Kyla Jamieson

Photo credit

Denis Gutiérrez-Ogrinc

Biography

Kyla Jamieson was born and raised in Squamish and North Vancouver. Her début poetry collection, Body Count (Nightwood Editions 2020), wove the disparate experiences of a brain injury, modelling in New York City, and studying creative writing in Vancouver into a text that was named a CBC Best Poetry Book of 2020 and received praise for its candour, humour, and complexity.

She earned her BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has served as a literary editor of both poetry and prose in roles with SAD Mag and PRISM international. Guided by her belief in the universality of creativity, her cultural work centres self-expression, interdependence, and embodiment. She was the Vancouver Public Library’s 2024 Writer in Residence and is passionate about supporting emerging writers. Find her at kylajamieson.com or in the ocean.

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

The first poetry collection I owned was Miracle Fair by Wisława Szymborska. I found it at a bookstore in Hong Kong when I was fourteen or fifteen, during my first summer working abroad as an international fashion model. Her language was simple but philosophical, abstract and intellectual. I was a young woman trying to make sense of myself and my place in the world, with a head full of ideals and questions. Szymborska’s writing showed me poetry could be a place for ideas and inquiry. My favorite poem of hers for many years was “Children of Our Era.” “What you say has a resonance; / what you are silent about is telling.”

Another poem I loved was “If” by Rudyard Kipling. I remember falling in love with it when a classmate in my International Baccalaureate English class recited the poem to us. It’s an epistolary poem addressed to the speaker’s son, framed as advice on how to “become a Man”—but its directives didn’t feel gendered to me. The poem enunciates the merits of integrity, nuance, courage, resilience, and character. While I question the individualism of this text now, it was clarifying to encounter many of my values in a poetic text as a young student. I think this was one of the first epistolary poems I studied, where the speaker addresses a specific recipient, and this is one of the forms I continue to reach for the most in my own writing.

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

I first started writing poetry when I was twelve or thirteen years old. The first poem I wrote had something to do with weather and perspective—it was about the subjectivity of human experience.

At that time, I didn’t have many examples of the poetry a young woman could create. In high school, I read “For Anne Gregory,” W.B. Yeats’ poem about a young woman who “only God” could love for who she was, rather than for her beauty. But I didn’t read poems by girls like Anne Gregory—in literature, I was only encountering young women through a male perspective. In my early writing, I gravitated towards big emotions and pain points, somehow thinking that suffering was the only thing that could render a young woman’s life interesting to readers.

It wasn’t until I started publishing poems, around the time I started my MFA in Creative Writing, that I began to think of myself as a poet.

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

I always say that life is my primary material, not language—part of my job as a poet is to live. Joyfully and meaningfully. To learn to lie to myself less. To travel to the edge of understanding and make it beautiful, so uncertainty becomes a place people are willing to linger. To translate emotion or embodied knowledge into language. To lay down paths of text other people can follow, through feeling, back to themselves. To remain human, and remain loyal to our shared humanity. To ask questions I may never answer. To find new ways to communicate what I don’t yet have the language for, and to witness both the absence and possibility of that language.

If you have a poem in our anthology what inspired you to write it?

I wrote this poem, “In Exile I Draw the Tower Card,” about six months after experiencing a concussion that completely dismantled my life. I had a pink post-it note on my wall at that time, where I had written: “WRITE ABOUT YOUR LIFE RN.”

I hadn’t read any poems about brain injuries or the way they changed the texture of your reality. In many ways, it felt like nothing was happening in my world, because I was so constrained in my function and abilities—but poetry doesn’t need plot. Sometimes it’s enough to say: “I’m lost, and this is what it feels like.”

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

Jorie Graham’s “On the Last Day.” A poem full of inquiries, where periods replace question marks: “How do I / find sufficient // ignorance. How do I // not summarize / anything.” The poem presents ignorance as something worth searching for, surrendering thought, protection, and the self to turn towards dreams, desires, and needs.

The poem ends with a bold, declarative statement, asserting our human limitations: “No one can tell the whole story.” One of my favourite things about poetry is the way it allows us to make such statements, without proof or explanation—and often without context. I would love to know this poem better, to carry it with me.