Jennifer Williams

Perform?

some poems for you here today and we'll talk a little bit about them as well.

So I'll let you start with your first poem.

Thank you.

And you are very well-travelled, and something else about you is, and part of the amazing thing about your career is that you found a way to work for half the year and travel for half the year, really, haven't you?

Because you do this sort of, there's a Canadian festival, series of festivals that happen over the summer.

Whereas in Edinburgh, we just had the Fringe Festival in August.

These happen in cities all across Montreal, I mean, all across Canada.

So performers can actually travel from one to the next throughout the summer.

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you write the poems, where they come from, are you thinking even when the ideas first come into your head about where they might fit into a show further down the line or is there a much more kind of

free generative process where you're i mean my impression of you knowing you for a long time is that you are like super well read you're always interested in politics and history and literature and all sorts of things and and what's going on day to day in the world around you and that that all seems to be feeding into your work so but i'm just curious about whether i mean the writing of the poems is that different from the creating of the

the hour-long show, or is that all part of the same person?

And do you find that there, as you do pull some of them out and read them or perform them, I mean before you read this, you said to me already that this poem that's on the page,

is a different version than the one you would be performing if you were performing it now.

Do you find that as you perform them, they change and that's part of editing them almost?

Absolutely.

It is in and of itself a totally

great focus and, you know, for someone like yourself, you've made a whole career out of it.

But I think even for people for whom that isn't their ultimate goal, it's a really invaluable technique.

I've heard people say that Paradise Lost should be much shorter and it would be a better poem, and I wonder if he'd been performing it, what would have happened to him?