Spotlight series #119 : Scott Inniss

The one hundred and nineteenth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Vancouver poet Scott Inniss.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah, poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young, Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, American expat poet in London Katie Ebbit, Brooklyn poet Nada Gordon and Kingston poet Jason Heroux!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Loch Baillie

Loch Baillie (he/il) [photo credit: LMJ Photography] is a queer writer based in Quebec City. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, ice, dove parachute (Cactus Press) and Citronella (Anstruther Press), as well as the forthcoming collection River Running (icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2026). Loch is an associate poetry editor at Plenitude Magazine, and his writing has appeared in publications such as Maclean’s, yolk, Tidewise, and Ahoy. Find Loch online @lochbaillie or by visiting www.lochbaillie.com.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My debut chapbook Citronella (Anstruther Press, 2024) changed everything for me. In the months surrounding its release, I got really into the Canadian micropress scene and began connecting with other poets. This mainly happened through Instagram, and that platform remains the place I most often interact with other writers. Putting out a chapbook showed me just how generous the poetry community in Canada can be. It’s an incredible community to be a part of.

My second chapbook, ice, dove, parachute (Cactus Press, 2024), came out only nine months after Citronella, but it is quite different. While Citronella introduces broader themes — sexual identity and leaving one’s home — ice, dove, parachute takes these themes further, exploring their repercussions through a more intimate, domestic, and Québec-oriented lens. It is a follow-up in both subject and tone, and a more grown-up work. My forthcoming full-length collection, River Running (icehouse poetry, 2026), will weave together the threads of my chapbooks in a much fuller way, and I look forward to it serving as many readers’ introduction to my work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Funnily enough, I didn’t! I was raised by English teachers, one of whom is a novelist, and so I was primarily interested in prose from a young age. By the time I was a young teenager, I decided I wanted to write novels. This was around the time that young adult dystopian and urban fantasy books were flying off of the shelves. Think The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Mortal Instruments. I started (and abandoned) several projects, and by the time I was sixteen, I became more interested in writing about my own experiences and began taking a more diaristic approach to my writing. At that age, it turned out I could write a poem a lot faster, and more naturally, than a book chapter.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It’s a slow process. I tend to write down a bunch of words or lines and then give my poems their shape later on. This typically happens in my Notes app or in a Word Doc. I’d love to be the type of writer that fills up stacks and stacks of Moleskin notebooks, but it’s never worked for me. I far prefer a word processor, or even just scraps of paper. Some of my first poems were written on notepads at the ice cream parlour I worked at in high school. I’d carry them in my apron pockets alongside customers’ orders.

My first drafts very rarely resemble what I publish. In the case of River Running, the original manuscript became stretched in the middle partway through the editing process. I lost a family member in mid-2024 and wrote a series of poems that would eventually form the book’s third section. River Running was initially concerned with metaphorical and anticipatory grief — but it has become concerned with a very concrete sort of grief, as well. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? 

This might be unusual, but the titles often come first. I love titles. I love the act of naming something. It’s like a generative exercise. A perfect example of this is my poem “Antediluvian,” which is the last poem in Citronella. I was curious about the period of time in the Bible between the fall of man and the Great Flood — what I came to know as being called “antediluvian” (or “pre-flood”). I began asking myself, what happens in a moment of banishment? How does one feel looking back at a place called home while simultaneously seeing some strange land on the horizon? It was the first poem I wrote for Citronella, but in doing so, I knew I’d already written its ending. I wrote towards that closing with the other poems; led the speaker all the way to the edge of that cliff.

I don’t think I’ve yet figured out how books “happen.” But I can say this: the more I write, the more I understand how my poems interconnect. It was clear to me when I had enough poems for my chapbooks, and it was clear to me when I had enough for my full-length collection. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy public readings but wouldn’t consider them part of my creative process. Being part of a community of writers and receiving feedback is essential to my creativity – but reading the work aloud to an audience, not so much. It is fun, though!

