an interview with Maureen Hynes

CV2: Canada is a country made of many cultural, religious and spiritual traditions. How would you say this has changed poetry in this country? How has this diversity impacted on your own writing?

The intensity and engagement, the verve and the sheer talent of so many new poets who may never gain a national voice is so welcome and refreshing to me. These are the young writers, rappers & dub poets, women performance poets, gay and lesbian writers who claim their bodies and their sexualities as fit subjects for poetry, yes. Working class writers and immigrant poets writing about their experiences in their new country, in their home countries. I hunt these poets out for Our Times [the national labour magazine which I am poetry editor for], I can't get enough of them, and I think Hallelujah! when I hear this work, these voices that may not get heard outside of the downtown bars across our country. I wish these kinds of poets were having more of an impact, but they still seem to be a sort of unrecognized cadre of "underclass" poets.