
Kathryn Mockler has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, has been published in many journals, has two collections in print, has had her work screened several times on television and screened at a number of festivals. Currently she teaches creative writing at UWO and co-edits the UWO online journal ‘The Rusty Toque” at www.therustytoque.com.
The interviewer is Stan Burfield, host/organizer of Poetry Night.
Stan: When I started reading Onion Man, I thought, “Hey, this is just prose broken up into short lines”, but when I got further into the story I began to feel that you had found the perfect format for it. It actually felt like you had discarded all poetic and prose forms and, starting from zero, had asked yourself how this content would best be presented. Did it happen something like that?
KM: At the time I started writing these poems, I was reading a lot of narrative poets. Douglas Burnet Smith’s collection The Knife Thrower’s Partner, Michael Ondaajte’s Collected Works of Billy The Kid, and Michael Turner’s Company Town and Hard Core Logo were particular influences for me.
The interviewer is Stan Burfield, host/organizer of Poetry Night.
Stan: When I started reading Onion Man, I thought, “Hey, this is just prose broken up into short lines”, but when I got further into the story I began to feel that you had found the perfect format for it. It actually felt like you had discarded all poetic and prose forms and, starting from zero, had asked yourself how this content would best be presented. Did it happen something like that?
KM: At the time I started writing these poems, I was reading a lot of narrative poets. Douglas Burnet Smith’s collection The Knife Thrower’s Partner, Michael Ondaajte’s Collected Works of Billy The Kid, and Michael Turner’s Company Town and Hard Core Logo were particular influences for me.