rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Nicole Mae

Nicole Mae, for “Prairie Bog”
read Mae’s shortlisted work here
2025 Bronwen Wallace Awards • 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 Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short fiction.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 2, 2025.

Nicole Mae is an interdisciplinary artist. Their poetry, films, and artworks reflect themes of nostalgia, longing, Prairie queerness, Hungarian diaspora, ill body, shame, and romantic love. Mae teaches poetry, hosts creative writing workshops, and runs a multimedia art subscription called Love Letters. Mae lives in Treaty Four, otherwise known as Southern Saskatchewan.

What first brought you to poetry?

I’ve been writing ever since I was a kid but it was during my upperclassman years of high school that I found my way to poetry. My creative writing teacher saw value in my poems before I did. She encouraged me to submit them to magazines and to attend local writing retreats. I was apprehensive at first, but the Saskatchewan poetry community was so welcoming. I found myself wanting to be a part of it. It was around this time that I met my first love as well. Instantaneously, I started writing poems every day. I studied up on the Beatniks, listened to word-heavy rappers, and bought as many books as I could afford. 

Who were you reading? What poets were prompting your writing?

At that time, the poets I found most inspiring were Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Tyler Knott Gregson, Rudy Francisco, and Pablo Neruda. I also loved studying song lyrics. People like Lauryn Hill, Tupac, Nas, Nonname, Lana Del Rey, Nujabes, and Hotel Books inspired me greatly too.

What were those writing retreats you were attending, and how did they help inform your writing?

I attended a writing retreat called Creating in the Qu’Appelle a couple of times. Unfortunately, it’s no longer up and running. I had some wonderful mentors though—Jennifer Still, Evie, Ruddy, and Sheena Koops being a few. Attending Creating in the Qu’Appelle was pivotal to my journey as a writer because it was the first time I found myself surrounded by a community of storytellers. The energy was invigorating. There were spoken word readings, literary workshops, rap performances, Indigenous and trans keynote speakers, and forest cabins full of new friends. Plus, all of my mentors nudged me towards poetry. I had been writing a magic realism novel at the time, and they all expressed enthusiasm for my prose and descriptive language. They told me to apply it to poetry.

What did those first poem efforts look like? And how do you feel your work has developed across the time since?

In the beginning, my poems were impassioned and raw—full of bluntness and urgency. They focused on exposing specific feelings and experiences rather than shaping them with intention. Over time, I’ve developed a deeper understanding of craft, and have refined my work to become more thoughtful, immersive, and vivid. I feel as though I can express my stories and experiences with more ingenuity now. 

The submission process for the Bronwen Wallace requires putting together a small, chapbook-length selection of your poems. What was that process like, to assemble your poems into such an order? Did you find it difficult? Enlightening? Did you learn anything about your poems by attempting to put them together into something for submission?

The process felt organic! Prairie Bog is a part of a larger, finished manuscript. It was quite fun sifting through it to find ten poems that could best encapsulate its geist. I wouldn’t say I learned anything new about my poems but instead revisited some tender memories and experiences of mine. 

What strikes me about some of the poems in your selection is the physicality, the immediacy, of the landscape. How important is landscape to your poems?

Landscape is deeply significant to my poems because it holds many memories. Throughout my life, I’ve retreated to prairie fields, lakes, and hills to process grief. When language has felt out of reach, and my body has carried more pain than I could manage, the land didn’t ask for explanations. It offered its presence and a place to sit. There’s such solace in cold winds, shuffling grass, birdsongs, and Western sun. People are often surprised at my fondness for Saskatchewan because the politics are quite dreary here. There are cruel and unjust bills being imposed right now—all of which affect me directly. Gender diversity, disability justice, and reproductive rights are being trampled on, and I’m working hard with my communities to oppose that. Simultaneously, I’m able to remind myself that our land is not our politics. Our land is wiser and stronger than any system we’ve built. I can still find queer joy and mind/body healing when I leave my house every day.

How do you see your work in relation to the work of other Saskatchewan poets?

My poetry is definitely distinctive—written from uncanny experiences, linguistic experimentation, and a gender-bent perspective. This being said, I do share a deep sincerity and earnestness with other Saskatchewan poets. While our approaches to poetry may differ, there’s a common thread of authenticity and gratitude that connects our community.

