück is definitely one of my most important influences, because of what she's taught me about the lyric mode, its geometry and possibilities that I want to spend my life exploring. I have learned a lot from John Ashbery and Claudia Rankine, too, especially from the fascinating things they do with each poem's audience and speaker, the "you" and "I" inside each poem.

In some ways I feel like all my work is about influence. In one way or another, most of my poems are conversations or ekphrastics or "afters" -- my secret imaginary communications with what I've read. It's one of my favorite ways to write.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing a chapbook, or through working on your forthcoming full-length collection?

Yes, a huge difference! Three years ago, I was very poem-focused. I wanted to make each poem a perfect unit that could stand alone -- or that should stand alone. And that's still true! It's still one of the things I love most about reading and writing poetry! I'm still that poem-focused person, as a reader and a writer. I love that you can come to a poem and experience it like a perfect little world, or like a room you can come into and out of, shutting the world out.

However, writing The Animal in the Room really did change my practice. It was my first sequence of poems that was written intentionally as a sequence. But now that I've written that way once, I've never really stopped.

That's how I'm writing nowadays. I like my little projects -- little groups of poems that are in dialogue with each other. My new work since I moved back to Canada in 2021 is all sequences: two new chapbooks and a new full-length manuscript in progress. I even went back and revised all of my older poems (all the stuff I wrote before and during my MFA) into three chapbooks, then added new poems to mould them into cohesive sequences. (That's actually where my chapbook What I Meant to Ask came from!)

Has co-creating and working on a comic strip affected the ways in which you approach working on poems? Has one anything to do with the other?

Oh, boy! This is something that I could really talk your ear off about, because in my other-other life, I'm a composition specialist... and I did my MA research about how writing comics impacts your skills and knowledge in other kinds of writing!

My interest in this area of composition pedagogy came from my personal experience writing comics -- from what I already knew about what comics can teach us as writers in many different media and forms.

So the short answer is... YES! I think comics writing has influenced me hugely as a poet. Comics teaches you to think constantly about how text and image work together dynamically. Comics also (perhaps more than any other medium!) depends on the reader and cartoonist working collaboratively to make meaning happen. For these reasons, I love thinking about poems as comics.

(tl;dr: This is one of my favourite soapbox topics! Poets should read comics theory! You will learn a lot!)

Comics has also taught me about how to work collaboratively with other artists. Scriptwriting requires efficient translation between technical description and stylistic narration -- and between image and text. These are very useful skills for poets, in my opinion, because our whole job is to figure out how to make the un-word-able or un-worded into words somehow.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Yes. Mentorship has been absolutely crucial to my work. I've been blessed with wonderful teachers and mentors throughout my life. My college advisor David Sofield introduced me to a particular canon of modern writers -- Bishop, Frost, Merrill, Walcott, Wilbur -- poets who were in conversation with the centuries-old poetry I was studying at that time. I thought he was teaching me how to read poetry, but he was also teaching me how to write it, even though I didn't know it at the time.

The novelist Richard Bausch was the person who convinced me to do an MFA and professionalize my practice. Most importantly, he was the first person to call me a writer to my face and tell me I was good enough to actually throw myself into this. That changed my life. And it's a good reminder to me about what mentorship actually looks like. It's really not so much about teaching someone a technique, or telling them to move this line or that comma. Real mentorship can also be reading someone's work like a colleague, like it's something that deserves to be taken seriously in the world. That's what it can look like.

I've had amazing opportunities in graduate school to study with some of the best poets and poetry teachers you can find anywhere: Victoria Chang, Martin Nakell, Carolyn Forché, and especially Anna Leahy, who directs the creative writing program at Chapman University. They've each been crucial to my work at crucial times, showing me what I need to be reading and thinking about to do what I am trying to do! And now I'm doing my PhD at the University of New Brunswick, I'm working under the mentorship of amazing poet-educators like Sue Sinclair and Triny Finlay. I can't say enough good stuff about how inspiring the literary community is here in Fredericton. I love what I'm writing right now, and I feel like this community is a huge part of that.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Since 2017, I've been obsessed by Rainie Oet, who writes these perfect poems about triangles, porcupines, and lyric personas. Everyone should go get obsessed with her, too.

I also just had the opportunity to hear Christine Wu read a poem called "ANCESTRY.COM HAS NOTHING ON ME" at UNB's Poetry Weekend. It's a poem about family, history, and multivocality, and so she used the voice recorder on her phone to produce multiple voices as she read. It was a seamless, thought-provoking performance, and I've been thinking about it ever since!

An interview with Toast Wong

Toast Wong is an activist, engineer and butch idiot living in Toronto, Ontario. Growing up on the Credit River, she writes about diaspora and gender, divorce and science with a lack of regard for her physical integrity. Sometimes, late at night, you can see her drive like an asshole in the West End.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I've always liked writing in high school, but never really spent the time to hone my craft or anything like that. I played in a bunch of bands that went nowhere, which I think helped me figure out the mechanics of metre and rhyme, but I took a very long hiatus while I was studying engineering.

