POETRY BOOKSHELF

Poetry is a witness statement of my life—memories, longing, grief, fear.

We need to have practical ways of managing wildfires, but it’s also important to express how it feels when the air is suddenly unbreathable, or when the sky is yellow for days on end.

I used to be moved by work that was strange and avant garde (if that word means anything anymore), but the older I get I also want poetry to make me feel something

So much of poetry is connected to community. We do the writing alone, but we’re always working within a larger circle, speaking to the poets whose collections we love, whose writing lives in us as surely as our own words do.

Through poetry, I believe I can use pain and anger as productive, redemptive forces. I can write critically from a place of love, soften into tough but necessary conversations, and I can work to create an aura of inclusivity, granting space, as the universe does, to migraines and orgasms alike, to contradictory truths and multiple versions of the same story.

Poetry allows us to inhabit the experience and thoughts of another human being, to find some small part of ourselves reflected.

My mother hunted moose

as a child my grandfather taught her

how to field dress a bull:

make an incision from the throat

to the pelvis

the abdominal cavity emptied

haul him up between two pines

the body inverted

antlers almost grazing

the soil

each hind limb leashed to a trunk above

to allow the flesh to cool

then she'd climb inside

the open chest

fix her toes along the ledge

of two ribs

and with a kick to the bull's left shoulder

he sent her

swinging

Poetry is not a genre so much as a methodology for my interaction with the world. I am not a “solo” writer:

Reading one 16-line fragment is very different from reading 256 of them. Something very interesting happens when all those words pile up on each other over a few hours.

Poems connect us. They are intermediaries when grief blinds us, when joy takes our breath away, when memories visit in the night and don’t leave a trace.

To fully experience a poem is to eclipse our perceived selves and enter into something more heeding and resolute than the frangible cage of flesh, bone and breath that we exist in.

My poetry persists in a state of suspended completion[…] It remains flexible, changeable, ready to be adapted to the world and the needs of the moment.

Rooted in the indescribability and disembodiment of pain, Nisa Malli’s Allodynia looks outward to space and the future of humankind, as well as inward to the body.

A statement of poetics is always a work in progress and is therefore always subject to revision. Revision is to see anew. Revise always, or try to.

Many of my poems contain images of creatures, beings and experiences that have been somehow maligned or ostracized. I try to create space around them where they might be, at the very least, seen without so much stigma or judgement.

Poetry is at its best when it provides a space for radical work to exist. I’m not so much interested in the poem as I am interested in the expansive possibilities of what poetry can or cannot contain.

As a daughter of a flight crewmember, I grew up staring at maps and clouds from within airplanes. I was incubated in flight, my mother used to joke. I lean on this unique upbringing in the way I shape, write, and perform my poems

The moment is a fish and the poet a hook. Like the time I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth and my daughter was in the bathtub washing her hair.

Through writing, I hope to always have a path back to a home that I can no longer physically return to. Through poetry, I hope to make a home in a different shape, in another form.

The poetry I love best has no illusions about its limits, brings us to the furthest threshold of what’s possible in language, then lets us go. This kind of poetry is maybe not exactly expressing the inexpressible, but it does bring us to awareness of the inexpressible.

I stumbled into poetry entirely by accident. I noticed that the notes I took nightly about what had happened that day on the job, just to help me understand the strange male construction culture I’d fallen into, were getting shorter and shorter. They looked almost like – could it be – poetry?

In my poetrying practice, I never care about the reader’s response. Like Li Shangyin’s spring silk worm, my sole concern is to turn out what is best inside of me; if people do not care about my contribution to the world, why should I?

There is the technical aspect, of course, having fun with words and seeing how ingenious you can be with a line break or a metaphor. And then there's the moment when you realize what the poem does, what histories and knowledge it shares, and what futures it imagines.

A child waving at strangers from a car window, the thrillful bliss of someone waving back, that’s all I want for my poems.

I think poets breathe the air of the poets alive around them as well as those that have come before. It’s inevitable that a poet’s pieces are filled with echoes of other poets, obvious or subtle.

A poem is a capsule—simultaneously a record of a moment and a gesture to forever. A poem is a way to work through, or toward, something.

Etel Adnan says, “Writing forces one to go the bitter end of what thinks.*” Her statement strikes a chord with me—the demanding mental and emotional striving towards a meaningful and artistic poem, finding its core and form in a morass of cloudy ideas and feelings.

For me, poetry is an opportunity to fully engage with a singular aspect of writing in a way that isn’t possible with other genres.

Humour is real. Even in darkness. A friend used to say, “Your poems show us what insides look like.”