Happy Birthday Poetry Quebec!

 

Poetry Quebec (PQ) celebrated its first birthday yesterday on the Fête National. Its mission - to remember the past, the present and future of English language poetry and poets of Quebec - has succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. Over the course of the year, PQ has interviewed, reviewed and presented poems and articles about and by English language poets of Quebec. Contributors wrote on a variety of topics including the founding of QSPELL/QWF while its editors produced soapboxes and editorials tackling, among other things, the state of reviewing and the meager payment of poets for their work. PQ reprinted early Canadian poems written in this province; it also invited poets to take a position on war and to write about it.

 

Various theme issues appeared this past year including the inaugural one dedicated to Louis Dudek and the highly popular third issue titled "War & Silence." One of its community outreach successes was partnering with CBC Radio's Homerun to run a successful poetry contest.  For a one-year-old, Poetry Quebec has learned and achieved a lot!  It has established the fact that we were, are and will be here.

 

In one short year, not only did PQ manage to produce four issues but it has had 468,225 hits with a high point of 89,559 in January 2010. PQ also has the rare distinction of having each of its pages indexed by Google and archived via CACHED, making the publication accessible even if it is offline. Moreover, every page of PQ has been customized for the Google research and crawling indexing system. To cap it all off, the National Library of Canada has requested that PQ be archived in its system.

 

We are very proud of our achievements and applaud our contributors for the quality of their work. To our readers, a big thank-you for your support.  We look forward to an even more fruitful second year. 

 

 

The Editors