Spotlight series #107 : Misha Solomon
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT:
I first became interested in writing poetry after taking a workshop with Derek Webster at the Quebec Writers’ Federation. When I mentioned this new interest to Karen Hill, a friend whom I met through my work in TV, she bought me a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. I read the slim collection, and liked it. At some point later on, fellow Montréal poet Will Vallières lent me a copy of Meditations in an Emergency (I haven’t yet returned it, I’m sorry, Will). I read the slim collection, and liked it. Later still, when my fiancé, Guillaume Denault, and I were looking for a creative activity to do together, I found French translations of Lunch Poems and Meditations in an Emergency and, for a few weeks, we would read a Frank O’Hara poem in both languages and use it as a source of inspiration to write something of our own. At some point, Guillaume bought me The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, a decidedly unslim collection of everything O’Hara wrote before his untimely death. And at some other point, I read “Having a Coke with You” (as “Having a (Diet) Coke with You,” of course, you understand) at the wedding of my best friend, Kayla Tanenbaum.
In “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun),” O’Hara writes about writing “one of [his] ‘I do this I do that’ / poems in a sketch pad.” I do not really know why O’Hara has become so important to me. I should add that at some point between reading Lunch Poems and Meditations in an Emergency, my dear friend Sarah Burgoyne, an experimental poet to whom I refer as my “poetry fairy godmother,” assigned O’Hara’s manifesto “Personism” in a poetry studio she was leading, which I also enjoyed. O’Hara was a homosexual, and I am a homosexual, and O’Hara died young, which is intriguing and tragic, and his death is a different kind of tragedy than the tragic deaths of so many fellow homosexuals who died young in the decades before I was born. And so, with an awareness that this does not quite follow logically from anything that precedes it, I have decided to write poems inspired by each of O’Hara’s poems in The Collected Poems, of which there are over 500. Four such poems will appear in my forthcoming full-length debut collection, to be published by Brick Books in 2026. I’ve written about a dozen others. Frank did this, he did that, I understand a little under half of his references, his meanings, but I do this and that as well.
Oh look, here’s one now:
Autobiographia Literaria
after Frank O’Hara
When I was a child
I wanted to be an actor
but knew that was the kind of thing
a child would say.
I loved animals perhaps
because they are such bad actors
and so in secret I could know
I was better.
I had a pet snake who
couldn’t act but now I have a dog
who does an excellent impression
of loving me.
Now I am not a child I am a poet
although I know that to be a thing a poet
would say! Each poem is a role.
My dog plays but one part!
Misha Solomon [photo credit: Faith Paré] is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022), which was nominated for the Expozine Award for English Literary Publications. His work has recently appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review, and Riddle Fence. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026.
