Yusuf Saadi on his Griffin Poetry Prize nominated collection, Pluviophile

Yusuf Saadi's debut poetry collection, Pluviophile, is a Canadian finalist for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body.

The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes.

Saadi is a poet from Montreal. He won the Malahat Review's 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry for The Place Words Go to Die, a poem from Pluviophile. CBC Books named Saadi a writer to watch in 2020.

He spoke to CBC Books about how this collection came into being.

A first collection

"Because it's my first collection, it's just essentially a compilation of all of the poems that I've written up until this point since I first took the creative writing course in my undergrad.

"I wrote them when I was doing my MA at the University of Victoria. I was doing a lot of academic writing at the time. Whenever I get bored or sick of academic writing, I'll just end up writing poetry.

"When I was initially writing individual poems I wanted to submit to literary journals, I didn't have a sense that this was going to be a collection one day. That seemed very far away. After having enough individual pieces, I thought, 'Why not try to publish it as a chapbook?' The next step was to try to publish a collection."

• 55 Canadian poetry collections to check out in spring 2021

Thinking on the page

"A lot of writers are obviously always trying to incorporate their experiences into their writing. When you're having an experience, oftentimes you're already thinking about how you can write this. Especially experiences that are emotionally heavier, writing always seems a good way of, not simply expressing emotion, but thinking through them.

Especially experiences that are emotionally heavier, writing always seems a good way of, not simply expressing emotion, but thinking through them.

"Writing helps me as a thinking process, to think on the page. The poem editorial internship was one that I wrote when I was young, in my early 20s. I was doing an internship and thinking about my place in the world and how powerless it felt.

"I do like to try to play around with form. If I write a poem and it has certain line breaks, I might ask myself: What will happen if I completely change it? Ninety-five per cent of the time it's really bad, but once in a while it worked better. I think that allowed me to experiment with form to try to find things that work. It's just playing around and seeing what works, and always being open when I'm in the revision process."

Yusuf Saadi's poems are like the introspective thoughts that come up on a long walk on a cold day

3 years ago

Duration 0:54

"On St-Hubert a toothless snowman stares into my window, smiles. This wintry air is anaesthetic ringing glass-on-glass of interlocking crystals."

The creative process

"I try not to put too much pressure on myself to always produce.I don't think that's necessarily a good thing for writing. At times you need to kind of just sit back, reflect on the things you've gathered inside of yourself at least for me.

I try not to put too much pressure on myself to always produce.I don't think that's necessarily a good thing for writing.

"One of the great things about writing poetry is if I feel like there's something there, it usually doesn't take too long. When I'm working on a poem and into the process of a particular poem, it's nice that it's so short. I can feel like I've accomplished something and I can go on to write something else, something new.

"Once I have a draft ready, it's just refining it and really focusing on the line-by-line level or even the word-by-word level. That is the most enjoyable part of the writing process for me. I always start with the surface of the poems, start with the images. I think maybe that's why some readers like the poems, because hopefully they work both on a level of having depth but also being pleasurable on the surface level."

Blocking out reactions

"I was elated and very surprised [about the nomination.] I never expected that. That being said, I also try to tune these things out as much as possible from my headand to not let it affect the way I see myself and the way I value myself.

If you write something great, then people will react to it. But that's not something you can control, you can't control people's reaction.

"I generally try not to think about the reader too much, especially lately. Now that I've had more publications, I do find myself thinking about how people are going to react to this. I almost don't like that feeling. I think it kind of takes away from being immersed just in the poem itself and not worrying so much about people's reactions.

"If you write something great, then people will react to it. But that's not something you can control, you can't control people's reaction. So sometimes I try to block out those reactions, and just try to focus on the poem itself and on the language."

Yusuf Saadi's comments have been edited for length and clarity.