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Terry Doyle’s Writing Space

My writing space is what would have been the master bedroom in this house. When I moved in, I immediately knew I would sleep in the tiny room at the back of the house and use this big, bright bedroom as my office, where I can put my desk in the middle of the floor instead of pushed against a wall. It’s got a glass patio door leading to a small, sketchy deck where I can gaze toward the East White Hills in St. John’s—a place where I went to walk and mentally edit my first two books—or I can sit out there on the sketchy deck and have a coffee during the 3.5 months of the year when the weather will allow it. There’s carpet and wallpaper from the 80’s, but I don’t mind. I have a pile of plants in here, and I have my SAD lamp on the desk, looming above the absolute mess of stickies and note pads. I’ve only been in this space for about a year and a half, and I can’t really be sure yet if anything I’ve written here will be something I’ll look back on as a success, but I’ve also been trying to reframe what success looks like when writing fiction. Success is getting to write every day while my son is at school. Success is the act itself. Who knows how long I can reasonably keep doing this before financial concerns overwhelm. For now, getting to sit at this desk during the day is cause to celebrate. How lucky am I!?

Terry Doyle
Terry Doyle is a writer from the Goulds, Newfoundland. His books, DIG, and The Wards were finalists for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the ReLit, The Alistair McLeod Short Fiction Award, The Winterset Award, The John and Margaret Savage First Book Award, The Margaret Duley Award, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Fiction. Terry won the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2017, and his fiction has appeared in Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, untethered, and elsewhere. 
 

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Michael Lithgow’s Writing Space

When I think about a writing space I think about a desire for what is absent. My writing spaces for a time have been a shifting, nomadic occupation of ‘here’ when I can get the moments to write – waiting at my daughter’s sport practices or art classes, a few free moments in the lull of an evening, on airplanes and in airports. I routinely write in cafes, using the solitude of a crowd like a studio, turning up my playlist to help withdraw from this world into the ones I am visiting in my stories. I have a home office, but I moved out of it a while ago. It’s in the basement where the cold and dark can get to you, and when we shifted some things around down there about a year ago, it became a defacto storage room. I moved upstairs to the dining room table, another kind nomadism. The light is great, but none of my talisman’s are there, just debris from my professional life and the clutter of an open space bungalow. 

But recently, I had the urge to reclaim my office in the basement. I moved the furniture and boxes to new bardo zones, and I’ve cleared away the stacks of paper and notebooks and other accumulations of neglect. It’s still cluttery, but this kind of clutter is more intentional: a small collection of sort-of-working Polaroid cameras picked up in junk stores and put to work creating image traces of the life I’m sharing; a bag of beachcombed ceramic fragments collected during a visit to Cape Breton, because that’s how they got rid of garbage back in the day, by setting it on the beach and letting the tide take it away; an enormous jar of buttons, the volume of which could only have been collected over a lifetime the way it used to be done when buttons were valuable and clothes still repaired, also a junk store find (I’ve never been sure why I keep it, a jar of possibility perhaps, and care taken for small incidental things);

 I have my grandfather’s level, a long wooden carpenter’s tool as beautiful as it is useful. My father kept it on his desk, and when my father died, I moved it to mine. There is a small shrine of old things accumulated over years –a magic lantern slide, a Victorian ink bottle, the hotel key my parents kept from their honeymoon; an old and unbelievably heavy metal tape dispenser from my wife’s grandmother’s dry goods store in Miramichi, New Brunswick; a 16th century floor tile from Valencia; a small handmade cocoon in a jar given to me by an artist in Vancouver decades ago. I also have on my desk a jar of wonderment given to me by a dear friend, things she encountered while working in the north–the jawbone of an animal, dried lichen and other weedy things, tufts of caribou fur. On top of the jar I have a 140 million year old ammonite fossil, a gift from my wife on our honeymoon. On one of the shelves is a leg bone from a moose, something I found in the mud near a cabin where I go with my writing group twice a year to share the lonely burdens of writing. And of course, there are books stuffed and crammed into shelves and stacked on the floor. One of my bookshelves I made when I lived in Chelsea, Quebec. I bought some old barnboard from a farmer and cobbled it together, the books resting on the rough circular-saw scarred surfaces of the planks.