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

It depends entirely on what I’m writing. What I’m currently working on is heavily informed by theory (see answer to question 19) — but up until this point, my writing has been more concerned with lived experience, such as notions of self, home, and interpersonal relationships. Now that I’m in graduate school, it feels only natural to work on a project that blends my academic interests and my creative interests.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? 

This is a big question, and one that could be answered in no less than a hundred different ways. I see my own role as a writer as being a sort of truthteller. In Shakespeare’s plays, the truthtellers often operate on the margins and in the fens. Think of the Fool in King Lear or the witches in Macbeth. These are queer, weird (wyrd) characters. I feel similarly as a queer writer. I write to reveal uncomfortable truths. I write frankly, and shy from writing fiction, because there is so much happening in the real world. Fiction is an interesting genre. I read a lot of it, and I value the way it can offer escape or confront me with difficult truths. But in my experience, contemporary poetry doesn’t allow for distraction — it cuts straight to the bone.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

For me, it is absolutely essential. I often prefer the editing process over the writing process because I feel more lucid there. Writing a poem is like throwing a pack of playing cards on the ground, and working with an editor is playing fifty-two-card pickup. I’m a better writer because of my editors. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 

Ocean Vuong posted this great Instagram Story about cultivating one’s soil; this idea that writer’s block does not exist and that it’s only a lack of creative stimuli. I’ve taken that to mean: if I’m not reading, moving, living — I’m not writing.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism)? What do you see as the appeal?

I find it quite difficult, but I think I’m getting better at it. Poetry is my default setting, and so when I write prose, it tends to be lyrical. I’d like to develop a prose style that feels complimentary to my poetry — but at the same time, if I ever wrote a novel, I wouldn’t want it to read like a seventy-thousand word poem. I love novels by poets; every word and punctuation mark is chosen so carefully. But for me, I’d rather be known as a poet who occasionally writes prose. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? 

I don’t have a specific routine. I’d like to write more regularly, but I find it difficult without external pressure (a workshop or a deadline, for example). I can’t force a poem. Some weeks I write a great deal. Some weeks I don’t write at all. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

A long walk. A hot shower. Rereading favourite poems.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

It’s music for sure. I couldn’t live without it, never mind create. I’m often more interested in how a song sounds than what it’s saying. How I hear music is how it feels to write (or read) a good poem.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Louise Glück, Richard Siken, Maggie Smith, Ada Limón, and Ocean Vuong have all had a significant impact on my poetry. For specific writings, I’ve turned time and time again to Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and the final paragraphs of Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to give songwriting a try. Writing for someone else, that is.  

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’m trying to get better at plants, so maybe a horticulturist? I was never very good at science, but I’ve become obsessed with orchids thanks to Susan Orlean. I just replanted one for the first time and it bloomed!

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’m not sure what that “something else” would have been. When I began writing, I couldn’t stop. I still can’t.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 

White Oleander by Janet Fitch. It’s brilliant. I enjoyed the film adaptation by Peter Kosminsky, too!

19 - What are you currently working on? 

My Master’s thesis! It’s a research-creation project that combines poetry, essays, and interviews with artists about bilingual art in French-speaking Canada. It's called Head Split in Half  and is technically my second full-length book. It is theoretically concerned with notions of confession, belonging, and language. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

introducing: Goose and Frankie,

These two young gentlemen (who will be four months old tomorrow) entered our household last Saturday afternoon. We'd been pondering new cats for a while, our young ladies preferring one each, in part so they wouldn't fight over a single one, and so the kittens could entertain each other during school-days. After the loss of our Lemonade more than a year ago [see my obituary for him here], the household was finally ready to be able to move forward (there was talk at one point of attempting to get Lemonade "a friend," but we never quite got there). Again, the kitten-proofing (lots of stuff getting knocked over) and the sunroom door closed (until potentially poisonous plants can be re-housed). Again, the attention to litter and water and brushing and food.

