Today’s special weekend contributor to The Optimisms Project, poet and teacher Sina Queyras, is all about chaos, the creative chaos that emerges when we dare to break from daily routines and customary points of view.
For project curator Jacob McArthur Mooney’s introduction to The Optimisms Project please go here.
What makes you feel optimistic about the future of poetry in Canada?
After I catapult over my initial fear, chaos actually makes me feel optimistic. When we have a little break from the norm we have the opportunity for new points of view, new configurations to emerge. We hear a lot about the downside of all this turmoil with book stores, kindle, ebooks, lost readers, but what we are witnessing is a massive upheaval, a change. Anyone who isn’t seeing this as an opportunity for innovation, for regrouping and reconfiguring is missing the point. Younger poets, my students at Concordia, particularly the undergraduates, are getting this and that makes me feel optimistic. They aren’t paralyzed by fear, they are motivated by the work. In fact,this year two of my first year students, Emma Healey and Mike Chaulk, started an online journal. They have tremendous energy and enthusiasm for poetry and poetics, as do the people involved in Margaret Christakos Influency Salon through U of T. In her latest book, Suzanne Buffam notes, and in doing so echoes Erin Moure and many other poets and philosophers, that “Despair comes from failing to believe new things are possible.”
Young poets haven’t bought into the downer mentality. The “Can Lit” machine and how it’s this one, monolithic thing. No. It’s what you make it.
Sina Queyras is the author of Slip, Teethmarks, and Lemon Hound, which won the Lambda and the Pat Lowther awards for poetry, and the editor of Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Her newest collection, Expressway, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. She currently lives in Montreal.
I am a published poet (House Beneath) and a high school teacher. I find my students love poetry. The grade 11s especially love the Romantics, and even the grade 8s love Emily Dickinson and think she is crazy or otherwise interesting. They love Canadian, American, British, new and old, whatever I read with them. They love imagery and sound and are full of deep questions. There is a great future generation of poetry lovers coming up, from what I can see in my little west coast high school.