Being a butch transgender woman makes you tough to the world, I think, because it keeps throwing things at you until you're whittled down. I try to keep those scraps. The first thing I ever tried to get published was a eulogy for my friend Maia, another butch transgender lesbian, and I try to keep her in mind when I'm writing.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

For a poet I'm not very well read at all. I loved Good Bones by Maggie Smith, and I like Richard Siken. I'm split on how I find alt-lit poets like Tao Lin because I'm not a fan of that sort of navel-gazing, but it was formative for me. I find a lot of inspiration in mathematics textbooks, in punk music and political literature. The last thing I read was Jose Maria Sison's The Guerrilla is a Poet, which is a collection of poems written in political exile from the Philippines, which I think is a very different approach to diaspora writing.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing in literary journals?

In terms of approach, I sit on individual poems for much longer now. I don't really know what I'm trying to say in my poetry yet, so I write as much as I possibly can and try to group my poems together by vague themes (bodies in motion, history as it passes through the world). Then I think about how it fits in with the rest of the things I'm trying to say.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I really really do not know what I'm doing, and I think eventually that will catch up to me until someone actually tells me how this poetry thing actually works. There are friends who I probably couldn't have done this without – ML Gamboa and Aeon Ginsberg are two poets who have encouraged me, helped me through submissions and generally entertained my nonsense. Tea Williams, my ex-partner shows me lots of poems and gives me pointers on how I can improve a lot, and I'm very indebted to them.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I've been enjoying Guy Elston's work and Matthew Walsh's These are not the potatoes of my youth.

An interview with Jessica Lee McMillan

Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet, educator and civil servant. She has an MA in English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinhole Poetry, Gap Riot Press, Antilang, Blank Spaces, Pocket Lint (gnurr), Red Alder Review, Dream Pop Journal, SORTES, Lover’s Eye Press, Willows Wept Review and others.

She is a member of the Royal City Literary Arts Society and associate member of The League of Canadian Poets. Recently, she won first place for poetry in the 2022 RCLAS Write On! Contest. She has read her work for audiences in BC and the US. A first generation Canadian, Jessica is a settler who lives in New Westminster, British Columbia on stolen and unsurrendered lands of the QayQayt First Nation.

Website: https://www.jessicaleemcmillan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaLeeMcM

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I wrote poetry as any proper gothy teen, took creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, put out a zine in grad school, but got waylaid by the production of discourse on writing. I struggled with fears of idealism, sentimentality and overriding angst in my writing. My voice often felt bigger than I was ready for. While I have always had creative outlets such as painting, I did not write every day until 2019, when I submitted a poem to an anthology commissioned by New Westminster's Poet Laureate at the time, Alan Hill. Accumulation of life experience, ownership of my voice and desperation for creative discipline to counter the proverbial grind finally aligned and I simply could not stop writing after that. The impulse to write is existential. Once I turned on that switch and realized how much I could channel through poetry--sans academia--it became the lost language I would begin to learn speaking again.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Many of my poems are ekphrastic, particularly in response to music and sometimes film. I seek writing on music as poetry/poetry as music whether it is Langston Hughes, a physicist such as Stephon Alexander or John Coltrane--recently branded among Blue Note's "tone poets". I am not looking for metaphors but proof of interconnection--proof of free jazz in arranged lines. I am interested in ekphrasis as not only a response to art but as a rhetorical device where the poem becomes what it is responding to. I am querying my first chapbook, which looks at theories and etymologies of scale for its poetics and so many of the poems are ekphrasis on notions of scale.

Prose writers Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison have informed my poetic fascination with the body and text.

As for specific poets, the Modernists from Mina Loy to Dylan Thomas have an impact on my work but reading Blake set my world on fire at a young age. I have said a few times that I hope to be both Blake and Pound and find a way to be exultant and grounded. And the wonderful thing is, poetry itself inspires me to write because it can evade polarity.

I have special reverence for Fred Wah, bill bisset, Ray Hsu, Adrienne Rich, Randy Lundy, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Catherine Owen--and recently Liz Howard, Billy-Ray Belcourt and George Elliott Clarke--but I cannot read enough contemporary poetry. My list grows daily.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing in literary journals?

I encounter the instruction "send us what you love, not what you think we will love" in submission guidelines, which speaks to the writers who overthink sometimes impossible prediction on editorial taste. I have stayed my course in how I write individual poems because they range in tone, subject and approach from absurd, pastoral and experimental to vispo, concrete, and form poetry. I tend to let the poem be itself and look for a journal where it may fit.

I have to think first about what a poem wants and any audience comes in the editing stages. When a literary journal has been gracious enough to give feedback, I keep it in mind for valuable information about legibility to audience.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I could not evolve without mentorship. In the last several years, I have navigated much of this solo and it is easy to reach a plateau. I took a poetry course last fall with Kevin Spenst that helped me explore many techniques with more intensity. His playful, clever and well-read direction changed my trajectory.

