What the Occasional Poem Can Be: A Conversation with Sina Queyras

Each year, The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest celebrates poems shaped by moments of public and private significance. In On Occasion: Poems for the People, poet and editor Sina Queyras gathers work that marks grief, celebration, encounter, memory, and community. In this conversation, Queyras reflects on editing the anthology, the social life of poetry, literary citizenship, reviewing, influence, and the ways in which poems move between intimacy and the wider world.

Selena Mercuri: Our call for submissions indicates that we’re interested in “light verse and verse more sombre, in the whole spectrum of tones and occasions.” To me, that also encompasses the range of On Occasion: Poems for the People. On your website, Lemon Hound, you reviewed an anthology and wrote that you wished the editor had approached it with greater diversity—racially, geographically, economically, and beyond. With this in mind, how did you approach the curation?

Sina Queyras: I think I edited it generously and included a wide range of work—stuff I would not normally be drawn to. I tried to include people from across the country, and a diversity of aesthetics. I was cognizant of age and career stage. I wanted emerging writers, older writers, established writers. I think there could have been more queer writers, so that’s a flaw, and I think it skews more uniformly Caucasian than I would have imagined. If I were to give myself a grade, maybe an eight out of ten. There are a lot of things to address. I think that you try to make the balance as healthy as possible. 

SM: The anthology also has a wide range in form; you included concrete poetry, which is often left out of other anthologies. Was this inclusion intentional?

SQ: Very much. As I say in my introduction, I was just so livid when I looked at Geoffrey O’Brien’s Bartlett’s Poems for Occasions. It’s massive, a 500-page tome that has all the occasional verse you could want, but there’s nothing like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” which would have been an obvious inclusion. It’s all conventional, left-margin poetry.

SM: You included two of your own poems, “In the Nursery” and “In the Birth Canal.” Both appeared in My Ariel, but the new iterations are slightly different—we have a title change, punctuation added and removed, and lines reordered. How did these changes come about? How did you decide which of your poems to include?

SQ: That was me realizing I could revisit them. It was very exciting. To be honest, it was more of a last-minute thing. I had not considered including my work, and then I realized, oh my God, I love writing occasional poems too, so I just thought I should put them in. There’s not a lot of queer parenting in the collection. That’s why I included the poems that I did. And I did think about how they would translate outside the collection because they were written in a sequence in My Ariel and dependent on that context.

SM: The anthology is organized into sections. You placed “In the Nursery” under “Occasions of Mornings & Mothers,” and “In the Birth Canal” under “Occasions of Encounter.” What was the thought process behind where your own poems landed and the organization of the anthology as a whole?

SQ: It was a challenge because I had to sort things. I initially realized that what I had in mind was a decades-long project, in which I would actually collect, think about, and slot in poems to basically create an updated version of the O’Brien anthology. That’s not something I could do in the time I had, so I had to group things roughly into categories, and that’s how I ended up with the ones here. Some of the poems fit clearly, and some of them could have gone in three or four different categories. At some point, it ended up being a matter of evening out the categories. So, it was an unscientific project and process, and it was more about gut instinct. I did make a couple of changes literally in the final stages of the process; it was all very fast, and much more work than I thought I was signing up for, which, I guess, is always the way of writing, right?

SM: It certainly is. I also saw that you indicated there might be a second anthology—is that still a possibility?

SQ: I feel like this project is an opening designed to get people thinking more about what the occasional poem could be. I was really hoping people would write more of them. I mean, a lot more of them. So, I’m really glad, and thank you for reminding me about The New Quarterly’s occasional verse contest. I had known about it, but it had slipped my mind that it was something you did. So, yes, it’s about creating the conversation. I love occasional poems. They are important. I feel like we don’t think about them enough as poets. I don’t have conversations with poets about occasional poems. Nobody’s coming at me with poems they’ve written for an occasion. It’s really not something we discuss. It’s very strange. Do you have a lot of conversations about occasional poems? Have you, prior to this conversation, written occasional poems?

SM: Perhaps, in a sense. I never thought of them as occasional poems. For me, they were just poems written in relation to occasions, many of them personal, but I didn’t necessarily categorize them in any way. I feel that even many of the poems I’m reading might not be categorized that way, but they can function in that sense. And then, yes, after reading the wonderful poems in On Occasion over the weekend, I attempted to write one more intentionally. They interest me greatly, and that’s largely thanks to you.

