The Nurse on the Nature of Silence
In winter, my body
is a tree.
In summer
my body is a tree.
A bunch of dumb
birds
brood in
its branches.
A bunch of dumb
birds
bust each other up in
its delicious
branches.
Let the sun draw me
to harbor.
Let the sun
feed me to sleep.
Toronto ON: Good to see new work from Toronto poet James Lindsay, the chapbook-length Choral Coral Carol (Knife Fork Books, 2026), a single poem set as an extended accumulation of wayward, meditative lyrics set as long-lined couplets. There’s such a music to his responses, as the poem begins, immediately establishing his scene: “Here we are, wheat with no breeze, uniformed in unison / Primed and tuned yet starved of something sounding // Like a call and response, a staycation in lukewarm / Ominous spy waters. What have you been working on?” There’s a kind of catch-all element to the narrative progression, as though anything and everything is fodder for his particular lyric thought, one step and line immediately following another, across an element not only of song and lyric movement, but a process shared. As he writes, mid-way: “Careful / With the shapes you make your hands into when trying to move // Sound around. If we’re going to get this right, we’ll all have to / Make our voices stride to where the sun is stepping away from // Like the dancers we’re not allowed to distract, but hit their marks / In winking shimmers. Let’s make a line. Who cares who’s first?”
London/Toronto ON: From London,Ontario-based poet and singer-songwriter Jenny Berkel (and my introduction to
her and her work) comes the chapbook Colossal Wreck (Toronto ON:
Anstruther Press, 2026), an assemblage of thirteen first-person narrative
lyrics, and a follow-up to her chapbook debut, Grease Dogs (London ON:
Baseline Press, 2021). “Between you we are pressed.” she writes, to open the
poem “O Night, O Sky, O Sea,” “Beneath you we are puny // bags of blood rolling
/ your currents. We ooze // to you. Let loose / to you. Take your open // -ness
as invitational, / a bitch in heat.” There’s a music to it, one propelled by
lyric but held by action. There is such a direct and precise narrative line,
perfectly aimed, to Berkel’s lyrics, one that shoots like an arrow, piercing the
pure heart of any subject. “Inside a mouth run / out of air,” begins “Voice
Lessons,” “sibilance / and hum. Serpentine / lullaby, soundless vowels, / a
shape with nothing // born.”
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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?
I had no idea about poetry publishing when I sent my first book, The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems, to Arktoi imprint editor, Eloise Klein Healy. I taught myself to write the book by following the story of the main protagonist and teaching myself to write in various poetic forms as prompts to move that story forward as well as creating my own forms that I made up along the way. When I heard Eloise talking at a conference about the Arktoi imprint and about her goal to make a seat at the publishing table for lesbians, I had an intuition that I should keep that slip of paper with her contact information. In my first quarter as an MFA student at the University of California Riverside, I was in a class called “The Writer’s Life,” where we had to send our work somewhere. It was free to send to Eloise so I sent it, not expecting anything to come of it. I was very surprised when I got an e-mail from Eloise on my 30th birthday, asking me if the manuscript was still available. Throughout the next year, I worked one-on-one with Eloise on the revisions on the book, learning along the way as she advocated for my artistic choices. My most recent book, Shiny City, is more experimental but still maintains that spirit of teaching myself about the project while I’m writing. I chose to send my book to Airlie Press because of its cooperative model – to learn more about the publishing process – so I do feel like I’m following in Eloise’s footsteps with my intention to contribute to the field.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wouldn’t say I came to poetry first because I hated the poetry I was exposed to in high school. What we were asked to read in class felt very far from my life, but I was always interested in reading stories and wanted to be a writer. I wrote a few stories, but I don’t think I had the experience, dedication and community support at the time to grow my interest into a more sustained creative practice. So I will say that I came to poetry publication first. I came of age as a community organizer in the Bay area, learning equally about direct action and spoken word, and how they both contributed to the movements I became part of. At that time, writing poetry fit best in my life – I could write in short bursts on public transit going to my non-profit job, and there was a community of open mics where I could share my work.
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?
No project has been the same, but I often write in small flashes which slowly accumulate. The initial generating is quick, but the sequencing and order of the larger project – figuring out its shape and intention – is usually what takes the most time.
