Erin Wilson’s poems have appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, EVENT Magazine, Freefall, TAR, Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Vallum, and elsewhere internationally. She’s been long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize and has won a Pushcart. She was chosen by Lorna Crozier as a co-winner of Planet Earth’s Poetry Spring Contest, A Tribute to Patrick Lane. She lives on the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek. Her dearest friends are trees and wind, and wind through trees.
You can read Storm/Aperture in the April 2025 issue.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
Probably, if I had to identify only one collection of poetry as a touchstone, I would choose The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris) as the most important collection I return to again and again, for its breadth of voice and depth of wisdom. However, it would be difficult to exclude the great haiku poets (R. H. Blyth’s haiku series has been invaluable) or John Thompson’s Collected Poems & Translations.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
There is nothing that might take the place of poetry. Poetry occupies a mysterious world and allows us access to that mysterious world. Language is a forest. Poetry is walking through that forest.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Convincing myself that I have touched truth and demonstrated it. For me, it’s an ongoing and intuitive process.
What are you working on now?
I have a few projects on the go right now. They each have a different theme, goal, or voice. I don’t seem to get to choose which I work on. The piece itself tells me where it belongs.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Definitely visual art. I’ve been enamoured with Andrew Wyeth these last few years, and I have great love and respect for Turner, Whistler, Morandi… Classical music has become a new solace. Foreign movies are incredibly important to me. I seem to need to hear voices that exist beyond what is culturally familiar.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
Every morning I have a list of places I visit online to read the new publications. Then I return to books. I have books with me at all times. And notebooks, should an impulse arrive. I walk in the woods as often as possible. I jot down what I see, how I feel. There is always a conversation that opens up when I’m in nature. I’m not sure who is speaking on either side, but an alertness opens up in me, and I feel the word, “Yes.”
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I’m reading Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. I adore Tolstoy, especially his character Levin in Anna Karenina. I’m beginning to connect with Linda Gregg’s All of it Singing. It took me some time this winter to work up to watching Elem Klimov’s important anti-Holocaust movie Come and See. I knew it would be difficult, but what I didn’t understand was the additional complexity regarding the main actor, Aleksei Yevgenyevich Kravchenko (who does a brilliantly gut-wrenching portrayal of a young Belarusian in Come and See), who apparently has been listed as an enemy to the Ukrainian people after participating in the movie Solntsepyok (which I have not seen) in 2021, which is considered a Russian propaganda film. It is utter insanity to think that we have not fully learned the lessons of war. An insanity and an indignity to our humanity. (I also highly recommend Diamonds of the Night, a Czech anti-Holocaust movie; the opening scene reads nothing short of a revelation in filmmaking!) I was very thankful to accidentally happen upon James Tate’s poem “The War Next Door” shortly after seeing the movie. I highly recommend it. And I’m so deeply thankful that I have somehow stumbled into the language of classical music late in life. Anything Glenn Gould can grasp and keep my attention. What a character he was!
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
Actually, I might say failure has taught me a great deal. Not being able to get certain pieces published right away has afforded me time to find particular words or happen upon quotations that have become pertinent to a poem. Once I waited long enough to come across the word gormless. That’s been a favourite happening in my life:) Or the word Eigengrau. Or the Spinoza quote, “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.” So the best advice has been— wait, give the poem time.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I belong to a writer’s group of two. My husband, James Owens, also writes poetry. Although we write very differently, we are constantly sharing work we encounter and work we generate ourselves. It’s a bit of a temple, this sharing. Real work happens there, work like listening. (Editing is a form of listening.) Sometimes just sitting with the experience of the poem is the work.
But wait. I have a dear friend I met over a decade ago online. She has become family. And she has such a gift for brevity. So, our writer’s group has three members.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
When I was a child, I was quietly other. Just after my father’s passing, I received the gift of a book that included my name and the names of my siblings. That simple happening became a truth for me. It wasn’t all that long after that that I began writing.