PAUL VERMEERSCH

Chris Banks talks about his book Winter Cranes

2012-01-07T11:51:00.001-05:00

Chris Banks is well on his way to being Canada's premier meditative poet, and his Winter Cranes was one of my favourite books of poetry published in Canada in 2011. In a "One Question Interview" with Alex Boyd, Banks discusses the ideas and motivations behind his quiet, well-crafted poems. Here is a sample:

... a problem arises when we pay too much attention to the inner chatter of the mind, it can lead to self-seeking and isolation from other people. Thankfully poetry has taught me to mind the gap. My imagination looks for resemblances and correspondences and suddenly a connection between what is happening in my mind and what is on the outside is satisfied for a moment, and there is a feeling of transcendence.

Read the whole piece here.

Some of My Favourite Canadian Poetry Books of 2011

2012-01-05T19:00:00.003-05:00

A top ten of sorts. In alphabetical order by title:

Campfire Radio Rhapsody by Robert Earl Stewart (Mansfield Press).

Earworm by Nick Thran (Nightwood Editions).

Folk by Jacob McArthur Mooney (McClelland & Stewart).

Gift Horse by Mark Calanan (Signal Poetry/Vehicule).

L'il Bastard by David McGimpsey (Coach House Books).

Methodist Hatchet by Ken Babstock (House of Anansi Press).

Post-Apothecary by Sandra Ridley (Pedlar Press).

Rebuild by Sachiko Murakami (Talonbooks).

The Shining Material by Aisha Sasha John (BookThug).

Winter Cranes by Chris Banks (ECW Press).

Of course, to avoid any conflict, this list excludes any books for which I was the editor, all of which have my total recommendation. These books are: Grunt of the Minotaur by Robin Richardson, Love Figures by Sam Cheuk, and Dance, Monster! by Stan Rogal.

Now, these lists are always somewhat arbitrary, and if pressed on another day, in another mood, I might have made an argument for other books; Gabe Foreman, Linda Besner, Helen Guri, Phil Hall, Leigh Nash, Matt Rader, Leigh Kotsilidis and many other people published books in the last 12 months that I absolutely loved. 2011 was one of the strongest years for Canadian Poetry in a long time, with so many wonderful books it is impossible for short lists to do them all justice.

I'm looking forward to 2012, with more great Canadian poetry books on the way!

A round-up of this year's Governor General's Award shortlist for poetry.

2011-11-14T17:06:00.001-05:00

Phil Hall reading from Killdeer in Ottawa.

I've written about this year's shortlist for the Governor General's Award in poetry. Here's a sample:

In Canada, the announcement of a poetry award short list is always a cause for celebration. And, invariably, it is also a cause for complaint. We poets, you see, are notoriously hard to please. Some of us will be excited about the nominees, either because we love their work or because they are our friends, while others will be disappointed that another great poet has been ignored or that one of our enemies has managed to sneak onto the short list again. Our jubilation is only matched by our chagrin; we are supposed to be passionate, after all, and our tempers flare so high because, as we frequently tell ourselves, the stakes are so low....

Read the rest of it here.

I will be reading the poems of Al Purdy at a fundraiser for the A-Frame Trust featuring Margaret Atwood

2011-11-08T09:42:00.002-05:00

Tickets are still available for a November 23 fundraiser for the Al Purdy A-Frame Trust, a non-profit organization whose aim is to preserve the literary and architectural heritage of the house built by poet Al Purdy in Ameliasburgh, Ontario.

The fundraiser will feature Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood, who will give a presentation titled “Bulldozing the Mind: The Assault on Cultural and Rural Heritage. ” The presentation at the Regent Theatre in Picton, Ontario, will be followed by a reception with food and wine.

I will also be taking part in the event, reading the poems of Al Purdy.

Tickets are on sale at the Regent Theatre box office in Picton. They cost $40 for the presentation alone, or $65 for the presentation and reception. For more information, click here.

As some of you know, I was the editor of The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, a book of poems and remembrances (which included an original cartoon by Margaret Atwood) intended to raise funds and awareness for the Trust. If you would like to buy a copy of the anthology, you can order one from Harbour Publishing here.

For more information about The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust, or to make a donation, please visit www.alpurdy.ca.

Jacob McArthur Mooney on the shortlist for the Dylan Thomas Prize

2011-10-20T15:19:00.002-04:00

The Dylan Thomas Prize is the world's largest annual literary prize (£30,000) for young writers (i.e. under 30). The shortlist was announced today, and it includes Canada's own Jacob McArthur Mooney, author of Folk (M&S, 2011).

Mooney is one of Canada's best young poets, and one of my personal favourites. It's great to see him getting international recognition for his excellent work!

Here's the entire 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist:

The Meeting Point by Lucy Caldwell, Faber
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale, Atlantic Books
Folk by Jacob McArthur Mooney, McClelland & Stewart
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, Orion
My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher, Orion

Read the press release here.

Coverage by CBC here.

And coverage by BBC News here.

The Insomniac Press Fall Launch Party is Monday, October 24

2011-10-16T09:05:00.000-04:00

WHEN: Monday, October 24, 7pm - 11pm.

WHERE: The Dora Keogh Irish Pub, 141 Danforth Avenue, Toronto, Ontario.

On Monday, October 24, Insomniac Press will be launching five new literary titles at the Dora Keogh Irish Pub in Toronto, including Robin Richardson's debut poetry collection Grunt of the Minotaur.

Poet, playwright and novelist Stan Rogal, releases Bloodline, a mystery novel. Insomniac Press published Stan's Dance, Monster! Fifty Selected Poems earlier this year.

Also launching are Jamie Popowich's debut story collection Metraville, Donna Bailey Nurse's latest book of criticism What's a Black Critic to Do II, and the re-release of Karen X. Tulchinsky's celebrated novel Love Ruins Everything.

RSVP: FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE

Visit Insomniac Press

Visit Dora Keogh

Tomas Tranströmer internet round-up

2011-10-12T21:11:00.003-04:00

Tomas Tranströmer has won this year's Nobel Prize for literature. For those who may not be aware of his work, here is a round up of 47 of his poems available on the internet, and some recommended further reading.

POEMS

From The Nobel Prize website:

Allegro

The Half-Finished Heaven

Under Pressure

Open and Closed Spaces

The Nightingale in Badelunda

From The Academy of American Poets website:

After a Death
Outskirts

From The Poetry Foundation website:

National Insecurity
November in the Former DDR
The Indoors Is Endless

From The Guardian newspaper website:

Alone
(audio version)
Tracks

From Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts:

18 poems from The Sorrow Gondola translated by Patty Crane, with Swedish originals.

From Brick Magazine's website:

Breathing Room

From Google Books:

16 poems from The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems translated by Robin Fulton
(Note: "Baltics", a long poem, is incomplete.)

FURTHER READING

Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Text and Video

An Essay on The Sorrow Gondola

by David Wojan

POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton.

The Half-Finished Heaven: Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly.

The Deleted World, versions by Robin Robertson.

Margaret Atwood to appear at fundraiser for the Al Purdy A-Frame Trust

2011-10-04T20:34:00.000-04:00

Margaret Atwood will appear in a special fundraiser for The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust in Picton this November 23, 2011. Here is some information from a press release about the event:

Friends of East Lake (FOEL) is proud to present Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic and environmental activist Margaret Atwood in a special presentation at Picton’s Regent Theatre on November 23, 2011. Her provocatively titled presentation “Bulldozing the Mind: The Assault on Cultural and Rural Heritage” follows a reception with Ms. Atwood at Books & Company featuring County food and wine.

Tickets are available for the presentation only or for the combined event, which is a fundraiser for the Al Purdy A-Frame Trust and Friends of East Lake.

The A-Frame Trust is dedicated to preserving the cottage built by celebrated Canadian poet Al Purdy and his wife Eurithe on Roblin Lake in Ameliasburgh. The cottage was a destination for outstanding writers of the era, including Ms. Atwood, at a time when its owner became one of Canada’s most popular and important 20th century poets....

Tickets for the November event will go on sale at the Regent Theatre box office in August at $40 for Ms. Atwood’s presentation only or $65 for the reception and presentation.

Read the rest of the press release here.

As some of you know, I was the editor of The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, a book of poems and remembrances (which included an original cartoon by Margaret Atwood) intended to raise funds and awareness for the Trust. If you would like to buy a copy of the anthology, you can order one from Harbour Publishing here.

For more information about The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust, or to make a donation, please visit www.alpurdy.ca.

Sam Cheuk's Love Figures reviewed in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement

2011-09-29T13:15:00.000-04:00

U of T Creative Writing grad Catriona Wright reviews Sam Cheuk's Love Figures in the latest Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Here's a sample:

Reading Sam Cheuk’s debut poetry collection Love Figures is like stepping into a film noir. Each poem is “an interrogation room” (63) with the speaker at once the detective “rummag[ing] through the memorabilia / for clues” (74) and the perpetrator confessing, perhaps falsely, to being the one with his “hand on the cleaver” (16). A chiaroscuro effect, as likely to be created by 9-11 memorial searchlights as by the shadows between a girl’s crossed legs, simultaneously conceals and spotlights meaning. Doppelgängers and multiple personalities abound. Two-way or compromised by hairline fractures, mirrors disorient and distort rather than reflect. Speakers connect to the others in their lives, most notably parents and lovers, with sincere ambivalence. Here, lying is always the quickest way to the truth.

Read the entire review here.

Marcus McCann interviewed on MyGSA.ca

2011-09-27T07:01:00.000-04:00

I'm currently working with Marcus McCann to bring out his second collection of poems The Hard Return with my 4 A.M. Books imprint at Insomniac Press in spring 2012. Marcus has been interviewed by the queer advocacy site MyGSA.ca, and I'd like to share that with you. Here is a sample:

MyGSA: Do you find you are impacted by place? Does an urban space provide you with a lot of material for your writing? Have you lived/traveled outside of Canada and have those places/spaces influenced your work?

MM: Yes, in terms of urban space. I find a lot of poets who live in cities still resort to poems about birds and wheat fields. Why is that? I write poems about cell phones and puffy coats and apartment towers because for most Canadians, that’s more likely to be an image they can conjure in their heads, compared to a red-throated lorikeet or a creeping thistle, or whatever.

Read the entire interview here.

Today my blog just passed 30,000 hits.

2011-09-14T09:02:00.000-04:00

As of this morning, my blog has been visited more than 30,000 times since I started it a few years ago. Perhaps I will celebrate in some small way. Perhaps by reading some favourite poems. Thanks for stopping by.

Sachiko Murakami's Project Rebuild

2011-09-04T00:59:00.002-04:00

In conjunction with the launch of her new book Rebuild, Sachiko Murakami gives us Project Rebuild. According to the site, "Project Rebuild is an experiment in collaboration. You are invited to move into any of the poems on the site, and renovate them as you will. Your new poem will then join the front page neighbourhood." Once you poke around the site for a minute or two, the game becomes apparent. It's fascinating project. I have just "renovated" my first poem on the site. I invite you to read my poem, and then, if you wish, you may "move in" to my poem and "renovate" it however you wish! To see my poem, called "Well Well Well", click here.

If you're in Toronto this week, come to Sachiko's launch on Wednesday night at The Press Club. The details are here.

They Will Take My Island? Who's "they"?

2011-09-02T18:40:00.000-04:00

So what is this "They Will Take My Island" thing that people are whispering about?

See for yourself! Click here.

Peter Darbyshire's latest short story is "The Angel Azrael Rode Into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse"

2011-08-25T07:51:00.000-04:00

Peter Darbyshire is one of my favorite contemporary fiction writers. His novels Please and The Warhol Gang are excellent, and to give you a taste of his writing, here is a new short story, a weird western tale called "The Angel Azrael Rode Into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse."

Here's how it starts:

     The angel Azrael rode into the town of Burnt Church on a dead horse, followed by a pair of buzzards. The buzzards trailed him everywhere. They knew a good thing when they saw it.

        The day was hotter than the time he’d ridden into Hell, which was maybe why Azrael hadn’t seen a soul since passing the sign announcing the town’s limits: Burnt Church Pop. 32. There were other numbers on the sign, but they’d been crossed out. The houses at the edge of town looked empty, their doors hanging open, but Azrael knew that didn’t mean much.

        Not all of the inhabitants were in hiding. A man in black sat on the step of a burned-out church that Azrael took to be the inspiration for the town’s name. The spire was just ash held in shape by memory. A metal cross was still at the top, though, if a little melted. Azrael noted the claw marks on it, but they didn’t mean much of anything either. Not in this land.

Read the whole story here.

I'm on Twitter

2011-08-21T09:30:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone. I thought it was about time I gave this twitter thing a try. My Twitter handle is @PaulVermeersch. Check me out!

Follow @PaulVermeersch

Reading at the 24th Trillium Book Awards

2011-08-19T17:50:00.000-04:00

Here I am reading my poems "Ode to Amoeba Proteus" and "Elegy for Paul Winchell" at the 24th Trillium Book Awards. Following me are readings by Didier Leclair and Michael Winter.

