Modern and Normal
It’s National Poetry Month, so every Monday in April I will be reviewing/discussing a book of Canadian poetry.
Angela Hickman/Books Under Skin
Anyone who teaches literature knows that it can be really rewarding but also extremely challenging especially when you hear “poetry sucks” at least a few times a semester. Upon hearing negative poetry talk in the classroom I ask students what it is we use to mark the most important times—typically weddings, funerals, grads, births—in our lives.
Kerri Cull/The Book Fridge
Writing lyrics is a very different skill to writing effective poems, and the two disciplines rarely coincide. With this in mind, here’s a look at the best and the worst of musicians in poetry – starting with five whose work really should have stayed in their notebooks.
Tom Hawking/Flavorwire
Transcendental poets such as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, who were also inspired by and deeply connected to the physical environment, used nature to show what it meant to be human. They were convinced that immersion in nature can teach us to understand ourselves, and in an era when we spend less and less time outside (less than any other in history), Armstrong’s poetry is a powerful reminder of what we’re missing.
Megan Power/Chronicle Herald
In was Martin Heidegger who said “In the time of the world’s night, the poet utters the holy.” Indeed. But, who are those writers we tend to gravitate toward? Who embodies “greatness?”
Dean Rader/SF Gate
From the elegiac quality of “Fetal”, in which the speaker tells of a stillborn twin, the indelible understanding of timing in the way Donaldson breaks a line, to the wit and humour in poems such as “A Note To My Poem”, wherein the speaker addresses the poem as if it were a lover, and the ease of the transition from one stanza to another, Donaldson’s unerring fit of form to sense pervades.
Heather Craig/Telegraph-Journal
Writing poems is not just a matter of sitting in front of the computer; it also involves living a life, going to work, doing the dishes. Perhaps the real question is how we arrange our lives so that we live as fully and as interestingly as possible?