Tell me about the multimedia art subscription Love Letters.

Love Letters is my monthly snail mail project! Each month, I write a letter and include an art piece (such as a poem, zine, sticker, photograph, painting print, etc.) that goes along with it. I started this project at end of 2024 with the interest of distributing my art and writing in a tactile way. With the rise of malicious social media and AI art theft, I wanted to create an intimate, safe, and slow-paced experience for those who want to engage with my work. It’s been a lot of fun making small art and sharing life events as they happen in real time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a new chapbook lands with Ethel Zine in June. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Dora Prieto

Dora Prieto, for “Loose Threads”
read Prieto’s shortlisted work here
2025 Bronwen Wallace Awards • 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 2, 2025.

Dora Prieto [photo credit: Adri Montes] was a 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers poetry finalist and a 2024 Writers’ Trust Mentorship participant. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, Capilano Review, and Catapult. Prieto won the 2022 Room Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Prieto shares the tools of poetry-making through a project called El Mashup, a workshop for Latinx youth on experimental poetry, fiction, analog cinema, sound art, and performance. She lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. 

What first brought you to poetry?

I credit two amazing poets and teaching artists: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Sheryda Warrener. Both teach at UBC. I started the MFA in fiction in 2021, after quitting a job in communications I was really struggling with, and having done little creative writing prior. One of my first classes was with Billy-Ray and he introduced me to poets who became foundational for me: Ada Limón, Natalie Díaz, Tommy Pico, Aracelis Girmay, and Victoria Chang, among others. After taking an incredible class with Sheryda the following summer, it was set: poetry had claimed me and I had to claim it back. Sheryda helped me get in touch with my deeper inquiry and taught me how to get out of my own way (usually by tricking the brain into submission). I really got hooked after that.

Now. There are many ways to think about the question of what first brought me to poetry, and another answer could be this: growing up between Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and San Cristóbal de las Casas in southern Mexico, my identity and way of thinking was formed through betweenness and attempts to bridge those worlds, cultures, languages, family members, and realities. A lot of poetry is written into rupture, so once I started reading more poetry, I recognized immediately the sense of urgency and attempt, of mending, and of the multiple selves that the speaker gives voice to. My sister Rosa and I are first gen university grads and I spent most of my 20s doing hard labour jobs, so the language of poetry wasn’t really in my world until I did the MFA. But once I got there—BOOM—I was in deep! 

Jumping into a literary MFA from, as you say, “having done little creative writing prior,” is an enormous leap. What were you hoping to gain, or even jettison, through such a program?

Haha yes, I’m aware there’s a bit of a flex in that. I came into the MFA hoping to write a polyphonic, multigenerational novel spanning Colombia, Mexico, and Canada—a way to document my family history and get closer to the complex real-life characters of my geographically and culturally disparate family. That didn’t end up being the right approach for me, but it was the original engine, and in some ways it’s still running beneath the work I’m doing now.

I also applied out of a kind of desperation. At the time, I was deep in my first desk job—something I’d worked hard to land, only to find it soul-crushing—and the pandemic had cracked open a lot of the capitalist myths that shaped my undergrad ideas of success. When I asked myself what kind of writing I’d do if money weren’t involved, it wasn’t the freelance music journalism I was doing for free concert tickets, and it definitely wasn’t the website copy, social media, and newsletters I was writing for work.

I’ve always been a heavy reader—books were a lifeline during a pretty unstable childhood spent moving between countries. International, but not in the sexy, middle-upper-class way. So even though the MFA terrified me, when I got in, I figured: at worst, it would be two years that didn’t advance a “career,” and I could always go back to communications. Or go back to firefighting, which I actually think is a much better job (more on capitalism’s lies in the poems!) In the end, I didn’t write that novel, but I found poetry—and a new way of listening to language, memory, and history—that feels far more alive to the questions I was trying to ask in the first place.

Once you made your way to poetry as your form, did the poems come quickly, or was it still a process? What were those first pieces attempting, and how close did they get to what you’d been hoping?