Peter Redgrove: an internet round-up

2011-08-13T21:37:00.000-04:00

Peter Redgrove, the late British poet, is one of my very favourite poets, but he isn't read much on this side of the Atlantic, and he isn't as well known as some of his British contemporaries, unlike his famous friend Ted Hughes. But his ease with startling metaphor, arresting imagery, and beguiling language makes him an equally entertaining and challenging poet, and one who I think more people would enjoy if they only stumbled on more of his work.

I've gathered here a handful of resources from internet to get you started. Here are some poems, articles, and interviews.

If you are looking for a good book of poems to start with, I have to recommend the selected volume The Moon Disposes from 1987, which was also published as Peter Redgrove: Poems 1954 - 1987 in the Penguin International Poets Series. It's one of a handful of books I often carry with me, and that I rarely, if ever, put back on the shelf. If you've never read Peter Redgrove before, I hope this round-up serves to ignite your interest in reading more of his work.

POEMS ONLINE

"The Count of Some Account"

"Dead Bird"

"Eden's Medicine"

from "Feeding Pieces"

"More Than Meets The Eye"

"Old House"

"One-Eyed Monster"

"The Patient Successor"

"Sleeper's Beach"

"Small Dirge"

"The Visible Baby" (with commentary by Ruth Padel)

"Water-Witch, Wood-Witch, Wine-Witch"

"Woman in a Flowered Dress"

ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Scientist into Poet: The Emergence of Peter Redgrove
an article by Neil Roberts from The Wolf magazine.

Peter Redgrove's "Tapestry Moths"
an analysis by Jo Furber from The Argotist

The Peter Redgrove Library
an article by Michael Peverett from "Intercapillary Space"

The Mystical Barber: A Review of The Harper
a review of Redgrove's posthumous miscellany by Anthony Thwaite

INTERVIEWS

The Science of The Subjective: An Interview with Peter Redgrove
by Neil Roberts

An Interview with Redgrove
by Lidia Vianu

OBITUARIES

An Obituary for Peter Redgrove
from The Telegraph

A Remembrance of Peter Redgrove
from the University of Leeds

PAPERS
Peter Redgrove's Papers
Redgrove's papers are housed in the University of Sheffield.

I've completed my MFA studies at the University of Guelph, now back to blogging

2011-08-12T11:52:00.000-04:00

I know that the frequency of my blog posts has been reduced considerably while I've been completing my MFA in creative writing at the University of Guelph. Now that I have completed the degree, I hope to return some of my attention to my blog, so stay tuned for future updates.

Guelph's MFA in creative writing began in 2006, the brainchild of the late and much beloved Connie Rooke. That first graduating cohort included such remarkable writers as poet Jacob McArthur Mooney, playwright and librettist David Brock, Trillium Book Award for Poetry winner Jeff Latosik, and many others.

I was fortunate to have many talented teachers and classmates while completing my studies, and I've had a wonderful time challenging myself to produce new work in the stimulating environment this program provides. I am especially grateful to have worked with closely with Dionne Brand and Kevin Connolly, two poets I admire greatly, and from whom I have learned much.

If you've found this blog because you have been contemplating applying for the creative writing MFA at the University of Guelph, I cannot recommend the program highly enough. It's simply terrific.

Philip Levine is the new Poet Laureate of the United States

2011-08-10T09:11:00.001-04:00

A long-time favourite of mine, Philip Levine has just been announced as the Poet Laureate of the United States. According to The Detroit Free Press:

Detroit native Philip Levine has been appointed poet laureate by the U.S. Librarian of Congress.
The Library’s 18th poet laureate consultant, Levine, 83, will open the library’s annual literary season Oct. 17 with a reading of his work.

As a Wayne State University student in his 20s, he wrote poems as he worked a number of industrial jobs at Detroit’s auto plants, including Detroit Transmission -- a branch of Cadillac -- and the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory.

“Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a news release announcing the appointment. “His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’ -- about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”

Levine succeeds W.S. Merwin as poet laureate and joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove and Richard Wilbur...

You can read the rest here.

And you can read Levine's poem "They Feed They Lion" here.

Stan Rogal's Dance, Monster! 50 Selected Poems reviewed

2011-08-05T08:33:00.000-04:00

Rob McLennan reviews Stan Rogal's Dance, Monster! 50 Selected Poems in the latest issue of Prairie Fire Magazine. Here's a sample:

A poet of sharp thought and halting line breaks, each of Rogal’s individual poetry collections is shaped as much around theme and subject as structure, making the coherence of individual books not the easiest to select from, but this small volume manages to keep to the expansive flavours of what makes a Stan Rogal poem work. Hopefully this collection will increase attention to his writing, counteracting the strange critical silence, and attracting not only new readers to his poetry, but reminding occasional readers just what he has been doing for years.

You can download the PDF here.

Please support Toronto's public libraries!

2011-07-27T13:16:00.003-04:00

Toronto's public libraries are under attack. Please support our public libraries. Sign the petition. Write to your Councillor. Stay informed.


CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE PETITION

Amy Lavender Harris writes: "Terrible Beauty: The Poetry of Paul Vermeersch"

2011-05-09T08:48:00.001-04:00

In her tenure as writer in residence at Open Book Toronto for May, 2011, cultural geographer Amy Lavender Harris takes a look at the evolution of my poetry over my first four collections. Here is a sample:

Paul Vermeersch has had a long and instructive apprenticeship as a poet. His first published poems began appearing regularly in respected poetry journals in the late 1990s, around the time he founded the I.V. Lounge reading series in Toronto. For about a decade Paul has been the poetry editor with Insomniac Press. During this period he has published four trade collections: Burn (ECW, 2000), The Fat Kid (ECW, 2002), Between the Walls (McClelland & Stewart, 2005) and The Reinvention of the Human Hand (McClelland & Stewart, 2010).

In each collection there is a measurable, and pleasurable, improvement in his craft. Over time Vermeersch's poems grow tighter, even more terse. Many of his early poems are descriptive, seemingly autobiographical. They find meaning in prosaic, if pointed events: the death of a dog, a kid who shoots himself with his uncle's gun, the psychological consequences of childhood obesity. These poems are fascinating and often powerfully written, a kind of southwestern Ontario Gothic that reads like a poetic counterpoint to the stories of Alice Munro.

Read the rest here.

George Murray interviews me, sort of.

2011-04-15T11:09:00.000-04:00

George Murray subjects me to his "questionless book interview" at Open Book Toronto. Check it out.

Introducing NewPoetry.ca

2011-04-06T12:39:00.002-04:00

George Murray, the driving force behind the popular book blog Bookninja.ca, is back with a new project: NewPoetry.ca.

Right now it's just a mission statement, but the future of this initiative looks promising. Here's a sample of what Murray proposes:

A magazine that proposes themed issues, then builds them by inviting poets and performers from all genres and forms to interpret as they will.

The web is the first medium that I know of that can accommodate most, if not all, of the forms currently out there. Through text, image, audio, video, and multimedia, as well as whatever new technologies are to come, NewPoetry.ca will publish the best of everything we can find: lyrical, visual, dub, sound, narrative, formal, hip-hop, surreal, automatic, recitation, aural, slam, flarf, algorithmic generations… and whatever is to come!

We’ll do this by bringing in key representatives from as many fields of production as we can, many of whom previously found themselves on opposite sides of the editorial pages. We’ll ask these people to bring us the best from their forms and styles for each issue. And we’ll see what comes.

For too long a lot of the poetic discourse in Canada has been squelched out by a handful of shrieking personalities pushing their own aesthetic agendas. I welcome a level playing field where those with different approaches to poetry can build something together rather than squabble over whose aesthetic values are more valid. Right now, it's only a statement of principles, but I'm enthusiastic to see what develops here and to participate when I can.

Ozymandiashay

2011-03-11T10:03:00.003-05:00

ybay Ercypay Ysshebay Elleyshay
ranslatedtay ybay Aulpay Ermeerschvay

Ihay etmay ahay ravellertay romfay anhay antiquehay andlay
Owhay aidsay: Otway astvay andhay runklesstay egslay ofhay onestay
Andstay inhay ethay esertday. Earnay emthay, onhay ethay andsay,
Alfhay unksay, ahay atteredshay isagevay ieslay, osewhay rownfay
Andhay inkledwray iplay, andhay neersay ofhay oldcay ommandcay
Elltay atthay itshay culptorsay ellway osethay assionspay eadray
Ichwhay etyay urvivesay, tampedsay onhay esethay ifelesslay ingsthay,
Ethay andhay atthay ockedmay emthay andhay ethay earthay atthay edfay.
Andhay onhay ethay edestalpay esethay ordsway appearhay:
"Ymay amenay ishay Ozymandiashay, ingkay ofhay ingskay:
Ooklay onhay ymay orksway, eyay Ightymay, andhay espairday!"
Othingnay esidebay emainsray. Oundray ethay ecayday
Ofhay atthay olossalcay eckwray, oundlessbay andhay arebay
Ethay onelay andhay evellay andssay tretchsay arfay awayhay.

Jeff Latosik on Open Book Toronto for March

2011-03-02T08:51:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't been posting much here lately, but as some of you know, I'm busy completing the thesis for my MFA, and that is taking up a lot of my mental energy. I hope to be a more active blogger when it's completed.

In the meantime, fellow poet and good friend Jeff Latosik will be the Writer-in-Residence at Open Book Toronto for the entire month of March. Check what he's doing here.

A Christmas present from Johanna Skibsrud

2010-12-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

In the Globe and Mail today, 30 writers are asked to talk about their favourite books of the year. Giller Award winner Johanna Skibsrud has some kind things to say about my lastest collection. Thanks, Johanna!

I read Vermeersch’s latest collection in a single sitting, which I don’t do very often. The language is dense, but there’s such a strong rhythmic pull to it – to me, gloriously reminiscent of James Dickey – that you just get carried; at times, it feels as though it’s being spoken to you by the most captivating and enlightened tent preacher. There’s also a deep empathy in Vermeersch’s work that helps to remind me what poetry – what language – is, or should be, about.

Read the whole piece here.

Q&A with Jon Chapman

2010-11-10T19:29:00.002-05:00

I love it when students want to know more about poetry, so I'm always happy to talk with them whenever I can. Jon Chapman interviewed me recently and posted our conversation on his blog... along with an old author photo that was taken when I was 27! (I remember that hair!)

Here's how our conversation started:

Jon Chapman: When did you know you wanted to be an author?

Paul Vermeersch: When I was a kid, I always sought out creative activities. I loved to write, but I also loved to draw. I had a subscription to National Geographic, and I liked to imagine that one day I would write stories about wildlife for them. But I also wanted to be a painter. I couldn't choose between painting and writing. In university I studied visual art and English, and when I gradulated I moved to Poland to teach at a college there. I thought I would paint a lot in Poland, but I didn't. I wrote a lot of poems, though, and when I came back to Canada a year later, I had most of my first book written. That's when I knew which path I needed to follow. I decided to devote myself to my writing, and I haven't looked back.

JC: What do you like best about being an author now?

PV: I don't really think of being an author much to be honest....

Read the rest here.

Upcoming reading: The Art Bar Poetry Series in Toronto on November 9

2010-11-03T18:46:00.000-04:00

I will be reading along with Jane Munro and Sam Turner in the Art Bar Poetry Series on Tuesday, November 9th at 8pm.

The series is located in Clinton's Tavern, at the corner of Bloor Street and Clinton, near the Christie subway station.

For more information on the Art Bar, visit their website.

To RSVP via Facebook, click here.

I love this essay by Matthew Zapruder

2010-09-29T09:47:00.000-04:00

Matthew Zapruder's essay "Show Your Work" (Poetry Foundation, September, 2010) calls for a kind of criticism that works toward an understanding of poetry, and not merely toward an evaluation (thumbs up or thumbs down) that relies on the taste and force of personality of the critic (which is mostly useless to a reader anyway). His focus is American poetry, but the thesis can apply anywhere, especially in Canada. Here is a sample:

What is the purpose of literary criticism? Among other things, to guide the reader past his or her resistance. Most art, subtly or aggressively, resists the familiar. Poetry in particular suffers from this resistance, because poets take the material that we depend on to operate in and make sense of the world (language), and bend it to other, often seemingly obscure, purposes.

Readers, sophisticated and beginner, need critics to explain why and how poets are using language for these different purposes, and what those purposes might be. Our attachment to familiar language is powerful, and understandable. Without critics, we will hold on to the familiar and be unable to accept that there are other uses for language, that there is new and exciting poetry all around us.

Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader. Only then can the reader grow to meet work that is unfamiliar, that he or she does not yet have the capacity to love.

Read the whole essay here.

Kalpna Patel's Pencil Project

2010-09-18T08:01:00.002-04:00

My friend Kalpna Patel recently visited the village where her family is from in India, and she found that the high school her parents graduated from is in need of a few necessities, like shoes for some of the students, and she has devised a way to help.

She has created The Pencil Project. These pencils are engraved with lines by several Canadian writers, and I am proud to be one of them. Proceeds from the sale of these pencils will go directly to the school. I urge you to read all about it on Kalpna's blog. Every little bit helps. It's a wonderful project. Please support it.

