Leesa Dean : Poetic Genesis: Goth Girl Swallows Wordsworth Like a Snake.

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

 

I’ve been reading the previous essays published here that respond to the question of how a poem begins/where poems come from. Otoniya J Okot Bitek refers to the poem as “a beggar at the ceiling of the mouth;” Julia Polyck O-Neill describes the involuntary emergence of the poem-object as “tenuous, irritating, visceral, somewhat liminal”. And so I enter my own relationship to this question from an intertextual space, the question itself a beggar at the ceiling of my mouth, both liminal and visceral.

The only way for me to answer this question is to return to Montreal, Concordia University, September 2001. A British Lit class in which we first-year students were called upon to study Wordsworth’s preface to The Lyrical Ballads and the iconic phrase “spontaneous overflow of feelings.” The noise of hundreds of student scratching notes on paper, the din of a large institution so incongruous with the quiet of pastoral England we were being asked to imagine, acted as a form of distortion. I couldn’t quite get where I was expected to be.

Later that day, we had a seminar with our TA who shook his head and said, “You’re not feeling it.” He had us cradle our 1200-page textbooks (feel the weight of this literature) and stand with our eyes closed while he slowly read “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” Then we were asked to slowly walk around the room and read for ourselves, to let the poem settle into our bodies.

At first, the images evoked nothing for me. I found them commonplace— I had grown up near a forest where the sun bent like bones through shafts of blue spruce. Time spooled as I bounded through ponderosas, burrs on my pillow every night. Then, something in the poem caught my interest:

    In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart…

These words were the catalyst for my spontaneous overflow. I understood exactly what he meant by fretful stir, the fever, weight hung on a heart. I walked and read; I re-imagined his landscape, but through the lens of the subtextual fret and fever rather than the forced lens of reverence. On the cognitive map I’d drawn in my head of Tintern Abbey, a shimmering image of a goth girl began to form beside Wordsworth—she as the embodiment of this fret and fever. Sun streamed through her black hair, illuminated her curious expression as she read over Wordsworth’s shoulder. Wordsworth, in his reverie, did not notice her sitting so close.

That afternoon, as I remember, was just days after 9/11 and I could not read out of context—should we ever? As I cradled the weighty textbook while my passionate TA channelled centuries old sublimity, a type of genesis for my own emerging poetics occurred. Poetry-as-goth-girl made sense to me, especially two days after I’d watched the towers crumble in real time on my rabbit-eared TV. Since then, my poetic process has been to first consider through a dark lens; arrive at beauty through it rather than in opposition to it. This is how my poems still begin, twenty three years later—through corridors of dark inquiry that eventually lead to wider, brighter rooms.

Like a serpent, goth girl can swallow that which is much larger than her. Her gentle teeth glint as she hinges her mouth wide, creeps to where Wordsworth attempts to translate his overflowing emotions into words. Soon, she is flexed. Soon, he finds himself in cavernous dark. He blinks. He inhales this gorgeous dark. Yet holding Wordsworth in her mouth is not an act of subsummation or eradication for goth girl. The goal is to subtly shift, not to consume. He rests in her jaw for a moment and when he emerges, blinking, he revisits the landscape in a more nuanced way.

I came across that perfect juxtaposition—"the gorgeous dark”— in a poem by Jenn Currin. When I am attentive, I find this gorgeous dark everywhere—Sanna Wani writes “the sun, a wound on your windowsill” in her poem “Memory is Sleeping.” The gorgeous dark is integral to the work of Ocean Vuong but is distinctly remarkable here:

That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.

Yes, I arrive at my poems through dark inquiry, but I am always seeking a type of dichotomy that is less of a helix and more of a liminal blend. Every time I sit down to write a poem, I let the jaws swallow me, but just long enough to return with nuance rather than submerge. Then, I settle into the liminal space, the gorgeous dark, and from there I write.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leesa Dean is the author of two books (Waiting for the Cyclone, The Filling Station) and two above/ground chapbooks (The Desert of Itabira, Apogee/Perigee). Her third book, Interstitial, will be published by Gaspereau Press in Spring 2026. Dean is a graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program and teaches creative writing at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC where she also helps run the Black Bear Review. In 2022, she was runner-up for the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. She lives on a small acreage in Krestova, BC, where she can often be found overthinking her own poetics amidst the lupins.

Leesa Dean : On Revelatory Skepticism, The Moon and Antarctica

 

 

 

 

I once let a person read my astrological chart. The reading took place in Mexico 15 years ago, near Palenque, where I was volunteering on a dysfunctional organic farm. My volunteer duties mostly consisted of hacking tall weeds with a machete in exchange for lodging in a tent near what we called “the scorpion house”—a pile of rocks that had once been a house but had somehow become a home for scorpions.

