Kyle Flemmer: Evolving poetry practice confronts expectations, finds purpose

Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. In April, Supergiants, Kyle's first trade book of poetry was published, and his next, The Wiki of Babel, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press. Kyle founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and released his first book, Barcode Poetry, in 2021.

Writer, poet, and publisher Kyle Flemmer

Kyle is the author of many chapbooks and his work has appeared in anthologies and exhibitions in Canada and abroad. In this interview, Kyle shares a humiliating moment early on in his writing years when he met iwth a creative writing teacher to discuss poetry. This encounter pushed Kyle think deeply about his writing and ask himself why he wanted to write. His evolving poetry practice changed significantly, and this is evident in his writing style and the themes he explores in his work.

The early stages of Kyle Flemmer's evolving poetry practice

On Creative Writing: Has your writing evolved over the years? If so, how?

Kyle Flemmer: Write for long enough you will necessarily see evolution in your style, however, I do think this plays out in different ways for most writers. For me, there was a pivotal moment between my early writings (i.e., the first few years of writing poems) and everything that has come after. The reasons for this tectonic shift were various: trial and error, improving via workshops, some extraordinary mentorship, and reading more widely and intentionally. Chief among these factors was the shocking realization that what I imagined poetry to be was almost entirely disconnected with poetry as is it practiced in the contemporary context. It was hard for me to learn that reading and loving the classics was not enough to hack it in contemporary poetry circles, that I would need to catch up and carve out a niche for myself in order to gain any traction.

Two memories stand out illustrating this predicament. First: I met with a creative writing instructor during office hours to talk about poetry. They asked me which poets were my favorite, and I responded, like a good Liberal Arts student, “the philosophical ones.” They pressed, “like who?” and I stuttered “W-W-Wordsworth?” They then listed a deluge of philosophical contemporary poets who I had never heard of (but was now destined to enjoy), exposing my monumental ignorance of the contemporary poetry landscape. Second: I presented a Canadian literature instructor with my first chapbook containing the best poems I wrote as an undergrad.

When asked for their thoughts, they described these poems as “good… for juvenilia.” This was humiliating at the time, but ultimately made me realize I had wildly overestimated my talents and maturity as a poet. It also made me realize that I could reinvent my practice whenever and however I liked.

Finding a place: Reconciling aim, identity, and the poetry community

These (and other) embarrassing confrontations with my own ignorance and arrogance pushed me to think more deeply about what and why I wanted to write. The quantum leap, for me, was finding answers to these questions. The answers change over the years, and my writing evolves accordingly, but nothing changed the game so dramatically as an honest accounting of the purpose of my involvement and of my position relative to my peers, colleagues, and contemporaries. At some point you have to reconcile what you aim to write with who you want to be and how you move through the real, living community of readers and writers.

Supergiants, by Kyle Flemmer

On Creative Writing: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

Kyle Flemmer: I like to read all sorts of books. Growing up, I was the kind of kid to read the books sent home from school, the books at the public library (my favorite place), the ingredients on the side of a cereal box, or the brochures at the bank indiscriminately. Nowadays, I lean towards science fiction, Canadian poetry, history, and literary classics, but I still regularly indulge in books of all sorts. I honestly can’t conceive of a reading life confined to a genre of preference. A huge part of the appeal of books as a vessel is that they are genre agnostic. The best reading experiences are not those that confirm your opinions or reiterate what you already know, but those which run counter to your pre-conceived notions, which challenge and surprise and inform and stimulate.

If pressed, I will always say Nilling by Lisa Robertson is the book of all books. In it, Robertson present a series of multivalent essays about reading, cognition, reproduction, and the written codex that strike at the meaning of life, so far as it can be summed, and so far as I perceive it. Nilling is a short collection of essays, but it justifies reading and writing in terms of the generative experience of human social interaction. To consciously and voluntarily cede one’s inner voice to the imported voice of the written word is an act of interpersonal communion that is deeply human and humane. Nilling is not a particular type of book, but it is a book that ennobles the written word.

Writing, editing, publishing interests converge with founding of The Blasted Tree

On Creative Writing: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

Kyle Flemmer: As it so happens, I was my own first publisher. I developed an interest in editing and publishing alongside writing while I undertook a creative writing program during my undergraduate studies at Concordia University. In 2014 I founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. as an outlet for my own writing and to publish the work of my classmates and friends. This was a convenient way to develop my editing and publishing skills while offering some manner of reciprocal support to the writing community. At first I published a handful of chapbooks, primarily short stories, about half of which were my own work. Over the last decade, The Blasted Tree has snowballed into a small visual art and experimental poetry press with narrow yet international reach. I released my first full-length book, Barcode Poetry, in 2021 via this press as well.

