Alex Manley : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I spent the final months of 2019 feverishly trying to meet a Goodreads goal that I was lagging way behind and ended up meeting it by pivoting to poetry collections, hard. I ended up finishing two poetry collections on December 31st around 11:30 p.m., having briefly snuck away from the New Year’s Eve party I was hosting. (My partner was not pleased.) These are the poetry collections I read during the course of that frantic late-year dash and a handful from 2020 so far:

Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer
Confirmation Bias by Ivanna Baranova
Tampion by Ali Pinkney
Space Struck by Paige Lewis
Number One Earth by Jasper Avery
Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen
Feed by Tommy Pico
Love Speech by Xiao Xuan/Sherry Huang
Renaissance Normcore by Adele Barclay
A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib
Prosopopoeia by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Even This Page Is White by Vivek Shraya
Mercy Tax by Rebecca Rustin
Homie by Danez Smith

Alex Manley : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I feel like one of the best attributes of film as a medium is the existence of the montage technique, and I think poetry is the closest thing writing has to a montage technique. Being able to juxtapose seemingly unrelated or even nearly incoherent concepts with each other is something that’s simply not done in other forms of writing. In poetry it’s not just normal, it’s expected; it’s wished for. There is so much beauty in throwing two things together and seeing what happens next.

Alex Manley : part three

Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I spent six years at Concordia University’s now-infamous creative writing program from 2007 to 2013, over the course of which I came to have a deep appreciation for the experience of workshopping poetry, of being in close contact with other poetic minds. The sensation of pushing and being pushed in new poetic directions is something that I’m not sure you can achieve by other means. I think you genuinely have to meet with other writers, consider their work, have them consider yours, and let the process take you where it may, maybe? That’s not to say that that experience is only available in creative writing programs, though. I’ve been lucky over the past two years to be a part of a small group of Montreal-based poets who meet every so often to consider each other’s writing, and the feedback from those writers has made me a stronger writer, a better poet and, I like to imagine, a more interesting person. (I also count them as my friends, or like, whatever.)

Alex Manley : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

For a long time — almost the entirety of my 20s — my poetics was around relationships, romantic love, sexual attraction, and the like. I couldn’t really — on a gut level — believe in the importance of poetry about other things: family, politics, disease, place, friendship, in part because my feelings about all those things paled in contrast to the intensity of my feelings around being loved and desired at the time. But in addition to the ways in which my lived experience has changed and, it seems, the world has changed in the past few years (creeping fascism and ecological collapse, anyone?) I’ve also been reading a lot more over the past three or four years, which has helped shift my relationship with poetry, and a year and a half of cognitive behavioural therapy has helped me de-center sex and romance in the constellation of my feelings, which I think has been a really healthy shift and one that I recommend to anyone who has access to therapy.

Alex Manley : part one

Alex Manley is a writer who's lived in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke their whole life. A graduate of Concordia University's extremely cursed creative writing program, their work has appeared in Maisonneuve magazine, The Puritan, Carte Blanche and Vallum, among others. Their debut poetry collection, We Are All Just Animals & Plants, was published by Metatron Press in 2016.

Photo credit: Blair Elliott.

What are you working on?

Improbably, I’m currently working on two different, full-length themed poetry manuscripts. The way I seem to work is that I’m deeply uncomfortable unless I have a project on the go. In 2016, with the editing process for We Are All Just Animals & Plants—my debut poetry collection with Metatron Press—winding down, I started work on something new: a poetry collection that would combine my passion—for lack of a better term—for romantic love and my history of devout Christianity, which lasted up until I was 18 or so and then quickly died. Despite now being a staunch atheist, I wanted to write something that paid homage to the role religion had played in my life as I grew up, as well as an ode of sorts to the beauty and power of certain aspects of faith: the ‘religious experience’ and/or ‘holy moment,’ the beauty of cathedrals, classical sculpture, Michelangelo’s “Pièta,” and so forth. In my head, it was a very gray book—solemn, sombre, tall and skinny and mournful. Meanwhile,  nearing the end of the first draft of that manuscript, I began work on another, different manuscript: a collection of poems written to and in and around the concept of Canada. I wanted to investigate something about this country—its vast expanses, its milquetoast reputation, its ‘old stock’ Canadians and immigrants, its hockey games, its racism. And I wanted to write a collection of poems that spoke to the Canadianness that my father instilled in me, one that was straightforward yet wry, serious yet winking. I wanted a Beaver Tail, a stubby Molson, and a wheat field. Right now, I’m trying to get both published… tell your editor friends.