This spring, I was also honoured to work with Ray Hsu who had such a remarkable way of gently allowing me to be more receptive to how my poems move, astutely guiding me on my reservations, assumptions and considerations of form. Their reflections on artistic vision and ordering the manuscript were foundational to understanding my poems on the individual and collective level. I don't think many poets are looking for compliments but want to be seen. Sometimes when we are on track, we don't know it due to subjective proximity. Dr. Hsu gifted me observations that pull the very threads that the poems articulate.

I am also grateful to become more connected to writing communities because I want to grow precisely in order to reach and support the writing community.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

A. Gregory Frankson is a poet has done a lot for spoken word in Canada over the decades and has recently edited an anthology missing from the CanLit canon: the absolutely essential AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poet. https://www.africanthology.ca

An interview with Charlotte Jung

Charlotte Jung is a concrete poet and experimental playwright. She’s originally from Stockholm, Sweden, and today she divides her time between the Stockholm countryside and her adopted hometown Chicago. Charlotte’s debut collection C was published in 2019, and she has since then published four chapbooks; MBRYO (Puddles of Sky Press, 2019), (SEED) (Timglaset Editions, 2020), HOLE BEING (NoPress, 2021) and ABCDE (Trombone, 2021). Please see www.charlottejungwriter.com for more information about Charlotte and her writing.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?
My wife is a poet and she greatly inspired me to start writing. I had been reading and commenting on her manuscripts for some years, and this sparked something in me.
            The creative act is a strange thing. For me the writing comes in waves, I can’t force or steer it, and in some ways every poem is a gift. 

Given you work in text and visual mediums, how do the two sides of your writing interact? How did you begin with visual poems at all?
For a poem of mine to truly take form and enter into its own being, the meaning/content of the poem has to be in correspondence with its graphic expression. At times I find this creative channel/condition to be quite narrow, too constricting, but at the same time it’s this interaction of language and image that gives birth to the poem.
            The visual form developed gradually. When I started out writing I wrote super short poems, often just a sentence or two, or some word pairings. It was not until the visual component entered into the text that it fully blossomed. At that time I had not yet come into contact with concrete or visual poetry, so I had no idea that this was an established literary genre.             

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?
In the beginning I wrote almost in isolation. I had no idea that what I was aiming at, and that which was slowly developing, was called concrete poetry. Not to mention that there were many other writers creating in this hybrid form of poetry. My first contact with something similar was when Primary Information published Aram Saroyan’s coffee coffee in 2010, and a Swedish literary journalist mentioned it in an article. Reading Saroyan gave me much needed validation. I had by then been rejected several times with the motivation that “it was too little” or considered as “art” rather than literature. 

What do you see as the difference between your visual work and your work in experimental drama?
That’s such an interesting question. To me both of these forms experiment with and disrupt structure. The absurd drama, in how it (among other things) doesn’t conform to “reality’s” time and space bound conditions, and concrete poetry in the way the text goes beyond the structure of langauge and enters the image.
            I would say that the biggest difference for me between the two forms is that my poetry comes from a silent, still source, whereas the drama pushes forth from a whole world of talking and moving highly energetic energies. 

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you begain publishing full-length collections?
So far I’ve only written one full-length collection, C, this was also my first publication (self-published in 2019). In C the poems were tightly interrelated, and followed one after the other, almost by necessity. After C this changed, and I started to explore and work with the poems more like independent entities, each poem creating a world of its own. Sometimes they come to me in themes, which then creates some form of narrative. These suites have then been published as chapbooks. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if another full length collection will come my way. 

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?
Like I mentioned above, a large part of my writing has been done in isolation, it’s only just recently that I’ve entered into this amazing community of visual poets around the world. It’s been a great inspiration and I’m so grateful for all the exchange and opportunity this has given me.
             When it comes to support I’d like to mention Amanda Earl. She was one of my first contacts internationally, and she was very supportive and encouraging. I’m also very grateful to the Swedish graphic artist Lina Nordenström. She spotted my work via my chapbook (SEED), (Timglaset Editions), and has offered to teach me letterpress printing, an amazing opportunity and something I believe will be truly inspirational. Especially when it comes to developing my writing further toward art – which I think in some ways may be the poems’ true form and expression. Several years back I saw an exhibition of the feminist artist Sarah Lucas’ work at Tate Modern, something I later realized gave me my guiding vision for my poetry writing: “There has to be a way to communicate in language, as powerfully and instantenously as she does in her art.”

Can you name a poet you think should be recieving more attention?
I’m right now, together with my wife, in the middle of translating the exquisite minimalist poetry of the Canadian poet Nelson Ball. He has such presence in his writing, and a wonderful feel for how to combine a detailed description of something, on the surface to be considered as ordinary, with a profound eternal subject matter. When Ball’s writing is at its best, it’s truly genius. When we started with this project we were really surprised to see that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page on Nelson Ball.

