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Je ne pense pas avoir découvert la poésie à l’école. J’en ai sûrement lu au secondaire… Mais rien de marquant. Quand j’y pense, le premier poème qui apparaît dans mes souvenirs, je l’ai rencontré par inadvertance en feuilletant le livret d’un album du groupe punk québécois Penelope. Je devais avoir 15 ans… La dernière pièce de leur premier disque présentait une chanson avec un vocabulaire très différent du joual avec lequel le groupe avait l’habitude de composer. J’ai lu et relu les paroles de cette chanson intitulée Spleen, sans pourtant en percer le mystère, bien qu’un certain C. Baudelaire soit crédité pour ces mots. C’tu l’bassiste, C. Baudelaire? Cinq ans plus tard, je suis à l’université et flâne à la foire du livre quand une couverture attire mon attention. Il s’agit du recueil Les Fleurs du mal d’un certain Charles Baudelaire. Ça me frappe ! Guidé par mon intuition, j’ouvre le livre et feuillette nerveusement son contenu. Je m’arrête sur un poème : Le spleen de Paris. Je lis... des mots… que je connais déjà par cœur ! Mon premier poème préféré, composé par mon premier poète préféré. Les Fleurs du mal, c’est le premier recueil de poésie que j’ai acheté. 

J’écris des poèmes d’amour à ma blonde au Cégep… J’ai 16 ans. Je ne lis pas de poésie, mais j’en écris. C’est comme ça. C’est d’ailleurs de cette façon que j’aborde la poésie en atelier. Sans même le savoir, on est plein de poèmes. On sait comment les écrire parce qu’on sait à quoi ça sert. Les poèmes, c’est bon pour dire les choses tough à dire. Ça prend cette forme-là. À 23 ans, je pars en voyage pour quatre mois et traverse le Mexique, le Guatemala et le Bélize. Je n’ai plus de blonde. Je suis en deuil. Je découvre le monde. Dans mon sac, Entre cuir et peau de Lucien Francoeur, mon deuxième livre de poésie. Dans les oreilles, les tounes de Aut’Chose. Je tiens un journal et, dedans, je parle en poèmes. À 25 ans, je suis de retour à Trois-Rivières. Par un fabuleux concours de circonstances, on m’offre de m’impliquer dans le OFF-Festival de poésie de Trois-Rivières. Je tombe dedans. Découvre les poètes de l’oralité, mes frères et mes sœurs de maux. Et avant longtemps, je me présente au micro pour lire ma poésie. Je ne sais pas vraiment quand ça commence… Mais c’est devant le micro que j’me suis pour la première fois senti poète. 

Révéler le vrai plus vrai que la vérité.

La pluie me suit de Patrice Desbiens

Au secondaire, j'ai appris à analyser les poèmes de Baudelaire, Rimbaud et Verlaine grâce à une enseignante un peu rebelle qui nous a parlé du symbolisme, des poètes maudits et de ce à quoi peut bien servir la littérature. Au Cégep, on m'a parlé de François Villon, des lais, des rondeaux et des ballades. Globalement, je crois que les enseignant·e·s que j'ai croisé·e·s sur mon parcours étaient pour la plupart un peu intimidés par la poésie. Ils nous ont appris à compter les pieds dans un sonnet classique plus qu'à démystifier le langage poétique. 

C'est à travers la chanson que j'ai découvert la poésie actuelle. Au Cégep, me rappelle avoir été flabbergastée par l'étude de Charcoal, de Richard Desjardins, tellement le texte débordait d'images et livrait avec tellement de justesse une critique sociale percutante.

J'ai commencé à écrire de la poésie vers la fin de mes études secondaires. 

C'est grâce à une sorte de conférence décalée, quelque part entre poésie, humour et jeu, proposée par un poète invité à notre école, que j'ai découvert que la poésie pouvait exister à l'extérieur des structures classiques qu'on m'avait présentées jusque là. La poésie m'est apparue comme un langage avec lequel on pouvait s'amuser, un langage qui pouvait permettre de condenser une pensée en seulement quelques mots bien choisis, mais surtout, comme un langage qui était à ma portée.

Il m'a tout de même fallu quelques années avant de considérer la poésie comme une partie de mon identité. Comme une de mes langues préférées. Je dirais que c'est à travers la reconnaissance des autres que j'ai pu oser me définir comme poète. À travers mes premiers prix, mes premières publications, mais surtout, mes premiers « j'adore ce que tu écris, ça m'a vraiment touché·e ».

Le travail des poètes, c'est d'abord un travail d'observation du monde. Les poètes, en posant un regard un peu décalé sur les choses, nous aident à voir le monde différemment, à le rêver différemment. C'est aussi un travail de générosité. Celle de partager des morceaux intimes de nous-mêmes, parce qu'on croit que quelqu'un d'autre peut y trouver de quoi mieux se connaître, se comprendre ou même se révéler.

