Sonja Boon is a writer, researcher, teacher, and flutist currently living in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Riddle Fence, Geist, ROOM, and The Ethnic Aisle, as well as in anthologies. Her memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, appeared in 2019.
You can read possible ground and hold my wake in the January 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?
As a mixed-race person, I have long been interested in the spaces between “defined categories,” not just between constructed racial and/or ethnic categories, but also in the spaces between life and death, human and more-than-human, sea and shore, and more. What does it mean to live in the in-between? What happens in these murky spaces? What possibilities exist there? How does the in-between challenge the very categories that bring it into existence? These are questions that percolate under all my writing.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I don’t have a single collection or poem that acts as a touchstone; rather, I find inspiration from different poets at different times. Most recently, I’ve been inspired by Narungga poet Natalie Harkin’s Archival-Poetics (Vagabond Press, 2020), a decolonial project of poetic refusal that has her own Aboriginal family stories at its heart, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016), which continues a long and deep relationships between poetry and Black feminist theorizing, and Junie Désil’s Eat Salt, Gaze at the Ocean (TalonBooks, 2020), which lives in the shadows and wake of the transatlantic slave trade, in the in-between spaces that separate life from death, freedom from captivity, past and present.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Because I’m originally trained as a classical musician, a poem begins with sound and rhythm. I want to feel words in my body, and to taste what happens when they jostle against each other in unexpected ways. And from there, I become interested in space – the open, rich silences between the words.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Music. Always music. First and foremost, I think as a musician (and as a classical flutist in particular). So sound, texture, rhythm, space, air, time, articulation, phrasing – all of these are central to how I understand poetry (both as a writer or as a reader).
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I start with found poetry. I open a page in a book I’m reading, or take a snapshot of books on my shelves, or find some random bit of writing online, and I start pulling out words and arranging and rearranging and working and massaging. I spend between 15 and 30 minutes noodling around. This is my morning warmup, like a musician will play scales and long tones and work on breathing. It’s not necessarily meant to “go anywhere,” but every now and then there are nuggets that I can (and do!) polish further.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
Earlier this fall, I read Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge: Life in Fragments (Penguin RandomHouse, 2023), and I’m almost ready to read it again. It’s an astonishing book: vulnerable, joyful, raw, critical, intimate, fragmented, heartbreaking, alive – and above all, an act of love.