There’s a Poem for That: E. McGregor + What Fills Your House Like Smoke

All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about What Fills Your House Like Smoke and how it came to be?

E. McGregor: The collection was originally my thesis for my MFA at the University of British Columbia. I went into the program knowing I wanted to write something about my grandmother, about the impact she had on my life and way of being in the world, but that was about it. I didn’t know it was necessarily going to be a poetry collection but that’s where I was able explore and tease out a lot of what I was trying to do. I was super lucky in having the opportunity to take classes with poets Susan Musgrave and Bronwen Tate, where most of the poems were born, and to have Billy Ray Belcourt as my thesis supervisor.   

ALU: What has been your most unlikely source of inspiration?

EM: I once dated a man who, as a child, had lost half of one of his testicles by falling down a flight of stairs and landing on a foosball table. There’s a poem about him in the book.

ALU: What are you most in the mood to read these days? Any poets you’re especially enjoying?  

EM: It’s been difficult for me to get back into poetry since finishing the book. While I was writing it, and doing my MFA, I read voraciously but afterward I was sort of “tapped out.” Only recently have I started dipping my toe back in, revisiting some standards in my shelf (Marie Howe, Rumi, James Wright) but also getting drawn into some unfamiliar, hybrid territory. A while back, my delightful friend and poet Kimberley Orton sent me Life in a Field by Katie Peterson. I just started to read it now, a year or so later, and it’s opening doors in my brain like only good hybrid material can. I sometimes shy away from hybrid forms – I get stuck on the question “what is it?,” even though the question is irrelevant and the only answer should be: “it’s good.” But good writing, no matter what shape it comes in, will sweep you up and make you forget all the old questions; good writing creates its own, newer, more interesting questions. 

ALU: Are there poetry collections you can’t get out of your head years later? 

EM: Oh yes. Christopher Dewdney’s The Natural History, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition and Natalie Diaz’ Postcolonial Love Poems.  

I read The Natural History years ago and it still makes me blush, remembering specific passages – it has an earthly sensuality that resonates with me, as if rotting loam deep in the forest was the sexiest thing on earth.  

I read The Tradition and Post-Colonial Love Songs during the pandemic, while I was doing my MFA, and they both blew my mind and my conception of what poetry can do wide open. Diaz’ use of colour and juxtaposition and imagery is so inspiring, as is Brown’s meticulous construction and the way he pulls his metaphors through the poem, at times like a ribbon, at times like a razor. And both Diaz’ and Brown’s use of violence – they both eviscerate and gesture to beauty, often within the same poem.