by Hannah Wilkes
On Monday, March 3rd, the English Department will welcome writer Julie Joosten to campus as a part of the Reading and Lectures series. Julie Joosten lives in Toronto, Canada and released her first collection of poetry, Light Light, last September.
Here is a review of Light Light from the website of literary press BookThug:
“Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, Light Light is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges the histories of botany, empire, and mind to take up the claim of “objectivity” as the dissolution of a discrete self and thus explores the mind’s movement toward and with the world. The poems in Light Light range from the epigrammatic to the experimental, from the narrative to the lyric, consistently exploring the way language captures the undulation of a mind’s working, how that rhythm becomes the embodiment of thought, and how that embodiment forms a politics engaged with the environment and its increasing alterations.”
As a preview of her upcoming lecture, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. in BC 163, here is a short interview with Joosten about her background with poetry and what she will be speaking about this coming Monday:
When did your interest in poetry first begin?
I don’t remember when my interest in poetry began exactly. But I loved reading and being read to as a child. I was drawn to the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the storytelling, and the wonderful rhymes that are a part of many children’s books. I think my interest in poetry, though wholly unformed and in many ways unconscious, began then, in the stories my parents read me.
What is your writing process like? Do you have a particular writing process that you go through?
I’m still trying to figure out my writing process. Part of the difficulty of that figuring is that I suspect my writing process is always changing. What doesn’t change is that I read constantly. And I take notes on what I read. And then I work from my responses to my reading and notes and begin gradually to form an interest or a series of questions that I enjoy tinkering with or elaborating or thinking about or sitting with. And then I start to write. I’m a draft writer, so my work undergoes many, many revisions.
Is there a poem or piece of writing that has special meaning to you or has inspired your work?
In Light Light I quote a passage from Keats’s Letters. In it, Keats writes of “having no idea but of the Morning.” This passage – and many others from Keats’s letters and poems – have been wonderful inspirations in my thinking, feeling, and writing.
What can your audience next Monday expect to hear?
My audience will hear poems interested in the juxtaposition of various kinds of language and histories; there will be some non-linear narrative, some plants, some animals, some skies, some empire, some thoughts about thinking, and some modes of attention. There will be verbs and nouns and present and past and future tenses (and everything in between), all a bit mashed up!r
Is there one book or poem recommendation that you have for students?
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses.