Laurie Koensgen lives and writes in Ottawa, Canada. Recent publishers include Literary Review of Canada, The Ex-Puritan, The Madrigal, Blue Moon Review, The New Quarterly, and Twin Bird Review. Laurie is a founding member of the Ruby Tuesday Writing Group. Her latest chapbook, this clingstone love, is with Pinhole Poetry.
You can read To My Grown Son Visiting Home in the July 2025 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?
My husband and I have lived in the same house for over forty years, the preponderance of our lives. For our two grown sons, now in their thirties, returning home must mean the ennui of old patterns as well as comfort in the familiar. In my poem I’m imagining that tension. But, ultimately, it’s a quiet testimonial: I can’t imagine not being here for them.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I’ve answered this question before by taking a sideways look into the lure of song, or the compression of flash fiction… But if I really couldn’t write at all I would need to do something with my hands. In my limited experience, I find collage intriguing. There’s a poetry-like relationship in it, between concentrated images and negative space.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
I’m pleased to answer this question now because I feel creatively successful. So many images I wished to share and ideas I wanted to impart are out in circulation. (And more is coming soon, in this clingstone love, a Pinhole Poetry chapbook.) Five years ago I set a goal: to answer one submission call a week. It felt daunting at first but I’ve maintained the commitment and look forward to the challenge now. I’m proud of that achievement and the unexpected breadth of international publications.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
For me a poem usually begins in metaphor, in the fusion of two disparate things. I entertain the collision, try to keep the energy vital. I’m aware of picture-ideas taking form in some liminal space, and work to find the best words with which to “fix” them. Other times a poem springs from wordplay that is satisfying enough to sustain. I imbue it with imagery. The shaping comes later.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I wake up to poetry by reading emailed poems-of-the-day. How I respond to the poems usually presages my writing productivity. My inner editor might already be active; rather than simply reading them, I find myself critiquing. On those days I may focus on poems in progress. Sometimes an image or idea opens me wide to my own creativity and I’ll work on something new. On uncreative days I research places to submit (and re-submit) finished poems. That research (like poetry itself) involves digressions. It’s like walking with a toddler who leaves the sidewalk to run up someone’s lane or to squat in a flowerbed. But the meandering rewards.
Do you have a trusted first reader and how did they win the honour?
I belong to Ottawa’s Ruby Tuesdays, a deeply wonderful poetry group that meets weekly to free-write and critique members’ work. I’m blessed with excellent feedback, from nine fine poets. They’re irreplaceable. But my son, actor Jonathan Koensgen, is my first reader. He brings the same scrutiny of sound and sense to my poems as he does to scripts. And maybe because he has heard it since before he was born, he recognizes my authentic “voice.” More and more I appreciate his counsel.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
I have always been obsessed with words, and how they occupy the page. Even as a baby, I loved their musicality. So it’s not surprising that I began to write poetry as a young child. Writing a poem felt like solving a mystery, sprouting wings, and glimpsing something holy, all at once.
That early love had become a secret by my late teens. Self-criticism twined with a reluctance to shine. But I kept writing.
In 2001 I was inspired to connect profoundly with poetry again. I was volunteering in special education, and advocating for the arts in schools, when the 9-11 attacks occurred. I decided to teach creative writing as an act of resistance against fundamentalism, as a tool against literalist language. I saw what could happen—as we’re witnessing now, within the country where those towers stood—when extremists censor metaphors, dictate imagery and work to destroy imagination. Designing those classes for young people made me reckon with poetry’s power. Its resonance and rebelliousness. Then, now, again, always, poetry ignites me.