These "chaos gremlins" (as Christine refers to them) are a curious Highland Lynx/Siamese blend, and lap-cats (at least so far), very different than our skittish and moody Lemonade. As well, as Lemonade, both kittens are polydactyl, with multiple extra toes (and accompanying claws) all over their wee padded feet. It took longer than I would have thought for the young ladies to land on names (and refusing any of the ridiculous names I offered: "Captain Marzipan!" "Peaches!" "President Eisenhower!" etc). Aoife finally chose "Goose" for her kitten, after our recent Captain Marvel (2019) watch [Aoife and I have been doing an entire MCU watch, having watched twenty-five movies-to-date in order of their release, as well as the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, Ms. Marvel (which I knew she'd really like) and WandaVision, with more to come]. Rose has landed on "Frankie," a name she claims she "just likes," but it makes me think of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, of course. "Frankie says Relax," I tell them, and the boy agrees. Although Rose had earlier attempted "My Melody," a Hello Kitty reference we weren't convinced by (when naming pets or children, one has to be able to land on a name one can yell), but made me think of this song from my youth (one I was actually surprised Christine didn't know), which I hadn't realized was by a Toronto band. Are all my references from 1980s pop? Possibly.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jake Fournier

Jake Fournier is a firefighter based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His book, Punishment Bag, is available from the University of New Mexico Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Punishment Bag changed my life in that it gave me something to do—or to aspire to do—for a long time. Having it growing somewhere in the background allowed me to describe myself as a poet. There’s a persona poem in the book about a first responder who recovers a suicide from a cesspool. I wrote it when I was an academic and had spent almost the whole of my professional life teaching language and literature. Now I’m a structural firefighter. Did the poem change my life?

My most recent work is green, stolonic—kudzu-like—and my previous work is sectile and cool to the touch.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poems are usually shorter, so if you waste a lot of time wrestling with yourself and questioning what writing is or whether it’s even advisable, I think it tends to just kind of win out over time. I’m not a huge fan of the genre divisions. I think what I write next will be some big combination of all these things.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Yes!

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

They almost always begin with the first line, but I can think of at least one exception. This makes me think I ought to start more in the middle. Starting at the end seems like a bad idea, though I know John Irving writes that way. When it comes to writing, I don’t like to do anything too exclusively, even if it works.

I guess the scare quotes around “book” in the question are supposed to distance the idea of a project that an author might have starting out from the object that ends up being produced and distributed in the world, but I kind of prefer to imagine that some ancient sophist poses the question while doubting the very existence of books. These so-called “books” your purport to believe in. That’s kind of how it feels to me, having rarified them so much with my obsession.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 

A few poems I’ve written came from imagining I had an audience. One called “Edible Arrangement” in my book and another called “What makes it a poem?” that I wrote after the book was done. As a reading attendee I’m always waiting for the reading to be over so I can get to the fun part of talking and making jokes and having a few drinks. Readings are best as a pretext for hanging out. I enjoy giving them very much though. If I could chain people to the seats and make them listen to me all night I would.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Not to be coy, but these seem like current questions. I think a lot of my poetry is asking what a poem is, trying to catch some fleeting glimpse of one of poetry’s contours. I guess there’s some organicism or naturalism behind my writing. I’m very interested in the question of what word comes next. Or, you know, should that be the last one.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers should write things, maybe even just in their heads. Ideally they’ll have some good intuitions about how it will ramify in “the world that is the world of all of us,” but that’s not necessary. Writers have to take on a lot that isn’t writing—teaching, child-rearing. They exercise a lot of judgement. That’s not really their social role as I see it. Even if a writer were just sitting in their own private version of a temple typing onto a ream of paper that fed immediately into a shredder, I think that would be good. I saw a very funny bogus and potentially even slightly offensive reel recently that features a Chinese sage with an English AI voiceover. The sage is saying “Is there a woman in your house who likes to sleep a lot? Don’t call her lazy! She is bringing good luck and fortune to the house. This is very hard work, so naturally she is tired and needs her rest.” That’s kind of how I see writers working globally.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Very few editors have seen anything profitable enough in my work to bother with it. Friends and my wife have done a lot pro bono. I listen very attentively, and I often change things, but really I just want them to tell me it’s perfect. I sort of wish I remembered everything I changed so I could get in there and change it back one day.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My therapist told me about a really great deep tissue guy who lives on top the Sandia Mountains, and she advised me to get in touch with him. I was very skeptical that it could help, and the work he was doing was and is very painful, some kind of jujitsu-grip technique. I don’t really understand it, but it works. Find somebody like that.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

