Ashleigh A. Allen, for “Balcony buffalo”
read Allen’s shortlisted work here
2024 Bronwen Wallace Award • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
Established in memory of writer Bronwen Wallace, this award has a proven track record of helping talented developing authors secure their first book deal. Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short fiction. The 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award will be announced on June 3, 2024.
I’m fascinated by your use of the prose poem in this cluster of pieces. What first brought you to the form, and what made you decide upon utilizing the prose poem for this particular grouping?
Thanks for this question! This is how I write—in this grouping of poems and elsewhere. I think we tell stories and write in ways that we enjoy reading, and I have appreciated prose poems since I was a kid listening to hip hop in my room, which was my introduction to poetry and when I began being a devotee of clever wordplay. I’d also add that I’ve not been drawn to writing using traditional forms for a long while, even though I teach them and believe they can be fun to play with. (Similarly, I admire modern forms writers invent for specific pieces of writing, such as the constraints OuLiPo employ for their projects.)
What is it that the form of the prose poem provides for you, do you think, that might not have been possible otherwise?
I’m not sure if it’s a matter of what is possible, but when I write prose poems, I am differently in tune with what I’m writing – thinking more about the language in the air than on the page; it’s maybe more patterns and rhythms and sounds. But then again, even if these are prose poems, I ultimately play with constraint because the length of the lines is still contained in this grouping of poems.
What writers or works sit at the back of your head as you write? Who are your models?
Some poets I turn to regularly are Terrance Hayes, Ocean Vuong, Diane Wakoski, Frank O’Hara, and many more New York School poets. I was also lucky enough to learn from many excellent poets in graduate seminars or community learning spaces, so I know their writing and processes, which inform my writing—these include poets like Paul Violi, Mark Bibbins, and Hoa Nguyen.
The Jury citation for your piece speaks to your “Frequent use of assonance and sibilance, concrete language, and a startling diction reveals a narrative which slowly develops through ‘clusters of curses’ and ‘dice and discomfort.’” I’m fascinated by how you use sound through these poems. How important is sound to the way that you write? How do you manage to get such evocative sound through poems composed for the page?
I think I mentioned earlier that writing poetry is a way for me to play. It’s not that sound is important, per se, but that it’s interesting to me and is something I often employ. I like having fun with sound, but it’s not a deal breaker if a poem isn’t doing anything interesting sonically.
Regarding your second question, I don’t know exactly how I “get such evocative sound” (though thank you for that compliment). In part, it comes from practice, but I also believe my relationship with sound has to do with my lifelong fascination with and respect for genius MCs. Even as a kid, I was entirely captivated by the early days of hip hop—that’s what originally inspired me to write poetry, to be honest.
Is this selection part of a larger grouping or stand-alone? Is this something you are working to make book-length?
This selection is part of a book-length collection I put together in the winter. I sometimes go back and edit here and there or add and subtract poems if something new fits well, but for the first time, I have something book-length, and that is exciting!
That is exciting! What has the process been like to put together a debut full-length collection? Did the manuscript evolve organically, or has there been much in the way of editing, revision and/or reorganization?
I returned to my writing during COVID-19, especially the first year of lockdown, and have maintained, in part, that dedication. Like so many others, I had the time to make art for the first time in many years. My writing felt unpredictable to me (and more violent and grotesque than ever before), but that was the moment we were in. My writing practice became a necessary ritual, and this manuscript emerged from there. So yes, it did emerge organically. It’s not a collection of “COVID poems” or whatever that would be, but it is a collection of what I found when I finally tended to the things I had been shoving into the periphery of my life. I sat with as many things as I could pull from the shadows and took stock. I constantly revise poems and occasionally re-order pieces in the manuscript. The process of putting the manuscript together has been wholly rewarding, even if the order may be a bit clumsy since I am new to this.
Well, the best part about assembling a poetry collection is that there isn’t any “single, right answer,” but multiple ways to approach connections; I’m sure four equally-experienced editors going through your manuscript might provide suggestions and observations that would produce manuscripts potentially quite different from each other. Finally: how close is this project to completion? Have you any sense of what might come next, or is that too soon a question?
That’s true about editors. This manuscript is done,
and I don’t know if I’d make many changes to what it is today. (Although maybe
if there’s an editor who has a convincing vision…)
What’s next? I will keep writing poetry. I also have an idea for a children’s book I hope to finally finish this summer, and, looking further down the road, I would like to write a collection of short fiction pieces. I don’t often write fiction, but I have edited fiction and currently teach fiction writing in my creative writing course. Each semester, my students inspire me to give it an honest go, so I think one of these days I will!
rob mclennan’s short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in August 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a suite of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).
