Talking Poetics #14 : Mary Kasimor

How I write poetry

Mary Kasimor

When I write, what I do more than anything is to take my notebook and just to begin. I try not to think about what I am writing, and I allow myself to write wherever it takes me. I give myself as much creative freedom as I can. If I like some of the words and/or lines that I write, I will save them and see what I can create. Even though the words and lines do not necessarily relate to each other, I find that everything is a part of the whole poem thing and I try to make it work in a way that I find interesting and somehow connected.

I am currently reading The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom by Leslie Scalapino. Her work is very mystical and experimental; I love to read her poetry—for the beauty of her poetry, and also because it loosens up the precise use of language that creates different feelings and meaning so that I can write creating my ideas and use of language. Actually, I read a great deal of poetry for that reason. I do edit my work, despite trying to work with what I have written. The beauty of my “method” is that I don’t get too hung up on my poem being a work of literature, but more like an experiment that may open even more possibilities in form and meaning for me. Sometimes it delights and sometimes it doesn’t.

I have finally come to a truce with my divided selves about writing poetry. I have been writing for so many years, and I can’t imagine myself not writing poetry. I have changed my perspective, however, by writing mostly for myself. I still appreciate getting my poetry out and having people read it, but I write more for the love of writing than for getting published. I realized not too long ago that becoming well known would not make me happy, but would continue to feed my discontent.  I continue to write for myself, and if anyone is interested in readying my poetry, I am very happy to make it available to them. I often tell myself that it isn’t important that I continue writing, but nonetheless I continue slogging along—writing as I choose. It has made it easier for me to continue writing without any great expectations, and I think that I am being honest about my writing.

Mary Kasimor who has been writing poetry for many years and considers her work experimental. Her recent poetry collections are Disrobing Iris (above/ground press 2019) Drink Me (BlazeVox Books 2019, The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox Books 2014), Saint Pink (Moria Books 2015), The Prometheus Collage (Locofo Press 2017), Nature Store (Dancing Girl Press 2017) Drink Me (BlazeVox Books 2019), and Disrobing Iris (above ground press 2019). Her poetry has been published in Word For/Word, Touch the Donkey, Posit, Human Repair Kit, and Otoliths. She also reviews collections of poetry.

Talking Poetics #13 : Michael Blouin

Aside from a couple of short stories published many years ago my real publishing career began in the 1990’s and was comprised solely of poetry which I had begun to write at a fairly furious pace and subsequently see published in magazines. This resulted in my first book “I’m not going to lie to you” (Pedlar Press, 2007, ed. Emily Schultz). Everything that I’ve published since in book form has been a novel, but I continue to write poetry and my newest poem is coming in the next issue of Taddle Creek. My process has not changed much at all over the last few decades, but the results have, I think. 

The new poem is entitled “The deeper the joy” and like most of my work it began with both an image and a phrase. I was reading about the conspiracy theory that comedian Andy Kaufman faked his own death in order to escape his celebrity status. Kaufman’s brother Michael followed instructions from Andy to meet at a specific restaurant on Christmas Eve 1999. Michael did so, whereupon a man he did not know walked up to him and handed him a typed letter from Andy, who wrote that: "everything is great in my life and I just wanted to get away from being Andy Kaufman.”

The mental image that began the resulting poem was that of a diner with tinsel decorations and red banquettes in the evening of Christmas 1999 with heavy snowflakes falling outside through the streetlights and a man in a booth waiting for a brother who would never show up. I suppose if one chose to look deeply enough one might conclude that it had something to do with my problematic relationship with my own brother, but I make it a habit to never look too deeply into my own work. The phrase that went with the image was that of the title; the deeper the joy. I found that phrase on my phone which is where I keep memos of all my thoughts for books, snatches of dialogue, titles, phrases, ideas. I have over 1,500 notes on my phone and often by the time that I end up using one in my work I have no memory of how or under what circumstances it originally occurred to me. This phrase has some connection to the body of the poem solely by definition but that relationship is also something that I have not defined for myself or for the reader.