The Pencils are being unveiled today at the Queen West Art Crawl, which runs today and tomorrow in Trinity Bellwoods Park from 11-6. Go check it out!

Insomniac Press has a new YouTube channel

2010-08-24T13:06:00.001-04:00

Check it out!

The first batch of videos features Jeff Latosik, Katrina Best, and David W. McFadden.

When it rains, it pours.

2010-08-17T14:23:00.004-04:00

Andrew MacDonald has reviewed The Reinvention of the Human Hand in the latest issue of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Here's a sample:

Both a swan song to our shared primordial past and an examination of how the animal within thrives in spite of, or perhaps in retaliation to, our best efforts to subdue it, The Reinvention of the Human Hand might very well be the year’s most astute meditation on human nature and its lingering past

Read the whole review here.

Roxanna Bennet Hates Almost Everything... but thankfully not my poems!

2010-08-14T14:26:00.002-04:00

Poet Roxanna Bennett (pictured is one of her illustrations), who was at my reading in Toronto this past Wednesday in support of Now Hear This, has written a combined review of my reading and of my new book. She's posted it to her blog called "Roxanna Bennett Hates Almost Everything," and while I often relate to that sentiment, I'm pleased to report that my poems appear to be one of the exceptions. Here is a sample:

The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a gorgeous sucker punch of a book.  Vermeersch has that rare gift of using small, deceptively simple words  to produce immense impact. He takes from popular culture people, icons,  animals that have fascinated us, spectacles that conflict us, reminds us  we are both audience and the wizard behind the curtain. Opening with a  poem about the Lascaux cave painting, we are at once reminded of our  origin, our place in the natural world that we conveniently try to  forget. Again and again, Vermeersch pulls us back into our rightful  place on the planet as mammals, part of the family of animals, not so  different from those we seek to dominate and destroy. In the poem ‘Boys  Who Envy Werewolves’, Vermeersch looks unflinchingly into the violent  human heart, and as readers, we are unsettled by the honest reflection  of ourselves upon the page. 

Many thanks to Roxanna Bennett. Read the whole review here.

Parkdale has a new (used) bookstore!

2010-07-31T12:34:00.001-04:00

Good news! My neighbourhood has a new used bookstore. We really needed one in Parkdale. It's called the The River Trading Company, and it's located at 1418 Queen Street West, just east of Landsdowne between West Lodge and O'Hara.

From the store's bookmark: "A unique store in Parkdale buying and selling good quality books, CDs, DVDs, and assorted interesting items, and affording a convivial space for authors to read and artists to show their work. Call David for details: 416-452-6727."

Today is the grand opening, so if you're in the neighbourhood, drop by and check it out!

Jacob McArthur Mooney has more on the story at Vox Populism.

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The false dichotomy of the Canadian poetry conversation

2010-07-20T21:31:00.001-04:00

It seems to me as though the public conversation about Canadian poetry these days is dominated by a false dichotomy: are you a practitioner of the avant garde, or are you a lyrical traditionalist? The only two aesthetic possibilities on offer are extremes: radicalism or conservatism. Both are more concerned with the progression or integrity of poetic form(s) than with poetry's function, and the most vocal champions at either extreme often seem anxious to claim sole legitimacy for their own camp.

But it's a fallacious dilemma from the start. There's a wide, wonderful spectrum of different approaches to poetry between these two wintry poles, any of which might produce work that could be called innovative, experimental, or difficult -- words that certain branches of the avant garde usually claim to have a trademark on, though many of Geoffrey Hill's lyrical poems could be called difficult, for example, and Tony Hoagland's approach to the narrative poem as an exponent of American cultural commentary is certainly innovative, etc. And I notice that, more and more, younger poets are quite rightly disinterested in band wagons and pigeon holes. Such things might provide some poets with a shortcut to recognition within their circle, but not necessarily to a practice of good writing.

And what does it mean to be avant garde, anyway? It's a good question, and one that this year's Scream Festival and now the TNSOW have both raised. Some other poets have jumped in with questions of their own. There's even some dissension within the avantesque ranks over who's more avantish (and I'm sure the answer is it doesn't matter). But in artistic parlance, the term simply means "at the very forefront of the art." To me, it seems a little arrogant and presumptuous to claim this territory for oneself, but in a more general way of speaking the expression has come to be used as a blanket term or brand name for a whole host of post-modern and theoretical approaches to writing that may actually have little in common beyond an aversion to established poetical tools like narrative syntax or a lyrical sensibility. I prefer the term "post-modern" to describe these approaches to poetry for the reasons mentioned above.

To be fair we must also ask what does it mean to be a traditional lyrical poet? Surely no one is actually interested in repeating the same themes in the same styles as Tennyson or Hopkins or Petrarch. Even traditionalists need to experiment in order to be relevant in their time. But to what extent must traditional poetics be abandoned in order to experiment? To what extent must tradition be observed at the expense of innovation? There is only fallacy in positions that offer only black and white answers to these questions.

All poems, in their writing, are experiments. Their outcomes are never assured. There is always some risk, some possibility of failure. Or there should be. I love poetry for these reasons and more. I love to read it. I love to read about it, talk about it. I think about it almost constantly, and I enjoy a wide array of different approaches to the writing of it. Sure, not all poetries are to everyone's tastes, but having personal preferences doesn't have to narrow the mind. In a very general way I love what poetry is, and I love what it does. I love the possibilities of poetry, and I became a poet because I am fascinated with the bounty of its history and the promise of its future, in all its mesmerizing, inimitable manifestations. I think most people who come to poetry humbly and sincerely have that in common. Why else would anyone devote a life to it?

Furthermore it seems ridiculous to me that so much hot air is vented in a spurious contest between the two most diametric camps: the stubbornly newfangled and the intractably fusty. Both camps have their merits and make their contributions to poetry at large, but poetry at large is much larger than both camps. If there was less evangelizing in the aesthetic fringes, less defending of camp-like mentalities, the art form would be better for it. In the meantime, I would encourage the majordomos of poetry's most terminal outposts to spend more time prospecting the vast, fruitful grounds between their ideological citadels. There's so much to explore out there in the open.

Some more kind words for my new book

2010-07-19T13:38:00.001-04:00

A few days ago in the Globe and Mail, George Fetherling kindly mentioned my latest collection in a lovely column about his home library, saying, "The Reinvention of the Human Hand by Paul Vermeersch is a remarkable collection, deep and rich."

A couple of days later (i.e. yesterday), novelist Mark Sampson gave my book a thorough review on his blog, and this is what he had to say: "The Reinvention of the Human is, quite simply, a powerhouse book of poetry, an astonishing feat for a poet who has not yet turned forty."

I am grateful that the book is being read by people who like it, and more grateful that they want to spread the word.

UPDATE: Mark Sampson's review has been reposted on the Maisonneuve Magazine website. Thanks everyone.

Why e-books suck for poetry

2010-07-14T11:43:00.003-04:00

The first time I saw my own work in e-book format I was thoroughly unimpressed. Disappointed, even. The formal integrity of the work -- line breaks, line lengths, stanza shapes, indentations, etc. -- was completely altered, bulldozed into gormless simplicity to better suit the limitations of its new vessel. It's like looking at paintings on a device that changes red to green and moves thing inside the paintings to different places. Solutions to solve this problem, such as scrolling horizontally or inserting some indication to readers that the format has been altered, are also unsatisfactory.

It seems I'm not alone. Billy Collins, among others, has weighed-in on the disaster of reformatting poetry to the clumsier e-book format:

"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up," says Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose "Ballistics" came out in February.

When he adjusted the size to large print, his work was changed beyond recognition, a single line turning into three, "which is quite distressing," he adds.

Read the whole article here.

A poem for Canada Day, 2010

2010-07-01T13:01:00.004-04:00

Civil Elegy
after Dennis Lee

Often the sun, the pollution, and the lives
of citizens congregating are
no different, invisible until
they come gutted to the concrete.

I watch the furies one morning, my city
nailed, men and women muddy
and crumpled before the
phalanx riding down Yonge Street.

Eight-hundred odd scared skinny gawked
and bolted like rabbits, zigzag
through porticos, twitching,
rootless, human. We might asphyxiate.

But in the tangle of truth, out of the smog
and empire, we sit down as if our lives were real.

-- Paul Vermeersch, Canada Day, 2010

I created this poem on reflection of the events of the G20 summit in Toronto last week, during which we saw the largest mass arrests in Canadian history, executed with the flagrant abuse of police powers and the violation of the rights of hundreds of ordinary citizens as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is an “elision” poem; the entire text of this sonnet is redacted from Civil Elegies (part 1) by Dennis Lee.

Upcoming readings: The Leacock Summer Festival and Hear/Hear

2010-06-29T10:41:00.004-04:00

JULY 25
The Leacock Summer Festival presents:
Paul Vermeersch, Matt Lennox and Meaghan Strimas
Sunday, July 25 beginning at 12 noon.
Leacock Museum National Historical Site
50 Museum Drive, Orillia, Ontario
Tickets: $10.00
For tickets call: 705-329-1908

ALSO

AUGUST 11
The Hear/Hear Reading Series presents
Paul Vermeersch, Devon Code and Colin Frizzell
August 11 beginning at 7pm (doors at 6:30)
The Free Times Cafe
320 College Street, Toronto

I Want to Make Things Difficult Again: An Interview with Jeff Latosik

2010-06-23T09:26:00.002-04:00

Over at Toronotoist, Jacob McArthur Mooney interviews Jeff Latosik about his new poetry collection Tiny, Frantic, Stronger. Mooney asks great questions, and Latosik's answers are sharp, insightful, and articulate. Here's a sample:

"I don’t want to label what other people are doing, but you could say what I’m doing in TFS is a poetry of doubt— its insights, pleasures, and dangers. The disassembling impulse you mention is just that: the attempt to move inward (or outward I suppose) and find some rung to grasp on to. What are the things that are fundamental, constitutive, in the world and in our own personal mythology? So, as you can see, this is a very first-book probing of identity.

"It seems, though, that one of the ideas we’ve inherited from the 20th century’s focus on destroying meta-narratives (God, morality, truth, etc.) is that anything is possible: I mean, that one can do anything they want, or be anything they want, that everything is bendable and flexible and, truly, anything goes. There are entire industries (self-help, cosmetics, some branches of medical science) that are devoted to selling the idea that you can have it exactly the way you want it, whenever you want it. This is the engine of modern consumerism, and, I feel, some part of me was cast in this fire. I suppose that’s what makes this personal.

"The book, then, is in many ways also a reaction to this idea, as I’ve self-defined it. I suppose what I see myself struggling against is a more general co-opting of language (in politics, marketing, news, etc.) for the purposes of making things easy. I want to make things difficult again. But I want there to be a rung."

-- Jeff Latosik

To read the whole interview, click here.

For more information about Jeff Latosik's collection of poems Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, click here.

Please help This Ain't the Rosedale Library!

2010-06-22T22:07:00.002-04:00

Hey folks,

(I stole this from Jake's blog, but it's for a good cause, and the more places we post this, the better, so...)

As promised, here is the go-to information for how to donate to the grassroots cause of saving This Ain’t the Rosedale library and, if not quite doing that, at least recognizing that what Charlie and Jesse have been doing for the last thirty years amounts to a form of public service. If we can’t save the store, we should at least let our thanks be known to the owners. Donations of any and all sizes will be appreciated. I gave them a hundred bucks, which is an amount of money I routinely pay my bartender for what amounts to a hangover and a lingering sense of guilt. I won’t miss it as much as a bookstore. If you have more, you should consider giving more. Or less, whatever you can reasonably spare.
Here’s a link to paypal page. And, to pull the heartstrings, here’s Charlie’s personal message describing recent events at the store…

“Our situation, which could be told as a long story about the plight of bookstores in Toronto and in many North American cities, is really quite a simple one. At our new location in Kensington Market we found a space with lower rent and overheads which thus represented an enticing solution to the difficulty of inflated rents facing many stores of our kind. For a year we worked in this space happily, until the recession hit with full force and we began to fall behind with our rent. Our response to this situation was similar to that of any small retail business. We bought shrewdly, held regular events, did book tables for small press launches, conferences and author appearances, did not invest in advertising, fixtures, signage or renovations, kept only minimal staff (the store has one part-time staff person), and most importantly worked full-time or more with long store hours, while drawing the absolute minimum for our own rent and expenses. In this way we were able, albeit very gradually, to pay our back-rent, and maintain an amicable relationship with out landlord. While the space presented a number of challenges, including our basement flooding whenever there was heavy rain, and though we heard many stories of rent reductions in our own neighborhood we were not offered this option, but continued none-the-less to enjoy working at the store and feel inspired by our customers’ enthusiasm for the books that we were selling. Quite suddenly this changed. Our landlord became impatient with the rate at which we were able to pay her and made demands for large repayments, without providing a precise accounting of what was owing. In light of our workload and the proliferation of other causes in this city, a fundraiser remained only an idea. Instead we responded to these unrealistic demands with an informal proposal which would not have been profitable to us, but to our landlord. We received only further demands which we attempted to meet within our resources until the locks were changed on Friday June 19th. We are once again offering our landlord a choice which would be beneficial to her and allow us to re-open our doors, and are hoping that the outpouring of encouragement from the public might influence our situation. Along with this we are seeking help with organizing a fundraiser, and we are accepting PayPal donations. As we were living day-to-day, as many small business owners do for years after opening or relocating, our own livelihood has been erased, and our present situation is very uncertain. None-the-less we have seen that many people value what we do and are eager to help us, and thus remain hopeful that a resolution is around the corner.”