Ensuite, il s'agit de trouver le mot juste, la forme juste, pour transmettre le plus exactement possible, avec le plus de force possible, ce qu'on souhaite dire, d'une manière qui ne fasse pas seulement comprendre, mais aussi ressentir. 
Il faut, pour y arriver, explorer le langage de fond en comble. En extraire toutes les ressources, puis bricoler, effacer, rabouter, pour inventer quelque chose qui soit aussi complètement juste, complètement sincère et complètement neuf que possible. 

J'ai écrit ce poème durant un road trip à Chicago, en plein hiver.
J'y ai passé quelques jours dans un appartement de Wicker Park, à boire des cafés, à écrire et à fêter le Nouvel An en faisant du karaoké sur YouTube dans un salon frette qui n'était pas le mien.

Les voyages me donnent toujours envie d'écrire. 
Il y a quelque chose, dans le fait de changer d'espace, qui force à se regarder sous un autre angle. 
À chercher comment être soi ailleurs.
Et on y fait parfois des découvertes étonnantes. 

C'est un peu cruel de ne pouvoir en choisir qu'un.

Mais j'ai un gros coup de cœur pour « Ma peau ne m'appartient... », de Nour Symon. 

D'abord, il aborde le rapport au corps, un thème qui me touche énormément, et qui me semble incroyablement pertinent. Nous vivons de plus en plus dans un monde de l'image, de la représentation, et on peut facilement crouler, sous la pression de correspondre à des modèles qui n'existent même pas dans la vraie vie. 

Ensuite, dès que je lis ce poème, j'ai envie de le dire.
Les répétitions, les énumérations et les sauts de ligne impromptus créent une rythmique avec laquelle j'aurais envie de jouer à l'infini.
C'est un poème qui demande à être interprété, joué. Qui demande au lecteur d'en créer sa propre version, à voix haute.

Pas trop, mais quand même un peu.

J’aime Prévert et je ne comprenais pas Césaire. On ne me présentait pas de poésie à l'école.

J’ai commencé à écrire à l’âge de 10 ans. La première fois, c'était sur le printemps. J'attendais Pâques et le chocolat.

J’ai commencé à me considérer poète quand j’ai tenu entre mes mains pour la première fois mon premer recueil La femme cent couleurs.

C’est un travail de précision et de sensibilité.

Il faut traduire en mots ce que notre cœur voit ou ressent. Il faut des images qui touchent l'esprit.

J’étais en voyage en Martinique et soudainement j’ai pris conscience brutalement que j’avais peut-être de la famille ici en raison de la répartition chaotique des personnes arrachées à l'Afrique, esclavagisées par la suite dans les Caraïbes. Une "cousine" a frappé à ma porte et j'ai été ébranlée. J'ai compris que je ne devais pas "jouer" avec les mots.

Qui es-tu?

la fille du silence

la soeur du déni

que vois-tu?

des chimères

qu'espères-tu

hier

I sadly did not read poetry in school. I was a terrible student in terms of showing up. I had a lot going on in my young life that prevented me from being the student I could have been. I spent lots of days reading fiction, preferring to get lost in fantastical worlds than live in the present. But all that turmoil only fuelled my writing poetry. 

If I did read poetry in high school though it probably would have been Micheal Ondaatje's Time Around Scars, a favourite of mine. Or Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's This Accident of Being Lost which is an inspiration to me in all ways. 

I remember sitting in my bedroom as a teenager pouring over notebooks filled my teenage angst spread over the pages as I wrote with a hunger to try and understand myself. I didn't yet consider myself a poet but I was writing everything. It wasn't until I graduated from my MFA from UBC that I gave myself the space to fully try poetry for real. I had spent some time during my degree writing poetry but I never believed that my poems were "good". It wasn't until I started to see poetry showing up more and more in my fiction that I turned back to poetry in a real way and finally felt like I was doing something to be proud of. 

Tob reflect back both our inner worlds and the world at large. We are here as documentors of the struggles, hopes, and beauty of the world that surrounds us. We are here to help society understand itself as we understand ourselves. A poets job is of upmost importance and is one of the things that's propels society forward. We speak for, up, and against forces in this world. Our words are of vital importance to the understanding of where we are and where we are going. 

i am graffiti by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.  

Since I did not read poetry when I was in high school, there isn't a particular poem that I loved when I was a teenager.

It was 2008 when I first started writing poetry and it was as of then that I started thinking of myself as a poet.

A poet's job is to inspire others to try their hand at poetry, to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary, to see commonplace elements with fresh eyes, to offer accessible entry points into poetry, to view how poetry is present, relevant, and significant in everyday life, and to illustrate how we all can connect to poetry on some level.

