Alyda Faber: Your free verse poetry is as crafted and concise as your poems following a defined form. Does this relate to what you say in Workbook about the artifice of writing?
Steven Heighton: Artifice is essential - which is to say, form is essential. Free verse poetry either has form - an internal skeleton as opposed to the exoskeleton that you find in a sonnet, say, or a villanelle - or it's just chatter, jotting, typing. The appeal of passing off untransformed personal minutiae as art is obvious: it's easy and, if it gets read and praised, there's a really direct form of ego validation (they don't just like my writing, they like ME). Personally, even if producing such work is easier, I don't want to spend any more time than I already do in the airless little cell of my ego. For me, writing is an escape from ego. I understand that when you're seated in that personal theatre of dreams and grievances, you can almost believe it's the realest thing in the world and everything beyond it is less real - a figment, a projection - but the opposite is true. The world is real, and the ego is a construction - a little shadow theatre, like Plato's cave.
- Steven Heighton, in conversation with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of The Dalhousie Review.
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