Try Poetry: Nothing Will Save Your Life + Nancy Jo Cullen

Interview with Nancy Jo Cullen

ALU: When was the moment that you decided you wanted to write poetry? Describe it for our readers. Was it reading another poem? Was it listening to a poet read? Was it something different entirely?

I started to write poetry in my early twenties after I’d just finished theatre school; my father had just died, and I’d was going through my first big heartbreak. I was listening to Joni Mitchell, mostly the albums Blue and Hejira and I was trying to find a way to express myself in a similar fashion. I hadn’t really engaged with poetry before that but then I discovered the writing of Adrienne Rich and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid which I read and read. I was working in theatre at the time and we were writing and producing new works for the stage and I was thinking about how a poem could sound and I began there. And then somewhere I came across the poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” by Auden and that poem made my head spin. That’s when I started to think about how a poem could work on the page too. It was a long slow process (about 15 years) from thinking I could write poetry to my first published collection.

ALU: If you had to pitch your featured poem to someone who had never read poetry before, how would you do so? What kinds of things do you think the new-to-poetry reader might find fascinating about it? What could you share about the poem’s writing process?

In a sense this poem is like reportage so maybe that’s how I’d describe it to someone who hadn’t read poetry before. A poetic report on my state of mind on the occasion of my 54th birthday. I was eating dinner alone at the bar of a nice restaurant in my Toronto neighbourhood and I was treating myself to nice cocktail and a couple of nice glasses of wine and rather enjoying myself but also feeling nostalgic as I turned another year older. This poem is owes a lot to the kind writing exercises I practiced when I was beginning to write but rarely do now. Of course, most of what I was scribbling while I was drinking and eating and people watching and daydreaming did not make it into the poem, but the poem began with me not censoring any random thought I wanted to drop onto the page.

Perhaps a reader new to poetry might be interested in the fact that I tried to stay away from lofty metaphors and language in this poem. I wanted the poem to feel like it might have if I’d just struck up a conversation with the person sitting next to me at the bar but since I’m a little introverted for that I imagined the reader as the person next to me at the bar. I like the idea of poetry as conversation and maybe a reader new to poetry would like that idea as well.

ALU: What’s a poetry collection or individual poem that you’d recommend to anyone looking to get into poetry?

I think I would suggest that a poetry-curious person dig into Best Canadian Poetry anthologies, the current year, and past years to be found in libraries. I love these books because they show a breadth of poets and styles. I also think reading the anthology across years is a good idea as each year is curated by a different poet and so no one anthology is much like any other. It’s a great way to learn about poets and poems you like as well as the journals that published them. Santa brings me a copy every year!

This bartender doesn’t want to talk to me –

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Thank you to Nancy Jo Cullen and Wolsak & Wynn Publishers for sharing ‘Drinking Alone on My Fifty-Fourth Birthday/Or, My Dad and Disco Died Circa the Same Time’ with us. Remember, if you purchase a copy of Nothing Will Save Your Life or any of the other featured Try Poetry collections, you’ll receive a free digital sampler containing all of our featured poems. (Purchase from All Lit Up or from your local independent bookseller; send proof of payment to hello@alllitup.ca if you purchase from your local!)