Snapshots
A quick look at the poetry world beyond CV2.
Essays & Reviews
- Formally Speaking: Screaming in Pentameter In my first day in the Berryman archive, browsing through box 5, folder 6, I come upon the first draft of “Dream Song 4,” which famously begins: Filling her compact and delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. The astonishing thing about this draft is its closeness to the final version, including the ...
- Industrial Roots: Listening in Windsor, Ontario When weeds grow through concrete you understand something although as a six-year-old child I wasn’t sure what. Being led by the hand up across and through the streets of Windsor, Ontario by my young single mother as she job and apartment hopped trying to make ends meet. Waitress, cashier, macramé teacher at the YMCA, Moy ...
- Ecopoetics and the Radical Lyric The project of engaging with “ecopoetics” always resonates with that part of myself that wants art to be civil, to be community-minded, to matter beyond itself. At the same time, it alarms that part of myself that wants to make art — a process that can be messy, selfish, dangerous, a process I want to keep free from ...
- The Integrated Life Although there are certainly relationships that rise above this standing reserve mentality (I’m thinking of my beloved bicycle or maybe your favourite mug), it seems equally obvious that when we strip the earth of its trees and minerals and oils as we are doing, we are treating it as mere fuel. I say “we” because however ...
- Figure and Ground: An Ecopoetic Travelogue July 1: Canada Day: it’s interesting how you can brag We stop at the Terry Fox Memorial outside Thunder Bay and watch people from several countries weep at the foot of the statue. Terry ran halfway across the country on one leg in 1980, the year I turned eighteen. Like a friend of mine that year, he had osteogenic ...
- Formally Speaking Last year I led a poetry workshop with a group of about 20 older and mostly retired people, nearly all women. At our first meeting we agreed to continue with more or less the same format they’d followed in previous years, where each participant read something and then others commented. At first I wondered why I enjoyed ...