SQ: I, of course, have been writing them now really explicitly as well, and I have about twenty occasional poems for specific occasions. Several poets privately expressed love for the occasional poem —well, Stephanie Burt, for one, and then a surprising non-lyric poet whom I won’t name because I don’t think she’d be happy if I named her. She’s somebody you would never think of in relation to this mode, her work is so opposite to occasional poetry. So, yes, there were a few surprises—people saying that they embraced this as a practice. 

Some people, like Burt, thought all their poems were occasional poems, but I think it’s more than just having written something that happens to correspond with an occasion, although I think that’s also really good. What interests me about the occasional poem is that it jumps out of the conversation in between poets. It’s a kind of poem I can give to a non-poet, who can read it, appreciate it, and pass it on. I have this dream of the currency of poetry, the way that poets exchange poems. I want non-poets to be that enthusiastic about poetry. I want non-poets to be cutting out poems and sending them to friends.

SM: Well, you had postcards as well, right, at the Coach House launch?

SQ: Exactly. My goal was for people to be excited about them and send them. I don’t know whether people have. I’ve been doing it. I guess I will know pretty quickly whether any of this translates to non-poets or to poets outside of the community of poets who are already in here. Having said that, it’s not that I don’t value conversations among poets; it’s just that I want that conversation to be more outward-facing. I think we have a lot to offer.

SM: Your book Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf opens with a quotation from Virginia Woolf, written during the Blitz: “Shall I ever finish these notes—let alone make a book from them? The battle is at its crisis… book writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that dismal puddle.” Why did you choose this quotation? It very much seems to capture the sentiment of On Occasion.

SQ: It’s interesting how far away that book already feels to me. It’s not that old. It was published in 2022. It was published in the COVID-19 era, so reading that quotation was quite a beautiful moment. I realized that Woolf was writing some of my favourite books of hers in a context, both in the world and in her mind, very similar to the one I found myself in at the time. In 1939, she was trying to imagine a world at the outset of this massive war, and that really spoke to me. It inspired me to feel a little more positively about where we were, and what we were grappling with, and the possibility that there would be something on the other side. Early on, it did not always seem that there was going to be an end to Covid. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve put it behind us.

SM: How does being a writer shape your sense of responsibility to respond to what’s happening in the world? What specifically is the role of the writer during times of crisis? What does it mean to be a writer in the world we currently inhabit?

SQ: It’s really interesting. My children are about to turn fifteen. They’re really big readers. They read almost entirely genre fiction. We have a new bookstore on Saint-Laurent called Joie de Livres. It’s really amazing. It’s always busy. It’s always full. It has a restaurant, it’s a lot of fun, and it sells pretty much 95 percent genre fiction. My children love it. 

It’s been a long time since Lemon Hound, which was published twenty years ago this year. I really had fun writing it. Writing that book was liberating for me because I put my joy front and centre. I wrote it because I wanted to understand what a sentence was. I wrote it because I wanted to understand what a poem was, and what my relationship to a poem was, and the moment I was in. It was a euphoric feeling. It was indescribable. 

I’ve not written like that since because I felt like I wasn’t doing my job as a writer; I wasn’t writing the difficult thing. And so, I’m sort of back now, twenty years later, thinking, Okay, I’ve written these texts that were very difficult for me to write, such as My Ariel. I didn’t think I’d ever write another poem after writing My Ariel, and at every turn, I thought, Well, I have to do the most difficult version of this poem. I have to have more at stake in this poem. It can’t just be a reasonable revising of “Lady Lazarus.” What is the most contentious thing I can think of to put in this poem? 

So, to make a long story short, I do think—and have thought—that poetry is a kind of activism. It is important to press the envelope whenever you have the opportunity, to say the difficult thing, and to mine difficult territory. But I’m once again coming back to this idea—partly from watching my children’s joy, and watching the way in which they love their books, and the world that their books open up for them—that in my next iteration, I’m putting my joy first, front, and centre in my texts. I think you can do both, and I think it’s important to have a balance.

SM: On the subject of your relationship to poetry, in an interview you did quite a few years ago, after your novel Autobiography of Childhood came out, you hinted that perhaps you were done with poetry. How did you move from that mindset to where you are now?

SQ: Yes, I keep trying to be done with poetry. I mean, it’s been a while. I published My Ariel in 2017—that’s nine years ago. As I said, I didn’t think I was going to write poetry again after that. I thought I had gotten it out of me, but, in a way, this anthology project was a healing experience because it got me back into thinking about what excited me about poetry. Sometimes, within the poetry community, you can write to what’s expected of you or to the contours of poetry at a given moment. You kind of slot yourself in, or there’s a temptation to do that, a kind of pressure you feel. 