-- Jesse and Charlie Huisken.

2010-05-31T12:35:00.001-04:00

My round-up of the seven books shortlisted for this year's Griffin Poetry Prize appeared in the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail. Here's what I had to say:

Judging a literary prize isn't easy. Reading so many books in such a short time is a herculean task, and then there's the heartbreaking chore of selecting a winner. All this must be doubly hard for judges of the Griffin Poetry Prize; not only do they select one book of poetry as the best in English Canada each year, they must choose another winner for the entire English-speaking world. According to the Griffin Trust, this year's crop amounted to nearly 400 books from a dozen countries.

First on the Canadian short list is Kate Hall's debut collection, The Certainty Dream. This book is concerned with those cornerstones of surrealism, ambiguity and the unconscious mind. It's fertile ground, but difficult to plow....

To read the entire article, click here.

"lyrical elegance and an extravagant horror that lingers"

2010-05-18T22:10:00.000-04:00

Professor Dee Horne of UNBC has written a review my new book in the online newspaper The Mark that includes the phrase "extravagant horror that lingers"! I'm tickled!

Here's the context:

In a style that evokes paintings by Hieronymous Bosch, Vermeersch’s writing has a lyrical elegance and an extravagant horror that lingers and invites us to re-think how we are living. For instance, “A Scorpion in Alcohol” is kept in the kitchen as a reminder that it is not the actual scorpion sting but the fear that once petrified and still haunts that is the true poison.

You can read the entire review here.

Marnie Woodrow has written a terrific article about the need to preserve the Al Purdy A-frame

2010-05-02T09:24:00.002-04:00

Here's a sample:
The campaign to save the house seeks to create a well-maintained retreat for writers for eight months of the year. The property must be purchased and the buildings restored to meet code and contemporary needs, after which heritage status can be appointed by local and provincial agencies. According to the organizers, if every Canadian donated just three cents, the dream could become a reality. “Small donations from a number of people do make a difference,” says Eurithe. That said, a handful of major donors would enable the residency to open that much sooner. If 18,000 avid Canadian readers donated $50 each (the minimum for a tax receipt), success could also be achieved. Whether or not apathy defines our culture yet again remains to be seen.

To increase awareness and raise additional funds, Harbour Publishing has produced The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology. Proceeds from sales of this informative and beautifully produced book, edited by poet Paul Vermeersch, go directly to the campaign. It includes passionate essays by Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee and Steven Heighton, among many others, interspersed with Al Purdy’s own recollections of and poems about life in Ameliasburgh.

To read the entire article, click here.

Stephen Rowe on my poem "Hands"

2010-04-16T22:42:00.003-04:00

Stephen Rowe, author of the wonderful Never More There, comments on my poem "Hands" on his Below the Spruce blog. Here's some of what he has to say:

The preoccupation with the disconnect between man and our distant, ancestral history is one of the prominent themes of this book. In this poem, the image of the human hand possessing “a fierce, primeval strength” is significant in that it harkens back to the days when humans had not yet fully developed as a species and still remained intimately connected with other primates and, it may be argued, the natural world as a whole. There is a frustration in the image of the smashing of hands against stones, which underscores this tension between man and nature, this uncomfortable reminder that we are not as far removed from apes as we might wish to believe.

To read the whole post, click here.

NOTE: the problem of bushmeat poaching is severe in places where gorillas and chimpanzees live. The use of wire snares has become a constant danger. To learn more about it, please read Dr. Lucy Spelman's Quest blog which chronicles her time (2007 to 2009) working with mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

Matt Robinson's new collection invites you explore Halifax, and now there's a map to guide you

2010-04-12T23:36:00.002-04:00

This is cool. Matt Robinson's new collection of poetry Against the Hard Angle takes the reader on a tour of Halifax, and now ECW Press, Robinson's publisher, has created an annotated Google map to guide the reader through key locations in the book.

View Halifax in Verse in a larger map

Open Book Toronto Blog: My 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Predictions!

2010-03-24T14:57:00.003-04:00

"Oscar predictions are familiar fare, and while predictions regarding literary prizes are similarly ubiquitous, they are often kept strictly between friends. This year I've decided to put my Griffin Prize shortlist predictions out there for everyone to see, and I'm calling on the readers of Open Book Toronto to share their own predictions..."

Click here to see my picks!

"I Am Happy to Live in an Age of Plenty" in The Walrus

2010-03-15T13:33:00.006-04:00

My poem "I Am Happy to Live in an Age of Plenty," is in the April issue of The Walrus. The poem is from my new book, but you can read it online here.

Autistic art?

2010-03-09T15:06:00.004-05:00

Back in November on this blog, I wrote:

"I dislike fundamentalisms of any kind, and that includes both critical and aesthetic ones. In poetics, at both the conservative and radical ends of the spectrum, you have those modes that fetishize their own kind of formalism to the detriment of (or even to the exclusion of) concerns about content. At either extreme these formalist fundamentalisms (say a revived take on the radical poetics of Oulipo or an orthodox approach to classicist meter and rhyme) you will find a kind of literary autism; the poems are toying with their physical minutiae, but they are disinterested in actually communicating much of anything."

In the current issue of the Christian commentary magazine Image, Australian poet Les Murray, who himself has Asperger's and a son with autism, says something very similar:

"A lot of modern art is very autistic. There is this arbitrary law that you're not supposed to be sentimental or have any feelings. What the bloody hell is that but autism, pretending to be some kind of automaton? I came across a wonderful phrase recently. Some fellow writing against the Conservative Party of Canada, parodying their attitudes, described the conservative image of Harvard as 'the great ice-palace of the modern elite'—where it's all intellect and no feelings allowed."

You can read the entire conversion between Les Murray and J. Mark Smith, who teaches English at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, on the Poetry Daily website.

Win a free copy of my new book!

2010-03-08T08:13:00.003-05:00

From Open Book Toronto:

March Book Giveaway: Paul Vermeersch's The Reinvention of the Human Hand

We're thrilled to announce that Paul Vermeersch is Open Book's March Writer in Residence. Visit his WIR page to read his blog, his Reading Recommendations and his Ten Questions with Open Book. Send an email to clelia@openbooktoronto.com with the title of one of Paul's Reading Recommendations, and your name will be entered in a draw for a copy of his latest book, The Reinvention of the Human Hand (McClelland & Stewart, 2010). The contest closes on March 31st.

You can send your questions and comments for Paul to writer@openbooktoronto.com or post them onto his page.

Open Book Toronto Blog: QUEERING JASON KENNEY, LITERARY STYLE

2010-03-03T11:26:00.002-05:00

Following yesterday's unpleasant news about our Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, I felt this needed to be done.

Certainly, gay and lesbian Canadians have made a considerable contribution to our national identity through our literature. I propose we assemble a reading list for Mr. Kenney, one comprising the very best of Canada's queer literature, great books by queer authors and books on queer themes....
Now, I'm calling on Canadian publishers from sea to shining sea to send Jason Kenney a "review copy" of all the books you've published by queer Canadian authors. You can find his address by clicking here.

Send him books by Ivan E. Coyote and Camilla Gibb, and books by Wayson Choy, Michael V. Smith, and Sina Queryas. Give him Billeh Nickerson, John Barton, Jen Currin, and Betsy Warland to read. Recommend something by Marnie Woodrow, Darren Greer, and Sky Gilbert! Of course there must something by Sky Gilbert!

To read the rest, please visit my Open Book Toronto Writer-in-Residence page.

Open Book Toronto Blog: THINKING ABOUT GERMANY, LIAO YIWU, AND EMPTY CHAIRS

2010-03-02T11:08:00.002-05:00

I won't be cross-posting every blog entry I write for the Open Book Toronto site here, but I will keep a few of them posted here as a reminder. I hope you like the one I wrote today.

THINKING ABOUT GERMANY, LIAO YIWU, AND EMPTY CHAIRS
Three years ago I was invited to participate in the Berlin Poetry Festival. I have many fond memories of that trip and still consider it one of the highlights of my writing life. It's a powerful thing to travel internationally in order to share your work with people -- with readers and writers -- from around the world. The invitation was an honour. The experience was unforgettable.

Today in China there is another poet who has been invited to a literary festival in Germany. His name is Liao Yiwu. Unfortunately, he will not be able to attend his conference in Cologne. The Chinese government, which has been cracking down lately on people they consider dissidents, will not allow Liao Yiwu to leave the country.
For those of us in Canada, similar restrictions would be unthinkable....

To read the rest, please visit my Open Book Toronto Writer-in-Residence page.

I am the writer in residence at Open Book Toronto for the month of March

2010-03-01T08:07:00.003-05:00

Each month, Open Book Toronto has a new writer in residence, and this month it's me. Drop by and check it out.

Jacob McArthur Mooney and Paul Vermeersch talk about The Reinvention of the Human Hand

2010-02-23T11:44:00.004-05:00

From the interview:

Jacob McArthur Mooney: The Reinvention of the Human Hand reads, in many parts, like the author is feeling out a human territory inside the animal world, trying to identify the parts of us that are ancient and imperative versus those that are cosmetic and fleeting. Obviously, this is a poetic concern with a lot of history and varied degrees of what we might dismissively call anthropocentric attitudes, from the animal-as-human metaphors of a Ted Hughes to the increasingly ethereal nature-speak of Canadian poets like Tim Lilburn or Robert Bringhurst or Roo Borson. There’s an attempt in this book, I think, to find a third way, a kind of rapprochement between the two. Where do you see yourself in this tradition?

Paul Vermeersch: It’s interesting that you should mention Hughes. I feel that I’m coming at the topic of the human/animal in a very different way than Hughes did. I’m more interested in the human-as-animal than the other way around. I think that’s an important distinction. Intellectually, I guess I wanted a kind of post-humanist approach to primitivism. But creatively, I didn’t want to set out to arrive at a predetermined conclusion with the poems in this book, so “feeling out” is a good way of putting it. I don’t like writing poems that exist merely to illustrate a theory. Like animals, poems have their own life; that is an idea I share with Hughes. So I wanted the book to evolve, in a manner of speaking, rather than force myself to write poems to fill pre-existing niches. In the end, I explored several poetic approaches to a few different ideas I have about the human/animal divide, and then I put them next to one another to see how they behaved.

Read the whole article.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland

2010-02-20T11:27:00.005-05:00

I'm really enjoying it, so I have to recommend Tony Hoagland's new book Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.

As Dwight Garner points out in the New York Times, Hoagland "writes in an alert, caffeinated, lightly accented free verse" which at first glance might seem frivolous and rudimentary, but it would be high foolishness to accuse these poems of lacking the poetic rigor of more stringently blueprinted fare.

Deep down, Hoagland's poems address the growing malaise of our times, of a civilization drowning in its own disposableness. The voice of these poems isn't so much desperate for an authentic, emotional experience; it's more like the voice of someone who was once desperate for an authentic, emotional experience, but who has now given up the search, more-or-less, but is still open to the possibility. He holds a mirror up to our complacency and laziness and suburban comforts, and it should almost horrify us, except that it's so damn funny.

So potent is Hoagland's anti-tonic for the cushy, slovenliness of Western life, The New York times felt inclined to review the book twice, once by Dwight Garner (mentioned above), and again by Joel Brouwer, who said, "Hoagland rejects both the cynic’s lie that everything superficially beautiful must be rotten underneath, and the romantic’s lie that everything apparently ugly must possess some essential nobility."

Which is not to say that there is neither cynicism nor romanticism in Hoagland's poetry. I think there is plenty of both. Like chocolate and chili, Hoagland combines the two flavours into something powerful.

Lucia Perillo in conversation: "We killed coyotes; we killed birds. I killed lots of things."

2010-02-16T12:51:00.002-05:00

Here is Lucia Perillo in conversation with Maria McLeod at the Poetry Foundation Website.

As readers of this blog may know, Perillo is one of my favourite contemporary poets. If you haven't read her yet, you should. And her latest book Inseminating the Elephant is a good place to start. Perhaps this interview will convince you.

In this interview Perillo discusses her "origins" as a poet and the shift in her outward identity that came with a diagnosis of MS.

I have never really thought of Perillo as a "disabled poet" or as a "poet of disability" even though her subject matter often covers that ground. Mostly, I think of her as a kind of nature poet (in the broadest possible sense -- she is a trained biologist, and as a poet she is remarkably attuned to the physical universe), and as a poet of the borderlands between the body and the mind.

Read the whole interview here.