"Praise the Rain" by Joy Harjo, who was named the U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2019.

Yes, I read poetry in high school — of my own volition! I remember enjoying Max Ehrmann’s prose-poem, “Desiderata,” as well as Coleman Barks’s translations of Rumi’s poetry.

I started writing poetry at the age of seven or eight, in grade three. Instead of going outside for recess, I wrote a poem in AABB quatrains — “A Poem About Birds” — on the school computer. Huge early-’90s sans-serif typeface. Printout on continuous-form paper. I still have that poem! At some point after that, I started keeping an exercise-book of poetry forms — haiku, tanka, cinquain, couplet, limerick, sonnet — that I would challenge myself to write. (I still have that exercise-book.)

In grade four, I wrote several short stories and poetry collections for which I would create elaborate front covers, back covers, and copyright pages. My teacher, Mr. Alderson, was good enough to have each one spiral-bound for me. I realized only last year that my juvenilia — both short fiction and poetry — is very humorous. I have been reclaiming that literary sensibility in small ways in my second poetry book, heft (M&S, 2019).

I think I came to understand that my “work” was poetry from the age of seven, soon after composing “A Poem About Birds.” I always submitted poems to Toronto District School Board’s annual anthology, which was then called Acorns. I never had a clue what I wanted to “be” in the way of a “proper” or “financially-viable” career, but I knew that I loved to write poetry.

However, whenever someone asks me exactly when I first started writing poetry, I also think of my friend Tim Robertson’s reflection on his own creative start. When I lived in North Bay, Tim told me that his “first poem” involved being a child, sitting on a rock, and scratching the letters m, o, and m into its surface. Tim tells it more beautifully — but this story really struck me and made me interrogate, rethink, and widen my definition of “poetry.” Beginnings — creative and otherwise — are often blurry and/or complex. What constitutes “the moment” and what constitutes “the moment before”? What separates them? (Physicists, Buddhists, river, cosmos: answer me!)

I can imagine as many “jobs” as there are poets — or, rather, poems! However, as a poet, I hope to never merely reproduce culture. For me, a poem that is “working” is an intervention. A poem that is “working” makes some kind of trespass. (I try to find alternate and truer words for “good” and “bad” — hence, my use of the adjective “working.”)

As a poet, I also hope that each of my poems — and books — builds and offers a space of refuge for and connectivity to its reader/listener. On the idea of “building”: I think of myself as an architect who constructs my own private architecture of resilience — who writes for my own intersecting emotional, energetic, spiritual, and social survivals — but who then holds a door/window/crack open so that others can find a temporary home inside this dwelling, too.

I hope that each of my poems enables questioning, courage, empowerment, and/or restoration.

On the Poem "bhater mondo":

The poem "bhater mondo" was inspired by a memory of my mother feeding me rice balls when I was a child. Sick at home, missing school for the day, the particular bustling energy with which my mother cooked and the love she imparted through that simple dish is an intimacy and a tenderness I wanted to remember.

On the Poem "susiya":

"I was deeply moved and inspired by a very spare poem in Against Forgetting: Zbigniew Herbert's The Wall. The Wall opened me up to poetry's capacity to manipulate time, and led to my manipulation of space in the poem susiya." - https://www.cbc.ca/books/griffin-poetry-prize-finalist-doyali-islam-on-6...

The Poetry in Voice online anthology contains so many wonderful poems, it’s difficult to choose just one — but I would select Alice Oswald’s “A Short Story of Falling.” This poem staves off existential woes and holds me to its language and rhythms.

I heard/witnessed Alice Oswald reciting this poem live at the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize reading at Koerner Hall. I wept. I was restored.

Yes I read poetry in high school, and that's where I truly fell in love with poetry. Poems by T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats were influential, as well as the Romantic poets Wordsworth. Colleridge, and Keats. The pivotal poem was George Herbert’s “The Collar.” The metaphor “rope of sands” was so evocative of spiritual struggle — it made me realize that an image and a metaphor could be powerful things to get a message across that were memorable and make me feel the feelings expressed in the poem more than the a simple prose passage could. 

I started writing poetry in high school but really got into it in university. In 2001 I decided to take my writing seriously by reading as much as I could get my hands on and writing every day. I truly started thinking of myself as a poet when my first poem was published in the following year. 

The poet’s job is to observe and try to use language to convey what he or she observes. Within the very good poems are universal truths and records of times and places. All poets contribute to this. Poetry can be political, environmental, or about anything really, but at the heart of a poem, no matter the cause or subject, is precise observation. 

“Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The rhythms are beautiful and the theme universal. I am moved by the last lines every time I hear them or I read them. 