A trickle and then a rush. My first poems felt direct and honest in a way that my fiction hadn’t. They were primarily lyric and narrative, often with an elegiac tone, á la Ocean Vuong. Mimetic, to some degree. I remember the shock, delight, and significant imposter syndrome I felt when my first poem was published in Catapult (RIP) when Billy-Ray was on the editorial board. Jorie Graham’s words, “A poem is an experience, not the record of an experience,” became a crucial lesson for me, leading to a shift toward more looseness, humor, and freedom within the lyric “I.”

The “rushing” really started in Sheryda’s class in May 2022. Since then, I’ve been writing quite a bit—10 to 50 pages of poetry a month—and reading voraciously. I’ve never felt so intrinsically motivated by something, and I’m incredibly grateful that things aligned for me to discover poetry amidst all the randomness. Sheryda has an exceptional talent for guiding students to produce their best work through interdisciplinary, process-driven, and material explorations. Under her guidance, my poems became more expansive, layered, and deeply engaged with an inquiry process, rather than existing as isolated pieces. She not only taught me to love poetry but to love it in my own way.

The submission process for the Bronwen Wallace requires putting together a small, chapbook-length selection of your poems. What was that process like, to assemble your poems into such an order? Did you find it difficult? Enlightening? Did you learn anything about your poems by attempting to put them together into something for submission?

The poems are from my manuscript, which I’ve been editing, rearranging, and expanding since I graduated from UBC last May. The submitted selection came from what was draft six of the manuscript, and I'm currently on draft eight!

When putting the packet together, I focused on choosing poems that I felt best represented the collection as a whole, were among the strongest pieces, and shared enough thematic and narrative connections to flow together, even without the surrounding poems in the full manuscript.

The process of shaping those ten pages was actually very beneficial. It pushed me to make cuts for the submission that I might not have otherwise had the motivation or courage to do.

I like how your poems are built as accumulations of phrases that appear, at first glance, to be straight, but then bend a bit. I see you quoting Anne Boyer at the offset, but where did this adherence to the deceptively straight phrase emerge?

I started writing in monostich during a 2023-24 christmas visit to Mexico. Between family obligations, little time alone, and intense conversations, my Notes App got full of potent fragments I needed to jot down, but that didn’t cohere together. When I revisited them to send to my mentor (I was on a thesis deadline at that point), I kept them mostly in that form, more out of lack of time than anything else.

My mentor, Sheryda, recognized something compelling in these isolated lines and encouraged me to explore them further, rather than reverting to my usual stanza structures. She introduced me to francine j. harris’s “Single Lines Looking Forward” and other monostich poems, which helped me appreciate the unique power of the single line. It offered a directness that my previous use of enjambment and line breaks hadn't achieved.

A single line feels exposed, urgent, and definitive. It can even hold a certain audacity. And what really captivated me was the potential for associative movement created by a line break after every line. When each line of poetry is followed by a line of absence, the leaps between ideas intensifies. I also find a connection to the concise nature of tweets and memes, and elsewhere in the manuscript, I explore how the assertive yet often capitalized-upon voice of girls online adds another dimension to this form.

I’m still learning so much from the single line—how much weight it can carry, the sensation of taking a step and then encountering open space, and the challenge of balancing a sense of forward movement with the pleasure of associative jumps.

How did you get involved in El Mashup, and how has that informed, or been informed by, your work?

Daniela Rodríguez, a dear friend and collaborator, and I started El Mashup in 2021. Our paths crossed in 2019 at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival’s (VLAFF) Youth Jury, and we recognized the lasting impact of having a creative, leftist space for Latin Americans. Noticing a gap in similar opportunities for Latin/e/x youth between 13 and 18 years old in Vancouver, we decided to create a program focused on building community, developing skills, and exploring artistic expression. El Mashup has since grown into a collective of five members, and we now operate out of the Clinton Park Fieldhouse in Vancouver, a three-year residency.

At its heart, El Mashup embraces interdisciplinarity, mashing up everything from creative writing to experimental film, sound, and performance. While my own poetry work is more traditionally rooted, El Mashup inspires me to experiment more—this winter I’m making an experimental documentary that blends poetic travelogue and family research in Colombia. I think El Mashup also reminds me to connect my practice with the community whenever I can. Dani and I aspire to be the “weird art aunties” who encourage them to keep creating!

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a new chapbook lands with Ethel Zine in June. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : 2025 Trillium Book Award shortlist interviews: Jake Byrne

DADDY, Jake Byrne
Brick Books, 2024
2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2025 Trillium Book Awards will be announced on June 18, 2025.

Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2’s Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.

Much as your first collection, DADDY seems very much constructed as a book-length project. Do you see your books-to-date, or your writing more broadly, in terms of projects? How do manuscripts get built?

I think books in Canada are more likely to thrive in the ‘project’ format primarily because the provincial and federal granting systems, which keep the ecosystem running, reward applications – and therefore books – that have a clearly defined narrative project. It is the same way that grant applications for books that are, say, two-thirds finished already are more likely to succeed, if only because the author can describe their project with that much more specificity and clarity near the finish line versus from the starting line.

If you look at books published in the U.S., there are fewer ‘project’ books, and books tend to be eclectic compilations of very polished (arguably very safe) work, because the competition is so intense that it is contest juries that shape what gets published down there.

But this is a long way to say that I still think it depends on the book.

You describe DADDY as a book-length project like my first book, but from my perspective, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin had a concept but no actual project until the second last round of editing, when it finally came together. I hated that book until two months before publication because I felt it did not live up to the idea I had for it, which was vague and ill-defined until the last minute.

To me, Celebrate Pride is a more classical ‘first book’ in that there are a bunch of poems in there that were not written for the book – tons of poems I wrote for school that I no longer liked but didn’t want to throw out either, formal experiments, trying on other writers’ voices, using personae, characters, all sorts of games and tricks.

DADDY was written as a project, and the project was to finally start writing poems about my relationship with my dad – poems about my other two parents followed shortly thereafter, and then the second half came as a joyful consequence out of the self-discovery I was doing in the first half. (There’s actually a third section that got cut because the book ballooned, and I wanted to keep this one lean. As lean as a maximalist can manage, anyway.)

I didn’t really think my story was worth telling, but I had been taught to think that my childhood was normal or even good, and I have since realized it was not.

The first poem in the book – “Parallel Volumes” – describes the thought process and genesis of the entire book. I felt I had been protecting my family by not writing about them. Readers can smell insincerity, though. The words don’t connect when you’ve filtered them through several layers of abstraction. Then I realized if I didn’t tell this story I was going to, on some level or another, die. Probably not literally, but there was going to be a big betrayal of my soul there, and that was not going to be good for me or my art.

That said, I listened to a few concept albums at a critical point in my teenage years, and that kind of ensured I’ll be doing the concept album thing forever, for better or worse.

What a long way to say it depends! But it’s true. The job of the artist is to figure out how to build the idiomatic better mousetrap, and the finished product will probably look like a mousetrap even if the internal process that led there was very different.

Curious. I’ve long considered the book as cohesive unit to be an extension, partly, of the west coast poetics (the Talonbooks/Coach House axis) of the long poem across the 1960s and 70s. I recall a complaint by one of them during that period, George Bowering, perhaps, of Irving Layton poetry books, how they were all completely the same: once enough poems in the pile, it became a book, and then onto the next pile. Through all of that, is your preference, then, to compose poems as they come, and worry about the shape of how they might fit into a full-length manuscript once you’ve enough to consider?

Well, I'm about to out myself as a dunce, but I have virtually zero education in the Talonbooks/Coach House axis of the 1960s and 1970s; my long poem comes from the Modernists.

More to read, I suppose. And yes – poems as they come, and the structure to fit them into after. I think poetry must have a somewhat spontaneous element to its composition.

If I were capable of writing book-length projects as planned and sequentially, I’d be a novelist – there’s more money in it.

I came to this art form mostly because my undiagnosed ADHD made it difficult to stick to the disciplines that required many hours of consistent practice. Poetry you still practice, but over long periods of spontaneous composition. There is a finite number of poems you can write in a day – and that number is three.

Oh, hardly a dunce: I think each of our different experiences through reading provides us different elements of information, including what to read and even how to read. Your answer made me wonder if I’m too often too comfortable within a set of held facts (new information to reframe and reshape is the key, I suppose). And we’ve spoken before about ADHD, and our different avenues there, also. Do you find a difficulty with completing projects, or even working on one project at a time?

Absolutely to both. The last 10-20% of any project is the worst for me, and I always have about four book ideas on the back burner.