 

An interview with Monty Reid

Monty Reid is a poet based in Ottawa. His books include Garden (Chaudiere), The Luskville Reductions (Brick) and Crawlspace (Anansi) as well as recent chapbooks from above/ground press, corrupt press, postghost press and others.  Segments from his current project, The Lockdown Elegies, have appeared in Train, The Quarantine Review, Noon, Guest and other journals in print and online.  He is the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa's international poetry festival.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I've never been able to figure out what exactly got me started.  I was a happy, if sometimes lonely kid.  My father died when I was very young, and we were poor.  There weren't many books around but I read everything in the house.  Still, I was more interested in baseball and hockey.  I wrote my first poem in high school, trying to impress Yvonne, the girl who sat in front of me in English class.  Didn't work, and I should have learned.  I got into law school at the University of Alberta but discovered that the only classes that held my attention were literature, and I soon switched out of Law into English.  Some profs there (Doug Barbour and Bert Almon mostly) encouraged me to write.  I had a few publications early on (Nodding Onion, White Pelican, Grain) that let me think writing would be a sustaining interest.  But I have never seen it as a career. or myself as a professional poet.  I just see writing as one of the most satisfying ways of engaging with the world.  Music would be a close second.  And the world, with all its wonder and its outrage, is always there.

What keeps me going is seeing the fresh and provocative work of other poets.  For each, it's a way of thinking through the world.  Maybe I can still learn something. 

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Influence isn't a strong enough word.  I borrow, steal, extend, respond.  And there are so many.  I've long loved WH Auden and (particularly the later) William Carlos Williams.  Bob Kroetsch, bp nichol, Phyllis Webb, were all early influences. Bob Hass, with whom I once had a very strange breakfast in Lake Tahoe, helped me calm my line down and Leslie Scalapino showed me a lot about hesitation. I continue to admire the passion and slow-burn fury in Erin Moure's work, but also the sustained interest in translation, which has become significantly more important to me over the years. M Nourbese Philip's Zong was an eye-opener. I was influenced as well by the social committment and generosity of spirit in Tom Wayman. I'm in awe of the constant production of rob mclennan. There are so many more.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem over the years? How has this evolved?

I almost never approach the individual poem any more. They always seem to hang out in bunches anyway, like teenagers at the mall. A poem always seems to be a means of exploration, the trails lead off somewhere else, the options open up, and as I've gotten older I'm more at ease with chasing down some of those options with less urgency than before.  You realize, eventually, that you can't chase them all.

You seem to favour the extended lyric. What is it about the longer form that attracts you?

There's a kind of loose coherence there that attracts me. The longer form has a bit more carrying capacity.  It can go off in different, sometimes unpredictable directions (see previous question) and the links that hold it together can be looser or tighter, as required. I don't believe the self, that lyric generator, can be lost completely without serious dysfunction, but its hard edges can soften, and it can be redistributed in various configurations and concentrations in multiple locales, which is something the extended form makes available. Most of my recent sequences feature this constantly redistributed self.

You were the managing editor of Arc Poetry Magazine., as well as the current artistic director of VERSeFest. Why are these roles important, and what have you learned through the process?

And long before that, I edited NeWest ReView (for a year) and started The Camrose Review (with Wade Bell and Robert Kroetsch), put out crudely-made chapbooks as Sidereal Press, helped found the Writers' Guild of Alberta, and helped establish VERSeOttawa.  I believe in doing the work that makes a community of writers possible. That work can take many forms and can be approached in many different ways but I do believe that 'community' is profoundly important to the well-being of writers (and others). There are those who distrust the notion of community, but most of them are just part of different communities.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I've never had a mentor per se. But there are many who have helped along the way, from university profs to poet friends to patient partners, for which I continue to be grateful.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Sylvia Legris. Rob Winger. AnnHarte Baker.

An interview with Jay Besemer

Jay Besemer is the author of the poetry collections Men & Sleep (Meekling Press, forthcoming 2022), Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2020), The Ways of the Monster (KIN(D) Texts and Projects/The Operating System, 2018), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Chelate (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) and Telephone (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013). He is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Jay was included in the groundbreaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter @divinetailor.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I began as a small child, trying to emulate the science fiction stories I loved. I began reading spontaneously at a very early age (a neurological event/arrangement called hyperlexia) so by the time I was 8 or 10 I was reading at an adult level and attempting very ambitious sci-fi tales I wasn’t able to follow through with. (I still can’t!) I also kept journals and notebooks sporadically until age 13, when I began a steady journal practice I still maintain. My poetry emerged from that journaling experience at about 14. I remember suddenly shifting the prose in the notebook to enjambed lines and stanzas, but I don’t recall why it emerged in that way.

