Finding the Form: A Beauty in Silence
Why the glosa? It’s a tricky form: pick four consecutive lines from a poem and write four stanzas, each one ending with a line of the epigraph; rhyme lines six, nine, and ten; and, most
importantly, pay homage to the source but also weave in new images and ideas.
Like many poets, I was introduced to the glosa through P.K. Page’s Hologram. I taught Page’s “Planet Earth” several times. Whenever I taught the glosa, I would also write one. My
tribute to Anna Akhmatova uses lines from her poem “Lot’s Wife.” The glosa “For Gerda, on the threshold” in my second collection Ghosts Still Linger quotes Jan Zwicky’s “Beethoven: Op. 95.” These writers spoke to me and I wanted to respond to their work. The glosa lends itself to dialogue. In their Canadian poetry anthology In Fine Form, Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve
include a glosa written by David Reibetanz based on P.K. Page’s “Autumn,” a poem which is itself a glosa with lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Autumn Day.” The act of writing a glosa
creates a community of poets, all speaking to one another.
In December 2023, my third poetry manuscript was rejected yet again. I’d been working on this manuscript for four years, and the rejection felt like a silencing. It also felt like a door
slamming shut. To regain both my voice and a sense of belonging, I set myself a goal of writing a poem a day. For inspiration, I chose lines from my favourite poets: Steven Heighton, Louise Glück, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, Eduardo C. Corral, W.S. Merwin, John Thompson. Several poems
began as glosas but changed to prose poems or free verse during revision. I wrote ten poems in an incredibly productive ten days.
On January 4, 2024, I wrote “A Beauty in Silence.” At that time it was written, the war in Gaza was worsening; the war in Ukraine had dragged on for two years. Hope for a better world seemed elusive. I was reading W.S. Merwin’s poems and the first lines from “Learning a Dead Language” resonated: There is nothing for you to say. You must / Learn first to listen. Merwin’s words reminded me of the power of poetry to speak across time.
That night I wrote in my journal, Will anyone hear these poems? I’m grateful the editors at The New Quarterly listened.
Kat Cameron (she/her) is a poet and short story writer. Her second collection of poetry, Ghosts Still Linger, won a High Plains Book Award in 2021 and was a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Her collection of short stories, The Eater of Dreams, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award in 2020. She is a recipient of a 2024 Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant. Her poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Capital City Press, Paragon Press, and the Literary Review of Canada.