CURRENT ISSUE

Command Respect, Hold Imagination:
Kiran Bassi interviews Kevin Irie

This year we are lucky to have you judging The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry contest. What are you looking for in a winning entry?

I’m looking for a poem that takes me where I wasn’t expecting to go yet seems inevitable in its destination. As a reader, I come with my own biases and expectations and preconceptions of where I think a poem will go after reading the opening lines, or the title. I really love poems that confound expectations, that take me down to unexplored poetic depths or up to fresher air and leave me with lines or images or a perspective of life that I did not expect—and the unexpected can be delivered in many forms, be it free verse, rhyme, erasure, prose poems. But much depends on the behind-the-scenes craftwork: knowing when to break a line, when to shift tone, when to stop, when to leave the reader dangling. Essential work that is unseen.

In an interview with The New Quarterly you wrote that “as with people, some poetry books command your respect, others hold your imagination.” Have you read much poetry that accomplishes both of these items? What qualities distinguish them from works that accomplish one, or neither of these.

That comment refers to Shima by Sho Yamagushiku, an extraordinary book driven by the visionary and visceral. As for respect versus imagination, for me, it aligns with the conscious and unconscious, a matter of the formal technique you see and the emotional impact you feel. It’s the difference between respect for Sylvia Plath’s first book, The Colossus, which was her display of technical literary mastery and her second book, Ariel, which was simply masterful. For me, technique is constructed intellectually, but the imaginative is intuitive emotionally. One you can respect because you can see it constructed there on the page. The other appears invisible but its effect may last for years. Poets are lucky when both merge—and technique is more than metre and scansion. As for books that hold my imagination, I can offer two examples. Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green is an excellent example how a seemingly casual voice hides the technical craft involved: when to swerve in tone, when to add humour, when to heighten emotion. It’s a masterclass of capturing the reader with a controlled narrative though one would be hard pressed to point out the poetic techniques usually covered in writing guides. In interviews, Green thanked Molly Cross-Blanchard, a poet of verve and talent, for editing, which also points to the benefits of having help with the technical scaffolding—and how it is a conscious continuity of cumulative choices. I respect the work involved all the more because it is so seamlessly integrated into the emotional impact.

For a closer, more personal example, I can say I read Joy Kogawa’s new and selected poems, From the Lost and Found Department, with respect and admiration for her position as an established Canadian poet, but the most important part to me individually was how that book opened my imagination to write my latest book, Evacuations, following that. But this is where the individual meshes with the poetic. Kogawa and I are both Japanese Canadian, with a family background of internment in Slocan during World War II, a fact touched upon in my poem “Post-War Photo: A Funeral in the Rockies” in issue 231 of The Malahat Review. So, yes, there is a personal link in this case, but connections are not defined or confined by family history. Stephanie Bolster’s new poetry book, Long Exposure, is both poignant and panoramic as she delves into the internment camp of Tashme as someone for whom this is both remote yet ominously relevant.

You recently published your collection Evacuations with the University of Alberta Press, and have an illustrious public poetic history including, but not limited to, being anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2026, The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (2025), and winning first prize in Grain’s 2024 poetry contest, as well as second prize in Prairie Fire’s 2024 contest, and third prize in The New Quarterly’s poetry contest. Given these achievements, what advice do you have for newer poets just beginning to step into the space of entering these contests? What renders a poem complete for entry to you?

Write the poem, then set it aside, even for a day. Look at it again. Keep your enthusiasm alive but not your subjectivity. Read it as if it is someone else’s poem. See if the order is the best one. Ask if you’re saying too much, or too little. It’s hard to know how much a reader can infer from a line which you assume will be understood, so it’s tempting to slam a slogan down onto the page. Is a line inserted into the poem because it sounds “literary” or “memorable” as opposed to organic? It’s tempting to keep some lines because you know they are “good” even if they do not suit a particular poem. I know this from experience. It’s also tempting to want a poetic line to make it into print. The only common thread to my three winning poems is that they were written with no desire to win anything. I entered them after they were created; I did not think of the contest first and then try to create a “winning” poem. The impulse was genuine—and this was not my first time entering any of those contests.

Every poem is an act of control: you are choosing where to accelerate, when to slow down, what thoughts are allowed to be heard, what part of silence is allowed to be present. What renders a poem complete for me is the sense that there is nowhere further it can go by the end and nowhere further that it needs to go.

What does your own writing regimen look like? Has it changed over the years, and does it change through the seasons? If so, how?

The one consistency is inconsistency. I’ve tried different methods: writing in the morning, writing at night. I once thought I wrote less because of the cold in winter, and yet the poems in Evacuations, with a few exceptions, were all written over the winter of 2023-2024. Inspiration does not obey expectations. Inspiration generates its own energy which summons you more easily than you can order it to appear. But do find some time to sit at the desk or screen, just to show you are prepared to receive, though there may be little or nothing incoming for much of the time. Don’t abandon your post. There are so many who have abandoned poetry already.

What writing advice have you received that has been most impactful on you? Why do you think it was impactful for you personally?

Read, read, read. Read other poets. Read other poets that you do not know. Read poetry journals. This is advice many other poets have given before, and I give it now. I still feel energized by the discovery of other poets, even if the poet is “new” to me, and here is my shout-out to just three recent first books that personify that: Non-Prophet by Qurat Dar, Devotional Forensics by Joseph Kidney and The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston (the last two are previous poetry contributors to The Malahat Review). In each case, here is a poet with a singular voice and fresh perspective who illuminates the world anew. All are so deeply themselves, yet nourished by other poetry, and each is casting more needed light on these times. Live in the light of other poems until you too can shine on your own.

 

 

---

---

We gratefully acknowledge all of our supporters