For me, critical prose has mostly been a way to secure funds and benefits. The University of Chicago gave me an amazing fellowship that stipulated, you know, “finish your dissertation within the space of the year or you’ll be immediately ejected from the program.” That’s not verbatim, but that made it very easy to focus on criticism for a while! I like having the big degree too, that’s very appealing. I put the letters after my name on LinkedIn, and I have all the magazines address themselves to “Dr. Fournier.” And people at work still call me “doctor” or “doc” as a kind of joke every now and then. It can be very confusing for the patients.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

If I’m not at work I usually wake up and spend the first few hours of the day staring into my cell phone screen. I had a lot of debt and financial insecurity through my teens, 20s, and early 30s, so I’m basically obsessed with money. Now that I have some retirement savings, sometimes I’ll just go into my E-Trade account and refresh the page over and over watching the market values go up and down however many hundredths of a percentage point. If I’m at work, I make coffee for everyone at the station and then I go out into the bay and wash the trucks. I really like language learning, though I’m miserable at it, so I’ll usually put a Spanish audio lesson on a single Airpod, and I’ll scrub up the engine and the rescue repeating things like, En Argentina, hay una región vinícola muy conocida. Ayer, hice un recorrido por los viñedos.

I read this book recently called Living on Earth—it jumped out at me from the nonfiction table at the Strand on the Upper West Side, I think because it was what I was presently doing. Anyway, the author, Godfrey-Smith, talks a lot about the corpus callosum—the connection point between the two hemispheres of the brain. Apparently reading really enlarges this thing. He also talks about some subtle measurable differences in the brain activity and anatomy of people who read and write from right to left, and my routine, since I was even a very young child, has involved writing left to right. I’m thinking it could be good to start writing right to left. It’s just a matter of choosing the right language.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My window and the birds outside, or sometimes I’ll write about the coffee on my desk. If the birds outside seem a little too boring, I have an Audubon Society Field Guide with all the really great birds in it. The boobies and stuff. If that doesn’t get you out of a funk, I don’t know what will.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Vanilla. My mother had a very acute sense of smell, and she loved vanilla. If I ever smell Vel soap again (they stopped making it) I’d be instantly transported to my mother’s bathroom. Also, Murphy’s Oil Soap.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Leslie Marmon Silko has this great thing about how the plot of Ceremony is like a spider web, and Paula Gunn Allen has all this awesome stuff about the Lakota sacred hoop and what she calls a matrifocal worldview. Spiders scare me a little, and there’s black widows here in New Mexico, and brown recluses. Their bites cause a lot of damage, but the thing is they hardly ever bite people. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I even put out some chemical that’s supposed to kill them. We had a lot of spiders in our yard, and I like to lift weights out there, so I was worried I’d accidentally bother one when I was grabbing my BowFlex adjustable dumbbells, and it would bite me. I’m not going to do that anymore though. I hope they come back so I can learn more about how to write poems from them.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