I have two new poems in Forget Magazine

2010-02-14T16:53:00.003-05:00

I have two new poems in the latest issue of the fabulous on-line magazine Forget. These poems are even newer than my as yet unreleased new book. They are so new, they are from the future. Check them out!

"Wilderness"
and
"Stadium"

Happy ninth anniversary to Forget Magazine, and happy Valentines Day!

What's new so far in 2010

2010-02-06T12:29:00.005-05:00

Well, I haven't updated the blog in over a month, so I thought I should check in and account for my absence. I have been busy! Exciting things are happening, and I will be back to write about them as they unfold.

A few days ago I received the advanced copy of my new poetry collection The Reinvention of the Human Hand from McClelland & Stewart, and I have to say I am very happy with how the book has turned out. Andrew Roberts did a marvellous job with the design, and this is certainly my best looking book to date.

As with my last book, I got to work with A.F. Moritz as my editor. We all know he's one of the best poets in the English language, but as an editor he's an absolute joy to work with; he's so astute and generous... simply top notch. He really helped me whip the manuscript into book-shape.

The book's official retail release date is March 17, and plans for a launch party in Toronto are in the works (date and venue TBA).

***

In other news, I am still busy with my studies. I am enrolled in the MFA progran in creative writing with the University of Guelph. Right now, I am wandering through the forbidden forest of fiction writing, and with the help of Michael Winter, I might just find my way. Writing fiction feels strange to me in many ways after working solely in poetry for so long, but with some help, I'm sure I'll learn a few tricks and put a few more tools in my toolbox.

***

Also, coming up in March, I will be the Writer in Residence for Open Book Toronto. Stay tuned for more information.

My favourite poetry collections of 2009

2009-12-13T18:34:00.010-05:00

Here is my top 10 poetry collections of 2009. I want to preface this list of personal favourites with the same disclaimer as last year’s: I'm probably forgetting something here, and I haven't got around to reading all the books I've meant to read this year, and I do have a stack of books I've bought but haven't read yet, so try not to take this too seriously. If your book isn't here, I apologize. You know I think you're brilliant. These are not ranked (stopping at ten is arbitrary enough), rather, they are listed in alphabetical order by author:

1) To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth (Graywolf Press)

2) A Village Life by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

3) Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo (Copper Canyon Press)

4) Lousy Explorers by Laisha Rosnau (Nightwood Editions)

5) Mr. Skylight by Ed Skoog (Copper Canyon Press)

6) Pigeon by Karen Solie (House of Anansi Press)

7) Something Burned Along the Southern Border by Robert Earl Stewart (The

Mansfield Press)

8) Reticent Bodies by Moez Surani (Wolsak & Wynn)

9) Selected Poems by Dara Weir (Wave Books)

10) Always Die Before Your Mother by Patrick Woodcock (ECW Press)

As usual, I don’t include books that I’ve edited for my own imprint with Insomniac Press, though I think these are also wonderful books, and I recommend them to you as well:

Wanton by Angela Hibbs

Porcupine Archery by Bill Howell

Naming the Mannequins by Nic Labriola

Honorable Mentions

There are simply too many fabulous books to fit on a list with only ten slots. Here are some other books that I loved from 2009, and I hope you will love them, too:

God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Nightwood Editions)

The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall (Coach House Books)

Word Comix by Charlie Smith (W.W. Norton & Company)

This Way Out by Carmine Starnino (Gaspereau Press)

Mole by Patrick Warner (House of Anansi Press)

James Dickey internet poetry round-up

2009-12-11T21:37:00.008-05:00

While many people today know James Dickey best at the author of the novel Deliverance (and as the sheriff in the film version of that novel), James Dickey was first and foremost a poet, one of great primal urgency and emotive power whose poetry achieved enormous popularity in his own lifetime and beyond.

I am a fan of James Dickey's poetry, and I have noticed that there are a great deal of excellent resources for readers interested in his poetry on the internet. I have gathered here what I consider to be the best available. If you're a fan of Dickey's like I am, then I hope you enjoy where these links take you, and if you're new to Dickey's work, then I hope they lead you to his books, where you are sure to find more of his fabulous work.

POEMS FROM THE ATLANTIC

"For the last Wolverine"

"The Sheep Child"

"May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County by a Lady Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church"

POEMS FROM POETRY OUT LOUD

"The Heaven of Animals"

"The Hospital Window"

"The Lifeguard"

"The Strength of Fields"

POEMS FROM POETS.ORG

"The Dusk of Horses"

"Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek"

"The Shark's Parlor"

"Falling"

POEMS FROM THE POETRY FOUNDATION

"At Darrien Bridge"

"Buckdancer's Choice"

"In the Marble Quarry"

"In the Tree House at Night"

Poet and novelist Maria Hummel offers a marvellous essay on Dickey's poem "The Sheep Child" (a personal favourite of mine) at The Poetry Foundation's website. I encourage you to read it after you've read the poem a few times.

MISCELLANEOUS

Bronwen Dickey on her father's legacy

CNN audio archive of James Dickey

The James Dickey Library, University of South Carolina

The James Dickey papers, Washington University in St. Louis

The James Dickey Society and Newsletter

Enjoy.

Authorial intent, snark, and missing the point on purpose.

2009-11-21T15:12:00.011-05:00

Lately, some of my contemporaries have been engaged in a rather nasty debate about the state of poetry reviewing, the apparent prevalence of snark, and the role of authorial intent in criticism.

Let's start with "authorial intent"

This is a much misunderstood and abused term, and I think some people might be misunderstanding it on purpose. It's a familiar term in critical discourse, and I don't know why it needs to be explained, but apparently it does. It has a specific meaning that has nothing to do with magically "knowing" what the artist was "trying to do" like some are claiming. That's just a red herring. That's not what it means at all.

Poetry is more than mere building blocks; it's communication, and all communication has a purpose, which to say it has intent. In critical discourse, engaging with "intent" has more to do with understanding how the poetry works within its given mode, understanding how a text has been assembled and reading it with an eye towards understanding its purpose, its message, and its content. For example, one would not (should not) measure a poem by E.E. Cummings with the same material yardstick one would use to measure a poem by Robert Frost, or whichever two dissimilar poets you might choose. The two poets have a different ethos, a different project, a different way of communicating, a different "intent" that is expressly manifest in their work.

It's disingenuous to say a critic cannot, given a close reading, determine the functionality of a text, and from that, extrapolate its purpose and gauge that against the traditions it either draws upon or tries to subvert. It would be an incompetent critic indeed who could not do that, but that is what it means to engage with the "intent" of a text in critical discourse. It has nothing to with reading the author's mind. If a critic understands the "intent" of a piece, for instance, he will not declare that a poem failed to be a sonnet when in fact it meant to be a lipogram, or vice versa.

Different modes of criticism have their own relationships with the idea of authorial intent: deconstructionists, post-structuralists, materialists, etc. Only the most rigidly fundamentalist critical approaches disregard "intent" completely. In doing so, they create large black holes in the reading of a text. They miss the point on purpose, so to speak. I dislike fundamentalisms of any kind, and that includes both critical and aesthetic ones. In poetics, at both the conservative and radical ends of the spectrum, you have those modes that fetishize their own kind of formalism to the detriment of (or even to the exclusion of) concerns about content. At either extreme these formalist fundamentalisms (say a revived take on the radical poetics of Oulipo or an orthodox approach to classicist meter and rhyme) you will find a kind of literary autism; the poems are toying with their physical minutiae, but they are disinterested in actually communicating much of anything. When such fundamentalists bring their aesthetic ideology (their dogma?) into the critical arena, they end up measuring poetries against it that aren't compatible with their criteria. Holders of this position cannot help but commit the fallacy of saying, "the non-traditional is bad because it is not the traditional" or vice versa. They mistake the rationalization or the justification of taste with the application of reason and critical rigor. They are, in a sense, defending a camp. They are saying: I have staked my poetic identity to this ideal, and now I must protect it and evangelize it. But creativity isn't fostered by defending a camp. It comes from exploring strange, new lands. The plural and open are fruitful, while the limited and the closed are doomed.

And what does this have to do with "snark"?

Quite a lot, actually.

But first, let's remind ourselves exactly what "snark" means in terms of book reviewing. The term was coined by Heidi Julavits in an essay in the March 2003 issue of The Believer magazine:

I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do [italics mine], even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake. This hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt is, I suspect, a bastard offspring of Orwell’s flea-weighers. I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community... (link)

So, according to Julavits, a refusal to engage with intent is a key ingredient in snarkiness. The critic is there to look clever and bitchy, and engagement with the books, and with literature in general, is secondary. Snarkiness is inherently self-serving, and generally at someone else’s expense. It’s selfish. I agree that this style of book reviewing has become all too prevalent in recent years. I believe that even if a reviewer dislikes a work, he can afford its author the dignity of treating it seriously, and if he does not believe a work warrants serious critical attention, positive or negative, then why review it? Just to be bitchy?

This raises another issue. Whenever the issue of snark or nastiness in reviewing is raised, someone, usually the offender, inevitably cries, "What? You don't believe in negative reviews?" Again, this is a simple case of missing the point on purpose. A bitchy tone and a critical value judgment are not the same thing. A snarky book reviewer is no more a “critic” than a muckraker like Perez Hilton is a “journalist.” A reviewer can offer a negative value judgment without being snarky, entertaining himself with his own barbs. Indeed, such a rancorous tone can be evidence of an ad hominem fallacy; if a reviewer's tone (or, indeed, his language) suggests that he believes the author is inept (rather than the text insufficient), then he is guilty of an ad hominem fallacy. This seems to go hand in hand with the fallacy that all insults are honest and all civility is phony, or that trying to hurt or demoralize people is a valid critical stance.

It isn’t.

The Al Purdy A-frame in the Globe and Mail

2009-11-18T08:18:00.002-05:00

The launch for The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology is tonight at Harbourfront Centre. York Quay Centre, Lakeside Terrace, 7:30pm.

Here's what the Globe and Mail's John Barber has to say about it:

“It's not just a shack in the woods,” says Jean Baird, the Vancouver editor who is leading the preservation effort. “It has been a pilgrimage place for decades for young writers – for all writers.” Acolytes who never knew Purdy or drank his wild-grape wine out of old whisky bottles still leave totems on his nearby grave, according to Baird. “If the e-mails I get are any indication, the back roads of Prince Edward County are full of lost poets, looking for the A-frame.”

There's nothing else like it in the country, she adds. The boyhood home of Pierre Berton in Dawson City operates today as a writers' retreat, but that late author never wrote there and wouldn't recognize it if he were alive today, according to Baird. Purdy not only hand-built and lived in the A-frame, he made it and its landscape the focus of some of his finest poems. “Berton House doesn't have the clout of this place,” Baird says. “On a heritage meter, this one's off the charts.”

Not only a place of pilgrimage for such young, unpublished writers as Michael Ondaatje, the Purdy A-frame also appears to have functioned as the drunken boat of Canadian literature. Blackouts, broken legs and furious arguments mark the anthologized reminiscences.

Read the whole article here.

New on my bookshelf

2009-11-01T08:38:00.014-05:00

Here's some more catching up with what's new on my bookshelf:

A Village Life by Louise Glück

This is a warm, open and generous collection -- generous in the sense that the poet seems genuinely engaged with her readers in a giving sense. These poems are gifts. They are meant to be enjoyed and re-read, and they reward this over and over. It's a tremendous book that I want everyone to read.

Made Flesh by Craig Arnold

Craig Arnold's disappearance earlier this year while researching volcanoes in Japan is a terrible tragedy. This book, published last year, demonstrates an expansive and scrupulous literary intelligence. There is much to admire here, and I especially liked Arnold's "Hymn to Persephone." We are richer for what he wrote, and poorer for what he didn't have the chance to write.

Joy Is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook

Holbrook's approach to the poetic is steeped in the playful and the humourous. I like this. We need poetry to be fun as much as we need it to be the thousand other things it can be. For the most part, this book is delightful: lyrically sharp and poetically adventurous, but a few pieces did leave me cold. "POETsmart: Training for Your Poet," for example, takes a PETsmart advertisement for pet training and substitutes the word "poet" for "pet." The result is cute, but it works more on the level of a funny(ish) email forwarded to you by a relative. As a joke, it's old (so poets can be emotional and sloppy, okay and...?), and as poem, it's just (I'm sorry to say) trite.

Still, what's marvellous about this book is still marvellous. Read it for that.

Reticent Bodies by Moez Surani

Let's be thankful for Moez Surani. He has taken a multi-layered history and heritage and turned it into subject matter and backdrop for a delicately arranged collection of poetry that is engaged as much with its poetic pedigree as with its worldly one -- the result is a book that is enriched by its cultural relevence and its complex and unorthadox approach to lyric. Surani has that rare ability to write beautifully without ornament. His lyricism is stripped bare, unpacked, disassembled. It's effects are immediate. It's both stark and relevatory.