There’s stuff on the walls, too, watercolour paintings from my dad, images of east coast fishing shacks from his days painting in Nova Scotia in the 1970s. My daughter’s artwork is on the wall. There are photographs ranging from my parent’s wedding to our cat who died recently. Also, a page cut from an old biographical encyclopedia onto which an artist printed a colourful jellyfish (I happen to love jellyfish.), tentacles draping over a partial entry for the 18th century English writer Samuel Johnson, who by his own account was born “almost dead” (due to illnesses) and who described his life lived mostly in poverty as “radically wretched”. There’s the woodblock print I picked up at a community show I chanced on in Montmartre years ago, of a bearded man at the bottom of the sea hammering out fish, turtles, seahorses and the like, on an anvil. My mother’s spinning wheel is in my office. I remember sitting at her ankles feeding raw wool onto the wooden wheel. (I don’t know where else to put it, and so it’s there.) And there’s a photograph I took from the window in an artist’s studio in east London looking over a row of estate housing towards a London skyline in the blue of dusk. It’s my window of escape from a suburban basement, a way to acknowledge my own studio practice when I’m there. 

There is a certain chaos in my writing studio, and I suppose that reflects to some extent how I write. I am a reluctant planner. For me writing is the method, the way to encounter. Eventually, structure emerges or must be imposed, just as I must rearrange the clutter of my writing space into some sort of useful scaffolding for my imagination. But only without planning can I hope to encounter the unexpected and beautiful news I am looking for. That’s why I keep things that astonish me near my desk. I also have a small, slate coaster with the word ‘hope’ chiseled into it, a gift from another writer during a dark and difficult time in my life. So there’s hope in the space, too. At least I like to think so. When I can get in there. When it doesn’t become overrun with the clutter of parenting, the clutter of what I do to pay the bills, the clutter of defeat.

Maybe my writing space is a rhythm: not just the absence of space and not just the magic of a cave, but oscillation between the nomadic and the reclusive; needing to feel like I belong in the world, that my words have place and meaning in the necessary and urgent routines of the crowd; and needing to withdraw into my private imaginarium—the collages of memory and invention from which narratives take form. A private place where risks can be taken. I need them both, I guess.

That’s where I write.

 

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Michael Lithgow’s poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in various journals including TNQ, the Literary Review of Canada (LRC), The /Temz/ Review, Cultural Trends, Canadian Literature, Topia, Existere, The Antigonish Review, The High Window, ARC and Fiddlehead. His first collection of poetry, Waking in the Tree House (Cormorant Books, 2012), was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Quebec Writers Federation First Book Award. Work from this collection was included in the 2012 Best of Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books). Michael’s second collection, Who We Thought We Were As We Fell (Cormorant Books, 2021), was published in the spring 2021. He currently lives in Edmonton, AB and teaches at Athabasca University.

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What’s Carol Bruneau Reading?

Needing a palate cleanse after feasting on Michael Crummey’s The Adversary and Magda Szabo’s The Door—two intensely immersive allegorical novels—I gravitated to the nonfiction section of my favourite bookstore. A bit of backstory: as winter set in, I’d recently bought a treadmill and soon discovered the best way to make myself use it was by multitasking: reading while treadmilling away. (Though a proponent of less is more, I hate wasting time.) Whaling through The Journals of Hildegard of Bingen and poet Kathleen Norris’s essay collection The Cloister Walk, I struggled through R.F. Kuang’s bestseller Yellowface (and not just due to the monotonous movement of my feet). The upshot of what I learned? It was best to save fiction, literary fiction especially, for undivided mind/body/spirit attention, to be enjoyed from the couch.

Essays, on the other hand, synced better with footwork, brain food in optimal portion sizes to keep me on track. That day in Bookmark, I needed fuel for my writing, for my preoccupation with stories and ideas, my parallel universe of characters, situations and settings. Needed the inspiration of other writers, the well-heeled company of others’ brilliant words.

