Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s collection of lyric essays, Micrographia (2023) won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and was recently shortlisted for the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving, a collection of poetry (2021) and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir (2017). A new collection of poetry, Stock, is forthcoming with Coach House Press in 2025. Jennifer is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.
You can read Bath Time in the Northern Hemisphere and Sorting Shapes in the October 2024 issue.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
The easy answer is by writing in other genres, which I do—primarily creative nonfiction! But if I didn’t write at all I think I would have to find some other form of artistic expression, such as painting. The fulfillment that I get from poetry is in making something to share beyond myself, taking my own self-absorptions and turning them outward to ask, “who else recognizes this?”
How do you revise your work?
It’s a multi-stage process that requires a lot of time—not necessarily in the number of hours but in the passage of weeks or months (or sometimes years) on the calendar. Some pieces just need time to germinate…or percolate…or fester.
Most poems include at least one line or image that I think of as the “good enough” line. These are the lines that I’m not quite happy with but that I ignore for a while, hoping they will go away, like a scratch in the paint or a sliver in the floorboard. Eventually, I reach the stage of revision where I finally face the “good enough” lines and revise those, too.
I’ve also been known to continue revising a piece after it’s been published. My second book, Deriving, included several pieces that had already appeared in magazines but got another overhaul for the book. I like thinking of a poem as a living thing that can grow and change over time, rather than a static artifact.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
I find it’s so easy to get sucked into the external markers of success—publications, awards, reviews. Yet when I really think about what I want to achieve with my work, it’s to create moments of intimate recognition and connection with an individual reader. This is what I look for as a reader, too. There’s nothing better than hearing someone tell me that they were moved by something I wrote.
What are you working on now?
I am just starting to think about promotion for my new book of poetry coming out in 2025 with Coach House, Stock. It’s a response to stock photography, exploring how those image databases represent women through four tropes—the idealized mother, the businesswoman, the sex object, and an anthropomorphized Earth. I’m also writing new poems whenever inspiration strikes. And I’m working on something completely new for me—a middle grade novel.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I am lucky to have one day a week that I can devote to my writing. This is made possible by a well-paying job that accommodates that schedule and a partner who also has a well-paying job. I know that that is an extraordinary privilege and I think it’s so important to be transparent about that. But I also find that the initial spark of a poem doesn’t ever appear on those days. That happens in between driving kids to piano and scrubbing the toilet or while lying in bed trying to sleep. I’ve learned that it’s critical to jot those ideas or lines down in that moment, or I’ll never remember them. It also only ever happens when I am in an open mindset. I make space for poetry by trying to see my world through a poetic lens and being conscious about my attention.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I belong to a wonderful writer’s group with three other women I profoundly admire—Lisa Martin, Rayanne Haines, and Jannie Edwards. We are all mothers at different stages and we also have all lost our own mothers, and the ways that those two things intertwine through our work has made our group extremely close. We provide each other with feedback and advice as well as boost each other’s work—and often have conversations about writing and life late into the night. They all provided feedback on the two poems in this issue. Edmonton also has a vibrant poetry community and I get so much inspiration and feedback from many other friends in this city. I am also the co-chair of the Parenting Poets Community Committee for the League of Canadian Poets. This small group has a lively online community on the Slack platform. It includes both emerging and established poets who identify as parents. We share opportunities, discuss issues and challenges related to writing while parenting, and celebrate each other’s successes. We also have a channel devoted to sharing our rejections, and sharing those in community really helps with the sting! Any parenting poet in Canada is welcome and can reach out to me for information.
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