The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall

I really like this book. It wants me to think about epistimology, ontology and various psychological states without being all poncey about it. This is good. Hall can promise that nearly every line of her poetry will deliver something interesting, be it a startling image, a memorable sound, or a surprise or twist of some kind. The poems seem to invite the reader to read them, and if a challenge is issued, it's never adversarial to the reader's enjoyment. What more could you want?

Dave Bidini on Al Purdy's house and the effort to preserve it

2009-11-01T08:20:00.002-05:00

In Canada, looking for ghosts is a mug's game. You don't have to look far. Places disappear after getting rezoned into bigger places, losing their borders and their names. Old brick buildings mortared with history fall to developers. And the only public recognition of past lives comes whenever city council or its heritage wing can agree on the weight of a person, place or event. John Lennon played his first concert without The Beatles at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, and Errol Flynn died on the steps of the Hotel Vancouver, but you wouldn't have remembered these events if I hadn't just mentioned them. In an empty country without many people, the forgotten often outnumber those who have failed to remember them.
Ameliasburgh, Ont., just south of Belleville, has its ghosts, too, or rather, its ghost: poet Al Purdy, the Voice of the Land. Al lived here for most of his life, although he later divided his time between his hometown and Sydney, on Vancouver Island. The late poet was regarded as cantankerous and combative by those on the outside, but to friends and literary accomplices, his hide was never as rough as his reputation. Over the years, he was an encouraging and congenial host with a soft spot for poets and for any artist who ever tried.

New on my bookshelf

2009-10-28T16:47:00.021-04:00

Well, thanks to a little something called "reading week" I finally have a few days to myself, and I thought I would catch up with what's new on my bookshelf. Let's start with three books I picked up today.

Selected Poems By Dara Wier

Wave Books has done the world a favour by publishing this book. I hope this selection of Wier's poems brings new readers to her work.

Stuart Ross pointed her work out to me years ago, and I've been reading it ever since. Some of her works are difficult to come by in Canada, though, so when I saw this on the shelf at Type Books, I snatched it up!

Wier doesn't appear to be interested in being a mere traditionalist, but she doesn't seem interested in doing something new for the sake of doing something new, either. Rather, it seems likes she's always looking for the way the poem wants to be written. Almost never is a word, a line-break, or a punctuation mark out of place. These poems are technically neat as a pin, but the thoughts they contain seem to rage and wander and fret and sometimes moon the world. Her poems are funny without being trite, startlingly beautiful without being overly dramatic about it, and thoughtful without rubbing the reader's nose in philosophical pretentions. Rare traits all. I recommend her poems highly.

Track & Trace by Zachariah Wells

This is, without a doubt, one of the most beautifully produced trade paperback editions of a poetry book I have ever seen published in Canada (and with publishers like Gaspereau Press, Pedlar Press, and this book's publisher Biblioasis on the scene, there are more beautiful trade paperbacks around than ever before). When I first heard it was being illustrated by Seth, I worried the result might be a little too gimmicky, but no. Seth's stark, simple illustrations work well as a counterpoint to Zach's meticulous craftsmanship. As for the poems themselves, Zach has definitely built on the burly aesthetic he demonstrated in his first book (which was edited by me, incidentally). This is an aesthetic generally characterized by an assertive (even, at times, severe) approach to metre that is enhanced by an ardent attention to sonic effects like alliteration, syncopation, rhyme, etc., and his control over such a severe metre is both admirable and remarkable (only on a couple of occasions does it sound too conveniently clippity-cloppity to my ear). And verse with such a robust physicality is well-suited to his subject matter: woods, ponds, floods, cormorants, slugs, briars, ice floes, etc.

I'm recommending that you order one today.

Mister Skylight by Ed Skoog

If you haven't heard of Ed Skoog yet, memorize the name. This is his first collection, and it is stunning. Thanks to a tip from my good friend Chris Banks, I read some of Skoog's work in APR a while back and just loved it.

The poetry of both Dara Wier and Zachariah Wells, although very different to one another in style and technique, leaves the reader with a tangible sense of the intellectual vigor and material craftsmanship that went into it. Not so much with Skoog. Not to say these poems are not wonderfully thoughtful and well-crafted, they are! Often with tremendous formal constraints and schemes ("Canzoniere of Late July" will blow your mind). But Skoog manages to make it appear effortless, natural, protean -- It's an illusion, of course, and a good one, and one that makes the strength of the work all the more powerful for the reader. Skoog brings his combination of innate talent and acquired skills to bear on a poetic debut that's truly exciting and memorable.

POETRY CONTEST: After Al Purdy

2009-10-28T06:27:00.002-04:00

From the University of Calgary:

Following Al Purdy’s death in 2001, The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust was formed in order to save the poet’s home in Ameliasburgh, Ontario from the wrecking ball by transforming it into a writer-in-residence retreat. This retreat will offer Canadian authors and critics a secluded, historical setting in which to develop the manuscripts that will shape the next generation of Canadian literature. Towards this end, the After Al Purdy Poetry Contest offers poets the chance to engage textually with the legacy of one of Canada’s most important poets, while also contributing to the fundraising initiative to save the A-frame.

The Contest: We are seeking previously unpublished poems that engage in some direct way with Al Purdy’s poetry, poetics, and/or poetic legacy. There is no limit on the length or number of poems submitted as long as the appropriate entry fees are included. The judges will select the top three poems in each category (see Categories, below). Event, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review will each publish two of the winning poems in 2010. The winners will also receive a selection of titles from Harbour Publishing (including Paul Vermeersch's forthcoming The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology) and Freehand Books.

Categories: Entries will be judged under one of two categories: emerging poet or established poet. An established poet is someone who has published a book of poetry (longer than a chapbook), or has one forthcoming with a confirmed publisher.

Contest Fee/Donation: Entry fee is $10/poem, with all monies thus collected going directly to The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust. Further donations to this initiative are welcomed and encouraged. Tax receipts will be issued, upon request, for any submission fee/donation of $50 or more. Cheques and money orders must be made out to The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust.

How to Enter: Send a cover letter identifying under which category your poem(s) is/are to be judged, along with one hard copy of each poem, and the appropriate entry fee ($10/poem) to:

After Al Purdy Poetry Contest,
Department of English, University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4

Please include your contact information, including your name and email address at the top right-hand corner of each submitted poem. Email submissions will not be accepted. Please keep a copy of poem(s) submitted; entries will not be returned.

Contest Closing Date: Entries must be post-marked by Friday, November 13, 2009. Winners will be announced by January 1, 2010, and will have their winning poems published in 2010. Entries will be judged by University of Calgary English Department graduate students and faculty:

Suzette Mayr, Owen Percy, Robyn Read, and Tom Wayman.

Sponsored by the English Department at the University of Calgary, Freehand Books, Harbour Publishing, The Antigonish Review, Event, and The New Quarterly.

Visit After Al Purdy Contest on the web at www.english.ucalgary.ca/afteralpurdy
More information on The Al Purdy A-Frame Trust can be found at www.alpurdy.ca

Mooney and Banks have new poetry blogs.

2009-10-17T16:26:00.007-04:00

Last month, poet Jacob McArthur Mooney (The New Layman's Almanac) was the writer in residence for Open Book Toronto. I liked his blog posts so much, I told him, "When you're done with this job, you should start your own blog. I'd sure read it." And now, heeding my advice, Mooney has started his own blog, so I'm taking the credit for it. He's calling it Vox Populism, and his first post is about the recent use of poems by Frost and Whitman in television commercials for Ford and Levi's respectively. Interesting stuff.

Poet Chris Banks (Bonfires and The Cold Panes of Surfaces) also has a new blog, and I'm going to take the credit for it, too. Recently, I mentioned to Chris that we poets all have a role to play not only in the making of poetry, but also in the conversation about poetry (or something along those lines). I suggested he write about the kinds of poetry he likes best and why, and, as if heeding my call, that's the very purpose of his new blog Table Music.

Both of these will surely be excellent blogs for anyone with an interest in poetry. I know I'm going to be reading them regularly. After all, they were both my idea!

And while I'm at it, I'm also going to take credit for polio vaccines, blowing up the Death Star, and the invention of the wheel.

The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology will be launched at Harbourfront Centre.

2009-10-16T15:37:00.007-04:00

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Harbour Publishing and Authors at Harbourfront Centre invite you to celebrate the launch of The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology with special guests including: Paul Vermeersch, Dennis Lee, Geoff Heinricks, Russell Brown, Dave Bidini, Michael Ondaatje, Steven Heighton, and more.

Poet and novelist John Degen of the Ontario Arts Council will host this evening of poetry and anecdotes. Book sales and an auction featuring Al Purdy items & artwork will help raise funds for the Al Purdy A-frame Trust, an organization dedicated to preserving the A-frame for future generations of Canadian writers.

This event will be held at Harbourfront Centre in the Lakeside Terrace located at 235 Queens Quay West on Wednesday, November 18th at 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:00 pm. Refreshments and canapes will be served. Tickets are $8.00. For more information, please call (416) 973-4000.

http://www.harbourpublishing.com/
http://www.readings.org/

Griffin Poetry Prize announces the judges for 2010.

2009-10-14T08:38:00.004-04:00

The judges for next spring's Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced, and it's certainly a smart bunch: Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips.

I like this line-up, and it follows a pattern the Griffin Prize seems to like: a Canadian, a European, and an American. Carson is the Canadian judge, but she's not exactly part of the Canadian poetry scene. This makes it nigh-impossible to predict who might make the Canadian shortlist based on close associations alone and should quell some of the inevitable cronyism allegations that often accompany literary prizes.

The judges have a lot of work ahead of them. There have been an awful lot of excellent collections pubished this year and paring the list down to four international and three Canadian titles will be a challenge.

In 2008, six of the seven shortlisted books were either collected or selected volumes, and that created a feeling that perhaps the prize that year was given more for a life's work than for a single book. But in 2009, the shortlisted books were all stand-alone collections. Will there be a similar trend this year?

Al Purdy Auction in Ameliasburg on October 17th

2009-10-01T20:55:00.002-04:00

Looking for a fun fall road trip? How about one with a literary theme?

AMELIASBURGH - Al Purdy Auction

Saturday, Oct. 17th - 10am - 1pm

Al Purdy Library in Ameliasburgh

Contents: The auction will include small items, sentimental trinkets and household items/furnishings from the A-Frame as used/purchased by Al, Eurithe Purdy and the many literary visitors to the cottage.There are some volumes of old books and magazines that will be included in the auction.

With your help we can raise money to support the A- Frame Trust Project.

Where: The Al Purdy Library, Ameliasburgh, County Rd #19 in the village of Ameliasburgh. Continue through village to STOP SIGN and turn immediately left on Whitney Rd.

Al Purdy's house on the cover of Filling Station

2009-09-30T13:53:00.002-04:00

Check out the latest issue of Filling Station magazine... on news stands now! The cover story is about Al Purdy's A-frame house and the effort to preserve it as a cultural landmark and writing retreat for authors.

And while your at it, why not pre-order a copy of The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology. Proceeds are going to the The Al Purdy A-frame Trust. The anthology is great read (if I do say so myself), and the trust is a worthy cause.

It's great that word is getting out about this project, and kudos to the folks at Filling Station for getting on board.

What poetry are U of T students reading?

2009-09-05T08:23:00.004-04:00

If I have less time for blogging these days, the opposite seems to be true for Jacob McArthur Mooney, who is this month's writer in residence for Open Book Toronto. In the back-to-school spirit, he's had a close look at what poetic fare students of the University of Toronto (pictured here the last time they updated their reading lists, apparently) can expect to find on their syllabi.

Here's a sample:

I don’t know what I expected, but I expected more. I went to an underfunded university at the far edge of the country, took exactly three English courses, and still got exposure to the likes of Solie and Babstock. What’s stopping the University of Toronto from doing the same?
And why is The Waste Land an introductory text, exactly? I’ve read The Waste Land twenty times, and there’s still stuff in there I can’t quite wrap my head around. What is it about the instruction of poetry that makes us begin with poems that are as distant and foreign to their students as possible, and slowly move toward things like Al Purdy’s Rooms for Rent on Other Planets (English 354Y)? I’m not talking about degrees of difficulty, you understand. Al Purdy can occasionally be a very difficult poet, but he writes about a life far more coherent to a crowd of 1991 births than a Spenser or Keats or even Eliot or Pound.

Read the rest at Open Book Toronto.

Back to school

2009-09-04T15:28:00.005-04:00

Starting next week, I am going back to school... not only as a teacher at Sheridan College, where I have been teaching since January 2007, but also as a student! I am enrolled in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Guelph. I have not been a student in any official capacity for over thirteen years, but I fully expect that this will be positive, challenging experience.

Right now, I am putting the finishing touches on my new collection of poetry The Reinvention of the Human Hand which will be published by McClelland & Stewart this coming March, and I'm also preparing for the October release of The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology, of which I am the editor.

Between teaching, studying, writing and editing, I will have a lot on my plate over the next several months, and this might leave very little time for blogging, but I do hope to update this site from time to time, especially with news about my new book, Insomniac Press's poetry titles, and the Al Purdy A-frame project.