As luck would have it, the books I chose happened to share a shelf: journalist and folklorist Emily Urquhart’s latest collection of essays, Ordinary Wonder Tales, Giller Award winning novelist Esi Edugyan’s collection of 2021 CBC Massey Lectures, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling, and the inimitable Salman Rushdie’s Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020. A solid entry into his writing, I hoped, since in past efforts to read him, I’d found his loquacious style overwhelming.

In Urquhart’s writing, her ideas approached through a folkloric lens, I found instant companionship: ideas I readily share about the magical, goosebump-raising proximity of the unseen world to our everyday one. Stories about ancestral communities in Newfoundland, hauntings, childbirth, happenstance, and the incredible fragility of our lives. So moved by these essays and their uncanny relatability, I’ve already delved into Urquhart’s two earlier collections.

Meanwhile, treadmilling away, imagine my shivery delight cracking Edugyan’s book to discover similar themes, but viewed through the lens of race. Writing with candour and a cool, far-reaching intelligence, Edugyan shares personal experiences of hauntings with a humble respect for the uncanny, debunking the dangerous mythologies that allow white supremacy to blind us to the realities of existing as a black person. These erudite, expansive essays opened my eyes to how very little I knew about racism’s global roots, reaching from the historical to the current experiences of the black community not only in North America, but Africa, Europe and Asia.

As a white, reasonably well-educated author from a settler background, living and working in a province riven by systemic anti-Black racism and its legacies, I have much more to learn. My ignorance of much of the history detailed here proves Edugyan’s contention. Of course, we read to see ourselves reflected. Books reassure us that we’re not alone, but more importantly, call us out when needed, showing us where we should hold ourselves accountable. And then (feet treadmilling, nose deep in book), on to Salman Rushdie. Maybe by accident or no accident whatsoever, I soon discovered here all the themes explored in the other collections writ large. No holds barred, Rushdie’s essays cross cultures, religions, ethnicities, literary eras and genres. At this point, only halfway through them I can’t wait to hit the treadmill and dive back in, because Rushdie is easily one of the bravest writers I’ve read—and not just for his acclaimed political and moral stance against murderous opponents. The collection is an array of literary lectures, acceptance speeches, talks, and critical writings that convey the astonishing depth and breadth of his work. With its focus on the transformative power of the imagination, on the power of literature to resist religious and political ideologues that would crush all freedom of expression and freedom of choice, the writing also proves Rushdie to be among the more magnanimous writers I’ve encountered, as funny and self- effacing as he is biting, a fiery defender of the truth as he sees it. Yes, I’m embarrassingly late to the party, and as a person of faith, I don’t necessarily agree with all Rushdie’s opinions about God, although he’s spot on when he speaks of godlessness. Also, the relative shortage of women writers he discusses as peers in the first half of the book rankles—although, in passing, he references Edugyan, and later on, I gather from a quick skim of the remaining contents, mentions Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag and a host of others.

All three of these collections explore and embrace magic realism. But Rushdie’s remarks push ideas raised in Edugyan’s and Urquhart’s essays toward an absolute, about the power of the imagination (the supernatural and the stuff of fables) to bring to the fore our worries and fears, and the power of writing to exercise, excise, and sometimes even exorcize them. In an essay about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he writes, “…The wonderful has deep roots in the real and for that reason is able to use the surreal to create metaphors and images of the real that come to feel more real than reality, more truthful than the truth.” (126). So be it! At their core, the three books challenge us to question the boundaries between what is “real” and what’s invented, what is true and what is the product of spin.

Serendipity, that I happened upon them shelved fairly close together, or simply evidence of Bookmark’s thoughtful curation? I don’t believe (much) in accidents. Each of the collections is a triumph, not just for the writer but the reader, whoever and wherever you may be. I see you, their contents said to me, and isn’t it the writer’s job to make the reader feel noted, that the concerns they share are addressed?

Reading these essays, for all my shortcomings (just one example: an inability to read Samuel Beckett’s novels, a common issue Rushdie handily tackles) and the limitations of my own perspective, I’ve felt not only seen but nurtured and challenged, mind (and body) exceptionally well exercised. Moreover, they’ve prepared me to hit the couch and re-enter fiction land, where my heart truly lies. First up has been a novel by Amanda Peters, a Nova Scotian author of Mi’kmaw descent, The Berry Pickers, in which dream and memory guide the lost. Right now is Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (talk about less is more). And next up? The Satanic Verses.

