Snapshots
A quick look at the poetry world beyond CV2.
Essays & Reviews
- Rathven (Part 2 of “Homestead: Venturing into the Poetics of Place”) The imagination of going home so frequently means going ‘back’ in both space and time. Back to the old familiar things, to the way things used to be… the truth is that you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. ...
- Where to Begin (Part 1 of “Homestead: Venturing into the Poetics of Place”) “I’m going home,” I tell the cab driver, as he loads my suitcases into the trunk. He smiles and says, “Alright then,” puts the car into gear and pulls away from the curb outside my house in Winnipeg. It’s 4:52 a.m. and we’re on our way to the Richardson International Airport, where I’ll board the 6:30 flight to Toronto en ...
- Making Art in Winnipeg To practice art in this particular town is risky. Like all particular towns, this one has its perils. Some say it’s the wind. Some say it’s the moment the summer sky’s split white by lightning. It’s the shadow of the peregrine falcon that haunts the high glass towers. It’s the black ice, the burning stubble, the reckless ...
- The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company The title of “Winnipeg Cold Storage Company” poses the question of collective memory and what it means to say that ‘things might be done with storage’? The problem of collective memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some ...
- Notes on Systems, with Winnipeg in Mind In recent years Winnipeg has had its reputation, at least in the visual arts, blossom internationally. With high profile group exhibitions in Ottawa, New York, San Francisco and Paris, artists from our prairie city have been talked about like never before. These exhibitions have favoured place over anything else, and ...
- found: one city one poet one voice & one love letter It took me a long time to call myself a writer. Even longer to put ‘poet’ next to my name. Back then, Rosanna Deerchild didn’t even exist. And if not for this place, none of it would have even happened. After graduating from my town’s only high school in ...
- Process and Parody, Reading and Writing I read Linda Besner’s debut The Id Kid (Véhicule, 2011) because I can’t imagine writing like this, for the perfect title, and because the book brims with energy, craft and humour. I suspect that she’s a process poet, but it’s too soon to tell. In “Dogwalker’s Lawsuit,” a typically satiric Besner poem, she appears to be ...
- Language that Burns: Remembering Adrienne Rich There are poets, and then there are poets. The first category is large and consists of all those who write poems. The second category is tiny and consists of those few in every generation who write poems as if the act is a matter of life and death, a personal striving that transcends the personal by virtue of its urgency ...
- Poetry Makes Love: On the Occasion of the Infinite in Poetry Mary Oliver is a poet who gives her attention to her natural surroundings and to a presence that she finds there. “The universe is full of radiant suggestion,” she writes. “Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever ...
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Review: Cantilevered Songs by John Lent John Lent composes in long loping lines, often in mellifluous sentences, rather than breaking his lines on phrase, or against the grain of his syntax, though he’ll also narrow down the line to a pneumatic drill on occasion too, or let it eddy and pool at the ...