What keeps me going? Living my life in the world, deeply involved with it and its beings. The need to write is a constant in my life, but one thing that’s been vital in continuing is to let myself not-write for long periods of time. I have to let my work and my process change, especially as my physical circumstances change, and sometimes this requires a break of a year or more on certain types of writing, or on certain projects, so as to give the changes a chance to happen, to catch up to myself as it were. It’s how I stay loving, if that makes sense.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Oh boy. I always put Tristan Tzara at the head of lists like this, but I am also connected to the other Dada and Surrealist poets. I read a lot of traditional Japanese poets as a teen/early adult, especially Basho and Ikkyu. In college when I first began writing prose poems I read Merwin’s versions very avidly; I’ve loved him since then. More recently I find myself more engaged in relation (I mean both work & author in conversation) with my peers and other contemporary poets, as my working modes continue to change with me. I think this is what’s most important to emphasize about my poetics: it’s a relationship, always present and always changing, more a mutual engagement than a unidirectional flow. I have always favored poetry in translation, as you can tell from my initial influences, and I’ve done some translation myself. Now that I’m very secure in my poetics, in what I do and how, I find that there is more of a process of mutual recognition than influence happening when I connect with other poets/poetries.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem over the years? How has this evolved?

The individual poem...not really. My process relies on an attention to the needs of each piece/projec itself as it forms, so no matter how it originates (from a source text or from an interior urge) the individual poem communicates its needs and I help it form. That’s the best way I can put it. The approach is always permission and attention, making space for the poem to happen. What’s changed over my decades of work is the confidence with which I can make that space, and the trust I have in both myself and my work to honor our needs.

There’s more to say about this but it ties in to your next question too, so consider these two parts linked.

Lately you’ve been working on erasures. What do you see as the difference between your visual work and erasures, compared to your work in the lyric mode?

I’d rather address the similarity here, for many reasons. I do countless visually-oriented erasures, for example the ones you’ve been featuring. But some of my erasure projects result in another text, a book of prose poetry (like A New Territory Sought) or stanzaic poetry like Crybaby City or the forthcoming Men & Sleep. The important thing here is that both types of erasure products (book or image) result from the same originating process. That process also relies on the same attentiveness to the project’s needs--whether a whole grouping or long-poem book project, or an individual or serial image derived from painting or drawing over a source text.

That connection also exists between these erasures and my other work (I make video pieces and film photography, as well as collage--and collage-poetry--and other visual art forms). In other words, when I work on things, I do not impose any preconception of the precise form or content of what I make. For instance, if I choose a source text for an erasure project, I am not initially sure what kind of erasure it will be. That gets revealed along the way. I have just completed the second draft of a chapbook-length erasure project based on an antique sewing machine manual. Though that source includes the kind of illustration that often sparks a great visual erasure, it soon became clear that I was uncovering & co-creating--with the text--a compelling piece that needed to remain word-only. When I record video and audio to use in a piece, I don’t have a final form in mind. The video forms itself around what the raw segments suggest when I revisit them in the editing program. Same with my collages--both types of work take a long time, typically characterized by lots of poking and shifting, repeated engagements, and then some kind of unpredictable something! that unites and gives life to the whole.

Honestly, this happens with the unsourced or interior-sourced poems and prose as well. Basically everything emerges out of the same root approach, but some of the specific processes differ from project to project.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I grew up in Buffalo, New York. It’s a big poetry city, but in a sort of “town/gown” way. I was more of the “town” variety, not being connected to the poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. One of the major benefits I had, though, was the example of family friends and friends’ family members who were poets. I can’t remember when I first started going to poetry readings, which tells you how far back it was! Anyway, it was vital for me to see that there were grownups who took this stuff seriously and who were making poetry and sharing it with audiences. Also, when I was a teen, I took part in a youth workshop led by Jimmie Canfield at Just Buffalo Literary Center. That place was then pretty new (this was the mid-1980s), and Jimmie’s now moved on to another world, but I think her instruction and example offered me my first chance and my first tools for committing to my poetry, as a lifeway, and as something I could offer the world.

Truthfully my main mentors now are my friends and peers, other contemporary poets, with whom I collaborate and converse and work toward a better world. I’m also lucky (and old) enough to have a chance to informally mentor some younger/newer poets. Now that my teaching days are ten years behind me it seems it’s paradoxically easier to do that!

Can you name a poet you think should be recieving more attention?

I resist singling out an individual because there are so many undervalued poets! These days I can only talk about where one should search, and for what/whom. So:

●      new/young poets publishing in tiny magazines or on tiny presses;

●      new/young poets self-publishing, streaming or doing open mikes;

●      Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Muslim and Arab poets, particularly Palestinian, African & African-diasporic & from other colonially-impacted cultures;

●      working-class and poor poets;

●      trans poets;

●      disabled poets;

●      poetry in translation;

●      poetry emerging from an experimental process or taking a “difficult” form;

●      poets whose lives involve multiple intersections and variations of those above cultures, experiences, backgrounds and circumstances.

