Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Joseph Schreiber is a writer based in Calgary, Canada. He is the Criticism/Nonfiction Editor at 3:AM Magazine. His reviews, essays and poems have been published in a variety of literary sites and publications including Numéro Cinq, Minor Literature[s], Burning House Press, RIC Journal, and Sultan’s Seal. He also maintains the literary site Roughghosts.
I consider myself a writer who incidentally or accidentally steps sideways into poetry. If asked, I say I write essay/memoir and only lately have I started to cautiously append “poetry” to that response. What I really mean is that everything I write starts from a truth of my own experience, or rather, I write from the inside out, ever aware that what I know, or think I know, about that experience is limited.
Much of my writing when I finally gave myself permission to write openly about my life, a life that has crossed genders and, as such, had to be kept a secret from many in my life and workspace, focused closely on gender identity and body dysmorphia. It was angry, melancholic, and vulnerable. But it can be uncomfortable to put oneself at risk of sharing too much, and yet I have never been inclined to fictionalize my story. In the end it could be—or at least appear to be—even more revealing than I might want, for what reader is not inclined to conflate author and character, especially when apparent details of the lives of both seem to overlap even just a little?
Poetry, fractured prose, and fables have begun to play a greater role in my writing repertoire by offering a space for me to explore the raw, the visceral, the discordant elements of my being from a distance. It still arises from my own emotional journey, sometimes riding close to the arc of my narrative reality, but I can be abstract, ambiguous or disassociated from the speaker or the subject as much as I want or need to be. Many of my poetic efforts gestate over long periods of time, moving in and out of first person, falling apart and coming back together as need be. But in the end, it is all trial and error. I don’t really know anything about writing poetry at all.
In the Dreaming Land
← October 2019 Issue
This site is designed and maintained by GONECASE