Past contributor Manahil Bandukwala talks with the winter issue #225 contributor about the unsaid aspects of a poem, the desire for balance, and her current project combining ceramics and poetry.
MB: “off the page” leans into plurality and multiplicity, both the kind that is evident and out there, and that which is hidden. In the second half of the poem, you dive into the contradiction of “Canadian niceness.” What makes poetry a good medium to explore the duality of plurality?
LY:
Poetry often embodies much plurality. When you read a poem, you’re always holding several truths: the author’s truth, the suspended reality of the poem is its own truth, and the truth of your own life experiences that you see reflected in the piece.
In “off the page” I share an experience of normalized exclusion and oppression as a Canadian. If a reader is holding the singular truth of “Canadians are nice, full stop” then the poem offers them another true singular experience.
I think where many people experience discomfort with plurality is thinking that in order accept another offered truth you must first let go of the one you’re currently holding. This type of thinking creates rigidity and limits one’s perspective. With poetry the reader is instead invited to hold both truths and learn that they possess a great capacity for plurality.
I think that plurality contains much grace and humanity, and that being able to embody it allows for a more expansive and balanced life.
Read the rest of Liselle Yorke's interview.
Em Dial, issue #225
poetry contributor
Poetry Editorial Board member Délani Valin talks with the winter issue #225 contributor about their upcoming debut collection In the Key of Decay, the boundary between desire and subjugation, and how growing food can mirror a writing practice.
DV: These poems approach a narrator’s memories from middle and high school with deftness and subtlety. In “Nostalgia, Ultra—Lovecrimes,” a dinner party conversation alludes to high school teachers’ sexual misconduct, and in “Lincoln Middle School, Gym Class,” there is an ambiguous sense that an instructor may be inappropriate based on locker room rumours. Both of these poems express layered manifestations of power. Can you speak to the ways in which these poems complement and differ from each other in their approach to this theme?
ED:
I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting with nostalgia recently, both on a personal level—trying to bring myself back to childhood and adolescence through music, food, media—and on a more conceptual level. I’ve been thinking about who is allowed the privilege of nostalgia, what comprises an individual sense of nostalgia versus a collective one, and in what ways the slippery question of power morphs and changes over time due to a tendency to look at the past through rose-colored glasses.
Both of these poems are contending with a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability that accompanies being an adolescent girl. I wanted them both to invoke nostalgia through more universal entry points, like discomfort with one’s body in gym class or reminiscence about high school over a dinner table. In “Lincoln Middle School, Gym Class,” I also wanted to add a layer of complication over the power binary between students and teachers when things like queerness and desirability come into play.
In “Nostalgia, Ultra—Lovecrimes,” there is a tension around the serious turn of the dinner party conversation. There is a sense that the topic of teachers’ sexual misconduct must be tacitly spoken about with levity and indirectness. Yet, the form of this poem expresses directness through its technique of making an assertion and using a column to expand on the idea, for instance, “Presumption: this can’t be happening in every school across America.”
Read the rest of Em Dial's interview.
