Recent interviews
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An Interview with Ós Pressan Clarise Foster: Starting a publishing venture in Canada these days is a pretty ambitious venture — but it seems that the publishing industry for books in Iceland is quite robust, so I am wondering at what point during the workshop did the discussion of writing turn to one of publishing and how did that discussion turn into plans to create your own publishing house? Ós Pressan: You’ve caught us at a great ...
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alternative fluency Clarise Foster: How does a piece of poetry/art take root for you creatively? And how might you begin to work on a piece, does it most often begin as/with text? a rawlings: Relationship. With land, self, friend, language. I’ve been running in counter-clockwise circles on North Atlantic foreshores. To make contact with. To land as in to arrive as in to touch. Down. Deeper, farther, under. To under-stand. ...
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An interview with Jeramy Dodds CLARISE FOSTER: One the first official acts of the initial Icelandic immigrants when they arrived in New Iceland, a reserve on the southwest shores of Lake Winnipeg, in 1875 was to name their first town site Gimli—a place described in your recent translation of the Poetic Edda as the ever-after paradise of the gods. After fleeing extremely harsh environmental and economic conditions in Iceland, including ...
New poetry
- untethered is it my blood that makes me wander? / the diaspora of my soul scattered / over many lands / the ...
- The day dawns on and undoes us The wet sand and sweat that mortared / our hands since dusk scorched / and mouldered to dust. Still / / ...
- Gimli/Kanada / Icelander, 6 ½ fet, 250 lbs / (höfuðið samsvarandi / tjúguskegg (rauðlitt) / undan fornmanninum / ESK / ...
- Blue Spruce It stands up / for wildness / in the face of the civil / lies told by the humming wires / overhead in the ...
- Wreckage When Grimsvötn’s eruption wiped / out a steel bridge, floodwater bending / the massive beams like origami, / ...
Essays and reviews
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Review: Once in Blockadia by Stephen Collis Once in Blockadia is Stephen Collis’s sixth solo full-length book of poems (he also collaborated with Jordan Scott for 2013’s DECOMP). It comprises five titled suites, two of which are a 12-page meditative poem (“Home at Gasmere”) and an even longer serial ...
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Review: The Significance of Moths by Shirley Camia Toronto poet Shirley Camia maps the immigrant experience through lyric minimalism and vivid imagery in her second collection, The Significance of Moths. Divided into six sections — “In the Palm of an Evening,” “The Portrait Unravelling,” “Humbled Knowing,” “A ...
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A Logos No One Can Agree On (Part 1 of “Groundwork: Tracing the Tradition of Rhetoric in Poetry”)
It's been about 100 years since a coterie of Modernist poets exiled rhetoric from poetics. There have been outsiders and outliers, of course, but for the most part, the Modernists have been so successful that the mere hint of rhetoric in a poem is enough for it to be castigated as non-literary. Poetic discourse has ...