I very much did not like reading poetry through most of high school. I think this is because the poems we were given to read didn’t speak to my experience. But then I fell in love with the poetry that I discovered, on my own, in my late teens. The first poet I got really into was Leonard Cohen—this began, of course, with his music. But soon I devoured his writing—his poems and novels. I still have a very beaten up and tattered copy of his book Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, which I took with me when I went backpacking in Europe and the Middle East quite a few years ago. I bought the book about twenty years ago. The very first poem of that book has always stayed with me. It’s from his first collection Let Us Compare Mythologies and the poem is simply called “Poem.” It’s maybe the only poem I’ve memorized that I’ve never forgotten how to recite—though it’s also only eight lines long. Like so many of his poems it is seemingly simple – the content is crystal clear—I still don’t like getting too confused about what is ‘going on’ in a poem. But there is so much silence and tension in "Poem", and most important of all—to me—vulnerability. My favourite line in the poem is “silence blossoms like tumours on my lips.”

I came to write poetry around the age of sixteen though I resisted it because my mother (Libby Scheier) was a published poet. Despite myself, it seems, I wrote poetry somewhat secretly in a journal. You might call what I wrote poems, but perhaps more accurately it ought to be called lyrics—very cringe-y lyrics. I am a little embarrassed to admit these early ‘poems’ were mostly inspired by late 90s goth music—like Nine Inch Nails. A couple years later, I would discover and become inspired by the poetry of Leonard Cohen, Charles Bukowski, Jim Carrol and the beat generation—particularly Allen Ginsberg: typical poets for young men, you might say. I still return to those poets now, though my taste and influences varied and matured as I got a bit older.

I’m not sure exactly when I thought of myself as poet. I always thought it would be more of hobby, but life is what happens, as John Lennon said, when you’re making other plans. I ended up writing a lot of poems after my mother died when I was twenty. Expressing that grief through poetry helped me endure that very challenging time. After a while I wondered if some of my poems were good enough to be published and submitted a few of them to magazines—and I fortunately, at first, got more acceptances than rejections (I would get plenty of rejections later). I guess that was when I began to think I was a poet or at least realized I needed to write poetry and wanted to share it with people.

Although I’m a pretty secular person, I take what the mystic-philosopher Simone Weil said—“(a)ttention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”—as a perfect statement, in a sense, of what the job of a poet is: to, firstly, pay attention. Free (as much as I enjoy fiction and memoir) of the need for narrative structure, we are liberated, as poets, to just notice and capture what surrounds us and what is deep within us. We shape that noticing into a common language (in my case English), but in a sense, part of the job, is also translating that noticing into one’s own special language or way of speaking—the poem. It is both an easy and difficult “job”—being a poet. Noticing takes little work, but doing little work is sometimes difficult.

It's very hard to choose--so many amazing poems! But if I had to choose one, it would probably be Wallace Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." It is one of my all time favourite poems and one I have taught to my students, over the years, to illustrate both the power of imagery and as well as the power of silence and breath. I am particularly fond of the fifth stanza (part V.): I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. It is that final line of the stanza, the moment after the whistling, that always gets me—how you can almost hear the memory of the whistling in the silence that follows – and that whistling is so ephemeral but, in a sense, it's also infinite. In reciting the poem, I would love to capture that particular moment.

I fell in love with poetry in high school thanks to Joan Hall, my English Lit teacher who is still teaching at my old high school. She introduced our class to Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us.” Its first three lines seemed so contemporary and clued in to the current environmental movement: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— / Little we see in Nature that is ours." I loved how such lovely language could also speak in the voice of environmental outrage. It was one of many poems that I loved as a teen.

I started writing poetry as a teenager. I wrote out of heartbreak and longing, but I didn’t see myself as a poet. In some ways, I still don’t always see myself as a poet. Really, I'm a full-time “maker”; I craft poems, create lesson plans (for my students), help others build chapbooks, concoct jokes and unique voices for performances, and so on and so forth.

A poet’s job is to keep track of feelings, ideas and one’s immediate and wider environment through language that sings and singes into memory. 

"Top" is a poem in the collection "Ignite," a book which centers both around my father's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia and how it is that I fail to recall so much of the difficult parts of my childhood. I wrote "Top" by stitching together two rare memories I have of me and my father together. Both of these moments involve being in motion: on his bicycle and on his motorbike. I wrote “Top” almost ten years ago and now when I look back, I see how the poem creates a sense of growing up while spinning off-balance. So many of us have grown up in conditions that were confusing and traumatic. Writing has helped me come to terms with my father’s tragic life and all the holes that it left. Art is where we turn this patchwork into (I hope) some semblance of song.

That is a tough question. All of them would be my first answer, but if it had to be one, I’d say Phoebe Wang’s “Application Form.” I love how it drifts through a drone of formal language into the wildly poetic. It also draws us into the heart of someone undergoing a restrictive application process, thereby bringing us into the experiences of so many new Canadians. What better type of poem to learn by heart?