Susan Ioannou

Susan Ioannou is a widely published Canadian poet, fiction writer, and literary essayist.

The Big If

Over many years, I led workshops for the University of Toronto, Ryerson Literary Society, and local writers’ groups. Closest to my heart was the 12-year, evening Poets’ Workshop for the Toronto Board of Education. Delving into the challenges of the art with others who took the pursuit seriously was inspiring.

Tight Poem

A tight poem isn’t “thin” at all, but “solid”. Each significant word resonates—with action, with an appeal to the senses, or with symbolic overtones. The poem exudes substance and sits on top of the page in three dimensions. The opposite is a poem so abstract, general, and vague

Revision (2)

Because a poet knows what is behind her lines, it’s easy to forget that a stranger doesn’t. Where is the action happening? Who is doing it? When is everything going on (at a single moment in time or over several weeks), and so on? Sometimes, detail is so

Revision (1)

Revising means more than trimming, which can sometimes strip too much of a poem’s energy. That’s why early drafts, messy with the freshness of detail, are worth hanging onto, even when a poem appears done. Words act on each other, and from those earliest versions, wonderful new connections

Metre (4)

An important point is that each metre has its own emotional overtones, and changing the weight and pace of the lines will alter their mood. However, before the listener can tell that the metre shifts from, say, a stomp to a flutter, first that stomp pattern has to be established

Metre (3)

Poet David Brayley has added his thoughts on metre. He writes: Metre is the scaffolding that supports a poem, and I think it’s always there, however regular or irregular. Maybe what puts poets off metre is hackneyed use of the regular—bitter memories of poems they were forced to

Surprise

A reader should never be fully able to predict what will happen next. Otherwise, why bother to read the whole poem? The shiver down the spine that an effective poem evokes comes not only from the images, ideas, and emotions it embodies, but also from the freshness of language, apt

Metre (2)

When metre seems hard to scan, it’s often from focusing too much on individual words rather than on the sound of the line as a whole. Let the words run together in the ear, saying the line aloud over and over if necessary, until the natural rise and fall

More on AI and Poetry

The preceding Poetry Note on Carmen Starnino’s “Poetry & digital personhood” apparently struck a nerve and provoked some thoughtful responses from writers on Facebook about what poetry actually is or means for us. I was particularly reassured by a direct email from David Brayley, who can speak from professional

Carmen Starnino

Reading “Poetry & digital personhood: On artificial intelligence and creativity” (The New Criterion, Vol. 40, No. 9 / May 2022) brought to mind a famous essay from two hundred years ago. In his “Defence of Poetry” (1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley takes issue with friend Thomas Love Peacock’s suggesting that poetry

Sound and Sense

If ever there was occasion for a thesaurus, a poet working on sound is it. Our culture is so visually oriented, we are less attuned than previous centuries to the meaning that sound itself conveys. To double check a poem’s sound, go through each line, looking at the individual

Sound As Inspiration

From listening to actual sounds in the world around me, images can begin to dance in my head. The same has happened when I hear particularly rhythmic lines such as e.e. cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town / (with up so floating many bells down)” and am

Marvyne Jenoff

Apart from the enjoyable observations they contain, what also delights me about the poems in Marvyne Jenoff’s Climbing the Rain (Silver Bow Publishing, 2022) is their deceptive easiness. Because the language appears so simple, even matter of fact, and moves on its own subtle rhythms, its refreshing twists are

Blaine Marchand

Looking back and within, Blaine Marchand’s recent Becoming History: A Life Told Through Poetry (Aeolus House, 2021) is a touching and skilful blend of prose and poetry drawing from family photographs, letters, and the author’s own childhood as one of eight siblings, then as the good adult son

Metre (1)

Contemporary writers resist metre for a number of reasons. A few may have a tin ear, or two left feet, and can neither hear the distinctive beat pattern, nor feel it on the dance floor of the page. Others do hear the beats distinctly, but consider the tum-te-tum of metre

The Poem As...

· Orchestra (not flute solo) that combines, varies, and recombines tempo, melody line, instrumental tone, and volume into a rounded (not linear) pattern · Egg, not to tiptoe around, but to crack open and savour its yoke · Macramé, multiple strands twined around a continuing meaning · Gateway into deeper experience · Fist, one by

Progress

In literature there is no “progress”, no “moving forward”, no real “avant-garde” except in the ephemeral details of form or fashionable focus. Yet over the years, book reviews have abounded with metaphors of forward motion: “ahead of its time”, “taking risks”, “pushing back the boundaries”, “travelling unfamiliar territory”. The same

Line: Kevin Shaw

From my “The Pleasures of Complexity: Kevin Shaw’s Smaller Hours” (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), published in The Antigonish Review [https://antigonishreview.com/] 192, Winter 2018 It was a lucky accident online, when I chanced upon the winning entry in the 2016 Prism International poetry competition. I was impressed with

Imagery That Dismays

Three kinds: · Showy firecrackers exploding in all directions, and not building to one dominant or layered impression · Disparate comparisons strung together that add no depth to understanding · Metaphors that are merely decorative and gratuitous, rather than growing out of the situation they attempt to describe

Imagery - Word Order

Word order is an important and often slippery trigger in a reader’s mental picture-making. Consider a poem beginning with the simile “I paddle, duck-like”. The first two words “I paddle” may spring the image of dipping a canoe paddle in the water. Immediately, “duck-like” overturns the boat, as the

Dirty Work

Writing a poem can be dirty work. I’m not talking about the gifts, those poems that sing their way into consciousness, every word slipping gracefully into place. I’m not talking either about poems that commute to destinations well marked but colourless. What I do mean are the poems

Free-write

A loosening-up creative exercise is to get comfortable somewhere beyond reach of a cell phone or other interruptions, and write nonstop, never lifting pen from paper for half an hour — a surprisingly tiring length of time. No censoring of thoughts. No rewriting or polishing. Just freely associating all over the

Detail

Three thoughts on its use in poetry (1) The significant detail is “metonymic”. In other words, even if we didn’t already know what the whole was, that detail would suggest it, as in the “greasy jeans” and “picking and pecking at life” of Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem about the

Monika Lee

Cover Blurb: If Water Breathes (Resource Publications, 2019) This collection is a delight for the senses. Lyrical, rhythmic, often subtly rhymed, Monika Lee’s poems ripple in the ear, refreshing amid the aural flatness of a lot of contemporary free verse. Her images are vividly spare, “like a flurry of

Sonia Saikaley

Cover Blurb: A Samurai’s Pink House (Inanna, 2017) The poems in this brilliant new collection draw you on a haunting journey through time and Japanese culture. Cherry trees, rice fields, blossoms, moonlight, teardrops of rain and dew evoke a Zen beauty of discipline and quiet obedience. Sensuousness abounds: the