Edugyan, Esi. Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling. CBC Massey Lectures. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2022.

Rushdie, Salman. Languages of Truth: Essay 2003-2020. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2021.

Urquhart, Emily. Ordinary Wonder Tales: Essays. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2022.

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Based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Mi’kmaki/Nova Scotia, Carol Bruneau is the author of eleven books. Her fourth short story collection, Threshold, a work of contemporary fiction, is being published by Nimbus/Vagrant Press this April. Her novels include Brighten the Corner Where You Are, longlisted for the 2022 International IMPAQ Dublin Literary Award.

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images

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What’s Terry Doyle Reading?

Lately I’ve been reading novels with first-person, unreliable narrators who are not very likable. This form really interests me because it’s something I’m trying to emulate. I’m interested in how a writer convinces the reader to stick with a narrator like this, one who we know is kinda shitty. Why does the reader care to keep turning pages? What is it that convinces them to stick with the narrator long enough for them to be redeemed (or not)?

Of course, the classic example is Lolita. But I crave something a little more contemporary, and a little more achievable.

Two examples that I’ve been reading and loving are God’s Country, by Percival Everett, and Treasure Island!!!, by Sara Levine.

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God’s Country was the first novel I read by Percival Everett. I was tickled to learn how prolific he’s been, and devoured several others immediately. Then he published The Trees, which became a pretty big deal. And his novel Erasure was recently adapted into a film called American Fiction.

God’s Country is a western, narrated by a selfish, no-good degenerate named Kurt Marder who hires a black tracker to help him find his recently kidnapped wife. Through his treatment of Bubba the tracker we see how awful he is, yet he narrates as if his actions are justified. This dramatic irony is at the heart of why these types of stories interest me. In Kurt’s case, I think we as readers are waiting for him to get his comeuppance…

Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! is narrated by an incredibly self-centered woman in her early twenties who works at the Animal Library and uses Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic book as a guide for how she should live her life. What starts off as a story told by a witty, if narcissistic young women, soon turns into a voyeuristic spectacle as she verges toward sociopathy. Which, I gotta say, is hilarious. I think both of these books achieve similar feats in very different ways, but the commonality seems to be humour. I’ve re-read God’s Country more than once but I borrowed Treasure Island!!! from the library, so I’ve had a copy sitting in my online shopping cart, waiting for me. Both books did that thing I hope to discover every time I open a new book: they held me in thrall, and when I wasn’t reading them, I was eager to get back to it. Reading is so personal, and tastes are subjective, but I have been recommending both of these books every chance I get.

Terry Doyle

Terry Doyle is a writer from the Goulds, Newfoundland. His books, DIG, and The Wards were finalists for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the ReLit, The Alistair McLeod Short Fiction Award, The Winterset Award, The John and Margaret Savage First Book Award, The Margaret Duley Award, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Fiction. Terry won the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2017, and his fiction has appeared in Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, untethered, and elsewhere. 

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images

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What’s Melinda Burns Reading?

Lately, as I’ve been writing poems about my brother who died in December, I’ve been re-reading Marie Howe’s book of poems, “What the Living Do”. The collection, written in 1998, is largely about her brother who died some years before of AIDS-related complications. As a poet I am instructed and inspired by her deceptively simple, straightforward language, the poems often written in couplets. And then lines that jump out and almost tip me over:

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“What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave…what happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, calling and calling his name.”

Even a simple recalling of a snowy evening “in a dark snowy winter” is redolent of a moment:

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“The radiator’s squeak and whine / Plows soon, their deep and decent rumbling.”

That word “decent” echoing “deep” is so unexpected but just right for a snowplow doing its necessary work.

Marie Howe was writing this collection around the time the poet, Jane Kenyon, died, and she dedicates it to Jane’s memory. In “The Prayer” she writes, “I want to go where she went, where my brother went.” But ultimately this is a book for the living, and the daily, ordinary things the living do—opening the windows, driving, spilling coffee, buying a hairbrush—the mundane yet beautiful things that remind us we’re alive. This combining of the tragic and the wondrous is what I want to do in my own writing.

