An interview with Jessica Lee McMillan

Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet, educator and civil servant. She has an MA in English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinhole Poetry, Gap Riot Press, Antilang, Blank Spaces, Pocket Lint (gnurr), Red Alder Review, Dream Pop Journal, SORTES, Lover’s Eye Press, Willows Wept Review and others.

She is a member of the Royal City Literary Arts Society and associate member of The League of Canadian Poets. Recently, she won first place for poetry in the 2022 RCLAS Write On! Contest. She has read her work for audiences in BC and the US. A first generation Canadian, Jessica is a settler who lives in New Westminster, British Columbia on stolen and unsurrendered lands of the QayQayt First Nation.

Website: https://www.jessicaleemcmillan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaLeeMcM

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I wrote poetry as any proper gothy teen, took creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, put out a zine in grad school, but got waylaid by the production of discourse on writing. I struggled with fears of idealism, sentimentality and overriding angst in my writing. My voice often felt bigger than I was ready for. While I have always had creative outlets such as painting, I did not write every day until 2019, when I submitted a poem to an anthology commissioned by New Westminster's Poet Laureate at the time, Alan Hill. Accumulation of life experience, ownership of my voice and desperation for creative discipline to counter the proverbial grind finally aligned and I simply could not stop writing after that. The impulse to write is existential. Once I turned on that switch and realized how much I could channel through poetry--sans academia--it became the lost language I would begin to learn speaking again.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Many of my poems are ekphrastic, particularly in response to music and sometimes film. I seek writing on music as poetry/poetry as music whether it is Langston Hughes, a physicist such as Stephon Alexander or John Coltrane--recently branded among Blue Note's "tone poets". I am not looking for metaphors but proof of interconnection--proof of free jazz in arranged lines. I am interested in ekphrasis as not only a response to art but as a rhetorical device where the poem becomes what it is responding to. I am querying my first chapbook, which looks at theories and etymologies of scale for its poetics and so many of the poems are ekphrasis on notions of scale.

Prose writers Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison have informed my poetic fascination with the body and text.

As for specific poets, the Modernists from Mina Loy to Dylan Thomas have an impact on my work but reading Blake set my world on fire at a young age. I have said a few times that I hope to be both Blake and Pound and find a way to be exultant and grounded. And the wonderful thing is, poetry itself inspires me to write because it can evade polarity.

I have special reverence for Fred Wah, bill bisset, Ray Hsu, Adrienne Rich, Randy Lundy, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Catherine Owen--and recently Liz Howard, Billy-Ray Belcourt and George Elliott Clarke--but I cannot read enough contemporary poetry. My list grows daily.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing in literary journals?

I encounter the instruction "send us what you love, not what you think we will love" in submission guidelines, which speaks to the writers who overthink sometimes impossible prediction on editorial taste. I have stayed my course in how I write individual poems because they range in tone, subject and approach from absurd, pastoral and experimental to vispo, concrete, and form poetry. I tend to let the poem be itself and look for a journal where it may fit.

I have to think first about what a poem wants and any audience comes in the editing stages. When a literary journal has been gracious enough to give feedback, I keep it in mind for valuable information about legibility to audience.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I could not evolve without mentorship. In the last several years, I have navigated much of this solo and it is easy to reach a plateau. I took a poetry course last fall with Kevin Spenst that helped me explore many techniques with more intensity. His playful, clever and well-read direction changed my trajectory.

This spring, I was also honoured to work with Ray Hsu who had such a remarkable way of gently allowing me to be more receptive to how my poems move, astutely guiding me on my reservations, assumptions and considerations of form. Their reflections on artistic vision and ordering the manuscript were foundational to understanding my poems on the individual and collective level. I don't think many poets are looking for compliments but want to be seen. Sometimes when we are on track, we don't know it due to subjective proximity. Dr. Hsu gifted me observations that pull the very threads that the poems articulate.

I am also grateful to become more connected to writing communities because I want to grow precisely in order to reach and support the writing community.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

A. Gregory Frankson is a poet has done a lot for spoken word in Canada over the decades and has recently edited an anthology missing from the CanLit canon: the absolutely essential AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poet. https://www.africanthology.ca