Those are the poets who are doing the most exciting work, and they all need more attention.

An interview with Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson (he/they) was born and raised in Scarborough, and they currently live in Ottawa, the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation. He is the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and his previous chapbooks include Listen, Partisan! (Frog Hollow Press, 2016) and Gravenhurst (above/ground press, 2019). @ceeeejohnson

Photo credit: Nicolai Gregory

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

Writing began and continues to begin, for me, with listening. In high school, listening was mostly music: emo, folk, musicals, R&B, metal, almost anything. As I've aged, listening has expanded to people and places. I try to listen to as many perspectives as I can, especially those that are different than my own. I try to listen to the news, listen to the universe, listen to my body. I still listen to emo, too.

I read a few of other writers' interviews with Train before taking a stab at my own answers, and I liked Conyer Clayton's response about what keeps her going: "the most crucial work of life; growth". It doesn't work for everyone, but I enjoy the times when writing feels like working through something, whether it's a concept or a desire or a real or imagined problem or concern. Writing can be an act of mindfulness, for yourself and the world around you. I think writing about a situation or an idea can really help you with understanding your reactions to or interaction with that situation or idea. Probably everyone could do with some more understanding and mindfulness.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Firstly, some individual poems/books of poetry that have stuck with me or that I return to often: "Naked Poems" by Phyllis Webb, Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg, A Pretty Sight by David O'Meara, Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, Otter by Ben Ladouceur, Thou by Aisha Sasha John, and the long poem "Ok Cupid" by Major Jackson. I could go on, but all of the books/poems I've just mentioned are probably the most important poetry-related things that live rent-free in my head.

The other way to answer this question would be to talk about the poets I've met who have left a lasting impression, and I think I'll get into this in a later question.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem, now that you’ve published a couple of chapbooks?

There probably isn't a wrong way to approach a poem, and I certainly haven't felt that my approach has changed since having poems published in chapbook form. Some poems start with a line or an image, and some poems start with an idea or a message. Sometimes poems are written for a larger project, and sometimes a poem is a one-off. The writing is the important part.

You are currently the managing editor of Arc Poetry Magazine. Why was this important, and what have you been learning through the process?

I am so grateful to be a part of Arc, for the people I get to work with and the people I have the privilege to publish and highlight in the pages of the magazine. Working for a literary magazine is incredibly rewarding for me because writers—regardless of whether they've published multiple books or if they're getting their first chance at publishing in a magazine—are generally very excited about having their work included in a publication. I get it! Having your work in a publication is always an honour, and I'm always honoured to be a part in others' publications. I believe that there are a diversity of voices that deserve to be heard, and working for Arc means I can play a small role in helping promote stories from BIPOC writers, deaf and disabled writers, LGBTQ+ writers, women and gender non-conforming writers.

That all said, I am a White, able-bodied, cis-man, and, because of this massive privilege I carry, I have learned and continue to learn that I have huge blind spots. I am working at being more aware of my biases and prejudices, both learned and internalized from being raised in a patriarchal capitalist society. Being critical of ourselves and of the structures around us is so important, in my opinion. There is growing diversity in the pages of literary magazines and in publishers' catalogues, but there are still too few Black and Indigenous people with titles of "publisher" and "editor-in-chief" and "managing editor". Sharing and promoting diverse stories is important, and I am finding it very rewarding to give Black and transgender editors a platform to solicit work and release special issues of Arc that highlight the poets in their communities. At the same time I know that so much more important work needs to be done.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I've never taken a university creative writing course or taken part in anything more than a one-off workshop/writers' circle, so I don't consider anyone as a mentor to my work in any official form. That said, Collett Tracey formed In/Words Magazine & Press at Carleton University in 2001 and, while I wasn't there at the beginning, I cannot give enough credit to Collett and the community of writers around In/Words for assisting my development as a writer during my time at Carleton. To this day I very much look up to In/Words poets who came before me, particularly jesslyn delia smith, Bardia Sinaee, Leah Mol, Justin Million, Jeff Blackman, and Cameron Anstee. Also, although I didn't take any creative writing courses in university, there were still transformative poetry courses with Andrew Wallace and Esther Post and especially Brenda Vellino, who was the supervisor for my Masters research project.

When I first started working with Arc, Monty Reid was the Managing Editor of the magazine and I very much continue to look up to him as a poet and organizer. In fact, I look to lots of writers in Ottawa as role models: Frances Boyle for her goal of receiving 100 rejections every year; rob mclennan for his commitment and all of his small press projects; Shery Alexander Heinis for her 5AM writers club and her engagement with the community; nina jane drystek for her always-surprising performance and experimentation. There are so many others I could mention here, but there is one more important person I would be remiss to leave out of any conversation about my development as a writer: Ashley Hynd. Ashley is a very kind, thoughtful, vulnerable, talented, and community-minded person, and I wouldn't be the writer I am today if I hadn't met Ashley a few years ago.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I've dropped perhaps too many names in my previous answers... so I'll keep that up. I'm gonna bend the rules and say that all of my poetry collective pals from VII should be receiving more attention: Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Margo LaPierre, and Helen Robertson are all exceptional poets. I am so lucky to get to write with them, and any attention that these individuals get for their writing isn't enough, in my opinion!