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Melinda Burns is a writer and a psychotherapist in Guelph, Ontario. She is the daughter of a Mohawk mother and an English father. Her poems, essays and stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Grain, The New Quarterly, Canadian Notes and Queries, and One Art.

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Carol Bruneau’s Writing Space

My writing space is a sunroom with windows for walls, flowering plants, a mess of books and papers, and a great ground-level view of our street. This room of my own is quite a step up from the dark little bedroom where I started writing fiction. These days, I often share it with my three-year-old grandson and his toys—fitting, in a way, since his dad, the youngest of my three sons, was his age when I first dared to try writing a story. Eleven books later, hardly a day passes when I don’t pinch myself, grateful for my good fortune in having this space, complete with desk, chair and lamp I won once in a draw. Along with books and plants, other treasured possessions reside here—my camera gear, family photos, a painted wooden horse my aunt brought back from Scandinavia when I was six. Oh, and a small, handy treadmill. I’m also lucky to live in an unusually supportive neighborhood, where everyone’s close but not too close. From my desk I can watch folks come and go, wave and occasionally be waved back to. I’m like a fish in an oversize goldfish bowl. Late at night, my lights blazing, people might guess that I’ve got a deadline, but in the daytime probably figure I’m just in here making stuff up. Night or day, the space makes the solitude of writing a little bit public, my time down the rabbit hole less insular, and reminds me there’s a beautiful world out there, and it’s time to come up for air.

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Based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Mi’kmaki/Nova Scotia, Carol Bruneau is the author of eleven books. Her fourth short story collection, Threshold, a work of contemporary fiction, is being published by Nimbus/Vagrant Press this April. Her novels include Brighten the Corner Where You Are, longlisted for the 2022 International IMPAQ Dublin Literary Award.

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Finding the Form with Megan Callahan

The idea for “Prepper” came to me during the early days of the pandemic. That spring, fear was at its peak. I remember watching the people around me—at the grocery store and pharmacy, in parks and cafés—turn furtive and suspicious. Panic buying and hoarding, behaviour that would’ve seemed paranoid and extreme just a few weeks prior, was suddenly commonplace and perhaps, I found myself thinking, justified. After all, people were dying. Borders were closed indefinitely. In 2020, I also happened to be pregnant, an experience that came with a complicated mix of excitement and fear. Would my baby be born into a safe world? It was in this context that I first got a sense of Darlene. I started to wonder: where is the line that separates healthy fear from phobia? How do we decide whether a fear is rational or irrational?

Research was a big part of my writing process, as I knew virtually nothing about preppers and survivalists besides what I’d seen in post-apocalyptic zombie movies: the gruff, rifle-toting men with a penchant for conspiracy theories. I wanted to examine prepping from a female perspective. What type of fears would a woman prepper have? What would draw her to the
community? I spent a lot of time on Reddit threads, combing through posts and researching the jargon. There are many types of preppers, I learned, and many levels of preparedness. But I was most interested in those intent on surviving an indistinct but certain apocalypse. Darlene, I knew, was in this camp.

At that point, I had the foundation of a story, but not the architecture. In earlier drafts of “Prepper,” I tried out different scenarios. I wrote several scenes set in different locations (at a preppers’ meeting in a church basement, in a bus shelter at night) but ended up cutting them, as they involved too many characters and weighed down the narrative. Feeling stuck, I moved the draft into my Backburner folder and promptly forgot about it. Then, in 2022, my 10-month-old daughter was hospitalized with a severe pneumonia and stomach flu. It was terrifying to see her listless in a bed, with tubes in her nose and an IV in her arm, the silence punctuated by the constant beep-beep of the pulse oximeter. She was discharged seven days later, a few pounds lighter but otherwise (mercifully) healthy. But the fear in my gut lingered. When I returned to “Preppers” soon after, the experience definitely bled into Darlene’s history.

