Q: Your debut collection The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) is full of persona poems, monologues and dialogues. The speaker is variously an animal, an object, a chemical element, a season, even someone on a date with King Arthur. Why?
A: To put it simply, because I’m not that interested in myself. Which isn’t true, of course – what poet isn’t obsessed with themselves – but perhaps I'm not that interested in the front-facing, autobiographical concept of ‘Guy Elston’. Memory, identity, the cause and effect of life and its happenings – it’s all a sheer mountain face, senseless. I need an angle, a longer way round.
Poetry can be so many wonderful things, and there’s clearly no one superior model. It can be urgent, timely and important, absolutely. Or, the complete opposite. I like to see my poetry simply as a form of storytelling. I’m most interested in forgotten, impossible, niche encounters and viewpoints, the kind which can thrive best in the literary-popcorn realm of poems. A snatched glimpse through a window into a courtyard you never knew was there. Some kind of masked ritual is happening in the courtyard. Think Invisible Cities, but snack-sized.
This is not to say that my psyche doesn’t fill the book. If anything, the book is even more full of me than if I wrote straight confessional poetry. When I write from the POV of Jonah’s whale, for example, I’m not starting from scratch – I'm necessarily depositing a bunch of my own hang-ups and melodramas into the voice of the whale.
I guess the short answer is, persona poems and odd dialogues are my way of incorporating Emily Dickinson’s famous “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” into my practice. I approach myself at a slant through these guises. If I see a flash of something I could be, or once was, or that might seem knowable to someone, somewhere, that’s my thrill. As for why – it’s simple. All I ever want is to make you both laugh and cry.
The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025)
About The Character Actor Convention:
A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell all exposé of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers – why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And all the while, character actors gather for the endless convention...
Guy Elston’s debut is a curious smorgasbord of personas, voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting ‘I’ questions its relation to itself. Wist, wit, and obsession rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner.
The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It’s something else.
Guy Elston
About Guy Elston:
Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He’s a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine.