Antonia Facciponte is a rising star of Canadian poetry. She has had her work published in some of the top literary journals, is a recipient of impressive scholarships, and first prize winner of Accenti Magazine‘s 2022 Poetry Contest. Her first collection of poetry, To Make a Bridge, is an outstanding debut which is wonderfully crafted with so much passion, heart, and beauty. Read this book and keep on eye on Facciponte’s future work. It’s sure to shine.
Why do you write poetry?
I’m curious about the world around me. I’m eager to think about the ways in which simple, commonplace experiences and memories and objects hold significance and teach us about ourselves. Poetry offers me the chance to observe and explore the everyday, to understand it from new perspectives and uncover untold stories. I write poetry to re-discover the familiar.
What was the hardest part about writing your first book of poetry?
The hardest part was deciding which poems to cut while editing the book. When accepted by Black Moss Press for publication, my manuscript hadn’t yet found its overarching shape or movement, and still contained a fair amount of excess material. But since To Make a Bridge had been in-the-works for several years, I became quite attached to each individual poem, and was a bit unsure about making drastic cuts. Bruce Meyer, my editor for the book, guided me through this editing process. He noted which poems were less-impactful, or repetitive, and also pointed out several pieces that were strong but better suited for another collection. Even though these cuts were difficult to make at first, the manuscript bettered because of this editing – it became tighter and more vivid and concrete. It’s important to trust your editor and be open to seeing the manuscript from a new point of view. And to save all those cut scraps for future projects!
Why did you structure the book like an opera?
I didn’t actually write To Make a Bridge with an opera structure in mind. Bruce Meyer found the opera in my words. When we were editing the manuscript, I handed Bruce a stack of unorganized poems, and he emailed me one day to say he’d discovered the manuscript’s operatic song. He’d orchestrated the poems into five parts: an overture, two acts, an intermezzo, and a finale. This new form created fresh rhythms and resonances between and among the poems, interweaving the tragic and comic notes with one another. A good editor doesn’t try to make the manuscript into something it isn’t, but rather listens to the art and finds what’s at its core. Bruce listened to my poems. And over the years, I’ve been delighted by the various ways people interpret the opera form; one friend recently noted how the everyday, domestic scenes that the poems depict are an interesting contrast to the opera’s lush and grand structure.
There is an incredible intimacy achieved in all your poems. Does this come naturally to you or do you have to edit heavily to achieve it?
When I write, I don’t consciously aim for intimacy – rather, I play with language as a way to defamiliarize something familiar, like an object or memory or place. I’m curious to search for distinct, sharp ways to use words. I also fictionalize and re-imagine the familiar thing (because I’m not writing autobiography). Through this writing process, I end up finding a new intimacy I didn’t know existed. Then, when editing, I’ll cut up and reorganize the stanzas and swap out words to explore and hone that new discovery. Writing everyday things with unfamiliar language allows me to find new familiarities, understandings, and connections.
Italian-Canadian poetry has been published since the 1970s. Were you influenced by the work of any of these poets in writing this book?
Definitely. When writing this book, I thought about how we bridge the past into the present, and how old stories translate into new voices. On the one hand, the collection explores these ideas through the grandparent-grandchild relationship: the narrator attempts to shadow her grandparents when they garden or cook, and seeks to re-tell stories passed down. In a similar way, I also sought to consider how established Italian-Canadian poets influence – or translate into – my own voice as a writer. I explored this through several poems that translate the English poetry of Italian-Canadian authors into English. These poems started as a writing exercise for an independent study course with George Elliott Clarke; he asked me to re-write an English poem into English. He wanted me to learn how a poem can be re-made with new words, like how a song can be re-preformed with new instruments. This translation exercise became a way for me to re-discover my relationship to Italian-Canadian literature, as I began to think about how my own writing emerges from and merges with other poets.
There are so many wonderful family moments in many poems. How important is family to your work?
This book is about family. It’s about the ways in which children and parents and grandparents attempt to connect with one another (sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding), and the ways in which we can re-imagine familiar familial relationships. But I didn’t set out to write “about family,” and I never sit down to write “on the theme of family.” Starting out with such a label stunts my thinking and leads to cliché and boring poems. Instead, I start with a small, commonplace observation – watching a grandparent clean the dishes after a meal, peering into a cabinet and inspecting the trinkets inside. I run with that observation, playing with imagery and lyricism, searching for a story – and through that process, I uncover new intimacies and understandings, and find love in vivid, concrete places. Writing is magic and starting out with the “theme of family” works against that.
What is your favourite poem to perform at readings and why?
I love performing “Intermezzo” for its concrete images and musicality. The poem is a story fragment, describing the fruit course between the mail meal and dessert; while fennel slices and lush strawberries rest on the table, the nonna washes tomato sauce from plates and the nonno quietly slices a peach. Each image is a note for the listener to catch and digest, as the poem’s assonance and consonance and alliteration flow forward and create sonic bridges between the spoken words.
Does your Italian background contribute to your writing in any way?
Much of my writing explores how I connect to my Italian background. I was born in Canada, so I don’t write about Italy-the-country as my home. Instead, my work poses stories, language, and recipes as cultural inheritance, and I write as a way to consider how I bridge toward and away from this inheritance. It’s not about living in the past, but thinking about how the past translates into the present. I often think about things that are lost-in-translation; for example, the poem “Mouthful” describes myself fumbling to pronounce my own last name, as I don’t have the proper Italian accent for it. But, through that failure to enunciate, I find new connections with my grandparents. When writing about these intergenerational relationships, I seek to keep the discussion of Italian-Canadian immigration going. Italian immigrants have become so well integrated into North American culture, people often dismiss or forget the hardships that Italian-Canadian immigrants faced.
What advice do you have to young writers who are trying to write about their family?
Write about the things that, at first glance, seem too commonplace to write about. In my opinion, the best poems come from everyday experiences. Look for stories in household objects, recipes, photographs. Observe with all your senses and ask questions. Actively seek out new perspectives. Play with words and think of interesting ways to describe what you observe – and you’ll discover things along the way. Don’t worry about writing “about family.” Just let yourself explore the everyday through language, and the meaning-making will come on its own.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a second poetry collection that reckons with the tale-telling customs of Italian-Canadian culture. The poems focus on a young woman who’s faced with the far-fetched stories of her great aunt, an ex-seamstress named Zia Sestina, and explore the present-day significance of old world myths, superstitions, and family lore. I’m interested in how we inherit and re-tell stories to connect with one another and learn about ourselves. How words protect us and how stories are salvation.
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