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What if all that junk in your head came out? You don’t have to have “mental issues” to know that there are rules in conversation, things that can be said and things that should remain hidden or reserved. I always seem to have Edgar’s caveat at the end of King Lear in my head: “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say,” that next-to-impossible ideal that is supposed to keep tragedy at bay.
Jeffrey Donaldson via Poetry Daily

Poets include Amanda Jernigan, Jeffery Donaldson, James Langer, Warren Heiti, Leigh Kotsilidis, Linda Besner, Asa Boxer, Mark Callanan, Shoshanna Wingate, Nick Thran, Anne Compton, Karen Schindler, Rhonda Douglas, Ross Leckie, the ghost of Richard Outram and many more.

“There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else,” he said in an early work, whereby he could both use flowers as an image of lovely womanhood and speak of pathology as a “flower garden.” The principle made for great mobility, for constant transformations that might affect a writer in late years somewhat like trying to run a hundred yards in ten seconds flat.
Kenneth Burke/New York Review of Books

Susan Musgrave, Lorna Crozier and Sharon Thesen, three vital, important Canadian poets, manage to do this. All three have been publishing for at least 20 years, reside in British Columbia (in fact, all have poems that take place on or refer to Haida Gwaii) and it is fair to say that they are all at the top of their games. In terms of tone and poetic style, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Their new books are simply stunning.
Zoe Whittall/The Globe and Mail

It was awful to turn on the computer to the news yesterday that Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch had died in a car accident on Tuesday night, returning home to Leduc from a reading, mere days before his 84th birthday.

This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, the Review’s editors have chosen thirty poems from the archives and will post one each day. Please bookmark this page and visit us throughout the month for new poems. You can also follow @nybooks on Twitter or visit our Facebook page for a link to the day’s poem.

I think poetry will always have a role to play. I’m not sure whether paper will wrap Kindles like the old game. What will survive and what I am conscious of as a poet is the orality of the form. The spoken word resides at the heart of the type of poetry I try to write — whether formal or free verse. The poem has to speak to an audience.