How do you decide what to read? This question came up at a lunch with friends recently, and once the subject started rolling around in my head I began finding other writers who had things to say about it. One friend sent me a link to this article from Brainpickings with excerpts from an essay … Continue reading One book leads to another
Category: Poetry
The art of looking and writing
How do you write about another art form? Can you really convey the visual in words? Poets use language to evoke a visual image for the reader all the time. But somehow, writing in response to another art form has always seemed a little problematic to me. I was not sure why one would do it. If … Continue reading The art of looking and writing
Jay Macpherson
Another Canadian poet has died recently: Jay Macpherson passed away on March 24. She was, according to Quill and Quire, one of “Canada’s finest— and arguably most underappreciated— poets.” Reading an assessment like that always makes me want to find out more. I knew of Jay Macpherson, very peripherally (she contributed some hymn translations for the … Continue reading Jay Macpherson
Discoveries: Colleen Thibaudeau
Colleen Thibaudeau’s obituary in the Feb. 9 Globe and Mail was intriguing in a couple of ways. For one thing, I had never heard her name before. This in itself is nothing new; even in the relatively small world of Canadian poetry I do encounter well-established poets I’ve never heard of. Having belatedly discovered Thibaudeau, … Continue reading Discoveries: Colleen Thibaudeau
Objects and memory
There are certain small objects packed away in a box in the attic, or tucked into the back of a desk drawer, that I will probably never get rid of, and this poem by Sharon Olds shows brilliantly the reason why. In “Toth Farry” (the spelling borrowed from a note her child once wrote to … Continue reading Objects and memory
Poetry by heart
April is National Poetry Month, and rather than write about how we should all read more poetry (that’s just a basic assumption), I’ll suggest something more specific: go back to a poem you memorized in school, and re-learn it. Memorizing comes with repetition, but when you no longer repeat the poem, lines tend to go … Continue reading Poetry by heart
Giving literature away
Saskatchewan writer Don Kerr’s latest poetry collection, The dust of just beginning (2010), has two interesting things on the copyright page. First, the book is under a Creative Commons license, under the terms of which anyone can “copy, distribute and transmit the work” for non-commercial purposes, as long as the author is properly credited. Second, … Continue reading Giving literature away
How to ruin a perfectly good poem, and why
The prolific American poet W.D. Snodgrass, in his book De/Compositions, asks the question: What makes a good poem good? and what happens when you remove that quality? The short answer is that you spoil the poem, but the particular ways of spoiling poems are what make this book so intriguing. Snodgrass takes poems by W.H. Auden, … Continue reading How to ruin a perfectly good poem, and why
Out of the ordinary
The genius of much folk music, whether traditional or contemporary, is that it takes perfectly ordinary situations and makes them interesting, significant, even mythical. Love, friendship, birth and death, natural beauty— all these are common enough, but all feel distinctive and unique to the one experiencing them. Hearing a song about the very thing happening … Continue reading Out of the ordinary
Discoveries
I’ve been roaming through this old anthology, published in the 1920s and entitled, with great simplicity, The Canadian Poetry Book. Without even looking at the preface or the endnotes you can tell it’s a school text. The names of Doris Morgan and her sisters from Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan are written on the cover and flyleaf. One … Continue reading Discoveries