lighting it as an attempt

Annick MacAskill: Are there choices you make at the beginning of a project besides perspective/voice that you find determine the “flow/force” of your writing? Like the kind of figurative language you set out to use, imagery, setting…?

Sue Goyette: I listen for the kind of language that’s percolating and the way words want to be strung along to create a meaning I don’t know yet. I have to say, a lot of the writing I do fails and doesn’t see the light of day. Maybe most of it. I sometimes get heavy-handed and drive it into a wall of being too literal, too wordy, too repetitive, too whoo hoo, too Sue, too important, too “meaningful,” too out there, so weird that I’m a little aghast by it and by weird I don’t mean a good weird. I get ready for this failure by lighting it as an attempt, as part of an ongoing practice that I’m choosing to engage with without much invested in an outcome. So one of the early decisions I make is consenting to taking the risk.

- Sue Goyette, in conversation with Annick MacAskill over at The Puritan. You can read the whole thing here.

chasing funny

The first poem I remember writing was in sixth grade. It was a haiku about finding a mouldy sandwich in my desk. There’s a lot wrong with how poetry is taught in schools, but if writing short poems about mouldy sandwiches is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. I was having trouble fitting in at a new school and when my classmates laughed at the mouldy sandwich poem that made me feel alright. Sue Goyette was on the radio the other day talking about how “chasing funny” primed her to think laterally and make unusual connections; that approach to poetry certainly resonates with me.

- David Alexander, answering rob mclennan's 12 or 20 questions over on his blog. You can read the whole thing here.

going forward anyway

I think one of the ways poetry is so vital and, by proximity or extension, myth, is how it can witness and then respond to our times with a metaphorical translation. I’m really interested in how poetry can assert another species of narrative into the conversation with its imaginative design and construction. And how it asserts wildness back into language. Poetry reminds words of their fur and their hoofs, of their seaweed and their hurricanes and, in the same way, reminds us of the more complete version of ourselves. In this way, it’s a crucial lifeline and energy source for a variety of kinds of languages: visual, sensual, emotional, political, animal, botanical, aquatic, astronomical. The list is endless and poetry is the host inviting us to a collective conversation where anything is possible. To that end, there’s a vulnerability involved in being in the proximity of poetry, of being comfortable not knowing the lay of the land but going forward anyway, whether it’s reading poems or writing them. These are good things to practice right now, I think. Crucial, even.

- Sue Goyette, in interview with Hannah Green over at CV2. You can read the whole thing here.

the same words everything else used

I remember, in my early teens, encountering the voltage in a good poem. I can still recall how startled I was by how the words in a poem relayed a kind of intensity and vitality and I was curious about that. I’d read a lot of novels and short stories but began to read poems to figure out how they were pulling off what they were with the same words everything else used. This intensity, vitality was one of the things that convinced me that there was something going on besides the dailiness and challenges of my own life. That there was a conversation apart from but still somehow fiercely connected to my own experiences and, at first, I was shocked by being addressed in that manner, so directly, then, later, I wanted to respond and add my voice to the conversation.

- Sue Goyette, in interview with Susan Gillis over at her Concrete & River blog. You can read the whole thing here.