a life-long poem chronicle by Renée Sarojini Saklikar
Lunch Poems at SFU connects the city with poets – it’s a great place to bring your lunch and your questions about poetry. There’s always a Q & A after the reading.
The light in the Teck Gallery at SFU’s Vancouver Campus is beautiful, the vibe is friendly and relaxed.
And we always end on time.
This month’s poets: Fiona Tinwei Lam and Evelyn Lau.
Welcome to Part 3 of my interview with Kathryn Mockler, author of Onion Man, The Purpose Pitch, and The Saddest Place on Earth:
RS: Who were your literary influences when writing Onion Man? How long did it take for you to settle on the form of the book, each poem a vertical compressed stack of words, each preceded by that bolded elongated em-dash? Did you try different forms, ways of arranging the text?
KM: Michael Turner’s Company Town and Hard Core Logo and Douglas Burnet Smith’s The Knife Thrower’s Partner were big influences. I also read a lot of Evelyn Lau during the time I was writing this book.
Over the years the poems took on many forms—short lines, long lines, prose blocks, etc. The shape of the poems was something I really struggled with, and after working and working on the line breaks, I settled on the form we see in the book. I didn’t think of the poems as cans until Michael Turner observed this in his blurb on the back of the book, but now I can see how they could be read like that. Whenever I’m working with line and form I usually rely on instincts and happy accidents. The form of Onion Man was a happy accident because it coincided with the content. Continue reading “TCP interviews Kathryn Mockler, Part 3”
Vancouver Island poet Mary Ann Moore reviews Where the Nights are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, an intriguing anthology edited by David Eso and Jeanette Lynes:
“As the letters, poems, emails and texts in this collection are grouped according to the age of the poets at the time of writing, poets and their eras collide. And what grand collisions they are. The book is rich in loss and endings, longevity and, no matter what the age, erotic and sometimes erratic explorations in the realm of love.”
– The Vancouver Sun
Honoured to be a contributor along with many outstanding Canadian poets, including, (and this is just a sampling!): Christine Lowther, Howard White, Ivan E. Coyote, Betsy Warland, Evelyn Lau, Susan Musgrave, Patrick Lane, George Bowering and Al Purdy.
thecanada?project 