After so much time away from my early draft, I suddenly had a new perspective. While rewriting, I realized that I needed to narrow my scope. The whole piece, I saw, could bestructured around Darlene’s suburban bungalow: the abandoned upper floor, the carefully tended garden, and the basement-turned-bunker packed with memories. Her house became the perfect metaphor for her life, and Joe walked in the door shortly after that, almost fully formed. He was the last missing element, and once I had him, I was able to write the conversation that gives the story momentum. Staging the entire scene in one location also allowed me to create a kind of downward spiral, with the story beginning in the house and ending in the bunker.

 

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What’s Liz Harmer Reading?

I have just finished a book that a dear friend recommended: Faces in the Water by New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Published in 1961, Faces in the Water is a novel narrated by a woman living in a psychiatric asylum in the 1940s and 50s (I think), and has only the barest plot: she enters the hospital at around 20 years old and lives there for nearly a decade. She receives electroconvulsive therapy (which she dreads) and dehumanizing treatment, and faces the ongoing threat of a lobotomy, which she narrowly avoids. But the novel does not sensationalize any of this; instead, it meditates on the self and is a loving testimony about the other patients and their suffering. It’s mainly very sad and very poetic, and it so happens that Frame herself narrowly avoided receiving a lobotomy when, days before it was scheduled, she won a major literary prize and her life completely changed. I have been writing about my great-grandfather’s time in a similar institution in the mid-century, and about my own experiences with mental illness, so it felt close to home for me. Especially on the topic of loneliness and the need to have a coherent self, it is a gorgeous elaboration. Here’s an example of the prose: 

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“I was ashamed of my wholeness compared with Brenda’s fragmented mind scattered by secret explosion to the four corners of itself. I knew they had tried to bore holes in her brain to let the disturbing forces fly out, like leaves or demons from a burning tree. Who could make her whole? Where was the conjurer? I was powerless. I knew only a rotund cleric who might, on persuasion, produce a stream of silk handkerchiefs from a top hat.”

I am also reading a great deal of student work. One of the MFA students I’m advising–Tlotlo Tsamaase–is writing really interesting genre-mixing fiction, and I have the privilege of getting to work with her on her new novel-in-progress. Her first novel, called Womb City, comes out next month, and based on my knowledge of her prose and her inventiveness, I recommend her work very highly. 

Photo courtesy of iStock Getty Images. 

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Kathy Mak’s Writing Space

Like the way inspiration spontaneously emerges from a single grain of existence, my writing space is a simple, makeshift corner of the kitchen table. Sandwiched between a wall of house plants in pottery vases, and boxes of scribbles, doodles, scraps dating back from my childhood days, I work under the same fluorescent lights and clang of running water pots and pans. It is within this cavern of sounds that I’m able to create. Odd bits and pieces come to me at any time of the day, and I jot them down in my little red notebook. When it comes in the cold, rainy evening under a bus shelter, I use my phone to record these bursts and pen them in my notebook later. After dinner, I turn on my laptop to revise. The dark but glowing silence at night thrums in cadence to my own tapping. Being in this space of impromptu and homeliness makes me feel most at ease. Writing roots from a deep part of me and not everything may be seen as true in another’s eyes, but I aim to write from sincerity and care, the same notions this space has given me.

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Kathy Mak is a writer and drawer. She is the author of chapbook Another Day (845 Press, 2020). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in a dozen literary journals including The /tƐmz/Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and PRISM International. She creates to capture fleeing moments of life and to reflect on her experiences. Visit her website: http://kathymak.weebly.com/

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John Adames’ Writing Space

The most interesting aspect of my writing space is a comfortable couch where I meditate before writing or revising my poems. I am a huge fan of Eckhart Tolle and every morning listen to one of his guided meditations that help to still the mind and allow for creative thoughts to come from a deeper place of pure being or what he calls an alert state of pure presence – a process for settling the mind similar to what Ted Hughes in Poetry in the Making says he acquired from fishing with a float:

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a “mental exercise in concentration on a small point, while at the same time letting your imagination work freely to collect everything that might concern that still point.”

Finally, I love being surrounded by my library where I can refer again and again to see how my favourite poets have dealt with a compositional issue I may be struggling with in a particular poem.

Photo Courtesy of iStock By Getty Images 

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