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?
I’m an author of short pieces that accumulate. When I first start writing, I am often responding in the moment to daily life and don’t have an idea where it’s going, but I figure it out along the way.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings are an important part of my process. I enjoy hearing how an audience responds to the work. Some of the mentors I’ve worked with and have been influenced by, such as Sharon Bridgforth, work with improvisation and audience conduction. I started developing a process of multi-directional reading. If I am able to use projection so that the audience can see what the poem looks like on the page/screen, I often use that opportunity to choose a different direction or variation to read the poem, against the grain of audience expectation. In this way, I often discover new meanings and layers within my work.
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?
I’m always thinking about what our relationship to each other has been and could be, both on an interpersonal level, but also on an intra-community level as well as an intra-species level. Much of what I’m wondering about now is how to survive this current moment and how can we dream of more sustainable futures, especially for those of us who are targeted and deemed unworthy of care.
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?
There are so many different kinds of writers so I think, similar to organizing roles, there could be a multitude of roles for writers – writers who reflect the reality of what is currently going on in our society, writers whose work helps us dream and imagine into the future, writers who help us grapple with our past.
8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s been an important part of the process for me to consider editorial feedback, especially from an editor who understands what my work is trying to do. It was especially important for my first book because I hadn’t gotten a lot of feedback prior to submitting the manuscript. For my second book, I had two editors – Emgee Dufresne and Anna Morrison – who helped me shape the trajectory and journey of the manuscript, which was also very helpful.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I completely changed my life after hearing Justin Chin on a panel about the writing life say, “Make your life fit around your writing, not your writing fit around your life.” After that, I made a commitment to my writing practice – of trying to figure out how to keep myself writing as much as possible.
10 – 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 try to do the morning pages (from The Artist’s Way) as a way to get the sludge out of the way before I delve in. When I have gone a long time without returning to the pages, I can usually tell something is off in my life, usually a time of deep stress and chaos. I tend to do better when I write in community so I often look for ways to plug into co-writing times if possible. Right now, I have a writing group I write with virtually in the mornings regularly. For years, I also have participated in the Daily Grind, an accountability group I was invited to by Matthew Olzmann, where I sign up every month and commit to sending a draft daily to the group by midnight every day. This year, in starting a new speculative prose project, I decided to adopt Jami Attenberg’s 1000 words a day prompt and attach it to writing exercises from Alice LaPlante’s Write Yourself Out of a Corner and am currently writing through a first draft.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to reading or experiencing/listening/looking at art. Also, sometimes chopping vegetables helps.
12 – What fragrance reminds you of home?
The fragrance I associate with home is my family’s cooking, often meals which need to be made together – dumplings, hotpot, soup.
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?
I often write in response to visual art and other art forms such as film and music. More recently, I have also participated in a project called Writing the Land. Poets are matched with land from nature preserves and then write poems in response to the landscape there.
14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Writers like Larissa Lai, Cathy Park Hong, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs who blend history and lineage with speculation have been cornerstones of my work. I also learn from writers who transform my understanding of what a book can do such as Salvador Plascencia in The People of Paper.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to travel more to places I haven’t been – and to spend extended time in Asia.
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?
Adopting two dogs into the family during the pandemic really changed my life for the better – and helped my writing because it constantly pushed me to examine life from a different perspective. I find learning about the behavior of dogs so interesting that if my dogs had come into my life earlier in my education, I might have chosen something dog-related instead of writing-related as an occupation.
17 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Since I’ve been young, I’ve gotten lost in stories as a comfort and escape. Through that experience, I realized how much power I had to the ability to shape my own reality and future through being skilled with working with words. As I kept writing, this became a way for me to understand my own experiences and the world around me.
18 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just read Rajiv Mohabir’s Cutlish for the Sealey Challenge. Much of the book is written in a form after Caribbean chutney music, which I found innovative and beautiful. The last great film I saw was Hamnet – I loved the way the actors used their bodies to embody these huge emotions of the characters and how that pushed me to experience this wide arc of emotions, from joy to grief.
19 - What are you currently working on?
