Finding the Form with Jean Van Loon

Awake one moonlit night in winter 2022, I wandered through the house, peering from various windows, rejoicing in silence and solitude. I scribbled some notes, wanting to capture the mood. Turning the notes into a poem, I began with tercets, a form I find flexible but also tight enough to compel me to be concise. I fiddled with edits over several months. Then I tried the ghazal form, as interpreted by John Thompson in Stilt Jack. That forced further compression and invited a more free-floating association among the stanzas. Honing the ghazal version, I returned frequently to add, subtract, change, restore. By then, one of my closest friends was dying, and she was much on my mind. I wanted to suggest the anguish of knowing she would soon be gone. That led to a new stanza. It took myriad tries to word it and decide where to situate it within the poem. For all I know, the poem may continue to evolve, but the version in TNQ issue 171 is where it has settled for now.

Jean Van Loon is a graduate of Carleton, Queen’s, the Humber School of Writing, and the University of British Columbia MFA programmes. Her second book of poetry, Nuclear Family, (McGill-Queen’s University Press) won the Ottawa Book Award for 2023. Her first, Building on River (Cormorant Books, 2018), was a finalist for that award. Her stories, poems, and reviews have been published in Event, Room, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, among others. She is a member of Ottawa’s Ruby Tuesday poetry group.