This is the opposite of how this question probably means to be answered. It seems like it’s after some deep foundational influence, but, before my new Zen Soto practice—just sitting—I’m reading a few poems a day by Laura Kolbe from her book Little Pharma. I met Kolbe just before midnight on December 31^st, and then she was the first person I talked to in the new year. She’s a doctor—a medical doctor— an internist, and her poems are deeply inflected by her being a doctor without being reducible to that. Since I started firefighting, I’ve become a little worried that my poems are going to go, like, “Get the Narcan!—.4 migs for IM.” Her writing feels important to me now because it shows how much deeper and weirder it can be than that. Justin Cox is another very important writer to my life and work. He wrote a book, Stock Pond, that might be even better than looking out a window. I’m also one fourth of a poetry coterie called the Merry Company, also sometimes called the Gay Science. The other members—important to me in every way—are Chris Schlegel, Jess Laser, and Dan Poppick. I don’t know how I got in. They’re sort of like the SEAL Team Six of poetry.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to get my paramedic license. I’m a basic, which just feels pretty lame when it comes to practicing medicine. I’d also like to run a 50-mile ultra.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’m thinking about maybe trying for a masters in linguistics or linguistic anthropology. A lot of my favorite critical writers are anthropologists by training—people like David Scott and David Graeber. All the Davids. And Ofelia Zepeda, who wrote one of my favorite poems of all time, is a linguist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t really see writing as being opposed to doing something else. Sometimes I wonder if writing is opposed to writing! I was just thinking how Siddhartha Gautama and Socrates never wrote anything at all. They were such great writers they didn’t have to.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I really liked Marty Supreme, but the last really great film I saw was On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni. It’s so good my wife was mad at me afterward just for being a man. I had a shelf with all the books I read in 2025 on it, but I dismantled it when I moved into my new office. It would have made answering this question a lot easier. I’ve read other great books since I read it, but I’m going to give Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires as my answer here. A few years ago my old friend Rowland Yang sent me a book by Benjamin Labatut called When We Cease to Understand the World. That was a banger. I have an idea for a book I’d like to write that is right in between the two of them, and all about poetry!

20 - What are you currently working on?

Yesterday I repainted the room that was my office, and I’m busy working on getting it ready for the baby. My wife is due on March 30^th. I’ve also been putting a lot of research into what VR headset I want to get and what games I can bring to play while she’s laboring. She’s an ob/gyn and she tells me about all the awful things the FOBs do when their wives are delivering. FOB is “father of the baby.” She tells me all this stuff—people delivering with the TV on, families eating crab claws in the delivery room—and I’m like, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Joshua Beckman, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries

 

Early 1984

Dad got a new sled for me and Randi. It’s great.
My Aunt Arlene came, and she got me an art set. I like it a lot.
Sean came over and we played Monopoly. He won.
We had Chinese food. I had a great time.
I got my new handlebars. I like them a lot.
Today I went to the YMCA. Jeff and Colin came too. It was fun.
We went to my Grandpa and Grandma’s house. It is in Florida.
We went to Clear Water beach. The water was cold.
I got to play Trivial Pursuit with my family. We had teams.
    My team won.
I went bike riding and saw an alligator.
We came home from Florida.
Today I was drawing and I had a lot of fun.
I rode my bike all day long. It was a lot of fun.
I saw my Aunt Libby and we had a picnic.
I went to art and I had a lot of fun.
I went to Hebrew School.
I hurt my ankle.
I met kids near my street. We rode bikes all day.

The latest from Seattle, Washington-based American poet and editor Joshua Beckman is A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2026), a sleek collection of careful and intimate poems that follows previous titles such as Things Are Happening (Philadelphia PA: American Poetry Review, 1998), Something I Expected To Be Different (Wave Books, 2001), Your Time Has Come (New York NY: Verse Press, 2004), SHAKE (Wave Books, 2006) [see my review of such here], the long poem Tomaž (2021) (a book I seem to have missed entirely) and Animal Days (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as two collaborations with poet Matthew Rohrer, and the stunning critical duo The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018) [a duo I mention over here]. As well, Beckman was a poet instrumental in organizing the infamous Wave Poetry Bus back in 2006, with readings in fifty cities (including a stop in Ottawa) across fifty days, bringing an array of poets across the United States and into Canada, introducing an Ottawa audience, at least, to the work of Matthew Zapruder, Anthony McCann [see my note from such here] and Monica Youn [reading poems from what became her Ignatz, which I reviewed when it landed; see my review of her latest here] as well as Beckman himself (among a couple of other poets, the full list of which escapes me).