The chart reader was a 23-year-old from New York who did not fit the visual profile of how I imagined a Vedic astrologer might look. He looked more like a bassist in an indie band. Somehow that made me feel more open to an idea I would have typically faced with skepticism under any other circumstances. We sat together under a banana tree while I took notes in my journal. He predicted my future using the twelve houses of the Zodiac and told me unbelievable things, like I’d one day be a teacher and a career artist. At the time, I was a functional alcoholic, stalled in an entry-level office job with no writing practice whatsoever. Apparently I was also going to marry an artist, and we would have a child. The path he described seemed diametrically opposite to where I was socially located. It felt dangerous to imagine myself in such a position of power, at least at that point in my life. Nonetheless I carefully, skeptically wrote down his words.

Somehow, he was not wrong. Somehow, I am a teacher, a mother, a working artist.

Lately I’ve been inclined to write about that iconic chart reading. I published an essay on the subject called “When Saturn Returns” which was included in Guernica Edition’s fabulous anthology, Changing The Face of Canadian Literature: A Diverse Canadian Anthology. Eventually, I started thinking about how two loosely connected frameworks—Vedic astrology and lunar orbits—might converge as a poetic personal narrative supported by visuals. This gave birth to my project, Apogee/Perigee.

The poems in Apogee/Perigee, published in April by above/ground press, physically orbit the page like the moon. Each explores a different Zodiac house, first from the perspective of apogee, when the moon is farthest from its origin. I employed the language of lunar cycles to depict my personal journey: when do we drift farthest from ourselves? When are we closest? What I like most about the word apogee is the double meaning— it can refer to the positively connoted pinnacle or climax of something, or it can represent an isolating point of orbit farthest from the origin.

Each “apogee” poem has a complementary “perigee” poem. Those poems explore what to me feels like a centre point, a home base that my life will inevitably spool away from and return to at different points. I was careful not to conflate the idea of perigee with some ideal, unattainable version of myself, nor did I imply through my poetry that my problems have been resolved.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted this to be a visual poetry project. I was able to work with my graphic designer pal Nathan Vyklicky, most famous perhaps for his comic in The New Yorker. Nathan orbited through all my vague directions and pivots as I mulled over what kinds of visuals could best support the poems, and finally we landed in the right place.

I’m not usually one to listen to music while I work. I have a distracted mind, and I usually prefer to sit in full silence when writing and editing. I wear earplugs even when no one else is home. For this project, though, I often listened to The Moon and Antarctica by Modest Mouse while I worked. The music on that album does something similar to what I aimed for in my poetry—it presents diametric opposites in ways that are complementary. It’s also an album I’ve listened to throughout my adult years, in states of apogee and perigee.

 

 

 

 

 

Leesa Dean is a graduate of the University of Guleph’s Creative Writing MFA program and an instructor at Selkirk College. Her first book, Waiting for the Cyclone, was a finalist for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards. Her novella-in-verse, The Filling Station, was recently published by Gaspereau Press and is based on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. She is the author of two chapbooks with above/ground press—The Desert of Itabira (2020) and Apogee/Perigee (2023)—and lives in Krestova, BC (unceded Sinixt territory), with her artist husband Matty Kakes and their daughter Scarlett Heart.

Tim Duffy, Sarah Venart, Joshua Beckman, Joshua Corey + Leesa Dean : virtual reading series #25

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Tim Duffy : “Between the Church and the Door” and “Cart”

Tim Duffy is a poet and teacher working in Connecticut. His work has appeared recently in Bodega, Pleiades, Entropy, Rabbit Oak among others. He is the founder and EIC of 8 Poems Journal.

Sarah Venart : “Octopus Laser” and “Stun Guns”

Sarah Venart was raised in New Brunswick and lives and teaches in Montreal. She is the author of I AM THE BIG HEART and WOODSHEDDING.

Joshua Beckman : “If You Pray These Days” and “poem n form d bill bissett”

Joshua Beckman is the author of a number of books including The Inside of an Apple, The Lives of the Poems & Three Talks, and most recently Animal Days.

Joshua Corey : “Exterior Century,” “Interior Medusa,” and “Interior Birth.”

Joshua Corey is a poet, critic, translator, and novelist whose books include The Barons (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), The Transcendental Circuit; Otherworlds of Poetry (MadHat Press, 2018), a new translation with Jean-Luc Garneau of Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses as Partisan of Things (Kenning Editions, 2016), and the forthcoming Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press). He lives in Evanston, Illinoi with his wife and about-to-be teenage daughter, and teaches English at Lake Forest College.

Leesa Dean : “Self-Isolation”

Leesa Dean is a graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program and a Creative Writing Instructor at Selkirk College. Her collection of short stories, Waiting for the Cyclone, was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards. Her poetry chapbook, The Desert Itabira, was published by above/ground press last year. She is a settler on Sinixt territory in the Slocan Valley where she roams her small acreage, finding inspiration in the wildness surrounding her, and mostly fails at trying to grow melons. The long poem read for this series is from a manuscript in progress titled How to Survive which explores macro and micro forms of survival, ranging from the species level to the personal, including meditations on the author's summer spent at Aircrew Survival camp in Northern Alberta in 1995 and her mother's life-long repercussions from having polio as a child, a condition that ultimately killed her at the age of 60.