New on my bookshelf

2009-08-22T13:52:00.015-04:00

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty

Mark Doty is one of those poets I have enjoyed reading for a long time, but there are still large gaps in my experience with his work. I hope that this volume will help me to fill many of those gaps, and that is exactly what a 'new and selected' volume of poems is supposed to do.

Hare Soup by Dorothy Molloy

Dorothy Molloy's wonderful poetry first caught my attention with her marvellous second collection Gethsemane Day in 2006. Her first collection, Hare Soup, was published in 2004 just weeks after her untimely death due to cancer.

Her poems are technically adroit and playful and full of sex and gusto. One could say she wrote "populist" poetry in the same sense one could say the same thing about Philip Larkin. The poems are certainly entertaining, but by no means should anyone take "entertaining" or "populist" to mean they aren't technically excellent, or inventive, or barbed with intellect and wit. She was a fine poet who died too soon, but we should be glad for these two excellent books.

Next we have three recent titles from Nightwood Editions, showing why Nightwood is one of the most exciting small literary publishers in Canada.

Letters I Didn't Write by John MacKenzie

John MacKenzie is another poet I've been reading for years, and he keeps getting better and better. His first book was published around the same time as mine, and we were both shortlisted for the 2001 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, both of us joining the long list of distinguished poets who haven't won that award.

His new book invokes Hank Williams and Federico Garcia Lorca with equal aplomb (among other things), demonstrating not only his technical skills, but also his chameleon-like command over a poem's voice.

Lousy Explorers by Laisha Rosnau

Rosnau's new book is mostly about domestic stuff: moving to a new place, going to a shopping mall, new marriages and motherhood and all that Home & Garden shit that normally makes me want to throw a book of poetry straight down the hole of the nearest outhouse... except of course when Laisha Rosnau writes it!

Unlike a lot of poetry that focuses on themes of domesticity, there are none of those fucking poems that use glaring sexual innuendo to describe the eating of something mildly exotic like, shall we say, a bowl of spicy pumpkin soup (you know the kind: 'I plop a dollop of cream in its middle...' FUCK OFF!). And thank goodness for that! To the contrary, Rosnau's poems are never content with mere fantasies of suburban prettiness. She brings a psychological depth and gravitas reminiscent of William Stafford's or James Dickey's disturbed rural precincts into the residential corridors of southern British Columbia, and that makes me very happy.

Living Things by Matt Rader

If this book is any indicator, Matt Rader and I share a lot of thematic preoccupations in our writing, so of course he has my complete attention. For his second collection, Rader has crafted poems in tune with the physical world, the wonder of nature, and the constantly rolling crest of history's wave. I like Rader's first book very much, but this one? I absolutely love it!

Albert Goldbarth talks about his toy spaceship collection and reads his fabulous poems

2009-08-20T10:25:00.009-04:00

Überpoet and extremely cool dude Albert Goldbarth, whose latest collection of poems is To Be Read in 500 Years, is the subject of a PBS poetry series feature on Jim Lehrer's show in which he talks about his collection of toy spaceships and reads a few poems from his new book; be sure to watch the streaming video!

New on my bookshelf

2009-07-20T08:35:00.016-04:00

John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956 -- 1987

It's a mountain of Ashbery. It's magnificent, vital, fun. Defies description. An absolute must have.

And it's Library of America, so the binding is GORGEOUS!

Chronic by D.A. Powell

Those who know me well enough know of my fascination with the poetics of the physical body and its relation to the natural, physical world. Powell addresses similar preoccupations in his new collection (actually it seems like somewhat of a departure for him; his previous work struck me more as "social poetry" in its aims... think O'Hara, think Hoagland, only the aesthetic was Powell's own), so naturally I was drawn to it.

I'm really enjoying the fluidity of his syntax and his ability to roll along in little eddies of image and sound.

T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems 1909 -- 1962

Okay, so he's a bit of a poncey wanker... but he has chops.

I needed it... you know... for reference.

Douglas Dunn's Selected Poems 1964 -- 1983

Out of print. Used.

I picked this up in Balfour's and read about a dozen poems while standing in the ailse. I quite liked them, so I bought the book. I'm looking forward to digging into it when I get the chance.

It has since been supplanted by a more recent selected.

Dennis Lee approaching seventy

2009-06-30T17:54:00.005-04:00

Jacob McArthur Mooney weighs in:

To see septuagenarianism looming in Dennis Lee’s near future is as inarguable a sign of time’s passing as exists for Canadian culture. His breakthrough success (1972’s Civil Elegies, the entirety of which Lee plans to read at the Scream) is so evocative of a certain point in the history of burdened optimism that it forever fixes its creator to a specific time and place ? as the perpetual radical twentysomething buzzing around Yorkville in the years before Canada stopped concerning itself with questions of what it meant to be Canadian.
Even more important than its introduction of Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies is memorable for its reintroduction of anger into Canada’s literary arsenal. A real, blood-and-spit kind of anger. And not just personal anger, either, or domestic anger. Instead, a massive, coast-to-coast, national anger. Anger as unifying theme. Lee’s early-career masterwork hums with a volatile disappointment that imposes itself on its readers, and that drags them into hard and surprising new territories. The humanism in Elegies is the kind that’s willing to put its head down and charge, unflinching, through to the far reaches of its philosophy and arrive as a kind of reactionary anarchism; as an anger that presents itself as both pout and polemics, before settling into its heartbreaking final movement as one young man sits in a public square surrounded by his fellow citizens and tries to give voice to his loneliness and rage.

Read the entire essay here.

And check out this event in this year's Scream Literary Festival. Lee will read Civil Elegies, Un, and Yesno in their entireties.

New on my bookshelf

2009-06-28T12:13:00.011-04:00

Poems 1959 - 2009 by Frederick Seidel

Sometimes I don't know what to make of Frederick Seidel. Just when you think he's cracking off some bit of eye-rolling Muldoonish clownery, swoosh! Out comes the switchblade! (or sometimes vice-versa). He's been called both a "ghoul" (by Michael Robbins) and the “the best American poet writing today” (lots of people). His writing is extremely complex, not only in its poetics, but also (probably even more so) in its psychology. All this is compounded by the mystery of the author. I went out today to enjoy a coffee and read the introduction to this substantial volume of collected poems. But there was no introduction. No context or commentary. No welcome mat. No doorway in. Just the poems to wrestle with... and readers better be ready for a royal ass-whooping.

House of Anansi didn't have its annual poetry bash in Toronto this year, so I'm only now getting around to the rest of their 2009 poetry titles after first reading Karen Solie's Pigeon.

Gun Dogs by James Langer

Langer is a poet clearly energized by the present-day Canadian renaissance of New Formalism in lyric poetry (which is the hot topic in CanPo according to its champions ...and only 25 years behind the Americans who have long since moved on to more interesting discussions). The mode, however, suits Langer to a tee. Forget whether or not it's fashionable right now (and right now, it is); he's just really very good at making the sounds of language do his bidding, and reading very good writing of any kind should be a welcome pleasure for anyone, shouldn't it? Occasionally the style wins out over substance (a few poems are like scrimshaw -- rustic and ornate, but what do they do?), but overall this is an extremely polished and eloquent book.

Mole by Patrick Warner

There must be something about Eastern Canada that lights a fire in well-rounded poets like Patrick Warner. He strikes me as the same kind and calibre of poet that those other Easterners Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan were at their very best: equal parts Romantic and Modernist, equally at ease with a tight quatrain or a whirling and lunging stretch of free verse, but also deeply and empathically contending with the haunting material substance of their worlds. Best of all, he possesses the ability to surprise the reader with small yet sublime revelations. Like a beam from a lighthouse, wherever Warner fixes his poetic gaze, he exposes the jagged rocks in the seemingly placid shallows.

New on my bookshelf

2009-06-23T16:33:00.008-04:00

Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes

Hughes' classic 1967 work on the writing and teaching of poetry is back in print. For me, the first chapter (called 'Capturing Animals') alone is worth the price of the book, but there's a lot more. It's always a pleasure to read a book like this by a great poet who is also a great commentator on poetry. Delightful.

Fish Bones by Gillian Sze

Taking their cues from painted scenes, photographs and portraits, these poems bring the quiet tableaus of their subjects' private lives vividly to life. Often, poems that describe still images are overly static themselves, claustrophobic with stagnant austerity... but not these. Sze's poems are often tender, funny, erotic or ardent; this is another encouraging debut by a writer who isn't content to ignore the physical world or the readers who inhabit it.

Some recent reviews I've written for the Globe & Mail

2009-06-20T16:26:00.004-04:00

Love Outlandish by Barry Dempster

"...it could be argued that love has been the principal subject matter of poetry since we began writing it, and from Solomon to Sappho, from Shakespeare to Sexton, many poets have made it their specialty. To that long list we may now add Barry Dempster.

Love Outlandish, Dempster's 10th collection of poetry, contains (let me count the ways) exactly 60 poems, and each one aspires to approach the well-charted subject of love from a new direction. In order to accomplish this feat, there are at least 4,000 years' worth of sap, sentiment and cliché to navigate around. It's a very tall order."

Read the rest of my review here.

This Way Out by Carmine Starnino

"What is surprising is how much more free-wheeling and playful Starnino the poet seems to be than Starnino the critic. For example, the poem Doge's Dungeon brilliantly uses this emoticon (:-o) as a kind of conceptual end-rhyme with the word “terror.” And the poem Heavenography is a stream-of-consciousness prose poem about “working-class” clouds. It's a rollicking, surrealist vaudeville of a poem that has more in common with experimentalist sensibilities than Starnino the critic might like to admit, but its jazzy freeform lightheartedness suits the poet so well that we should all hope he'll write more like it soon.

I like this version of Carmine Starnino best: the good-natured poet, full of beans, approaching his aesthetics with an air of carefree mischief. It's so refreshing, one has to wonder..."

Read the rest of my review here.

New on my bookshelf

2009-06-01T16:22:00.007-04:00

To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth

It's here! Let the bells ring out and the banners fly! Feast your eyes on it! It's here! It's here! Reading Goldbarth is guaranteed to improve your life, and now his new book is here!

Selected Poems by Robert Bringhurst

One of our preeminent poets, thinkers, and typographic gurus has a new selection of his poems. It's been a long time since his last selected, The Beauty of the Weapons, in 1982 (CORRECTION: The Calling in 1995). This volume is (still) long overdue.

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler

I was enjoying my friend's copy so much, I had to buy my own in paperback. Kleinzahler's poems really get into your blood and stay with you for while... like a symbiote. They speak to you when the world around you goes silent. I love these poems.

I translate Herman de Coninck in a new anthology

2009-05-31T10:15:00.009-04:00

When I was asked to contribute to The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World, I knew right away that I wanted to translate the work of the Belgian poet Herman de Coninck. I had two main reasons for this. First, it gave me a chance to engage with a part of my own Flemish heritage head-on. Indeed, in my life I have had very little exposure Belgian literature in general and Flemish poetry in particular. As J.M. Coetzee pointed out in his book of translations of Dutch-language poems Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, “Dutch is a minor language in the sense that is spoken by only some fifteen million people, and its literature is a minor literature in the sense that it is not widely read.” It is not minor, however, in its artistic accomplishments. And that brings me to my second reason for choosing Herman de Coninck. I was already somewhat familiar with, and certainly impressed by, his warm, surprising and magnanimous poetry. He is not only one of the most widely read of modern Belgian poets, but he is one of the most widely read poets in the Dutch language of all time. Despite his enormous popularity in Europe, only one volume of translations of his poems into English exists: The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman De Coninck translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown (Oberlin College Press, 2006). Since I’ve been an admirer of de Coninck’s poetry since I first read one of his poems in translation many years ago, I couldn’t ignore this opportunity to share some of his work with a new Canadian audience.

The European Constitution in Verse

2009-05-20T20:14:00.007-04:00

Recently, I was one of several poets who helped translate this international, multilingual project into its English version.

Originally conceived of and edited by Belgian poets David van Reybrouck and Peter Vermeersch (who may or may not be related to me. I actually have no idea. Peter, if you're reading this, please get in touch!) of The Brussels Poetry Collective, The European Constitution in Verse is authored by poets from across the E.U. in a variety of European languages, and published by Belgium's Passa Porta, a group that organizes literary festivals and publishes and promotes books, much like the Literaturwerkstatt in Berlin (as far as I know, there is nothing quite like it Canada.... and there certainly should be).

Here is what the editors have to say about their creation:

'If the EU is not to be given a political constitution, at least give it a poetical one.’ The European Constitution in Verse: a long poem in which enthusiasm for Europe is tempered by a critical view, the grand gesture rubs up against poetic intimacy and the necessary seriousness is counterbalanced by a satirical note.

The Brussels Poetry Collective started the ball rolling. The famous Geert Van Istendael, the Galician eurocrat Xavier Queipo, the rapper Manza and the French-speaking performance poet Laurence Vielle wrote an inspired basic text. At least forty other European poets – at least one from each European country – then set to work. David Van Reybrouck and Peter Vermeersch remixed the whole lot to form an alternative European Constitution.

