Photo credit
Stephane Savoie

Biography

Lisa Richter is a Toronto-based poet, writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of two books of poetry, Closer to Where We Began (Tightrope Books, 2017) and Nautilus and Bone (Frontenac House, 2020), winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, an Alberta Book Publishers' Award, and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her poetry has previously appeared in such places as The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Exile, and Literary Review of Canada. She has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and won first place in CV2 Magazine’s annual 2-Day Poem Contest in 2017. Her personal essays have been featured in the anthologies Voices for Diversity and Social Justice: A Literary Education Anthology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) and Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (Wolsak and Wynn, 2020). She holds a Bachelor’s degree in adult education, a TESL certificate, and has more than two decades of experience teaching youth and adults. Lisa's work explores themes of myth-making, memory, imagination, and identity. In addition to working with Poetry in Voice, she mentors emerging writers through the Sage Hill Writing Experience and facilitates workshops for adults with the Writers Collective of Canada. 

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

I read poetry throughout high school - Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Sylvia Plath stand out to me as poets who were important to me at the time. I was very fortunate to have an English teacher who introduced us to T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others, and who taught me to approach a new poem with curiosity and excitement. The poem that I was most in love with was "somewhere i have never travelled" by e.e. cummings, particularly the last line: "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands."

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

Probably in high school, though looking back, I think I wrote my first poem in my journal at age eight. I was incredibly lucky to grow up in an artistic household: my mother is a writer and visual artist. As a child, I was most passionate about drawing and painting, but during my teen years, which were often turbulent, fraught with financial hardship and emotional turmoil for my family, writing overtook visual art as my primary form of creative expression. I wrote and edited my poems relentlessly, and even compiled a 50-page manuscript of a collection when I was seventeen or eighteen (which thankfully, I never published).

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

I think the poet's job is to write poems. And keep writing them, even if the world conspires to distract you and rob you of your creative impulses. Also, to be vigilant, and pay close attention, which the poet Mary Oliver considered akin to devotion. I've often thought that to be a poet, you need a thin skin to let the world in, and a thick skin to deal with rejection, failure, and the test of one's will, endurance (and sometimes sanity) that goes with putting one's work out into the world. There's a quote I like from the Talmud (paraphrasing) that you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. That's how I see poetry. Not as a job, but as a path, a rocky one at times, a risky one, but far riskier, in my mind, not to follow, once you've discovered it.

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

That's a hard one - there are so many good ones, it's an embarrassment of riches! There are so many old and new favourites of mine, from Allen Ginsberg's "Supermarket in California" to Frank O'Hara's iconic "The Day Lady Died" to more recent now-iconic poets Ocean Vuoung and Liz Howard. But if I had to choose one, I would choose Alice Oswald's "A Short Story of Falling," inspired by her Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist reading in 2017. She recited her poems from memory, and it was spellbinding. I'd love to take on the challenge of memorizing one of her gorgeous poems.

Publications

Title
Closer to Where We Began
Publisher
Tightrope Books
Editors
Jacob Scheier
Date
2017
Publication type
Book
Poem title(s)
Title
Nautilus and Bone
Publisher
Frontenac House
Editors
Micheline Maylor
Date
October 22, 2020
Publication type
Book
Publication type
Periodical/Magazine
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