I stumbled into poetry entirely by accident. I noticed that the notes I took nightly about what had happened that day on the job, just to help me understand the strange male construction culture I’d fallen into, were getting shorter and shorter. They looked almost like – could it be – poetry?

In my poetrying practice, I never care about the reader’s response. Like Li Shangyin’s spring silk worm, my sole concern is to turn out what is best inside of me; if people do not care about my contribution to the world, why should I?

A child waving at strangers from a car window, the thrillful bliss of someone waving back, that’s all I want for my poems.

Humour is real. Even in darkness. A friend used to say, “Your poems show us what insides look like.”

When food devolves to nutrients, we need experts to tell us how to eat. Poetry is at the mercy of such forces. But “you do not need to fathom a carrot’s complexity in order to reap its benefits,” concludes Pollan. So eat the carrot. Write the poem. Eat the poem, says the carrot—

I’m interested in the immediacy of poems, something approaching improvisation, and yet shaped. I’m interested in the sound of poems, the interplay of words and voice. Giving the poem its due as a way to connect.

Jenny Odell calls artworks “training apparatuses for attention”; “if what we see forms the basis of how we act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear”[...] This is what my poetry is for: to widen the cracks in myself and peek through, to look past myself at the world.

I wanted to capture some of the complexities and frustrations involved in this process: the obsessive and depressive nature of the illnesses; the unpredictability of the medications; […] the darkly comic nature of mental illness in general; the hunger for stability of some kind. I was trying to say: I’ve been through this, and it’s messy as hell, and I want you to know what it’s like.

The thing is, those two tracks—the one the ephemeral swinging open of the occasionally encountered door to an elsewhere I call poetry, the other the long slow “project”—so often converge.

My poetics is very centered in the body and the various ways our experience runs through it. I consider grief, specifically the death of my mother, quite often in my work. Her loss is a thread that runs through all of my chapbooks, my album, and both of my books.

Poems help me to distill, clarify and find meaning in life, both as a reader and as a writer. I write on themes of loss, trauma, oppression, healing, sex, love and the strangeness of existence. I love how an ugly first draft will shape shift, showing me what it wants and needs to be.

Poetry is where my heart goes to live; to mediate on its joys, and sorrow, to wallow in the emotion of the moment and stretch it out in long delicious sentiments to fill me, and hopefully others up.

I delve into mythology, historical texts and images to search out the thing, the predicament or worry or little obsession on which to write and often find more than I can keep up with. I hope my poems are welcoming…

I write about Pakistani folklore, thinking about the richness of my own history and the ways it has been erased through colonization. I write about love. I love writing about love, and I love leaning into softness and vulnerability.

I dream new selves and alternative futures into becoming through poetry. I sing to the co-flourishing of the living. This song, in order to find its music, asks me to courageously accept past trauma before transforming the compost of the dead into a healing hymn.

The act of writing poetry is an emancipatory act that allows me to write my truths and observations about the world we live in. I also am a researcher at heart, which allows me to explore the art of poetry from a place of documentation, and engaging both the archives and engaging popular media references.

My poetry since the 1990s has primarily addressed black and mixed-race identity and, in particular, black history in British Columbia, variously at the formal meeting points …