People with ADHD are said to abandon things once they get past the point of proficiency, when there isn't the immediate feedback of ‘difficulty’ to keep the brain engaged.

And as a testament to that, I have about 70 video games in my collection played to the two-thirds mark and then cheerfully abandoned.

This is less cheerful a phenomenon when applied to vocations or relationships.

I think writers with ADHD should focus their thoughts on publishing during the last third of working any manuscript, to be aware that that the true difficulty of any writing project, in fact, might lay elsewhere. Given that, what loose strands have you been focusing on since DADDY was completed? And might that excised “third section” of DADDY ever see the light of day?

I hate to report this, but I have done zero literary work since editing DADDY. Zero grant applications. Haven’t even attempted to fix my busted literary website. Maybe wrote thirty poems in the last two years.

Life has been all maintenance work: resting, meditating, couples counseling/therapy, physiotherapy. Boring, necessary things. I'm proud of DADDY but publishing it came with a pretty serious cost to my family relationships.

That third section will be published eventually, but it’s about a – corniness warning – “spiritual journey,” and it feels a bit presumptive to publish on that subject.

It might be a while before I publish another book. I dunno. Ask me again in two years.

It sounds as though you are doing exactly what you need to be doing, and that’s a good thing. We can’t get to anything else until that stuff is properly covered. And thirty poems across two years is a lot for some writers, so I think you’re still fine. Separately, and this might seem like a foolish question, but has the Trillium nomination added or changed any of how you see the book, or your work generally?

I wouldn’t say it has changed it, but it’s definitely provided a little spark of hope. It’s silly – I want my practice to be immune to prize culture, but my ego is obviously not. The external validation is helpful, especially in light of my family estrangement. And it’s always humbling to be recognized by your peers.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a newchapbook is out now via Ethel Zine (but you already know that). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

Alina Stefanescu : “the poems we walk among as possible”: Notes with Alice Notley

 

 

“Poems are part of our being alive, to realize them, to say them . . . to say what we’ve done, how we feel, what we know, in such a way that the poems we say are as much like the poems we walk among as possible.”
              – Alice Notley, “Women and Poetry”

 

i 

I spent the final hours of May 20th alone with my notebook, admiring the wind’s maelstrom on our front porch. It was a reprieve of sorts to be engulfed in that tempest, feeling the air lift the hair from my shoulders, watching loose paper and junk mail careen off the table and vanish into the dark corner near the mulberry. 

There is music in the reed instruments preferred by Pan. The gusts run their teeth through the tree leaves and do something similar to the body. Something begins in the presence of this tree ravished by wind as the mind seeks Alice Notley. 

In “O’Hara in the Nineties,” Notley recounts the surprise of rediscovering Frank O’Hara’s poetry in France. “The century is your subject and you are its,” she wrote, “What you have of your own, your self, is in ‘wind’, ineffable poetry,” she continued, quoting the wind in O’Hara’s “Poem”:

and the light seems to be eternal
and the joy seems to be inexorable
I am foolish enough always to find it in wind

Only after crossing an ocean did she reconnect with the poems of the first poet that “sounded like” her. For Notley, sounding-like becomes a source of recognition and proximity. And “poetry is intimacy,” she tells us, “an instantaneous transferral of mind” that occurs when “silent tongue” in her head found O’Hara’s “waggled like mine.” This shared imaginarium has always been a space of reference and community among poets. 

A word— waggled — and a wind. A sensation that rips me from the private disorder of thought and pulls me by my hair into the sky’s disorder. Notley never extols a poem for its reticence. The poem’s voice should be “fearless,” as she put it. Wind knows nothing of fear, nothing of inhibition. 

 

ii

Why must we return to the beginning? 

Notley poses this question in different variations across her work, circling it in “Women and Poetry”: “Whole other poetry springing from nowhere, as at the beginning of the world in the hands of women? Or, perhaps even more desirably, as at the beginning of the world, invented equally by women and men together. Not, as now, already made out of men.”

For this, we need new cosmologies, new stories of creation that narrate an origin where gender isn’t the source of rupture and alienation. “Words are our poetry,” Notley says, but there are other poetries as well, other texts that warrant attention and reading— she mentions birdsongs and plant forms and patterns in the sky. “Poetry is the surface and texture and play of being, including the light that springs up in things from their depths.” 

Poetry is the “feather” in the altered “You” of “Madrigal for the Newly Pregnant”. Poetry is the hankering for “a little cloud sun on the mossy fun” that edges into “Enormous Earrings”. Poetry is whatever we do with what has been done and what we are doing. Poetry is the voice that cannot return to the air “where it lives,” near a campfire where the world is told. In The Descent of Alette, poetry will “exist on a two-dimensional surface …in the shape of a rectangle,” or in the performance of that text:

“ ‘What is this place?’ ” “I asked her” “ ‘It would be

paradise,’ she said,” “ ‘but, as you see,” “it’s very dark,” “& always

dark” “You will find that” “those who live here” “are changed”

Poetry is the medium where the question “where am I?” is inseparable from the story of what I am and what we have done. Poetry is the refusal of time-space that separates the living from the dead. And sometimes, poetry is the woman on a porch at night, her tongues loose and “waggling,” the serpents rising from the roof of her mind if only to writhe across the scalp’s surface before slithering onto the page. Alice Notley taught me that. She keeps teaching. 

 

iii 

Things we are taught may take the form of permissions. A few months ago, while delivering his Bagley Wright Lecture at the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Anselm Berrigan alluded to this particular way of sharing the world. Poets give each other “permissions” which function as an opening into possibility. Notley said Philip Whalen gave her “permission” to throw what Ted Berrigan called a “clean tantrum.” 

How to enumerate the permissions Notley has given— and gives? Any inventory is a dialogue with its incompleteness. Nevertheless: 

Permission, first of all, to begin . . . The Descent of Alette grew from the desire to write a “female epic.” After her stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, was killed in a traffic accident, grief brought Notley “close to large dangerous powers,” the sorts of powers that create a cosmos. The poem-sequence, Beginning with Stain, emerged from that emptiness in which Notley sought “a story for beginnings. The beginning of the universe, the beginning of living again after someone loved has died”: these two clauses sit side by side in Notley’s incomplete sentence. Incompletion has its grammar, and Notley has been true to it.

Permission to start with the stain and maybe address “the sons of bitches in Washington and Wall Street and L.A.” because “they are still sons of bitches and rich ones” at that—a permission that comes with the necessity of examining the bitches within us, the unthinking space that seeks protection from proximity to power and wealth.

Permission to mock the cult of soft power known as “meritocracy” and its attendant  prize-land by addressing the invisible speakers:

true im afraid to write these things down where come from from sayings of the dead
fro the cliches of the everywhere

— a permission that encourages us to upset the orderly politeness of comfortable clauses situated in rigid conceptions of time-space:

oh white wisp of line in the sky why and the trees next to space travel
i am qualified to give you pain by telling the truth

Permission to remember the voice across a “future”:

Someday I will remember this very future I am in, image in space.

I will at least see her, I say to myself, she will be someone

else than one ever thought and her eyes will be blue words on white.

Permission to palpate the core that is “always & eternally” aching:

a curious wild pain—a searching
beyond what the world contains, something
transfigured & infinite—I don’t find it,
I don’t think it is to be found.

It’s like passionate love for a ghost.
At times it fills me with rage,
                                   at times with wild despair,

Permission to be simultaneously “international and personal” in our sayings, and not to permit “any convention of thought or style to keep me from saying.” For poetry is a way of thinking, a way of articulating complex thought. And pain is “the source of gentleness & cruelty & work.”

Permission to refuse the nominal barriers between poetry and life, drawings and words, doodles and art, being and non-being, frivolity and seriousness — nothing is as lovely as this series which Notley tweeted on 12/28/13 and Rachelle Toaramino repeated yesterday:

I stole your stupid boxes that you call poems and threw them away

I stole your wealth and fame which are now irrelevant

I stole your ability to kill me after we’re dead

I stole scale so you wouldn’t be bigger than I am

I’m stealing everything that you know by knowing more

Permission to ignore L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’s dicta against poetic voice and first-person speakers in favor of chasing our shadows. A gauntlet in these injunctions to pick up the uncool, hysterical first-person “I”-ball and risk exploring the “unified self” Notley mentions in her essay, “Thinking and Poetry”: “The pronoun ‘I’ should be given back to people . . . but deepened…” 

Permission to develop “voice” through dialogues with imagination and conversations with interior selves and ghosts, including by addressing an aside to a voice:

          Aside: Voice

I love your voice.
And when they die
their voices will still
live together.