SM: Well, what does excite you?

SQ: Description excites me enormously. I like poetry that is more abstract than realist. No, let me rephrase this because, as a reader of poetry, I like a really wide range. My favourite writers include some of the most avant-garde poets and some of the most traditional formalist poets. I don’t have an aesthetic preference in terms of what I read, but in terms of what I can and want to write, I prefer to explore what I’ve called “accumulation of collision poetics.” I’ve also described it as “lyric accumulation,” which is to say, poetry that is an abundance of description and tries to recreate a feeling, perception, or insight in some way other than through direct description or narration. That’s what I am interested in creating. Lemon Hound is where I got that most satisfactorily for myself.

SM: In On Occasion, one of the sections that most excited me was “Occasions of Poets,” with Canisia Lubrin writing for Dionne Brand and Michael Ondaatje for bpNichol, among other dedications. In the introduction, you say that poetry has taken a beating in the past decade, but that it lives on through poets. Can you say more about how this section came together, and your decision to include it?

SQ: We come back to this conundrum, which is that some of the most interesting poetry is, in fact, always talking to other poets—so how do I bring that into this idea of the occasion? It’s perfect because a poet talking to another poet on an occasion allows the general public to overhear and enter into both the occasion and the poet’s relationship with the other poet. I think there’s something beautiful about that. I love it. CAConrad, another one of my favourite poets in the anthology, almost exclusively writes poems to other poets. Diane Seuss, similarly, is somebody who writes to other poets. A lot of poets do it.. So that was an easy section to edit, and it’s been a pleasure.

SM: My Ariel includes a poem after Louise Glück, alongside Plath’s influence throughout the collection, but not necessarily poems written for other writers. What does it mean to you to write a poem for someone? I’m curious about that particular intimacy when it’s directed at another writer, perhaps one you greatly admire. I’ve been tempted to dedicate poems to the poets I admire, but it almost feels embarrassing sometimes. In Rooms, you ask, “how do we appreciate the writers we love?” I’d love to hear more about that.

SQ: I’ve been very self-conscious about writing directly to other poets for all the reasons that you mentioned in your question. In the occasional poems I’m writing right now, I have several dedicated to poets; Erin Moure, in particular, has a couple in this new batch. I think it’s hard to do if you’re self-conscious. I was always more comfortable being slant about it, as opposed to direct. 

There are quite a lot of poets I want to elegize—poets we’ve lost. I wrote a poem for Alice Notley and Joshua Clover, who passed away last year. I’m being roundabout in this, but it’s easy to be sentimental, and when you’re writing to poets, that’s the last error you want to make. I am, by nature, a sentimental person, so I’m constantly having to keep myself in check because I want to write ecstatically about everything I love. It’s my favourite thing to do. If I could write a long poem that was just a list of all the things I love, I’d be very happy.

SM: In a piece about Joan Didion for Brick, you wrote, “Earnestness is the enemy of style.” What do you make of this in the context of our discussion?

SQ: Yes, sentimental and earnestness go hand in hand. Carson is interesting because she can somehow get away with being more sentimental than most. There’s a bracing precision that unhinges the sentiment in some way, making it less saccharine. I think Didion was an expert at that. The older I get, the more I love Joan Didion, and the more impressed I am with how accurate and how fearless she was in her self-description. 

That’s why Louise Glück comes up again. I didn’t love Louise when I was a younger poet. I found her very boring. But I really admire the way in which she was able to stick with herself. As a wfemale-bodied poet, I have often had this criticism levelled at me that I’m self-involved or that I haven’t developed—that, if you develop as a writer, you move beyond this obsession with childhood, beyond your own psyche.

It’s a very interesting line to walk, particularly in our time, because we both need these bracing accounts of what lived experience is and need to avoid veering into the narcissism that’s so rampant in our moment. Somebody who really has done this in a way that blows my mind is Richard Siken and his latest book, I Do Know Some Things. 

SM: You mentor and teach. You’ve started and have run a reading series. You ran Lemon Hound for years, writing reviews and interviewing authors. I greatly admire your continued involvement in all these capacities. What does being a good literary citizen mean to you?

SQ: Thank you for that very well-observed question. It is a balance. Personally, my life has been out of balance in the sense that I feel I have actually been more oriented toward service than I want to be in the future, but it is a very hard balance because I believe completely in being there for the younger generation. I feel a duty or calling to curate these spaces and opportunities for people to get together in ways that aren’t self-involved or self-promotional. The emphasis on self-promotion is not something I admire about the writing community. I like a balance—for everything you do for yourself, you need to do something for the community. It goes hand in hand. 

