Lisa Richter

I read poetry throughout high school - Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Sylvia Plath stand out to me as poets who were important to me at the time. I was very fortunate to have an English teacher who introduced us to T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others, and who taught me to approach a new poem with curiosity and excitement. The poem that I was most in love with was "somewhere i have never travelled" by e.e. cummings, particularly the last line: "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands."

Probably in high school, though looking back, I think I wrote my first poem in my journal at age eight. I was incredibly lucky to grow up in an artistic household: my mother is a writer and visual artist. As a child, I was most passionate about drawing and painting, but during my teen years, writing and particularly poetry overtook visual art as my primary form of creative expression. I wrote and revised my poems relentlessly, and even had compiled a 50-page manuscript of a collection when I was eighteen  (which thankfully, I never published!). I didn't have the confidence to submit my work to journals then but started a few years later, thanks to the community of poets that I met through the editorial board of the literary journal that I joined while at McGill University, and I've been at it ever since!   

I think the poet's job is, quite simply, to write poems. And keep writing them, even if the world conspires to distract you and rob you of your creative impulses. Also, to be vigilant, and pay close attention, which the poet Mary Oliver considered akin to devotion. I've often thought that to be a poet, you need a thin skin to let the world in, and a thick skin to deal with rejection, failure, and the test of one's will, endurance (and sometimes sanity) that goes with putting one's work out into the world. There's a quote I like from the Talmud (paraphrasing) that you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. That's how I see poetry. Not as a job, but as a path, a rocky one at times, a risky one, but far riskier, in my mind, not to follow, once you've discovered it.

That's a hard one - there are so many good ones, it's an embarrassment of riches! There are so many old and new favourites of mine, from Allen Ginsberg's "Supermarket in California" to Frank O'Hara's iconic "The Day Lady Died" to more recent now-iconic poets Ocean Vuoung and Liz Howard. But if I had to choose one, I would choose Alice Oswald's "A Short Story of Falling," inspired by her Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist reading in 2017. She recited her poems from memory, and it was spellbinding. I'd love to take on the challenge of memorizing one of her gorgeous poems.