Permission to narrate cosmologies and new beginnings where “A baby is born out of an owl’s forehead”.

Permission to rattle the end-stopped “dead-end” in order to discover the wild continuum. For, “finally we are allowed to write,” Notley says, where to write is to “hysterically pile up pages in a dead-end world using dead-end forms of articulation written on dead trees.”

Permission to laugh maniacally and kiss the tree as we crawl inside it. 

 

iv

She also encourages us to use poetry as a means of studying and thinking about the world we are given, this reality, what some call ‘the facts on the ground’. For the facts on the ground are different from the facts of the ground. 

In the ‘female’ epic, “the tyrant is us,” Notley told Shoshana Olidort, “The tyrant is what enslaves us to our forms.” The tyranny is present in every space that grants us awards, residencies, diplomas, accreditations, salaries . . . “the form of our life, the form of our politics, the form of our universities, the form of our knowledge, our thinking we know something.” The tyrant is the king of meritocracy: he wears his credits like bling, his subjects take that bling as a genuine legitimation of his authority. What Notley calls “the ‘female’ epic” is about liberation— ‘all for all’ vs. ‘mine for yours’. “The liberation of everyone,” as she puts it. 

As I type, the wind blows my hair into my mouth. I am here and not here: nothing and something in simultaneity. The last time I cut my hair shorter than shoulder-length was at the age of seventeen. Since then, it has hung below my shoulders.  There was no decision involved; no ethical stance— simply a personal desire to keep the sensation of these dead cells touching my back, moving over my shoulders, tangling in my forearms when doing backflips underwater. 

There are so many beginnings. “All her jewelry will be in this envelope,” said the mortician, before pressing a button on the machine that would cremate my mother. A warm-up button. The thought had never crossed my mind. 

“Add her hair,” I said, “her curls . . . cut as many as you can.” 

In the poem, those curls hold the hue of sunset at the instant before the ochre ball falls beneath the ocean. The horizon, like her hair, has neither decomposed nor deteriorated: it is there whenever I visit Orange Beach, Alabama. 

There is a strange sensation that returns as a shudder when the space between the bushes where I dump the teens’ hair trimmings is empty, as I always hope it will be. Imagining that the hair of my children lines the nests of Birmingham’s birds gives me pleasure, even though we have never found such a nest. Never glimpsed a bird-beak with our hair in it. 

These thoughts groaned with the wind as it shook the trees last night. Restless, unable to sleep, I admired the wind and tried to catch up on email. There, on the porch, as I typed with one thumb, the following “Tornado Watch” scrolled across at the top of my phone:

The time is 11:44 am; the internet signal is good; the phone battery is low; the words are excerpted from Morton Feldman’s conversation with his friend, Walter Zimmerman; the juxtaposition constructs a different relationship to the howling wind. Normally, I would go inside but tonight I am thinking of time, thinking of Notley’s “& I do & I will,” and posing to myself the questions of poems we walk among, as possible. 

“What am I buying right now?” Notley says. “This is the question everyone should be asking all the time: What am I buying, in terms of thoughts and ideas, from others?” 

And what is the cost of this purchase? 

 

Referenced:

The unlinked essays mentioned above all come from Alice Notley’s essay collection, Coming After: Essays on Poetry, published by University of Michigan Press. Poems referenced include “The New Brain”; “Madrigal for the Newly Pregnant”; “Enormous Earrings”; excerpts from The Descent of Alette; “I’ve meant to tell you many things about my life …”; “The Comfort”; “2/16”;

The words in beneath the tornado warning come from Morton Feldman in a conversation with Walter Zimmermann published in Zimmerman’s book, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians (Vancouver: Aesthetic Research Center Publications, 1976). The entirety of the quote typed into the email reads as follows: “Many times I've put myself up against the wall and shot myself. I'm into a continual perpetual revolution in my own personal response to my work, which means action, immediate action, immediate decision that only I can make, and that I have to be responsible for.”

 

 

 

 

 

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. She would be elated if you ordered My Heresies, a poetry collection published by Sarabande in late April 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.