Self-publishing can be a way around exclusion and gatekeeping

There is a huge stigma against self-publication, and on one hand I totally understand. Extra eyes on a text can help raise its overall quality, and nobody’s writing, not even that of the most careful, erudite author, is perfect. We have built entire industries around editing and publishing books that meet the highest-possible standards and self-publication can sometimes mean a book does not get sufficient polish before it is released. However, these standards and those who uphold them are also forms of exclusion and gatekeeping. Add to that the economic pressures faced by publishers and the finite amount of books released each year, and a great many authors are left struggling to find a publisher regardless of the strength of their writing. My advice is that if you are struggling to find a space that will home your work, make a space of your own (and a little extra for someone else), but do so in a way that is mindful of the community your work will circulate through. Your book does not need a professional editor, but if it has not been sufficiently edited it could be received poorly by a readership accustomed to high-quality publications.

Artificial intelligence will never take away the drive to create

On Creative Writing: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

Kyle Flemmer: AI is both a threat and benefit and everything in between. My answer depends on how ‘threat’ and ‘benefit’ are defined and evaluated. The first wave of publically-available, commercial AI—like ChatGPT, Grok, and Copilot—has been highly contentious and made a lot of people quite hostile toward generative AI, and usually for good reason. Concerns around stolen or unlicensed training data, the environmental impact, and the irresponsible rush to market are (mostly) valid. However, AI is not exactly new, nor is it a monolith; there are plenty of ways to implement computational processes ethically, and lots of writers and artists have already found ways to do so. Like most threats posed by new technologies in the present day, we’re usually talking about the consequences of large-scale corporate implementations, not the homebrew systems cooked up by grad students and digital media artists for non-commercial purposes. Unfortunately, polarization tends to erase nuance from the discourse, and we creative professionals are left either condemning or defending the technology wholesale.

I will say this: as an artist and writer who is deeply committed to my personal creative practice, I couldn’t care less about the threat of AI on an individual level. So long as robo-Margaret Atwood isn’t kicking down my door to terminate me, I think it’s alarmist to argue that AI poses a tangible threat to human creativity. Imagination and the drive to create are irrepressible, and I’ll be writing poems and making art regardless of what AI is capable of.

On the other hand, creative industries, i.e., those which extract profit from creativity, will suffer. Creative professionals are losing their jobs because companies opt for instant, low-effort output. The blame for this suffering falls not on technologies that reduce the need for human labor, but on companies that devalue human labor for the sake of short-term profits. The sudden introduction of this new technology has proven painful for some, but it is by no means unique. Most candle makers lost their jobs when the lightbulb was invented. Most portrait painters were put out of work by the invention of the camera. Fortunately, the most passionate and committed candle makers and portrait painters stuck around, and the world is denied neither useful technologies nor hand-crafted, artisanal goods. I imagine the integration of AI into our daily lives will pan out similarly in the long run.

On Creative Writing: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

Kyle Flemmer: I edit as I write. The unit of text that feels most natural to me is the phrase, so I find myself writing in small, deliberate loops that involve immediate revision to refine word choice and sentence structure.

For example, when drafting the previous sentence, I started with a simple idea (phrases are a unit of text), then introduced rationale to build the idea into a phrase (this unit of text feels natural to me), then added the ‘what’ of my argument (word choice and sentence structure) and the ‘how’ (writing in loops) to complete the overarching thought; before moving on to this explanatory sentence I check to make sure each word contributes to the expression of the idea and the sentence is organized effectively. Ideas occur to me in phrase-length units that I manually knit together into proper sentences by experimenting with word choice and order.

For me, there is no getting outside this process to write faster, stream-of-consciousness style, and just tidy the draft up later. I do, of course, edit again later, but at the time of first draft I almost always have a plan in place and am working toward a specific outcome, laying and correcting brick by brick until the plan is realized. A chef doesn’t cook a meal willy-nilly and pick out the bad bits just before serving it. They taste, smell, and observe as they go, adjusting accordingly. You wouldn’t lay train tracks without surveying the route, but you must also adapt and optimize as you go. That is how I write. It can be frustratingly slow (I’ve reread my answer up to this point while writing it two dozen times already), but when I do move on to the next idea, I usually feel confident about the one that came before.