The poem (I can’t use it here as the rights to it have been sold) is 291 words and like all of my poetry it follows no proscribed form or structure; my line breaks happen when I feel like starting a new line, my “stanzas” isolate sections of thought from each other, and the poem is usually about its ending. I don’t do anything special with language and, unlike most of my prose, I don’t experiment. To be honest I barely think of them as poems at all – there are people who actually write poetry, I just put together these small compositions which occur to me as something separate from the ideas that I can use for novels. I don’t want them to be orphaned.

I prefer to think of them as small moments, but they are certainly not crafted with any sort of innovation or as an engagement with form, structure or existing bodies of work. I read other poets and I have adjudicated for granting organizations, so I do see a lot of contemporary poetry. I’m not doing (can’t do) what those poets manage, and I can’t say that I really even think of myself as a poet at all although I’m aware that some others may. Certainly, these pieces are getting published as poems and I currently have four or five out at magazines so perhaps I am a poet by default. I think the creation of poetry, particularly innovative poetry, is a very important thing – but that’s not what I do. I craft small collages of moments which attempt to relate the universal to the specific without any concrete or conscious thinking about the use of language or even of form. For me, that’s not poetry, that’s just writing.

Here are two pieces which are not in circulation because I don’t feel that they are successful, ultimately or (perhaps) yet, but they do provide an example of what I’m working on:

well it… well it’s roast chicken today and feathers tomorrow

what bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins has is a certain reality

he has it by the throat and he’s holding it right down to the ground

and nobody can take it from him

“There’s certain names for snakes – was that a king snake? Was that a cobra? Now we don’t know one snake from another, and they say some poison snake if he bite ya you’ll die in a few minutes, so I didn’t mean to do the snake too much harm but I did by breakin’ his neck.”

he’s about the realest thing there is for three counties

you know what we have now is we have a culture that won’t stand for lies from their artists

everybody’s got to be honest all the time.

But with Lightnin’ it’s hard to say what’s true and what isn’t. Try doing that today. They’ll mount you up onto the facebook like a shot moose.

“One thing I do not like is a snake. I been told my bible stories and that ain’t the half of it. You see one of them big ones we got down here come at you from out the tall grass and you ain’t gonna like it neither.”

it’s a different kind of honesty and nothing at all to do with telling the truth

remember when we expected our artists to be liars and thieves and degenerates?

we had no illusions, then

“I ain’t seen no kinda snake ever that I liked. Saw one down by the tracks and I just grabbed it and I killed it.”

What kind?

“Big as shit kind.”

Did it have a forked tongue?

“You ever seen one that ain’t?”

and here’s something that he never said:

“I saw one fella one time get full baptized in the river, put right full under and he was a sinner again before his clothes even dried out…”

Feels like he could have said it though, and maybe should have, and maybe did.

Like the upcoming… poem?... in Taddle Creek, this one began with an image and a phrase and extrapolates those into the form of something that strives for the universal while remaining very grounded in the specific. I like the way the first two words of the title operate on more than one level. And like all my work it is next to nothing without its ending.

Here’s another:

white bird in a blizzard lost

I watched the opening sequence of The Hustler with Paul Newman

someday I will watch that whole picture

then I watched a documentary about The Who

but I cannot really like them

Google showed me the headline “John Stamos Shares Sweet Honeymoon Pic with Wife Caitlin McHugh”

I cannot make myself open that link

and if the phone rings

I will not answer it.

I was not magnificent enough for you and you left.

And you know what, you were probably right to do so.

And I can see for miles and miles and miles

but there is nothing left for me to see.

As I noted; this is not poetry that sits at the cutting edge of what constitutes the best work that is being produced these days – it is distinctly not of its time. As a novelist I’m very much aware of how my work might fit into what is currently the work that is moving the form forward – the best work. That is what I strive for in my prose. This is not that. This is what I do when I’m not writing novels. I am very pleased that it gets published. I certainly hope that it doesn’t get in anyone’s way.