I guess you can’t impose that on everybody, but it’s a value that I admire and aspire to. It’s really hard, and I see it in my students—the people who keep their heads down and focus only on their own careers have different trajectories than the ones who have their heads in their own work but are also mindful of the community. It’s a choice people make.

Many people are coming through writing programs. I think writing programs that don’t give students the opportunity to write reviews and understand all these different components of a literary world do a disservice in not giving that whole picture. I think programs are now increasingly teaching those skills—literary reviewing, curating culture, etcetera. They’re all important skills, and it’s hard to get them on your own. I learned by watching other people. That is a way of doing it, but it’s a long, slow way. 

We can be role models. Rather than a mentor, I’d prefer to model the behaviour I’m hoping will become more prevalent in the world. Something to take away is that being settled is not necessarily a good thing. I don’t even think a poem should be settled. I like poems that are still percolating because life and interpersonal relations are complicated. Creating thriving literary ecosystems is complicated. It’s something that can’t be settled. It shouldn’t be settled; it should be a little unsettled.

SM: Your reviews stand out from most reviews I’ve read. You bring yourself and your own experience into the critical discussion, and you’re honest about both what worked and what didn’t, what you might have wanted more of. Some of the reviews made me laugh and have made me reconsider the ways in which I’d like to approach my own reviews. What is a good review, to you, and what do you see as the role of a reviewer? What is the point of a review?

SQ: When I came back to Canada in 2007, I came in the middle of this huge debate about review culture. There were a lot of people longing for negative reviews. And there was a lot of anger at CanLit review culture that was just milquetoast. Everything’s great, with no criticism whatsoever.

I do feel for the people who long for the more negative reviews. Nobody is served by a toothless review. On the other hand, the negative review… Well, it’s just negative. Unless it’s funny or satirical in some way, or has some kind of play, I have a hard time with it. If it’s negative because it’s punitive, because it wants to hurt the idea behind the piece or the person, or the reviewer is so angry that this person exists on the planet, it’s not fun to read. 

At one point, I read a review saying that Anne Carson was the worst writer Canada had ever produced. It’s an interesting problem because the question is more about authenticity, and authenticity, for me, means that I often don’t know. I have mixed feelings. Something about this text is really great. Here’s what I love about it. Here’s what I wish were different. Here’s where I was disappointed in the text.

It also means understanding that the text exists within the microcosm from which it emerged. It’s related to programs, review culture, and discourse—it’s related to all those things. So, it’s not crazy to look up from the review and try to see the book in the context in which it’s appearing. I think that’s important.

SM: You recently quoted Canisia Lubrin on Instagram from her talk on The Dyzgrahpxst, published in The Dalhousie Review: “Poetry offers another means by which to intervene in the making of meaning. It gave us the stanza.” She cites Brand’s The Blue Clerk, verso 9: “The great interrogation room is the stanza, you are standing at its door.” Invention, Lubrin argues, is the great potential of that interrogation.

In an interview at Concordia a few years ago, you talked about rooms as both positive and negative, and about the need to invert the room into public space. What do you make of the stanza as a room in this sense, specifically, as an interrogation room: the room being interrogated, interrogation happening within the room, and the room doing the interrogating? What about occasions as rooms—the ones we’re trapped in versus the ones we long to return to but find ourselves locked out of?

SQ: Wow, that’s a great question. I love everything you just said. There’s a quote from Dionne that I often think about, which is, “History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.” She’s a huge role model for me, someone I’m always looking at with such admiration. But she also feels like this colossus from another world in some ways. Her relationship to herself is so admirable, and it’s very visible and vivid in the intimate space of the texts.

If the stanza is a room inside that text, it’s a room in which she can so quickly conjure this whole world. Scenes from her books flip through my mind when I think of her—A Map to the Door of No Return, No Language is Neutral, Thirsty, Inventory. All these books that I’ve read and admired over the years. They do have this quality of putting you there in the space. The stanza could be the space, for sure, but the space is wherever, it’s a mobile space, and you hear her in that. You’re listening to her inner thoughts in this space that is both private and public. 

What I’m interested in is that moment where you’re in this deep, deep, deep interiority and intimacy and then look up. That, to me, is where poetry lives, because it’s the combination of that power of intimacy with the ability and willingness to look at the world. That’s really magical.