Conor Mc Donnell : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Vital. Each book has a soundtrack, one that delivers a style and tone I want to feel while writing. I don’t listen closely I just let it wash and inform the direction my pen sways in. Safe Spaces (Frog Hollow Press) was all about Nick Cave (particularly Skeleton Tree and Push the Sky Away), Recovery Community (Mansfield Press) was all Twin Peaks, David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti. This Insistent List has been very heavy but also crisp precise and removed so, lots of Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Kraftwerk. Oddly enough, the current work (the long poem) has been written almost entirely without music, likely because it partly deals with silence so, the absence of music has sound-tracked this most recent work (groan). 

Conor Mc Donnell : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I find I am reconnecting with my native Irish language as I have now been in Canada 17 years but am no less Irish than I was in 2004, if anything I am more Irish and that is really starting to emerge in my writing. I am reading Ciaran Carson’s Collected Works having devoured his Belfast Confetti. I am re-reading Paul Muldoon’s Selected Works because I didn’t do it right the first-time round. I feel a constant urge to re-read Roxanna Bennett that is somewhat fuelled by an ongoing correspondence with her that has made 2021 brighter and more fun that it had any right to be. I just finished Homie by Danez Smith (HIGHly recommend), and Sorry for Your Troubles by Padraig O Tuama whose Poetry Unbound podcast is the highlight of my 6am daily drive to the hospital. While reading latest novels by Brandon Taylor, Catherine Lacey, Yaa Gyasi and Pola Oloixarac, I have also re-read comic / graphic novel runs of both Locke & Key, and American Vampire. I am currently making poetry eyes at Ilya Kaminsky, Hanif Abdulraqqib, and finally, hopping from toe to toe waiting for a copy of Antonio Lopez’s Gentefication to arrive. Not forgetting, scientific and poetry journals too …

Conor Mc Donnell : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t think it ever is. I know when I am in the home straight as that’s when I finally bring it to the laptop. Everything before then is on paper but when I find myself at a keyboard I know the words won’t really change much more and now I am looking at line, space, enjambment, shape on the page etc. That being said, I have long harboured the notion of one poem that re-appears in every book I publish, the latest showing of it reflecting where I am right now, and the cumulative versions tracing a line through my mind’s journey in words. One poem, Study of a Study of a Nurse, seems to fulfil that function as it is now due to appear in its third book; it is also one of those poems I ran out of the room to compose (?transcribe?) in a single setting so, make of that what you will. I do believe they are never truly finished. Even when a reader reads a poem and comes to their own conclusions that’s just one cul de sac of a blind tributary I have no knowledge of, or desire to influence, but the river they stem from flows on and I’m always immersed somewhere mid-stream (drowning in my own BS!) 

Conor Mc Donnell : part two

What are you working on?

A bunch of things. I have finished my second manuscript and am not really tinkering with that anymore, it’s a done thing now. I’ve been working on my third MS which is a long poem, which I didn’t really realize was a book idea until speaking with my editor in recent weeks. I’m about 60 pages in and feel almost done. Even though I read voraciously I was unaware that book-length long poems are the in-thing right now so that kinda pissed me off but, I know myself this is what needed to come out of me this year and I wrote it in a vacuum so, by the time it comes out in a few years, trends will have passed on to something newer and cooler than my dumb ass. Otherwise, I have taken the summer to rest and write because that is my academic ‘time-off’. Come September, I will be re-engaging with my research program at SickKids Hospital, writing-rounds for physicians at University of Toronto, and chairing Canadian Committees for Safety & Quality in pediatric anesthesiology and adult anesthesiology, respectively. It weighs heavy to realize that’s just the tip of my non-poetry non-clinical iceberg.

Conor Mc Donnell : part one

Conor Mc Donnell is a physician & poet. He is Staff Physician at SickKids Hospital, Toronto, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a funded researcher in opioid safety and stewardship and the current Canadian Chair of Patient Safety & Quality Committees for both the Canadian Anesthesiology Society and the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society. His debut poetry collection, Recovery Community (Mansfield Press), was published in 2021.

This chronological bio is to demonstrate what anyone can do with lots of reading, graft and the right people around you

2012: Wrote first poem

2015: First published poems (The Fiddlehead)

2016: First Chapbook (The Book of Retaliations, Anstruther Press)

2017: Second chapbook  (Safe Spaces, Frog Hollow Press)

2018: Short-list & Honorable Mention, The Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize 

2019: Short-list: RawArtReview Charles Bukowski Prize; Runner-up Vallum Prize in Poetry 

2021: Reader with longconmag   

2021: First full Poetry Collection: Recovery Community (Mansfield Press) 

2021: Third Chapbook (In the Museum, above ground press)

2022: …

How does a poem begin?

In stardust, like everything else around and inside us. I suppose there are two ways I know I have sat down and begun to write a specific piece: 1. I constantly write down words, word combinations, lines, long sentences into a notebook or the notes app on my phone. Every so often I run through these and pick at things that grab me and at some point, I begin to transcribe these fragments into a second notebook. All of this is done on the run whether on a break at work, waking up early, whatever. At some point I’ll notice a particular fragment is coalescing, maybe even cozying up to another fragment. Once these make it past another round of notebook trawling and culling, I’ll realize something is starting to happen and give it its own page and a working title. 2. On rare occasion I will jump up from watching a film or whatever random thing and run to pen and paper with an idea that is basically fully-formed that seems to write itself. After first run through I’ll know it’s done. These are always the poems that are accepted first offer for publication and/or get shortlisted; I wish it happened more often.