Jeremy Audet
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
Jeremy Audet is the Non-Fiction Editor at yolk and Founding Editor of Canto. His writing has been awarded the Bridge Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the CBC Short Story Prize, and others. He is a 2026 Writer-in-Residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-Frame Association and lives in Montreal.
The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.
What first brought you to poetry?
I’d written French poetry in high school, but mostly abandoned reading and writing for some years. One day in class my impressionable young-adult brain, having barely settled from the young-adult antics of the night before, encountered John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I teared up. He’d somehow put into perfect words the same questions, heartaches, and convictions I was experiencing two centuries after him. I guess it was an epiphany. I registered for an English degree and started reading again.
I wrote sometimes, mostly romantic little odes or ekphrastic poems while travelling, but I first started writing poetry as a serious pursuit midway through my degree. I devoted two weeks one winter break entirely to typewriting a thirty-page poem, which was really a mosaic of ideas and language from all the writers I wanted to emulate. Woolf, Auden, Barbauld, Keats, Ginsburg, Eliot, Whitman. It was a terrible poem, but once I’d written it I felt that, okay, I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, now I can write my own poems. In the years since, I’ve been blessed with incredible mentors both academic and creative, all of whom have kept that initial epiphany going.
How did you get from that point to starting to send out work? What did that process look like? Once you moved beyond those original poets, who were your more contemporary models or mentors?
As part of my Honour’s
thesis I studied twentieth-century literary magazines in Canada. I also
co-edited the literary journal at my university, Bishop’s, for an issue. Some
friends were also starting their own journal – yolk, for whom I now work
– and so the process of submitting work for publication seemed
relatively accessible. I was very methodical about it: I created a spreadsheet
with my poems on the y
axis and journals on the x
axis, and started submitting. I can still go back and see which publications
rejected a poem before its eventual publication. It’s also a good way to keep
track of which poems I should keep working on. Most poems of mine have gone
through four, five, six significant rewrites before their eventual publication.
I remained pretty loyal to the romantics and modernists until I encountered Derek Walcott. Omeros is a masterpiece that shattered my conception of what poetry made possible. I read it every year. Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin write in Walcott’s general legacy, and I admire their works to a great measure. Etel Adnan and Linnea Axelsson, too, are writers in translation I’ve modeled some work from. I focussed on ecopoetics during my Master’s, Nicholas Bradley being one of those aforementioned mentors and also a poet I admire, so I also have to highlight the impact of Rita Wong, Don McKay, and Derek Mahon on my own writing. Recently, though, and perhaps in keeping with my Walcottian orbit, I’m reading Seamus Heaney.
You say you originally began writing in French. Is there a difference in the way you might approach writing in French, as opposed to English? Is French a language you still explore through your work?
I've only recently returned to reading and writing in French. Despite it being my mother tongue, I spent most of my youth in English schools abroad, and with the exception of high school continued in English when I moved to Canada. The little French writing I have done is more colloquial, phonetic, usually short portraitures or lyrics. I approach it more carefully, thinking slowly as I go.
But French has been entering my English work in substantial ways as of late. Two of the poems that consist of “EARTH GIGANTIC” directly engage with the French language, asking questions about interlingual exchange, impossible translations, and what it means to have a tongue in both mouths. The major project I'm working on this year – a novel – has French-English dynamics as a central motif.
There’s a French word, dépaysement, I can’t stop thinking about. A literal translation would be “the feeling of being un-countried,” but there is no adequate English counterpart. I grew up all over the place, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and still move around frequently. In Québec I’m a francophone who’s adopted English. In British Columbia I hid my French roots. Dépaysement is my natural state of being – it runs through all my work, I’d say.
This is something I’ve discussed prior with Regina-based poet Jérôme Melançon, who composes and publishes poetry separately in English and French. His own writing follows different trajectories, in part due to the poetry of each language often following separate influences. Do you find similar considerations across your work in French or English? Is your writing in one language only, or even predominantly, impacted by writing you’ve read in that language? Or is it simply a difference of the way you think through each language?
I haven’t written enough in French to speak to that alone. But I would absolutely say the French books I read penetrate my poetry in English.
In Québec, especially Montreal, there’s stark differences between French and English poetry when considering structure, style, narratives. The English scene consists predominantly of individual poems, for instance, while collections in French often lose titles altogether, benefitting from a stream-of-consciousness looseness that generates a much more poetic reading experience. I’ve found more resonance with the French collections, stylistically, than with my English contemporaries in book form.