An interview with Robert Priest

Robert Priest is the author of seventeen books of poetry. His words have been debated in the legislature, posted in the Transit system, quoted in the Farmer's Almanac, turned into a hit song and sung on Sesame street. His latest recording of songs and poems BAAM! is available on Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. robertpriest.org

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old. That was under my own steam. I wrote occasional poems throughout public school both as assignments and just because I enjoyed it. I also attempted to write novels. In my teens I wrote dark satire influenced by John Lennon‘s books and love poems and letters influenced by love which I was constantly in. I always knew that I would be a writer and that was a steady vector through my life. It was a certainty. My plan when I finished high school was to go to University of Waterloo get a math degree, go into law, go into politics, become Prime Minister of Canada and then write after that. But I did four months of math and when I got onto my co-op job between terms I started to write in earnest and didn’t go back to school. I’ve been lucky enough to keep at it ever since – poems, songs, novels, plays, aphorisms, and a fair number of newspaper articles mostly for Now magazine. Whatever it was that initially made me certain I would be a writer is what keeps me going. I get a lot of joy out of writing. I do also have to credit the ancestors who envisioned and fought for the socialism that has helped to fund me. And in the present day the people of Canada through their agencies the various arts councils which have made the financial aspect of it a little less onerous.  One other thing – I lived for at least a couple of decades at the Bain co-op where I had a rent subsidy. When my income went down my rent went down. As during those years I was supporting a family I couldn’t have afforded to live in Toronto without it.

Plus I have a partner (the one in the Marsha Kirzner poem) who unreservedly believes in my talent.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

As a poet I was influenced a lot by Neruda, Mayakovsky, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Prevert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire (Paris Spleen) Margaret Atwood, Gwendolen MacEwen and the surrealist manifestoes of Breton. As a songwriter I was influenced by the Beatles, Dylan, The Stones Jim Morrison, Bob Marley, and later by hip-hop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9qCwMMX3FM) and lately by Neo Soul (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITr2lRqdMo) and again by Leonard Cohen (and my song about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AppyaqdMw1Q&list=RDAppyaqdMw1Q&start_radio=The) 

You mention in your author biography that your « words have been debated in the legislature, posted in the Transit system, quoted in the Farmer's Almanac, turned into a hit song and sung on Sesame street. » How have you been able to move your work into such a variety of spaces?

It came about pretty naturally in the flow of my life. I’ve had a long run. I had always been inspired by children’s literature and had always written rhyming children’s poems for what they now call middle school kids. But when we had our own children and I got immersed in picture books I saw that that was a high art and got ambitious to create in that mode. My adult poetry was always written somewhat surrealisticly (http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.ca/2014/03/robert-priest-hand-poems.html) but now, for little children, I was writing about the real world – poems/songs celebrating nature, seasonal change, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f40nMLLxfZg&t=3s) familial love, playground equipment etc.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrErwR3Xk4Q) In these poems by the way even though I wasn’t writing technically like Neruda I was influenced by his odes to common objects. A kind of cross fertilization. Having children also lead to my children’s novels and my plays Knights of the Endless Day and Minibugs and Microchips.

I have always had an aphoristic mode as well. Even in high school – I distinctly remember in math class having a series of aphorisms about vectors just pop into my head and getting really excited about it. I wrote my first song at the age of 12. It was just after the Beatles had broken big in the world and the fact that they wrote their own songs inspired me. I was walking along behind a girl I had a big crush on. She was kind of big but beautiful. So to the beat of my footsteps I wrote a song about her which I still know. Songs began to come to me unbidden all the time as did poems in my early 20s. The creative act was always accompanied by a high feeling and a great jolt of joy which was good enough reason in itself to write them down. So given my natural predilection, a poetic upbringing through my mother and through the library system’s books plus time to create at the expense of unemployment insurance, welfare and sporadic arts grants I’ve continued to be able to let the creative Chi take me. This has been a great blessing. I am grateful for it. At some point in my late 20s when I had put out a children’s album the CBC hired me and my co-writer at the time, Eric Rosser, to write at least one song a week for a children’s show. We didn’t get paid much but once a week a news-related children’s song was broadcast coast to coast including one just before the repatriation of the Canadian constitution and another kind of prescient one about cruise bouquets – using the war technology of cruise missiles to deliver bouquets to one’s loved ones. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z608h5Oec-k&list=RDAppyaqdMw1Q&index=2)

I still love a lot of those songs. By my late 20s and into my 30s I was writing poetry by day, finishing up with a children’s poem and often doing gigs with my bands at night. I never stopped working because working was my play. In that era (the 80’s) the Canadian content regulations came into being and in order to stimulate Canadian music the big media companies put together a fund called Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records. (FACTOR)

Through this I eventually got some money to make a record and some videos. (My first record was funded by a Canada Council grant to write poetry which I had already written so I used it to make the Robert Priest EP ) Here’s a cut about the murder of John Lennon backed by the Jitters (https://soundcloud.com/robert-priest/01-little-gun)  here is the Ontario legislature having a bit of a kerfuffle about my (with Al Booth) anti-Harris song: free Ontario  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2q4aqSGCAI&list=PLv4Yid1tq2jiP3d91__PeTLxInweb_7OE&index=8)

Lately you’ve been working on prose poetry. What do you see as the difference between your work with the prose poem, compared to your work in the lyric mode?

