Jessica Moore

I remember falling utterly for Ellen Bass's long poem, "Our Stunning Harvest", when I was 17, in a class taught by a fierce feminist professor at Inglenook Community High School who always had us begin with a 20 minute free-write, to music. I was forging my relationship with words those intense years --such depth of feeling! I have a memory of reading "Our Stunning Harvest" aloud to the class and feeling the building power of the poem, the potential in layering, the impact that has partly to do with precision of an image returned to multiple times, and partly to do with the expanse of the long poem.

I also remember having to memorize Victor Hugo's "Les Djinns" while on exchange in French Switzerland in grade ten. It, too, is a poem that builds - even visually, it begins with short lines of just a few syllables and swells to the loudest part of the poem, the clamour and rush of the swarm of djinns that passes, before growing slender and quiet again towards the end. Many subtleties of translation escaped me at the time, but the sounds, the music and the swell all grew familiar and rich through memorization.

I started writing poems when I was five years old, and published my first poem when I was eight, in the Toronto Sun -an ode to the creek behind my grandparents' house. Around this same time, I wrote another poem about recurrent flying dreams. Specifically, I was aware of NOT choosing classically 'poetic' words when describing the wind in these dreams (i.e. rejecting the verb "caressing" and writing "cooling my face" instead). I probably already thought of myself as a poet then..

There's something so incredible, so precisely between pleasure and pain, that happens when a line is just right -- it can go straight to the core. I am thinking of Alice Oswald, 'the heart's thick accent', or 'it's midnight and my life is laid beneath my children like gold leaf'. I am thinking, too, of Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations in an Emergency,"  Marie Howe, Erin Robinsong's poem "Late Prayer",  Dilruba Ahmed's "Phase One", John Steffler's "The Grey Islands", and most all of Anne Carson. I think poetry interrupts us in ways that can feel affirming, heartbreaking, and electric. 

I suppose this means I think the job of the poet is to wake us up! 

So hard to choose just one. But I would be drawn to the excerpt "From Whereas", by Layli Long Soldier, a gorgeous and wise book that feels necessary, especially as a settler wanting to unlearn so much of my 'settler education' (to borrow the words of another wonderful poet, Laurie Graham). I like the plainspeak and the emotion of this poem. And I love the shift when the poet's daughter, who has skinned her knees, is carried into the house bleeding--out of some mysterious instinct she's laughing, too, and the mother says, 'Stop, my girl, If you're hurting, cry.' This line undoes something in me as the reader, as it unleashes the daughter's held-back tears.

And then, too, I love the further turn when Long Soldier is reading a government document and notices her own reaction to the ludicrousness of the line 'the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter for the history of Native Peoples'. That same instinct to laugh takes over, and she recognizes, after the fact, that this is akin to what her daughter felt.