On Full Display: Interview with B.A. LeFrancois
B.A. LeFrançois is a poet, writer and educator, based in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland and Labrador.
B.A. was the winner of the 2023 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award.
In this interview, Canthius’s Digital Content Editor Manahil Bandukwala talks to B.A. about the winning poem, as well as writing and reading practices.
Manahil: Firstly, congratulations on winning the 2023 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award.
B.A.: Thank you so much! I was so surprised and incredibly honored to have my poem acknowledged in such an important way, and especially in Priscila Uppal’s memory.
Manahil: To start out with, could you speak to how you wrote your winning poem?
B.A.: I wrote this poem in the autumn of 2023. I was in a process of writing a poem a week for a couple of months and workshopping those poems in small groups. This was my fifth poem in a series of weekly creations. The morning that I started to write it, I had come to the realization that my previous four poems were all about hurt on different levels, yet that was not necessarily clear to those reading them in our workshops. For this reason, I made the decision to tackle the issue head on, to provide a map in and through memories and painful emotions for the reader to follow, to take the reader on a visual and melodic trip through that pain whilst hopefully providing a route to healing. The first word I wrote was ‘hurt’ to make it unavoidable, unmistakable and on full display; there is no escape from it except through the path opened up in the poem itself.
Manahil: I love that you describe this practice of consistent writing, and how your winning poem developed out of that. Two questions here:
1) Once you wrote this specific poem, how did the iterations from your weekly creations change, if they did at all?
2) Have you continued this process of writing a poem a week since then, and if so, have you been surprised by where your poems have taken you?
B.A.: I will answer these both at once. I hit a dry spell a couple of weeks after writing the winning poem, and I managed only to write one poem in January 2024 before entering a period of not writing at all for about four months. I think these non-writing times happen to a lot of creative writers. For me, when I feel I can’t write it tends to be uncomfortable and a time that is seemingly unproductive. However, I think that notion of ‘unproductivity’ is a capitalistic fallacy that is deeply embedded in many of us where we define our value in terms of quantity produced and engaging in a continuous activity that is recognizable only through output of written pages.
When I get through these uncomfortable times of not writing, I usually realize that I needed the space, and that not writing was not necessarily “unproductive” or empty space, but instead it is usually a time where ideas are percolating in weird and wonderful ways without my being fully aware. Just last night I felt the well open again and I wrote my first new poem in four months that feels like the breaking of this dry spell – or perhaps I should call it a spell of thinking and dreaming beyond what I have created previously.
The point I am trying to make is that these spells are not dry at all. This new poem I wrote moves in a dangerous direction of writing what for me has been the unspeakable, and showing that which is always hidden, despised or shamed. Perhaps this break from writing was about building up the courage to move my writing into directions that are more difficult for me to tackle. Perhaps my winning the Priscila Uppal Memorial award gave me the confidence I needed to continue to explore more challenging territory in my poetry, and perhaps my body/mind needed to process that for a while first.
Manahil: I appreciate your rejection of “dry spells.” Instead you’re inhabiting spaces in your mind and life where you’re thinking and reflecting—aspects that will then turn into poems.
Contest judge T. Liem describes the poem as “offer[ing] a place in which to grieve.” In your poem, the two stanzas start with the word “hurt,” and then move into explorations of how big and small hurt can be. Can you talk about the juxtapositions of hurt in the two stanzas, as you move through both outer and inner worlds?
B.A.: I don’t think I want to answer this question as it will feel too much like I am engaging in literary criticism of my own poem. I am far more interested in how others read the poem, and how the reader might answer this question. There is so much that could be said here, but I feel like I don’t want to say any of it or, more importantly, I want to fight my own urge to tell you, and to tell you all and everything else that is on my mind! My turn to writing poetry has been for me about offering to the reader an artistic expression for them to just sit with, or to analyze and engage in meaning-making over. That said, earlier in this interview I am certain I started to tell you what I meant by the poem, and so fighting that urge to explain rather than offering up something for the reader to explore is ongoing. I am also convinced that if the poem resonates with a reader, the reasons for that and the way it resonates for that reader is going to be far more interesting than the meaning I made of it in and through writing it. Something I loved most about what judge t. liem said about the poem was “Mostly, I want to say nothing of it at all except listen, look.” When I read those words, I thought “YES! Thank you!”, although I appreciated deeply the other insights into the poem that they provided also, allowing me to see how they read it and what meaning they made of it.
Manahil: I’m immediately drawn to the form, and the way you use white space. When writing a poem, how do you decide what form suits a poem best?
B.A.: I am particularly drawn to concrete or visual poetry. For this reason, I sometimes put a lot of thought into form and space before I start to write a poem. However, sometimes instead the form creates itself as I write, surprising me and showing me something different than what I may have set out to both say in the poem and do with the poem. When this happens, it adds layers to my thinking and the artistic creation, and it is often one of the most satisfying parts for me of writing. The white space is sometimes about tempo and breath or about leaving empty space for that which cannot be said, and other times it may be simply about using that space as a tool to create the overall form of the poem; when the poem I write is most successful, it is usually because the spaces I leave in it are doing all those things simultaneously. One of the first poets I ever discovered on my own as a teenager was bpNichol and I think his poetry has had a lasting impact on how I think through both form and sound in my writing.
Manahil: In the second stanza, you write how hurt is “giving birth to resistance.” This is also a turning point in the poem as hurt moves into community and belonging. Could you speak more to this idea of resistance, both within the context of the poem and beyond it?
B.A.: Resistance is a theme that finds its way into most of my writing. It is a political response to injustice and in my opinion is most powerful when it is in the form of collective resistance. This makes community so important for all of us, I think. In this poem, resistance provides that possible route to healing that I referred to earlier.
Manahil: Can you recommend a book or poem that has resonated with you lately?
B.A.: The most recent book of poetry that I have read from cover to cover is Susan Musgrave’s Exculpatory Lilies. In my opinion, Musgrave’s contribution to Canadian poetry has been really profound and it has certainly impacted me over the decades. This latest book from Musgrave does not disappoint.
In terms of individual poems, I have been reading Cavar’s powerful contributions over the past few years and have been blown away by their poetry. For this reason, I was thrilled and humbled when I learned they received an honorable mention in this competition for their poem ‘dyke’. I look forward to reading all of the poems that will be featured from this year’s Priscila Uppal Memorial award. I feel like I am in some awesome company.
Over the past year, I have also been dipping in and out of Nyla Matuk’s edited volume Resisting Canada which is an anthology of political poetry. I understand political poetry as the ultimate goal of artistic expression. The poetry in this book has been keeping me grounded and fired up.
I have two books of poetry on pre-order that I am waiting with huge anticipation to receive and read. They include Evan Reynold’s [abjections] and fellow Newfoundland poet Danielle Devereaux’s The Chrome Chair. As I wait for these two to arrive, I have Métis poet Michelle Porter’s Inquiries and Approaching Fire on my table that I am about to delve into. There is so much creativity all around us that resonates and inspires, and there is so much more out there that I am not even aware of yet.