Rob Taylor

Yes! A poem I hate-loved was William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow," which I printed out on a little piece of paper and kept in my wallet. It both shook up my brain in exciting ways and felt too simple to be a real "poem." It felt like anyone could have written it. In the intervening years, I've come to realise that that was a strength of the poem, not a weakness.

I first started writing poems in high school, but didn't write in earnest until mid-way through my Undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser University. We founded a club there, High Altitude Poetry, that published monthly zines of student work. I guess I began feeling like a poet at that time, partly because I was publishing poems in the zine and partly because I was doing that work with friends as passionate about poetry as I was. We were making each other into poets.

Poetry is, for me, first and foremost an act of human connection. If you read something and you feel, even for a moment, accompanied in your life - a little less alone in an increasingly lonely world - that's poetry working at its best.

This connects to my last answer. I think a poet's "job" is to record something of themself (their speaking rhythms, their thought processes, their personal history, their feelings, their opinions, their "voice") on the page so that when another person reads them the poet is somehow conjured up into the room alongside the reader. Or so that the two (writer/reader) become one. No person can hold a poem inside them alone - a poem is created in the meeting place between writer and reader. A poet's job is to prepare their end of that meeting as best they can, and then trust the reader to do the rest.