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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