I don’t know Jérôme's work, but I find his practice fascinating, and something I would like to aspire to. I’ve recently begun translating some of my own poems into French and re-translating them into English after some time away, as a sort of creative exercise. I would like to eventually translate my own poetry in full, because yes, the way I think in one language differs from the other entirely. Humour, musicality, syntax, sensation – all changes.
How does a poem begin for you?
I’ve had poems begin with the title. Some with a news article. Some with a single line recycled again and again. “Archipelago,” which is included in the shortlist package for the Bronwen Wallace Award, began with a very simple wordplay-on-title image: a grown up and child passing a paper back and forth beneath a door. “Albedo Effect,” which was finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, has a double origin: while I was quite literally restoring footage of my grandfather installing powerlines in Nunavut sixty years ago, I was also reading a wonderful essay by Nadim Roberts titled “Mangilaluk’s Highway,” about three Inuit boys who fled a residential school and attempted to walk home by following powerlines; only one survived, and the poem is a sort of compression of multiple griefs.
A poem never just forms out of thin air. I don’t believe in that “fleeting inspiration” thing. Sure, I too have been struck by the odd image and thought up a line or two on the spot, and sure, I too will sit down and write with passion for hours at a time because the words are just pouring out of me, but for me those aren’t poems. Those are drafts. The poem comes after, once you’ve chipped away at it, thrown it out entirely, rebuilt it, etc. Even the most commonly-accepted first-draft poems are not first drafts at all. Ginsberg revised “Howl” over long periods. Whitman wrote and rewrote Leaves of Grass forever. The poem is the fruit of tireless labour. And barely any of that labour actually takes place on the page.
I’m curious how you might see your editorial work, whether at yolk or Canto, in conversation with your own writing, if at all. How does your editorial work impact your own work, and vice versa?
I’ve become better at self-editing, that’s for sure. Going through so many submissions you also notice the clichés more, the trends, what people are writing about already, how they’re writing. When I first started as an editor for yolk, I read Canadian journals en masse, to get a sense of what quality to aspire to and what people were publishing. I’ve permitted myself to track down a quote from Hélène Cixous: “Literature itself has read. It doesn’t just arrive like that. It has read. I have read this, this, and this, it says, and it passes itself on.” No attentive reading will ever make you a worse writer. Even the poem within which you see nothing of value tells you, well, okay, this is how not to write. But even then, as an editor, reading something within which I see little value at first becomes an exercise in compassion. Okay, this has meant something to someone; how can I get close to that meaning?
And that practice, in
turn, makes you a more compassionate reader of your own work. And this is
vital: to be compassionate is to be able to get closer to what literature has
read before you,.
as Cixous says, to move back in time along that lineage of writing and sit with
it, let it sit within you. That is
the altruistic value of editorial work. And the editorial conversations I have
with other writers are always fruitful. The whole process nourishes my work
indirectly, I'm certain. Just allotting the space to engage with other writers
daily keeps the poetic spirit dynamic and thinking and ready. Who knows what
comes out of that space, and when?
I know you’re scheduled for a residency this fall at the Al Purdy A-Frame. Have you particular plans for your time there?
I’ll be organizing a panel and a workshop on the poetics of wildfire, hopefully with some panelists from across disciplines. In my personal time there, though, I hope I can complete this long, long poem I’ve been developing on my time spent as a wildland firefighter in British Columbia. I’m still not sure what shape it’ll take, whether book-length or chapbook etc., but it’s been in the works for well over a year now... I’d like to get it done while I’m there.
Though I’ll also be taking some time to work on this novel. I’m taking a course right now with the authors Madeleine Thien and Sarah Moss that fittingly enough wraps up the day I get to the residency, so the novel will be fresh in my mind, and I’ll probably make considerable headway on it while there. Though it’s hard to say. I’m particularly excited about the panel, though. My friend Janelle Levesque just spent the month of April there and hid a note for me. Depending on how well she hid it, I might spend a lot of time going through every little crevice in the place. But I might also spend my whole time there walking around the woods and lake. Make some stews. Maybe run into a bear. That’d be time well spent.
The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He has garnered the occasional writing and writing activity award, but never a book award.