Michael Blouin has won ReLit Best Novel in Canada, been shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bp Nichol Award, the CBC Literary Award, and is a winner of the Diana Brebner Award and the  Lampman Award. He has collaborated on recent projects with poet Gillian Sze, film director Bruce McDonald, poet and artist bill bissett and visual artist and author Elizabeth Rainer. He has been published in most Canadian literary magazines including Arc, Descant, Branch, Dragnet, The Antigonish Review, Event, Queen's Quarterly, Grain, Taddle Creek and The Fiddlehead. He has received rave reviews from The National Post, The Ottawa Citizen, The Chicago Institute for Photography and Literature, The Ottawa International Writers Festival, SubTerrain Magazine, Broken Pencil Magazine, Ottawa Magazine, This Magazine, The Telegraph Journal, Lynn Crosbie, bill bissett, Emily Schultz, Susan Musgrave, Marilyn Bowering, George Fetherling, Phil Hall, Sean Wilson, Paul Gessell, Catherine Owen and Lisa Moore. He has served as an adjudicator for The Canada Council, The Ontario Arts Council, The Ottawa Book Awards, Carleton University and This Magazine. His most recent poetry is in the Summer 2017 issue of Arc Magazine and his most recent novel is Skin House from Anvil Press. Forthcoming are material in Taddle Creek Magazine, the anthology The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings and the novels Dead is the New Alive, and I am Billy the Kid.

Talking Poetics #12 : Lydia Unsworth

How A Poem Gets Made

The germ is a phrase, let’s say ‘twenty-six miles across the sea,’ that comes within a fog of recent associations, a background noise that only requires tuning-in to. I don’t think as much as focus on the words that murmur through me, an ongoing narrative, like a baby chattering itself to sleep. It’s a making-sense, a structuring, a reforming and a stretching. Like how dough rises and you can pull it into nameless shapes. I’ll slam it against a wall. What I see is a deckchair, the stripes on that deckchair: Why stripes? What has been done to me? It’s not my image, it’s a postcard from somewhere, but that’s what I can see, and I’m seeing my country floating off across the water, festival music twirling alongside on the wind. I’m seeing leaves of trees behind a faint shudder of heat rising. A fata morgana. Tarmac. There is nearly always tarmac; it lines my dreams. Whatever book I first read the word-phrase fata morgana in. It doesn’t matter if what I remember is accurate, only that it leads on to other things, all that chaff can be stamped out in the aftermath. An oasis. The way we don’t always look up what words mean, allowing place names, band names, surnames to slide on and off our relaxing bodies on the beach. I start with a figure in a landscape, there is nearly always a figure melting into the tarmac on the beach. I tug their arm, pull on whatever article they happen to be reading, slap the face awake, twist its history into my own stranded interpretation. Words like chains, both links and restrictions, until I’m ground to a halt in what I hope is a worthy place. If not, plow on. Sand over boots, inside shoes, cast them off, the burning grains under the softest most unknown part of us. I won’t get my toes out in the middle of a board game. Who lies on a blanket in the middle of an inner-city carpark anyway? Can’t we take back our surfaces? Once, in Norfolk, the hot road, new and mallable, like an origin story. Volcanoes of motorway. And then I’m full of enough raw lava. I stick my hand in to the warm rocks, ignore the tourists striding past my crumpled melodrama. I like it down here where the theoretical leaves are, rinsed with Beckett, Perec, Kafka, and with all the preferably women I’m currently gagging in. I’m down here in my class and my past trying to rake it all pageward. You want form? You want skill? I can only polish up what the turned-over stones are revealing. I’ve got termites. I’ve got small tiny things. Ferns, etc. and every time I’ve ever walked past them. I’ve got the first tomato I chopped in order to feed myself at aged seventeen. Like a scene from Ghost. Words that as an adult have lost their importance. I’m finding them in the grips of my trainers, bringing them into the house. Piles and piles of discarded incidents, which I’m stirring up into a thick soup. Like I used to do with shampoos and gels in some ancient lived-through bathroom that in my remembered architecture now sits where the kitchen should have been. 

