Torontoist is celebrating National Poetry Month with a series of short essays, prose pieces, stories, and poems on the theme of optimism. What’s optimism got to do with Poetry Month you ask? Well, as project curator and poet Jacob McArthur Mooney wrote here last week, the contributors to The Optimisms Project are all poets, all under the age of 30, and each has been wracking his or her brain trying to answer a single question: ”What makes you feel optimistic about the future of poetry in Canada?”
The first of those bold answers comes to us from poet Johanna Skibsrud.
What makes you feel optimistic about the future of poetry in Canada?
I was recently asked in an interview why I thought that poetry was “a vital form of expression.” Not did I think that it was vital, but why I thought that it was vital. This is nothing unusual: we often begin our discussions of poetry by assuming a preliminary agreement that poetry is “vital”—at least in the figurative sense implied. I think that we need to back up a little. That we need to start taking this question seriously, and literally. That we need to start from the “do you” —and if the answer is “yes,” then that we need to talk about the “why” in terms of that “do you ”—in order that poetry can enter once again into a broader conversation. We need desperately, I think, to retrain ourselves to value—and to begin to practice more generally—the sort of thinking that poetry allows: a thinking that, rather than moving toward a definitive project or end, is rather a sustaining of the practice of thought; a way of inhabiting what Wolfgang Iser called, “the play of language.” It is this sort of thought, this sort of “play,” which is, or should be, the most serious, the most literally vital of things: “a means whereby we may extend ourselves.”
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two collections of poetry and a novel. Her most recent poetry collection, I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being, appears in April, 2010, through Gaspereau Press.