I slip into prose poem mode sometimes when I’m feeling too confined. My aesthetic for the prose poem is looser than for lyric poems. In a lyric poem the density requires every part of the poem to be “poetic”. In a prose poem one can flow into it knowing that the poetry of it might only emerge in the totality. Plus you don’t have to worry about linebreaks. A prose poem is form without form. And it can provide a lot of room for an idea to roll and unravel. You can always edit it down to make it more compact like a lyric poem. I like to get loosely on a roll and run with it. A prose poem can be a fairytale, or a mock essay, a surrealistic revel or a narrative account in plain language. For me anyway. I’m all for everyone coming from their own aesthetic on this. Here’s a prose poem that Ray Coburn made a track for: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ajAfYJEO7Y)

How important was mentorship to your early work? Was there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

My mother wrote poetry and composed stories and she encouraged me to do the same and insisted that I was a great talent. When I was 19 I moved into a house where the son, a guy named Ernie Spitzeder, was a writer and he encouraged the spirit of that in me.

When I was about 20 a novel writer named Leo Simpson was very impressed with me. That bolstered my already quite high opinion. I write my best when I feel like I am very significant writer. They weren’t exactly mentors but Irving Layton, Gwendolyn McEwan, John Robert Colombo, Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan all made it known to me that they thought I was an important new voice in Canadian poetry. Bronwen Wallace was also a very big help to me.

You’ve published multiple poetry collection as well as recordings of songs. What is the difference between working on poetry and songwriting? Are you able to work on both concurrently?

Writing a poem is different for me than writing a song lyric. My early songs came to me with melody and words together. So that’s different. I would often hear them in my head when I was walking. Some of these were decent songs and my 1st EP (which was funded by a grant to write poetry I had already written) contains 5 of them, some of which got radio play and press. (https://youtu.be/KqglQW6MdlY) But ultimately I wasn’t as delighted as I wanted to be with my sense of melody so I started to write with people who I thought had the gift.  From there on no I did still write some of my melodies I mostly wrote lyrics which other people put to music. But even writing song lyrics for me is different than writing poetry.

The vast majority of my poetry for books doesn’t use formal prosodies or rhyme. These poems make their own structure as they proceed. Whereas writing a song lyric I’m leaning into the rhythmic template and the small demand of the rhyme – getting some impact out of expectations built into these ancient structures. Of course I’ve just written about 30 iambic rhyming sonnets for my next book and indeed some of my songs use no rhyme at all and proceed more or less like lyric poems. There’s a lot of cross-fertilization that goes along with the ecologies of these various poetic modes. So songwriting these days is mostly a collective effort. Most often I will write a lyric and then sit with a composer — sometimes Allen Booth, sometimes Julian Taylor and mostly listen and somtimes make suggestions as they compose a melody before my very ears. This is so exciting. Other times Julian for instance might have a fully realized melody but only part of the words and I will sit with him and help him finish off the words.(my favorite — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrSoWw1g-4) With John Capek or David Bradstreet I send them words and they send me back a produced track containing the words put to music.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6a3Ho3r8aY&t=1s) Sometimes Dave sends me just a melody (as in his song “Imagine Me Home”) and I completely compose words to it. All this is good for the brain and good training for the other modes of writing because skills constantly migrate into other arenas. I don’t think I’ve ever cowritten a poem with anyone and wouldn’t want to. (actually I did one poem co-write with Charlie Petch and Ikenna Igebulla). Song collectivity is fine but in the poem I’m the master. “Song Instead of a Kiss” which was a hit for Alannah Myles was originally sent as a lyric to Nancy Simmonds who I had done a lot of cowriting with. She placed it before Alannah at a strategic moment and the song emerged from the 2 of them in short order. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAhKH3VEqjQ)

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Well I definitely am as averse to big headedness as anybody but my poor soul down at the bottom of its well is insisting on yelling “MEEEE!”  But the 1st person who comes to mind other than that is Wally Keeler otherwise known as People’s Republic of Poetry. He’s done some avant-garde provocative, self endangering stuff that is truly brilliant and unique. I can’t encapsulate it here but do yourselves a favor and look him up. He’s the finest exemplar of the avant-garde spirit this country has ever had.