Lydia Unsworth is the author of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (KFS, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (Winner, 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize), and two chapbooks: My Body in a Country (Ghost City Press, 2019) and I Have Not Led a Serious Life (above / ground press, 2019). Her latest chapbook, Throw the Towel In, will be released by KFS Press in 2020. Recent work can be found in Ambit, para.text, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Blackbox Manifold and others. Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter: @lydiowanie   

Talking Poetics #11 : Sarah Kabamba

First of all, I would like to thank rob for asking me to participate in this, and whoever may read this!

How is anything created really? How is art created? This may not even make sense, it might be just a bunch of rambling on my part. The creative process, like life, is so rarely easy and clean, despite what we would like.

I wish I could say I have a very structured organized way of writing but that would be a lie. How do poems get started for me? Often, it’s from a word, a phrase, something I read, or saw that sparks something within me. I can sit with an idea for days or even years before a poem comes forth from it. I don’t write poems as much as poems write themselves, I think. It doesn’t make much sense at times. I think artists are a conduit, or maybe vessel, is a better word that put what we’re surrounded by – emotions, stories, memories, etc. into something tangible that resonates with others, or that’s the hope at least.

I start with a very loose structure. I’d say I write in a circle, in that I start with a word, phrase, or an image, and then form the poem around it. I start in the middle and write outwards. The beginnings and end of poems are usually the last things I write.

I write everywhere – in notebooks, on my computer, on scraps of paper, on my hands, my phone, in my head. I think all these different mediums have their advantages and disadvantages. I used to (and still do, but maybe less so) struggle a lot with the editing process because I’d sit and stare at the poem on my screen, and it just wouldn’t work. But now, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to walk away from a poem or work, and just let it breathe. It’ll come. Often times, when I’m doing something else, completely unrelated, something will just click. It’ll come.

For me, in writing, I’m intrigued by both how it looks on the page, and how it sounds out loud. When I’m writing, a lot of it is done out loud, repeating words, phrases, or just ideas to myself, and hearing how it sounds. In regard to line breaks, that’s something that I usually add after to be honest. When I first write, my work is usually just a stream of all the ideas going through my head at the time. I just let it all out, no line breaks, no structure really, just let the poetry or story out. Then I go back (sometimes immediately, sometimes later) and read what emerges, taking out what doesn’t work, reworking sections, and adding line breaks as I see fit.

In writing this way, I am often surprised myself at what comes from it. In that what I set out to write about is not always what the poem ends up being about. Or the poem will go in a very different direction than I’ve intended. Or split into to separate poems. Sometimes the poem just goes where it wants.

I do find reoccurring themes or threads in a lot of my work, which isn’t always intentional. I had someone point out to me that there is a lot of water imagery in a lot of my work, and looking back, I was like huh, there is. For reasons I can’t completely articulate yet, I’ve always been drawn in by water, the connection to life, to women, to history, and that manifests in my work.

There are always writers in the back of my mind. I think that’s true of every writer, we are inspired by what we read, which is why it’s so important to do so. Currently, I'm reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Sisters' Entrance by Emtithal Mahmoud. Other writers that have influenced me/I love to read are Michael Ondaatje, Warsan Shire, Nayyirah Waheed, Ysrah-Daley Ward, Aime Cesaire, Tsitsi Jaji, and so many others (I could go on forever). One of the things that I’m excited about now that I’m done school, is to have time to read more, and just enjoy it. And slowly fall back into writing more. While I’m always writing in some capacity, I haven’t been doing a lot of submitting recently, more focused on just falling into writing slowly, taking my time, enjoying the process. That’s the beautiful thing about writing that I love, you can always come back to it, at your own pace. It doesn’t tie you down, but it grows with you, and gives you space to learn, grow, and expand. And I think that’s really important.

We are surrounded by stories and poetry, Sarah Kabamba just wants to share some of them with you. She is of Congolese origins, and lives in Ottawa, where she is (slowly) working on a poetry collection.