Sina Queyras

I fell in love with several poems in junior high. Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” Atwood’s “You Fit Into Me,” and “Death of a Young Son by Drowning,” and a visual poem from the fantastic (and fantastical) Kenneth Patchen called “Only Cherries” are poems I still have in my body.

I started writing poetry before I knew how to read or write. I did this by asking my siblings (I had five older siblings) what a particular word in the newspaper was, and then I cut it out, and another, and another, and then I made poems. I wrote intense — or so they seemed to me — and obvious poems about autumn, a fox in the chicken coup, a bird in the hand etc. My mother loved doggerel and wrote copious amounts of it, which — though I loved to hear her read them — sort of killed any instinct to rhyme. I am still reluctant to call myself a poet and do so tentatively: I feel there is a wide gulf between being a person who writes poems and being a poet.

As you might have gleaned from the previous answer, I have a fairly rigid definition of a poet. From my perspective a poet must not only be a master-craftsperson, but a superhuman, and by that I mean an emotionally mature, energetically charged individual willing to say what others can’t or won’t, and willing not only to laugh or weep, but rage.

I was transcribing film that my sister shot while walking with me on Jericho Beach and in other spots of Vancouver. I wanted to write an elegy for her, and I wanted to somehow complete her unfinished project — she passed away quite young. This [“Five Postcards from Jericho”] was the result.

I can’t resist Hopkins — who certainly inspired “Five Postcards.” So “Pied Beauty” or “The Windhover.” They are such classics. That sprung rhythm is so fun to read, and I would love the challenge of having to make them contemporary.