A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries continues a process articulated through Animal Days, composing poems out of an array of rough notes, journal and diary entries, leaning fully into the acknowledgement of that process, carving poems from what might be an array of first-draft looseness, narrative and immediate. “I love how in dreams you can climb a tree and recline in the / branches.” he writes, to open the sequence “The Great Good Fortune of the Dreamer.” “I love how in dreams you can fold up a giant picture without creas- / ing it. // I love how in dreams you can order spray cane flowers for dinner.” There’s a smallness, an intimacy and an interiority, to these notes, these fragments, with titles such as “A Chapter Summary in the Style of Boccaccio,” “A List of the Creatures Who Entered My Home This Year,” “van ride to jfk,” “Body Questions,” “David Shapiro” or “brief note back.” As the prior collection held poems from notes composed across extended and ongoing illness, the poems continue that particular level of sustained and sketched interiority. “J– of Barrytown crosses the river to buy lemons,” begins the untitled opening poem, a piece titled only through the table of contents as “a chapter summary in the style of Boccaccio,” “and one there, / in a single hour has three slight misunderstandings, each of / which he weathers, returning with a salad.” 

Beckman holds such a quiet intimacy to these poems, an unselfconscious note-taking through a variety of explorations and experiments with form, a deeply-purposeful assemblage of poems that manage such incredible attention to silence, moments and how both are best held. “What broke the tooth?” asks the poem “Body Questions,” “What cracked the tooth? / What filled the mouth with dirt and metal? / What got / into the heart?” Or, as the “Chap. 1” of the short sequence “Aegina, May (Chapters 1-8)” reads:

Full of quiet concern, a dear friend suggests a new path – The gathering crowd – A punishing scene – Sun Clouds – A history of the land over which the sun clouds first appeared

Beckman’s A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries closes with the title piece, a sequence of prompts on how to do exactly what the title says, offering this brief introduction: “The following is a list of instructions for making fragments from your diaries. Each instruction can be tried multiple times in the same or different notebooks. While my expectation is that you will naturally find the notebook and pages you are interested in and will move on when needed, on occasion I have given directions to flip pages or stay on the same page in the hope this might be helpful.” Across the book’s final seven pages, the notes include:

Any page, last two lines.

 

Any page, first verb to second verb.

 

Transcribe the next parenthetical encountered.

 

Write out the next three questions encountered.

 

Next three punctuation marks, each with the word after them.

The process Beckman describes is one I find curious, given it so foreign from my own compositional structures; Beckman’s processes seem closer to Ottawa poet Roland Prevost’s decades-long daily stretches of composing “log book” entries, returning back to his notes to shape poems, some of which landed, for example, in his full-length poetry debut, Singular Plurals (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014). Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, as well, works from endless notebooks, as I think does Canadian poet Lisa Robertson (there are most likely others, but those the most overt that come to mind). A sleek thing, at less than seventy pages, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries is a charming and intelligent book, one that offers so much through such delicate movement, and there are elements of his gestures I might even compare to the works of certain Canadian minimalists—Cameron Anstee [see my review of his latest], Jack Davis [see my review of his debut], Guy Birchard [see my review of his latest] or the late Nelson Ball [see my review of his posthumous selected]—all of whom manage a carved, careful and fiercely intelligent density across the short lyric, but Beckman presents as a moving target, holding those as elements of his work but not exclusively so. The form, one might say, is as much the thing, and the variety throughout the collection provides. Consider the poem “A. Said,” for example, a lyric of one word per line, with empty lines between, scrolling down across fifteen full pages. For brevity, there’s an awful lot of it, composed as a string of words that precisely roll and accumulate. “I // don’t // know,” the poem offers, mid-way, “R. // said // you // know // you // know // I // love // you // you // know [.]”