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Last Updated: May 12th, 2010 - 07:00:04 |
Essays
Anne Cimon: Treasures from the Poetic Store (tribute to Sonja Skarstedt)
As a poet, Sonja Skarstedt was present, open to the now in the material world that she observed so minutely. She recorded people, places and things in a rhythmic style, a knowingness of where she was. Joy and good humour in her poetry gave a lift to the reader.
Sep 22, 2009, 05:18
Essays
A Poet's Journey: Stephen Morrissey
My test of poetry has always been when hearing or reading someone else’s poems, am I moved to want to write a poem of my own? If I am, then the poem is a source of inspiration for me. Inspiration means that the poem is inspiring, it breathes Spirit into the reader. The experience of writing poems is life affirming and it is always exciting to begin writing a new poem.
Sep 5, 2009, 10:12
Essays
The Role of Little Magazines in Canada
The little magazine is a recognizable and peculiar phenomenon associated with the growth of the modern poetry movement in this century. In Canada, this type of magazine can be said to have appeared only after 1940, although a number of forerunners having some claim to be ranked as little magazines appeared earlier. It is with the period after 1940 that the kind of literary activity and movement‑poetry that had arisen in England just before World War I and in America during the 1920s began to flourish in Canada.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:31
Essays
Louis Dudek: Canada’s “Ideogram of Reality
In the final analysis, it is lucidity and concreteness that most readily manifest themselves in Dudek’s work, hence my subtitle, “Ideogram of Reality,” a phrase which comes from his essay “T. S. Eliot.” Finally, to capture both the range and immediacy of Dudek’s thought, I have sprinkled the interview with quotations from a few of his many books of poetry and criticism.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essays
The Ego in History
The Egyptians in their mythology had a visual organ, an Eye, moving about the universe: so that the Eye of God, however you spell it, comes before the “I” of man. In fact, it is some time before the individual poet and artist learns to say “I”.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essays
Functional Poetry
Tell em to open their mouths, you want to see their back teeth, their tonsils. Tell em to say AHHHH. Most Canadian poetry is written with the mouth closed. Ask them to write again when they think they’ve said something straight from the shoulder, no monkey business. Goddamm decoration. All icing and no cake. All cake and no meat. We want something to chew into in a poem, not just words.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essays
Louis Dudek: Critical Overview and Context
There have been only three major articles published—all in Canadian Literature. Even the reviews are slim. His early books received the same two or three notices one would expect for a new poet, but his later works have seldom done much better.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essays
The Sculpture of Poetry
Now that the feuds have died down it would no longer be appropriate for A. J. M. Smith to cry: “Layton shall tingle in Canadian air / And echo answer Dudek everywhere.” Omitting those polemics and parodies, salutary as they have been in stirring up the potage canadien…
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essays
Patterns of Recent Canadian Poetry
In a recent count of book‑publishing poets writing in Canada in English I was able to put down no less than fifty names. In making up this list, simply in the act of writing down names in their geographical, chronological, or various literary orders, a series of patterns seemed to emerge, a map of the current literary scene. Looking at these patterns and groups, one could easily see relations between them; our poetry is more self‑contained and unified at present than either English or American poetry can be…
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
Essays
The State of Canadian Poetry: 1954
Poetry today is not a popular art; Canadian poetry is even less known than English poetry in general; but as art, it is poetry, not prose, which will in the end prove to be the successful literary medium of this century. We should by now begin to realize—what our newspaper reviewers don't even suspect—that the vast majority of books, novels mainly, that reach the public nowadays, have no real pretension and can never have any place as literature, as permanent art.
Jun 24, 2009, 00:01
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