For the last few years, I’ve been working on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, which is focused on community breath stories. I’ve also been writing poem-spells and inviting the audience to breathe with me when I share them. They have been slowly accumulating and I’m currently thinking about a larger thread and sequence to gather them into a book. In the last few months, I’ve also begun a speculative novel which wrestles with the question of what kind of self-determination is possible under a deep repression for trans families.
To write poetry is to
make an active choice to assert yourself. To write is to assert presence, to
refuse to be voiceless; to articulate your passions, and to know that those
passions deserve to be discussed and explored. Poetry is how we assert that the
world can be different.
There is a never-ending flow of books that tell you how
to be creative, how to be a writer, how to find success in the literary
marketplace. These books propose how to be a success but rarely examine what it
means to be a success. They don’t discuss what the benchmarks are for poets, or
how striving for success can corrupt writing and lead to disillusionment and
loneliness. The pursuit of success often discourages poets from fulfilling
their literary potential. These books clog our shelves and present a false
narrative that sets poets on an impossible path.
[…]
This book, on the other hand, proposes—in a series of
short chapters, missives, provocations, reflections, and manifestos—another way
of thinking about poetry. To write poetry is to contribute to a balanced
ecology, not to race to the top of a food chain. Do It Wrong can be read
front to back, or back to front, or in snippets as you go. Read this book at
random, flip to any page, jump around. Don’t be afraid to mark it up, write in
the margins, or cross out the pages that don’t interest you. Dog-ear the pages,
tear them out, and pin them to your walls. I hope you’re inspired to write
back, to continue the conversation, to scaffold new ways of supporting poetry. Do
It Wrong doesn’t have all the answers, but, ideally, it will help you ask
more questions. (“CHOOSE WISELY”)
jwcurry once suggested to me that the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was a great writer, to his mind, in large part because he was willing to fail (and therefore manage to achieve what hadn’t even been attempted), but Beaulieu takes that idea a step further, suggesting that anyone who wishes to engage with art generally, or with poetry and/or small press publishing specifically, should be willing to completely go against how it has always and ever be done. “Given the meagre audience for poetry and the microscopic financial rewards,” he writes, early on in the collection, “I suggest that you not only dance as if no one is watching but write as if no one is reading you. Because metaphorically—and mathematically—no one is.” Through a collection of short first-person essays, Beaulieu works through ideas on composition, community, publishing, education, awards, experimental writing, influence, mentors, support and other threads around literary production and engagement that so rarely get discussed, let alone in such detail. Referencing an ethos of sharing and community around The Grateful Dead, for example, in his piece “EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WRITING I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD,” he ends with:
The Grateful Dead and their fans see the music as only one part of a wider artistic life, and they eschew power and ownership at every opportunity except when it can be wielded to increase awareness, make space, or fund colleagues. The Deadheads I know trade tapes, jam together, offer ideas, play their favourite moments for unwitting converts; they are dedicated to being kind. We need more poets to act like Deadheads.
Do It Wrong is incredibly positive and generative, and strikingly honest about how literary publishing works and doesn’t work, offering his years of experience through the literary and small press trenches on how best to approach the work, and what one might expect (and not expect), and how best to propel the art forward. He speaks of experience over commercial reward, and pushing to purposefully make it weirder. Honestly, this is a book I wish anyone engaged with this kind of work, or wishing to, should pick up and read, from the established writer to the emerging ambitious kids seeking glory and career through poetry (and they are very much part of the landscape), to the moody teenager secretly scribbling out lines in their notebook. Beaulieu’s voice is clear-headed and optimistic, articulating a joy through the process of exploration, learning and risk-taking, and a suggestion that those merely in it for themselves will end up in frustration, missing out on all the possibilities that an engaged community offers. Do you know anyone like that? You need to pick up a copy of this book for them, as soon as you are able. As Beaulieu writes to close the short piece “EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS ARE PEOPLE TOO”:
I’ve written
this book as much to advocate to poets out there as to remind myself of poetry’s
potential, its beauty, and its wish of community. To give me a balm for the dark
rings under my eyes, the frayed nerves, the sleepless nights, the anxiety that I
see in the mirror and in the faces of my friends and colleagues.
I write to help me become a better mentor, a better
person, moving from words to actions… and to stay actively aware of the implicit
and explicit lessons that I pass to my emerging colleagues.
