Wanda O’Connor is a Canadian poet, writer, actor, and academic whose work connects open-field poetry, desire, classical literature, feminist poetics, ecology, and place. Originally from New Brunswick, she studied classical languages and literatures and creative writing at Concordia University before doctoral work in Critical and Creative Writing brought her to Wales.
She teaches in English and Creative Writing at the Open University. Her research and creative practice include open-form poetry, Charles Olson’s projective verse, women’s poetry, feminist practice, classical subjects, ecopoetics, and interdisciplinary writing.
“the architect and desire”
“the architect and desire” moves through broken assertions about wind, bodies, rooms, family, television, and the repeated claim that “no human ever leaves.” White space interrupts clauses and separates words that might otherwise form stable sentences.
The poem’s architecture is literal as well as thematic. Gaps on the page become rooms, pauses, obstructions, and pressures through which the reader moves. The eye crosses blank areas and has to decide how strongly separated phrases belong together.
This spatial organization changes the experience of desire. Desire appears through proximity and distance, through what is placed together and what remains apart. The poem lets physical arrangement carry emotional structure.
Open-field poetics
Open-field poetry treats the page as an active compositional space. Line length, breath, spacing, and placement can determine movement as strongly as conventional meter or stanza. O’Connor’s engagement with Charles Olson’s projective verse gives this practice a historical and theoretical frame.
In projective composition, the line responds to breath and the page records the energies of perception. O’Connor adapts these possibilities to contemporary concerns, allowing gaps, fragments, and visual dispersion to organize thought. Catherine Paquette’s visual poetry offers a related example of page-space shaping pace, separation, and emphasis.
This approach gives readers an active role. The page offers relations among words and spaces, and reading becomes a process of navigating those relations. Meaning arrives through sequence and spatial tension.
Classics, desire, and feminist practice
O’Connor’s first degree in classical languages and literatures remains part of her creative framework, while her later research brings classical material into contact with feminist practice, contemporary poetry, and questions of desire.
Classical texts carry inherited structures of myth, gender, authority, and literary form. Feminist reading can reopen those structures by shifting emphasis, changing the speaking position, or asking whose desire and whose body the old narratives privilege.
O’Connor’s work draws energy from this encounter. Classical material becomes available for transformation within a contemporary field shaped by gender, embodiment, and critical attention.
Architecture and the body
The architectural language of “the architect and desire” creates a strong relation between built space and bodily experience. Rooms, walls, openings, and boundaries provide ways of imagining intimacy and separation. The body occupies space while also becoming a kind of space in the poem.
White space extends this relation to the page itself. A gap can resemble distance between bodies, a doorway, an interruption, or a silence that remains structurally necessary. Form and subject reinforce each other through these spatial correspondences.
Ecopoetics and place
Recent work extends O’Connor’s practice toward ecology and planetary imagination. Open University projects have placed her poetry and teaching in conversation with landscapes, coastlines, space exploration, and nonhuman life.
Ecopoetics changes the scale of attention. A poem can move from an individual body to weather, geology, coast, atmosphere, or planetary systems. Chuck Stebelton’s place-based poetry and field observation provide a useful neighboring practice grounded in landscape, birds, season, and local ecology.
Place in this work is lived, observed, and conceptually layered. A coastline can be geographic, historical, ecological, and emotional within the same poem.
Teaching and interdisciplinary writing
O’Connor’s academic work creates sustained contact between creative practice and literary research. Teaching poetry, classics, feminist writing, and interdisciplinary methods allows historical traditions to remain active within new composition.
Interdisciplinary writing also expands the range of materials available to poetry. Scholarship, performance, ecology, classical language, and visual arrangement can enter the same project when the form requires them.
Desire as spatial relation
Across these interests, desire repeatedly appears as a relation in space. Bodies approach and withdraw. Text fragments draw close or remain separated. Classical narratives enter modern contexts. Human attention reaches toward landscapes and nonhuman life.
O’Connor’s poetry gives these relations formal presence. Open-field composition allows distance, interruption, and adjacency to become readable features of the poem. Her work belongs within contemporary poetry that treats the page as a dynamic field where desire, history, ecology, and feminist thought can meet.