From the Vaults: Anna Maxymiw

Anna Maxymiw? Al Purdy is on line one.Anna Maxymiw, contributor to Issue XVII, discusses how writing "glosas" help her enter into dialogues with the dead.This poem is a combination of themes. It marked the true beginning of my writing about being Ukrainian. It’s a subject matter that is still difficult for me—being half Ukrainian means you are straddling a world, never quite standing in it, never quite accepted. I’ve found that writing about those experiences affords me a space to be as vitriolic or as sad or as ecstatic as I want to be, and editing trims down the raw emotion, until what I have left is a hard right hook of whatever experience, bad or good, I want to air out and make known.Secondly, The Taut String is a form poem, a glosa, which so many people gag at. But glosas are fun to write because you enter into a chattering back and forth with another writer, without needing them in the room with you. It’s challenging to stick to a rhyming convention, and it’s challenging to write a long poem. But through writing glosas, I’ve been able to enter into dialogues with Al Purdy, Robert Service, Pablo Neruda, anonymous poets.There are emotional copyright issues. It’s hard to write a glosa when you haven’t explicitly been given permission to take somebody’s writing and grow your own poem around it. Especially in this example: I chose to go as deep as I could, to try and inhabit the mind and body of the original writer like I was using a marionette. It was a subversive thing to do, and I knew it would have consequences. My act of borrowing caused a good deal of tension in the relationship that this piece of writing stemmed from. Looking back, I probably didn’t go about it the right way, but I loved the poem so much, and had tried not to write it from a place of malice. It was tribute, and it was catharsis. So I learned to stand up for my writing, and to stick to my guns, and to care less, and things worked themselves out, as they do. I felt it was the right thing to do and to write, and that’s what mattered in the end.Anna Maxymiw is a writer who has lived in Kingston, Vancouver, and Toronto. Her writing has appeared in such publications as EVENT, Maisonneuve,  The Globe and Mail,  The Malahat Review, and Arc Poetry Magazine. More of her work is forthcoming in The Rusty Toque. She is the recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Works in Progress Grant (creative non-fiction). Billeh Nickerson once called her “the gay Al Purdy,” and she has been dancing about it ever since.