We've got 3 copies of Queers Like Me by Michael V. Smith up for giveaway until the end of January.
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I’m fond of finding unusual ways for a poem to materialize, or, said another way, I’m interested in where I can find words or ideas in the world, to use as material in my poems.
I teach second-year poetry by introducing a variety of forms and approaches as a means to find content—a sonnet, for example, often asks for a rhetorical structure with a turn or volta. So I ask students what cultural cliché they might know to be otherwise—where do they have practical experience that might resist a falsity. That question gives them both the two sides of the argument and, likely, the volta too. Approached this way, many poetic structures can help you find your topic.
I’m always keen on books that have interesting approaches to making a poem. Here are some other strategies:
Found poetry is a cool way to get language delivered to you. In my previous book, Bad Ideas, I wrote friends and family and asked them to record their dreams, then used their descriptions to build a poem. In Queers Like Me, I took language from social media (Facebook) to make a poem using the status updates from myself and my father, during his protracted death in an Ottawa hospital. I also wrote a long poem, “Grandma Cooper’s Corpse,” which is a verbatim poem, taken from a live storytelling show I did on YouTube at the start of the pandemic. Essentially, I improvised a live story online, then used the recording to transcribe (and then format/write) the poem. Queers Like Me also has a long-ish poem called “Recipe for a Queer Performance,” which I wrote by using answers gathered from audience members during a performance I gave for World AIDS Day.
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Curio: Grotesques and Satires from the Electronic Age, by Elizabeth Bachinsky
Curio is probably the book I reference the most in my teaching. There are so many amazing strategies for making in Bachinsky’s book. She anagrams famous poems so that their "sound sense" remains—they have all the same vowels and consonants—but the lines are entirely new. Yes, that means they are sometimes nonsensical, but always surprising and fun. Same with her "found poems" where she Google searches a particular phrase that begins with “I am…”, like “I am tired” or “I am promiscuous.” She guides the search with the phrase she uses to gather material. Overall, there are five or six strategies for making in this book, which Bachinsky unpacks in the notes. I highly recommend trying some, or building your own systems for designing a poem.
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The Place of Scraps, by Jordan Abel
I love all of Jordan’s Abel’s books for their keen imaginative insight. They are so singular. I don’t know any other book quite like The Place of Scraps. From Talonbooks website, we know that “The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisg̱a’a Nation.” Barbeau purchased (and/or stole under duress) many Indigenous artifacts from the Nisga’a Nation, such as their iconic totem poles, so Abel’s book responds to this injustice by using Barbeau’s own anthropological writings about the Nisga’a to generate his poems through erasure. Barbeau’s cultural erasure becomes a tool to comment on cultural erasure. My favourite is the poem about insects which removes all the words from a poem, leaving only the punctuation spotting the page. Abel’s entire book as a long form erasure project is absolute genius.
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Made Beautiful by Use, by Sean Horlor
Another favourite teaching tool is Horlor’s Made Beautiful by Use, which has a suite of poems that are transpositions from famous speeches. I love seeing what Horlor does with a speech by George W. Bush, for example. These are often exercises in irony, or satire. Sometimes they are devastating fictions—this man would never say these things, even though these are his words, repurposed. Similar to erasure poems, these works source the language with more permission, meaning the process is more about reducing and rewording, changing the order, while still only writing with the lexicon found in the source speech.
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Vancouver, by George Stanley
Twenty years ago, George Stanley and I were in a queer writing group, where George talked to us often of his approach to poetry through freewriting. He wrote his long poem Vancouver using freewriting, which he described as writing as fast as you can, observing the moment so as to invite everything that passes through the moment onto the page. That might be what you observe—what’s happening around you—but also what you think, what you observe within your mind too. Allowing the ideas to come forth unfiltered. You might ping-pong around, or follow an imaginative thread, but the goal is to write without interfering with intention, without steering the mind. In that way, the poem is an embodied practice, because you’re writing about your environs inside and out, recording the moment of the writing. Vancouver is a gorgeous book, written in the city it is about by…George observing the city around him.
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Hooked, by Carolyn Smart
Maybe this is a stretch for how to find a book—who knows if Carolyn Smart would say if this was an easy process—but I thought Hooked was a clever way to build a collection. There are seven long poems in the book, each as a sort of imagined biography of (in)famous women. The women (and poems) share a time period, as well as a relationship to addiction or obsession. The collection has a kind of integrity in this shared approach, while also exploring a range of voices. What these narrators have in common is interesting, but how they differ is a thrill. I love a long poem, and I love a series, for how each iteration teaches you something different about what’s possible. There’s some comfort knowing that if you write one poem, you can reproduce others to make a book or series by following some of its main questions or guiding principles. If you find a central integrity within differing subjects, you’ve found a whole book.
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Onion Man, by Kathryn Mockler
I love everything about Kathryn Mockler’s Onion Man, which is semi-autobiographical. The poems are fairly short in length, and narrow both on the page and in their focus. For the most part, each poem is a small observation or moment. Collectively, they tell a longer narrative describing the time that Mockler worked in a Pillsbury plant, canning corn. The poems are often funny, deceivingly simple, and elegant. It’s a quiet, well-observed book about coming of age as a young woman, too often exploited, or trying not to be, in a blue-collar work environment. If this book were a film, it’d be an experimental montage. Imagine taking your story idea—which has a long-form narrative structure—but writing it out as a collection of small observations, formatted as poetry. Mockler’s books often make me question the genres, because she’s writing using all of them together.
We might argue that each of these books also rethinks what poetry can be. Biography, autofiction, erasure, transposing speeches, anagramming—not strategies we often go to for writing poetry, but thrilling approaches to find content where you might not have been looking.
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Learn more about Queers Like Me:
Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith’s latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.
In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences: teenage crushes, video cameras, post-club hookups, fears and terrors, closeted lovers, and daydreams of confronting your childhood bully.
Queers Like Me is an enveloping book— a meditation on family complexity and a celebration of personal insight.