On this Power Q & A, we are absolutely chuffed to welcome the wonderful Saskatchewan poet, gillian harding-russell, who answers our question about how her stunning poems take shape on the page. gillian’s 2018 poetry collection, In Another Air, was published by Radiant Press, and her 2020 collection, Uninterrupted, was published by Ekstasis Editions. Both were short-listed for Saskatchewan Book Awards.
Welcome, gillian!
Q: When thinking of how a poem should present itself on the page, how do you make decisions about a poem’s appearance?
A: My first answer is that I allow the poem to shape itself – I do not make conscious decisions about the poem’s presentation ahead of writing it. Since the eye and convention have taught me to read left to right, I do, however, favour a left justification and use the left margin as a point of departure for various kinds of expression.
Some poems write themselves in longer meditative or narrative lines. As an example, the voice in “Returning from the dead” (In Another Air, Radiant Press) uses longer lines to tell a story that begins with the refurbishing of the warships, the Erebus and Terror, that would take Franklin on his infamous last expedition. Similarly, “My Dearest John,” which is a fictitious letter written by an imagined fiancée of the shipboy John Hartnell who died on Beechey Island, uses long reminiscing and candid lines with dream imagery that carries the speaker’s voice, and I hope at once captures her first love and her need to carry on without him, her torn conscience and honest sentiments.
Some poems write themselves in short lines, as for example “Like an Albatross across the Beaufort” and “Off Track between Back Bay and Frame Lake” – which, interestingly, both have long titles! In these poems the images shape the verses and the short lines allow us to pause and reflect on particular images, whether it is a fox’s hole near the path or the implicit image of an albatross that finds its way into a poem about receding icebergs. One of the poems with the shortest lines is “Raven at -40” in which the quick images in the first stanza are intended to catch the reader’s attention to tell a story rather rapidly while assembling the details. Also, the short verses capture a tempo for wit. The raven plays a trick on the light sensor by sitting on it to make it turn on in Yellowknife where it is cold and the light is short in the depth of winter. Here, again, the length of lines and the dimensions of the poem are not a conscious decision but instead a reflection of the voice in the particular poem.
Some poems are written in irregular lines, some short and others longer, and an example might be the poem “Albatross” in which an albatross is discovered filled with plastic and has died of an artificial hunger due to our industries’ mismanagement. The long and short lines are intended to capture the solemnity and curt facts of the bird’s death, while alluding to a larger environmental situation against the echo of a literary albatross. Another poem with dramatically irregular lines is another raven poem, “Raven Talk” in which the idea is to capture the raven’s raucous and lively, not predictable and unfathomable intelligence that is “other” than our own.
Although I have never set out to write a shaped poem, there is one in In Another Air. As I started writing “Inukshuk,” I found myself thinking of that landmark, and so the poem shaped itself around its subject. An inukshuk is a type of landmark used widely in the north in which stones are placed on top of each other and often in a human-like form with a headstone. Although the poem begins in a single column to resemble its subject matter, the base of the pedestal is left-justified on one side and parted with another leg-like column to suggest that it may be walking over the landscape. I suddenly wanted the inukshuk in the poem to stride into life!
Last, there is a prose poem. Although prose poems for some poets may simply be poetic short prose, I tend to make breaks as in more traditional verse where the enjambments dramatize the action or the content in some way. And here I would point to “Outer Galactic Reports from Planet Z3” as an example of a prose poem with un-accidental line breaks. The block shape of the two reports, “Preliminary Report (2025 C.E.)” and “Secondary Report (3018 C.E.)” is also intended to suggest either a journalist’s or scientist’s reporting in the future.
The respledent gillian harding-russell.
More about gillian harding-russell:
Regina poet, editor and reviewer gillian harding-russell has published in journals across Canada and her poems have been anthologized in seventeen anthologies. Her most recent collections include In Another Air (Radiant Press, 2018) and Uninterrupted (Ekstasis Editions, 2020), both shortlisted for Saskatchewan Book Awards. In 2016, the suite “Making Sense” won first place in the Gwendolyn MacEwen Chapbook Award. A short chapbook, Megrim (The Alfred Gustav Press) was released in 2021.