Creators on Creating: Miguel Eichelberger

How do you define artistic voice? Where does it come from?

My favorite definition comes from George Saunders. He talks about the editing process, moving from draft to draft to draft, and how each time, for each draft, a different you is sitting in that chair. A tired you today, a you who just returned from vacation, break-up you, joyfully in love you, bereaved you, etc. each of them makes a decision about a sentence, a word, a stanza, a verse, and eventually, 20 different versions of you, through 20 different drafts, have collaborated and weighed-in. The gestalt of all these little decisions and arguments on your best and worst days result in something that only you could create. Something that only sounds like you. That’s artistic voice. It doesn’t land in the first draft, it comes in crafting through many drafts.

How does that arise in poetry?

For me at least, voice shows up in the arguments about where to break the line, why this word or that word isn’t quite right, do we want a caesura here, a rhyme there, should it be terse or flowery, how does the line find its way into a reader’s experience, etc. The one thing that is always consistent in the poetry I’m excited to write is a sense of music somewhere in behind the words. Voice is iterative with every changed syllable or meter, but there’s always some tune or beat to back it all up.

How does a poem begin for you? How do you build from there?

I don’t think I have a very interesting or satisfying answer for this as it’s happened a thousand ways on purpose and a thousand ways by accident. I’ve done entire sequences of poems each based on a word from a list I made simply because those words seemed delightful to me. Other times, it’s been an entirely intuitive process, or even a mechanical one. I’ve started pieces because I saw something interesting that day, or from just forcing myself to start writing on a blank page. Once there’s something there, it turns into an act of discovery—literary archaeology—digging into what’s on paper to find what might be, or could be, there if I add one image or another.

I’ve also set out to write a specific poetic form simply because the form seemed cool. No key image in mind, just, “I want to see if I can do a pantoum or triolet,” and trying things until something clicks into that structure. I remember reading Donald Justice’s Pantoum for the Great Depression and immediately wanting to respond to it in the same form. Can’t say that I did with any real success, but it was the impetus for a poem nevertheless.

What is your favorite poetic form?

Lyric. Emily Dickinson. Leonard Cohen. A.E. Housman. I know a lot of modern sensibilities move away from the rhyming space, but I’m so not here for that. That poetry moves, sways, pulls you in and then surprises you when you realize that it’s been effortlessly rhyming the whole time. I’ve heard rhyme described as a “gatekeeper” that holds the reader outside of a piece’s meaning. I do not truck with that at all. When rhyming is done with deep consideration and dedicated work to almost disguise the rhyme in the imagery one has chosen, it becomes something of magic.

Who are your inspirations?

To the three I mention above, I happily add John Donne, Coleridge, Rosetti, Ginsberg. I think the best poetry collection I’ve encountered in the last 20 years is Thomas King’s 77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin. John Vaillant is so good at making prose sound poetic that I barely understand what he’s doing, only that I love it (Read The Tiger and thank me later). Donna Kane’s Orrery is unfair to other poetry, but it’s also in a subject I deeply love so I feel like it sings specifically to me. The poetry of Bill Watterson that he threaded throughout Calvin and Hobbes is formative for my work, and no mistake.

How do you know a poem is complete?

Not sure I do. It’s more like I’ve come to an agreement with some poems; I like it enough that I promise to leave it alone so long as it leaves me alone. But if a new version of me happens to encounter that poem again, even after a decade of avoiding each other, that new me will inevitably have an edit to make here or there. There are a select few that definitely feel like they’ve answered all their questions, completed the circle they began, but I doubt they number more than ten.

You write in multiple genres, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, stage and screenplays — how do these forms complement and combat one another?

All forms are friends to each other and improve the delivery of each other. I urge everyone to write in every genre. To practice in every literary medium not just once, but many times. To find one’s voice in one enhances the discovery of your voice in another. There’s no doubt that poetry and plays are natural allies, but poetry and non-fiction are also mutual multipliers. So too are poetry and fiction. Write it all, all the time, and you won’t be disappointed.

What are the challenges of the Canadian literary landscape?

Hesitancy. Playing small. The Canadian literary field has a tendency to see itself as less-than when stacked up against other national traditions. And so we sometimes act as such. Honestly I see a huge opportunity for Canadian literature to lead in how we approach, understand, and value publishing in a new, digital age.

Like all artistic fields though, the biggest challenge is always funding. Canada has done a lot to invest in its literary and arts scene these past five-ten years. I hope this trend continues. We should be incorrigibly proud of what we create here, and who is creating it.

What haven't you written yet that you desperately want to?

Hoo boy. I want to write a collection of poetry that, like a particle accelerator, slams colonialism, manifest destiny, western religious myth (the foibles of the Bible), directly into all the wonder, beauty and daring that astronomy has given us, all that it is teaching us about our place in an ever-expanding universe. Examining the incumbent particles that break out at the point of collision is fascinating to me.

I want it to be funny, sparse, an exercise in curiosity not judgement. Inspired by what Thomas King does in 77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin with indigenous traditions and western mentality, but from my own perspective as a person brought up in a religion (Catholicism) that simply never took.

How do you view/use trauma in your approach to writing?

Trauma is healed when we understand the lessons it holds. When we can release the beliefs we created because of them. I don’t want to write from my wounds, but from what I learn from them. So for me each time there’s something I understand better, I’ll write from that understanding, that sense of freedom from an old burden.

Writing about why an ex-lover sucks isn’t interesting to me at all. Writing about what that relationship broke or unearthed or compressed within myself is far more universal and useful to the rest of world. Judgement is boring. So is revenge. Curiosity is exciting and, at least in my experience, far more connective to a reader.  

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Miguel Eichelberger is a writer, communicator, and joyful mutineer. His creative work has appeared in literary magazines and on stages around the world. His most recent publications include Acta Victoriana, Harpur Palate, Rappahannock Review, Literary Review of Canada, and Plainsongs Magazine, and his poetry is a feature piece in the Ducktown Poetry Trail in Atlantic City, a collaborative art project between Murphy Writing and the Noyes Museum of Art of Stockton University that brings awareness to issues of social justice.

Read Miguel's Poetose Poem

Read Miguel's Chapbook, Everything Is

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