Devon Rae : Good Poems

How does a poem begin?

A good poem arrests me. It demands my attention. When I look at a good poem, I can feel it looking back. I can’t look away. The good poem and I get trapped in a staring contest, a trance. Even when I eventually set it down and go wash the dishes or water the plants, I know I’ll return to it later. I feel it tugging at my edges.

In my writing practice, a poem can begin with an idea, an image, a phrase, a feeling, a secret, or even just a word that has lodged itself inside me. I pursue this hook and hope it takes me somewhere interesting. I like how Anne Carson puts it: “Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.” This following down is the work of writing poetry. I’m much less interested in where poems begin than in where they go. Poems can begin just about anywhere in my experience. For me, most of writing poetry is revision. I work on the same poem over and over again until I have the right words in the right order, to paraphrase Coleridge. That’s my only fidelity in poetry – to the right words in the right order. When I’m writing, I’m listening very intently, trying to hear which word comes next. I have to let go of a lot to write a good poem. I have to let go of my vision of what the poem should be and let it speak for itself. I have to let go of my longing to tell a particular story and my attachment to pretty phrases I come up with. I have to give up my shame and beliefs about what I’m allowed and not allowed to write about. I have to give up my clever ideas, because there’s a big difference between a clever idea and a good poem. Another major part of my writing process is throwing poems out. I have to write so many poems to get to the good ones. 

 

 

 

 

 

Devon Rae is a queer writer from Montreal, QC who now lives in Vancouver, BC. Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, PRISM International, Room, Plenitude, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Thirteen Conversations with My Body (Anstruther Press, 2024).

Devon Rae : (further) short takes on the prose poem

folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

A prose poem is a room the reader enters. In that room, something happens to them. They sit at the table. They gaze out the window. Sometimes, they make themselves coffee or lie down on the bed. It is a quiet room, a closed room, a room visited alone. The last line is the door, and when the reader exits, it locks behind them.

I started writing prose poems in 2020 and became addicted to the form. My favourite book of prose poetry is Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. I don't understand it at all, and I love it so much. It is like a fragmented dictionary of domesticity. Le Spleen de Paris by Charles Baudelaire is another book of prose poetry that deeply moved me. I remember reading it as a teenager – I loved the stranger in the first poem who was in love with clouds. Writing prose poems allows me to mostly avoid the problem of line breaks, which I find very tricky. It is a relief to eliminate one of poetry’s difficulties.

 

 

Conversation with My Menstrual Blood

I spill your ink, and it leaves a trail behind me, a trail others might follow, it spells messages in blood. The words you write are loss and grief. You toil each month for a child who does not come. You want to hold her close, you want to tend to her. But I give you just this emptiness to tend to. This lithic void.

 

 

Conversation with My Shit

You are marked by my interior, its twisted corridors. You lurk in darkness, out of sight, until I set you free, you touch water, light, you long for me to gaze at you. Which I do not, until I do, and then you speak to me. You say: rich, redolent, fulgent, lush. You speak in muddied tongues and loamy scents. And I say nothing back.

 

 

 

 

 

Devon Rae is a queer poet from Montreal who now lives in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, SAD Magazine, Touch the Donkey, and elsewhere.