Jason Stefanik is a second-generation adoptee raised in Manitoba’s Interlake. He currently resides in Winnipeg’s North End. He is a founding member of neither/neither, a creative collective at the Edge Gallery in Winnipeg’s inner city, and also facilitated a small poetry workshop for inmates at Stony Mountain Penitentiary. His poems have appeared in tart, Misunderstandings Magazine, Grain, Nashwaak Review, Arc, and Prairie Fire. He is the recipient of the 2015 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award and his book of poetry, Night Became Years, was shortlisted for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award. He's currently writing a sequence of poems on cryptography and often asks himself, "What would Auden do?"
By high school I was already probably too submersed in poetry — this added tremendous value to my imaginative life, but likely to the detriment of most other subjects, relationships, life skills, and interests. I grew up in a rural area, without cable television, and was lucky enough to have grandmothers that kept me reading: one grandmother in particular had me hooked on poetry — she really loved Longfellow; I really loved Tennyson - the Morte d’Arthur cycle was my Rambo movie, in a sense. I did have two outstanding high school English teachers (Glen Mitchell and Art Ammatuer!) who were kind enough to bend their respective curriculums to accomodate my poem lust. I guess from these beginnings, poetry tightened its head-lock on me. In high school I really loved Douglas LePan; I'm sure the first poem of his that really made me horny with a knuckleheaded romanticism was/is his “Coureur de bois.” But back then I was, embarassingly, already decalring myself a Symbolist poet, and would argue with anyone who tried to tell me that Keats was a finer poet than Shelley. I was really dumb.
I was young when I first started writing poems — my favourite book was Mother Goose, my favourite poem was “Jack Sprat.” So I always thought I could write little songs like that. I was also encouraged to knock out birthday and Christmas cards in rhyming verse, always going for the gag. My grandfather and an uncle or two would also inspire me when they'd write up a ditty for some occasion. I recall feeling that I was one of the “verse writers” in our family. I recall discovering a poem in my baby scrapbook: my mother wrote it, and it was a sort of vow to raise me (I am a second-generation adoptee) to the best of her ability, that she would always love and treat me as her own; and I recall the powerful feelings these stanzas of hers had on me. This phenomena, of reaching readers through poems, has fascinated me since I was a little person. My primary interest in life has entailed trying to capture sounds with tiny ticks on paper, yet I've never confidently thought of myself as a poet. Writing poems just feels like a horrifying but rewarding compulsion, sometimes a slog and sometimes surprisingly simple.
To educate, to inpire, to amend moral ineptitude, to enrage, to acknowlege important occassions, like the passing of seasons and royal Kings and Queens, to attack and defend, to dirge, to love, to satirize (and so amend?), to titillate, to feign, to negotiate the coda of words alongside and against the grain of self — maybe some of these things or maybe none of these things. I don't really know (sorry) what a poet's job is (and I can only answer in terms of myself) but believe a day is enjoyable if I've defeated enough resistance to feel on the way forward in a poem or two.
“The House on the Hill,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. The poem retains spooky kitch staying power. Early eco-poetics.
Joanne Epp's first poetry collection, Eigenheim (Turnstone Press, 2015), explores ideas of home, memory and longing; her second, Cattail Skyline (Turnstone Press, 2021) takes a close-up look at landscapes where she has lived and travelled. Together with Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen, she is co-translator of Wonder-Work: Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, The Phare, and other journals. She won second place in the 2017 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, and third place in the 2018 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Contest. Her work is influenced by poets such as Anne Szumigalski, Alice Major, and Sarah Klassen, and by prairie and boreal landscapes. Born and raised in small Saskatchewan towns, she spent several years in Ontario and now makes her home in Winnipeg.
I did read poetry in high school — we didn't get much of it in school, but the poems we did read made an impression on me. A poem I particularly liked, and the one I remember best from high school, is “Leisure” by W.H.Davies. I liked it, not just because I found the lines “No time to stand beneath the boughs/ And stare as long as sheep or cows” rather funny, but because I thought the poet got it right: it is important to “stand and stare,” to take time to notice what's around us.
I wrote my first poem when I was eight, and wrote a handful of poems during my school years. It wasn't until I was twenty that I decided I wanted to do more of this—there was a definite moment when that happened, and then another moment, a couple of years later, when I decided to take poetry seriously and learn how to write better. It took a long time to get from “I write a bit” to “I’m a writer,” and I’m not sure when it happened. Having my first poems published in a journal was very encouraging, but still didn’t give me the nerve to say “I’m a poet” out loud. The turning point may have been around the time I started getting book reviews published, or when I was accepted into a mentorship program; either way, it came after I'd been writing for a long time.
Attentiveness is a big part of a poet's work. I approach poetry as a way of expressing and giving shape to what I encounter in the world, and so, while a love of language is essential, poetry also has to come out of a love for the world.
“Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I like it for the sheer pleasure of its sounds, and for the way it describes things the poet observes in the natural world—things I've seen, and noticed with pleasure, but would not have thought to describe in quite this way.
Angeline Schellenberg’s Manitoba Book Award-winning debut Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016) was nominated a ReLit Award for Poetry. Her elegy collection Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2022 KOBZAR Book Award. Her work has placed in Prairie Fire's poetry contests and been shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. She has also published four poetry chapbooks: Roads of Stone (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2015), Dented Tubas (Kalamalka Press, 2019), Blue Moon, Red Herring (JackPine Press, 2019), and Irises (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Most of Angeline’s poems are confessional, usually in the form of prose poetry or free verse, sometimes using found material in playful ways. She has been influenced by Méira Cook, Don McKay, Joanne Epp, and Jennifer Still. A two-time Deep Bay artist-in-residence at Riding Mountain National Park and frequent Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program mentor with the Manitoba Writers Guild, Angeline currently hosts Speaking Crow: Winnipeg longest-running poetry open mic series. Her wildest collection yet, Mondegreen Riffs is forthcoming with At Bay Press in 2024.
I did enjoy poetry in high school. I remember loving "High Flight." I spent summer Sunday afternoons above the prairie in my dad's Cessna, so I knew what John Gillespie Magee Jr. meant by "high in the sunlit silence."
In Grade 7 or 8, I had a Sunday school teacher who encouraged me to write poetry. I wrote her an illustrated booklet of rhyming spiritual poems, the letters outlined in alternating blue and red pencil crayon. In my 20s and most of my 30s, I was too caught up with earning degrees, raising children, and getting over my fear of failure to write. In spring 2011, something clicked and I found my creativity again. I applied to the Manitoba Writers Guild Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program and was paired with Méira Cook in 2012. She got me submitting to journals and applying for my first project grant. I think I first thought of myself as a poet when, at the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium in 2013, I told Don McKay I was afraid of writing narrative poetry because it might come out sounding too prosy, and he responded with something like, "Don't worry about that. You're a real poet: you can't help but be poetic!"
A poet's job is to help us fall in love: with the natural world, with the sound of language, with our everyday life. To remind us how to breathe.
I’d choose "Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye, so I could summon anywhere its gentle updraft of hope for human connection.