I study English literature and music. My interests include poetry, poetic and musical form, the emotional and political significance of artistic form, harmony, music-text relationships, and writing poetry and fiction.
Interning remotely with Poetry Matters, for which I did not receive university credit, allowed me to work with an outstanding mentor in Prof. Miranda Hickman and to enrich my perspective on contemporary poetry. I also wanted to learn more about the administrative side of the arts events I value. Poetry Matters is an initiative based in the McGill Department of English dedicated to creating space for conversations on contemporary and historical poetry through workshops, readings, panel discussions, and online content, focusing on work from the McGill, Montreal, and Canadian contexts.
Over the course of my internship, I gained communications skills, worked on event publicity, received training in website content creation and curated a weekly series on form. I handled outreach to the people who participated in the previous year鈥檚 events, collecting their bios and the season鈥檚 event info for the initiative鈥檚 website. Meanwhile, sponsored by Poetry Matters, I took courses from McGill in creating content for the web and in website management, gaining translatable website skills, including knowledge of making content accessible. I contributed to event publicity by making posters. Learning about how to produce visually engaging materials, I became more knowledgeable about tying effective visuals together. Finally, I made social media posts. Most notably I was responsible for curating a weekly series, 鈥淔ridays on Form,鈥� highlighting essays and reviews engaging poetic form. Over the course of the experience, I received the opportunity to learn about and explore contemporary poetry and aesthetics with a focus on communities surrounding McGill.
Curating Fridays on Form was a highlight of my internship. Producing a weekly series encouraged me to read with a different eye than I normally do, engaging pieces of writing with the question of how they fit in the theme. As the focus on form aligned with my interests, and thanks to a generous freedom given me in selecting the pieces, I brought my own passion into the project. I selected material based on my interest in music-text relationships, for example in a post on the songs of poet-musician PJ Harvey. I also received the opportunity to learn about and highlight innovations in poetic form (e.g., a new variety of the Haibun form created recently by torrin a. greathouse). Fridays on Form enabled me to reach and read poetry and perspectives I might otherwise have missed, like the work of Mark Hyatt, and perspectives I already valued, like the work of Jake Skeets. Each entry in the series was an opportunity to practice valuable writing skills, honing my ability to distill and encapsulate complex ideas with a few engaging quotations and brief introductory materials. Thanks also to the deliberate and indispensable editing of my mentor, Fridays on Form allowed me to learn new reading and writing skills while both expressing my pre-existent interests and broadening my view of poetry.
Creating materials for publicity was a challenge for me. Working with visual materials posed a welcome difficulty. When I began working on posters, my sense of visual effectiveness and spacing, and my ability to link text and abstract visuals was lacking. In particular I had trouble identifying issues with subtle detail. I worked through my troubles with poster making by listening to and incorporating feedback. I consolidated feedback into lists and extracted general principles from both general and specific notes in order to build better working knowledge and more effective habits. My poster making improved, and I produced materials for readings and workshops hosted by Poetry Matters and one by the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
My internship has complemented my university experience by helping me develop a relationship with an excellent mentor and by exposing me to the working world of poetry, increasing the scope of my academic experience while giving me directly related practical skills. Working with Poetry Matters has enabled me to develop my relationship with a distinguished faculty member and to benefit from her guidance. I also learned about different kinds of poetry, theory, and aesthetics while developing skills in communications, publicity, writing, and website management that are useful in academic contexts and beyond.
None of this would have been possible without the funding I received. The funding granted me by the AIO allowed me to pursue my internship more freely and deliberately, letting me focus on my work with Poetry Matters by lessening my financial obligations.