This project is more than just a frivolous reworking of a political fiasco. The poetic constitution puts the debate on the fundamental principles of Europe where it belongs: among the free citizens concerned.

The project in available in Europe in book form, but you can read the entire text -- in English, French, Dutch, or in its original multilingual version -- online. It's an impressive undertaking, and I urge you to spend some time taking it in.

New on my bookshelf

2009-05-18T18:23:00.008-04:00

Word Comix by Charlie Smith.

Charlie Smith's poetry kicks ass. The author of Heroin and Other Poems and Women in America has a new book, and that's reason to celebrate in ways that might make your neighbours call the cops.

Late Nights with Wild Cowboys by Johanna Skibsrud.

An extraordinary debut by a someone who very probably has the skill and talent to become one of this country's major poets. I'm eager for more of her work, especially after seeing her read at Harbourfront not too long ago.

Verses and Versions: Three Hundred Years of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov.

This book's a feast of genius. Russian originals with Nabokov's translations on facing pages. A must.

New on my bookshelf

2009-05-04T08:13:00.020-04:00

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to update the new acquisitions for my bookshelf, but now that I have a moment to play catch up, here are some of the new books I've been enjoying lately.

Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo.

Perillo is one of my very favourite poets writing today, and this book is a wonderful treat. There are few writers who combine humour and seriousness of purpose and technique and talent so well and make it look so effortless.

Check out her poem "Altered Beast" for a taste.

Pigeon by Karen Solie.

Solie isn't considered one of Canada's best poets for nothing, and here is further evidence that her accolades are well earned.

Read her poem "Tractor" for a taste.

Spectral Waves by Madeline DeFrees

Here is a poet I really didn't know much about, but when I first read DeFrees's poems "Broken Sleep" and "The Visionary Under The Knife" on Poetry Daily, I was instantly captivated, and I knew I had to order the book immediately. The book is simply marvellous, and I am looking forward to reading more of her work as soon as possible.

We Will Be Fish by JP King

I saw King read at Harbourfront a while back and bought his book for a steal at ten bucks. King is a surrealist with a light touch, and the book comes complete with collage illustrations. The work, both poetical and visual, reminds me quite a lot of Ludwig Zeller, if not in temperament then certainly in style.

God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky

I enjoyed Bachinsky's last collection so much, I'm glad to have this book now. I've just started reading it, and so far it lives up to her reputation, which in case you don't know is stellar.

The Hayflick Limit by Matthew Tierney

Matt Tierney's first collection was published in 2004, so we've been waiting five years for his second. Over those years, I tried (unsuccessfully, on a couple of occasions) to persuade Tierney to send an earlier version of his manuscript to me at Insomniac Press. In the end, Coach House Books prevailed, but no matter. It's a good fit for Tierney, and what's most important is that the book is finally here for us to enjoy.

I write about Patrick Woodcock on the Globe & Mail blog

2009-04-30T16:25:00.003-04:00

I had the chance to write some commentary to accompany a wonderful poem called "Swimming with Pink Dolphins and My Dead Mother" by Patrick Woodcock in the Globe and Mail book blog today. Here's a sample:

On one particular journey up the Amazon, Woodcock encountered a pod of pink dolphins (as well as learning the local legends and lore surrounding same: The dolphins, according to the inhabitants, actually represent the reincarnated souls of recently departed loved ones). Still alive to the memories of his deeply missed mother, Woodcock took comfort and solace in the stories which inspired this simply stunning poem...

Read the full commentary and Woodcock's poem here.

Patrick Woodcock is coming home to launch a new collection!

2009-04-25T16:51:00.002-04:00

Always Die Before Your Mother
by Patrick Woodcock

Book Launch Details

Tuesday, May 12, 2009,

7:00pm

Where: Supermarket

268 Augusta Avenue

Toronto

My poem "Ape" (part one) is on the Globe & Mail blog today.

2009-04-24T20:40:00.003-04:00

My poem "Ape" (part one) -- along with some very kind words from Judith Fitzgerald and commentary by Jacob McArthur Mooney -- is on the Globe & Mail blog today. It's dedicated to Koko the gorilla. I hope you enjoy it. Here it is.

PS. You can visit Koko online at The Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org.

I'm on 30 in 30 today!

2009-04-13T07:38:00.003-04:00

I'm today's feature on Seen Reading's 30 in 30 project for national poetry month. You can hear me read my poem "The Difficulty of Forgiving Summer" from my book Between the Walls.

Be sure to check out the other poets in this program as well, including Griffin Prize nominees Kevin Connolly and Jeramy Dodds among many others.

My Griffin Prize Round-up in the Globe and Mail

2009-04-11T08:58:00.002-04:00

In today's Globe and Mail, I review the three Canadian books nominated for this year's Griffin Poetry Prize. Here are a few words from the review:

Crabwise to the Hounds, by Jeramy Dodds, Coach House, 70 pages, $16.95

...his poems resonate physically with cunningly crafted language while they successfully amuse the intellect. He balances form, content, entertainment and ingenuity without giving any indication that any ingredient is more or less important than the others.

Revolver, by Kevin Connolly, Anansi, 82 pages, $18.95

What astounds the reader is the virtuosity with which Connolly wields all the poetic tools at his disposal. And this artistic multiplicity is not some elaborate masquerade. Connolly isn't pretending to be 45 different kinds of poet. Here, he is 45 different kinds of poet, and each is the authentic Kevin Connolly.

The Sentinel, by A.F. Moritz, Anansi, 88 pages, $18.95

There is something reassuring in art of this calibre; it reminds us how things matter. Moritz's voice is unmistakable. His readers, his admiring peers and his reviewers have long felt this, but it has become so obvious that it must finally be said: A.F. Moritz is one of the true master poets of his generation.

Read the entire review here.

The Griffin Prize Presents the Shortlists of Pure Love and Awesomeness!

2009-04-07T10:41:00.006-04:00

The Canadian Shortlist

Revolver
Kevin Connolly
House of Anansi Press

Crabwise to the Hounds
Jeramy Dodds
Coach House Books

The Sentinel
A. F. Moritz
House of Anansi Press

The International Shortlist

The Lost Leader
Mick Imlah
Faber and Faber

Life on Earth
Derek Mahon
Gallery Press

Rising, Falling, Hovering
C. D. Wright
Copper Canyon Press

Primitive Mentor
Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press

I really believe this might be the one of the strongest overall shortlists in the history of the prize. I don't have a beef with any of the inclusions. The readings are going to be great!

Here are my predictions:

Canadian: A.F. Moritz

International: C.D. Wright

Mark Medley interviews Stuart Ross for National Poetry Month

2009-04-03T11:22:00.004-04:00

Toronto's Stuart Ross has been a fixture in Canadian poetry for decades, and is the author of many, many books of poetry, including (2008),Dead Cars in Managua I Cut My Finger (2007), Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003), Razovsky at Peace (2001) and Farmer Gloomy's New Hybrid (1999). He's the poetry editor for Mansfield Press, the poetry and fiction editor at This Magazine, and since 1979 Ross has run his own micropress, Proper Tales Press. He also runs poetry "bootcamps" and workshops across the country.

Can you remember the first poem you ever wrote? What was it about?
Don't recall the first poem I ever wrote, but the first I ever sent out for publication went like this: "If you double a bubble / you'd have two bubbles / but this information isn't worth / a pile of rubble." I was about 10 years old. It got rejected.

The rest is here.

UPDATE:
Keep checking back. They're doing another one each day. George Murray, Anne Simpson, Zach Wells, and Carolyn Smart so far. Click here for the default page.

30 in 30 for National Poetry Month

2009-04-01T11:35:00.004-04:00

Well, April is upon us, and it's time to celebrate poetry. For National Poetry Month, Julie Wilson's blog Seen Reading brings us a wonderful project called 30 in 30. The premise is that thirty poets read a poem of their own and also a poem written by someone else. I read my poem "The Difficulty of Forgiving Summer" from my book Between the Walls, and I also read the poem "The Sheep Child" (about which you may read a marvellous essay by Maria Hummel here) by the American poet James Dickey.

The list of poets Julie Wilson has brought together for this project is both diverse and impressive, and the poems of course are marvellous. Listen to Karen Solie's "Tractor" or Nick Thran's "The Age of the Pineapple" or Gil Adamson's "Finally" and you'll see what I mean.

And Bravo to Julie to bringing it all together.

April Fool's Day is tomorrow. Stuart Ross launches Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. Be there.

2009-03-31T18:11:00.006-04:00

Wednesday, April 1
7:30 pm
Clinton's Taven, 693 Bloor Street West (at Christie)
Readings by Stuart Ross, Heather Hogan and Steve Venright
Music by Sodapop
A free event

"If this book doesn't win the Giller, I'm gonna start pushing buttons!"
--Paul Vermeersch

Jacob McArthur Mooney reigns supreme!

2009-03-30T15:34:00.005-04:00

JMM (seen here in an undated photo plotting the demise of his arch-nemesis, super spy James Bond) has won the grand prize at an event some people are calling Harbourfront's Poetry Idol, and other people are calling the Jacob McArthur Mooney ass-kicking show.

But seriously, for me, the night had many highlights, including Ryan Kamstra's reading from Into the Drowned World in a style that can only be called hoboho, and Johanna Skibsrud, author of Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, reading an unpublished poem called "I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being" (this is one of the best poems I've heard at a reading in years, folks, seriously! And I've been to a lot of readings), and so much more. It was a fine night of readings by a bunch of talented young poets, which makes JMM's win all the more impressive. Congratulations, Jake!

Bringing Irving Layton Wine

2009-03-24T14:09:00.007-04:00

This short film documents poet Patrick Woodcock's 2001 journey to the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Montreal to bring his hero, the legendary poet Irving Layton, a bottle of wine. It is a humble token of a young poet's admiration and gratitide for this maestro's life and work. Though he was ailing from Alzheimer's disease at the time of filming, the archival recordings of Layton at the height of his vigour used in the film demonstrate his powerful charisma and literary genius.

Fellow poet John Stiles is behind the camera, and the film was edited by Ian Harvey with music by The Church.

Later this spring, Patrick Woodcock will launch his latest collection of poetry Always Die Before Your Mother.

I'm reading this week at Livewords

2009-03-24T11:39:00.005-04:00

I'll be reading old and new poems this Thursday as part of the Livewords Reading Series. Here's the details:

At Cervejaria, 842 College Street (just west of Ossington)
7:00 p.m. Doors Open
7:30 p.m. Open Mic Sign-Up
8:00 p.m. Performances Commence

Also reading are Jacob McArthur Mooney, author of The New Layman's Almanac, and Guy Ewing.

NOTE: See below. The open stage will be for cover poems only! I love this idea. I'm imaginging a good half-hour of honest tributes to great poets. It should prevent a good number of the bad-poetry remoras who attach themselves to these open-mic things from showing up.

† OPEN MIC CONTEST: Best Reading of a cover poem - $50 Cash Prize; sign-up and get your poem at 7:30 PM. Contest judges will pick the winner.

New book acquisitions

2009-03-10T16:33:00.009-04:00

New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, is an absolute feast. It contains more than 400 poems from more than 40 languages by 209 poets whose first writing was published after 1970. I'll be dipping into this book for a long time to come.

All Our Grandfathers Are Ghosts by Pasha Malla is delightful, one of the funniest books I've read in a years. I would recommend it to anyone, and it only costs ten bucks. So don't be a cheapskate, go buy a copy.

This was a gift from my good friend Stuart Ross. The Witness of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz is simply marvellous. Clear thoughts about the art and craft or poetry that are clearly written, eloquent, elegant, and profoundly intelligent: this is what literary theory was meant to be. This book is a gem.

Expressway by Sina Queyras is her fourth collection of poems. Her poetry can't be summed up easily. Each of her books are very different in tone, temperment and approach, but always executed with technical flair and heady intellect. This one raises questions about our social values and interconnectedness as embodied by our physical infrastructure. Intruiging, to be sure.

New book acquisitions

2009-02-16T13:53:00.015-05:00

The Book Collector by Tim Bowling: a new collection from one of the most consistently excellent narrative poets writing in Canada today. Bowling is a true craftsman, and it’s always a pleasure to have a book of new poems from him.

Ashland by Gil Adamson: probably one of my two or three favourite books of poetry written in Canada this decade. I lost my old copy, or lent it to someone and can’t remember, so I had to buy it again. If you don’t have it, get it and read it as soon as possible.

Halflife by Meghan O’Rourke: a debut collection from another young American. I recognized her name as the new poetry editor for The Paris Review, so I picked it up and thumbed through it. There were many impressive blurbs on the back cover. Yes, I sometimes notice these things. Inside the book, I read a couple poems that I liked, including one about a tiger at the Bronx zoo, so I decided to buy the book.

Seaway: New & Selected Poems by Todd Swift: Todd has been living across the pond for a long while, and I think it’s a good idea for him to put out a new and selected with Salmon Poetry. Here’s a poet who’s building a solid reputation for himself on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s a fine ambassador for Canadian poetry in Britain, and this book offers an excellent opportunity to get caught up on the first decade of his work.