Kirsteen MacLeod
I have a broad range of poetic interests and influences. I am never happier than when reading an international anthology of poems.
I am an immigrant, a traveller, and I am fascinated by 'geographies' in the broadest sense -- physical places as well as imaginative terrain. My work is the writing of place, whether physical landscapes, or inner spaces of body and mind.
My abiding fascination with the writing of place stems from formative experiences of a "lost world”—Scotland, where my family lived until I was three—and a "transplanted world"—Canada. This conflict-generating displacement inspires my poetry. I am particularly influenced by Scottish poets (George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Don Paterson), Canadian ones (Elizabeth Bishop, Sue Goyette, the Villanelles - my poetry group), as well as Ellen Bass from the US, the late Meena Alexander, and Lucille Clifton.
My work has been a finalist for prizes including the Arc Poetry 'Poem of the Year' 2020.
I live in Kingston, Ontario, was born in Glasgow, and count Brazil, India and a cabin in the north woods near Bancroft as among my most inspiring of places.
Yes I did. I read Patti Smith's Babel and it was an event in my life. I was a punk and I'd heard her music, which I thought was poetry. "Because the Night," is a favourite song, and the thrill has never left me. My idea of what was possible changed when I saw Smith's wild lyrics and poems and sketches in book form. And it made me realize that poetry is sonic, akin to music.
A teacher also introduced us to ee cummings -- "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond," I recall really loving. It was quite the change from Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, which I'd tried to memorize in grade school, and loathed!
I started writing poetry when I was in high school. Then I thought, 'I have to make a living' and went to journalism school. I didn't write poetry for about 20 years. Slowly, secretively, started to do so again. It's only been the past ten years I've thought of myself as a poet.
It's to inspire and share the beauty and elegance and solace and surpise of this neglected, misunderstood form, to make it available to all. We turn to poetry in the most difficult of circumstances, to express, to lean on and sustain us -- yet in a capitalist world where everything has to be 'useful,' we devalue it. Pascal said "Always keep something beautiful in your mind." The 'job' of poets is to reveal poetry's capacity for elevating and moving us, for touching on our humanity. And to gesture towards the dissident truth-telling power of poetry, which exists on the margins in our materialistic, technology obsessed society.
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