Josiah Nelson holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan, where he teaches creative writing. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, Hunger Mountain, The Nashwaak Review, Palette Poetry, Queen’s Quarterly, and The Rumpus, among others. He won third place in Fractured Lit’s Monsters, Mystery, and Mayhem Prize, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada.
You can read One Poem in the July 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Around the time I wrote this poem, I was reading a lot of found poetry. I think I registered that something about the form was inherently self-conscious—I guess because it’s poetry that acknowledges it’s in conversation with other poetry. I think that thought led to another: poems can be aware of themselves. From here, I wondered if a poem might dream of being something else. I experimented with this idea in a few different iterations: poem as movie, poem as painting, poem as provisional poem. I wrote a bunch of poems exploring poetry as a malleable, material thing, and One Poem came from that batch.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I do! I have many, so I’ll stick to recent poems I’ve been thinking about a lot. One is Bill Knott’s poem, Sonnet (To—). The line-breaks in the poem, and how they work with the images, create a really satisfying, surprising sense of rhythm. I’ve also been reading Lynne Thompson’s poem Haint & Haint a lot. As the poem progresses, it breaks off pieces of the opening line and repeats and recontextualizes them to striking, powerful effect. Like Knott’s poem, it has a great sense of rhythm, in part because it uses spacing in a really neat way. I also recently got a copy of CV2’s spring issue and have been reading a Paula Turcotte poem titled Spoiler alert: nobody in this poem wins over and over. It leaps around with such a wonderful sense of associative logic; in the same sentence, it moves through memories, years, rooms, stanzas. So many striking jump cuts that have been rattling around in my brain.
How do you revise your work?
Lately, I’ve been drafting poems on paper. If, from that, I’m able to cobble together a draft with some spark, I take it to a word doc. I think the first draft, for me, is about compiling images and attempting to establish associative leaps between them. I’m considering sound, too, but I’ll allow some clunkiness if it helps me follow the thread of the poem. In revision, I think I’m trying to be really attentive to that sonic element; I think it’s Jan Zwicky who suggests that a poem’s sonic quality is felt in the body. I’m trying to listen for wrong notes. Compression, too. I’m trying to cut words, tighten line-breaks, help it sing.
In terms of nuts and bolts, I have a word doc with all my new drafts. I’ll write the drafted poem there. When I revise, I copy and paste the original, and edit the new copy. Then copy and paste that version, make more revisions, etc. I rarely, if ever, go back to the original or middle drafts, but it brings me peace to know that, if I want to, I can. It’s also neat to see the record of changes I’m making. Knowing it’s all there, I think I have confidence to edit freely.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
What a question! I’m not sure I have a comprehensive answer, but I think I feel most satisfied when I sit with a poem for a long time, and arrive, suddenly, at some moment of insight. The breakthrough, I suppose, or finally finding a phrase or image that puts words to what I was trying to communicate the whole time. I often sense possibilities in opening lines, and that’s how poems usually start for me: I sense some inchoate potential for something curious in a phrase and just go with it. Making that potential material is success to me, and I think that has to do with sticking with an idea, being patient that something will happen. It always feels like magic when it does. Another success is editing the poem for a final time, reading it again, and just sensing: It’s done. Ah.
What are you working on now?
A couple of things right now. I’m tidying up a poetry manuscript exploring light—drafting new poems, revising old poems, adding some, excising others, considering order, sections etc…
I’m also drafting a novella about a sad Wizard in modern-day Saskatoon, which will help me wrap up a collection of short stories.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I’ve been asking myself this since about September, when my MFA ended. I didn’t focus on poetry during the program, but I found I wrote a lot of it because that’s the world I was living in. To a degree, it still is, since I did some teaching this past year, but on the whole I wrote way less, and very little poetry. I’m realizing I have to be more intentional, set aside time, go on walks etc.
I’m also realizing I’m best when I have material to chew on. I work part-time at a used bookstore (how lucky I am!), and have made a point to bring a notepad with an opening line that I haven’t yet teased a poem out of. On breaks and throughout the day, I dream about it, and sometimes I stumble into some words. It’s still slow going, but I think that’s going to be the way for me: treat those opening lines, when they occur to me, as precious material, and do my best to carry them around day after day. I think this helps, in the words of the poet Sheri Benning, “sustain the long thought,” and create a sort of continuity or rhythm for the poem’s development, even if it’s slow process.