branta

Canadians already read Margaret Atwood. Was there any person actually interested in Canada Reads who hadn’t read The Handmaid’s Tale? Ditto Life of Pi, ditto The Stone Angel, ditto A Fine Balance, ditto A Complicated Kindness. Again, I do not mean to disparage these novels; I unreservedly love Handmaid and Life of Pi, I dig Complicated, I’ve never even read Balance, and my views on Stone Angel are likely distorted by the overall unhappiness of my high school years and cannot be trusted.

I was incensed by this poem! Enraged almost. It was just not so. The reason for my outrage revolved specifically around the phrase ‘a red wheelbarrow/glazed with rain water’. No wheelbarrow of my acquaintance was a) red or b) so pristine as to let water glaze it. Generally wheelbarrows were mucky things, rusty, dented with a wobbly wheel. They sit outside collecting rainwater and rusting until they are needed to shovel muck and move mud. As a farmers child I KNEW what wheelbarrows really looked like.

They are the forms that break new ground, use unexpected combinations to express either new ideas or long standing ones that benefit from little shocks or big pushes. They can ask big questions. They can offer researched answers. But after looking at them side by side for about a decade I’ve come to a conclusion that their root difference is: new music actively gathers to it an audience whereas poetry seems content being left alone.

The poem state is manic: written as if it talks fast, talks much, talks an ear off; it grasps what it can, perhaps stays too long, but it is glitteringly present, evanescent, has the amiability of a high. But the real danger of the poem is the change it makes in its poet: convinced that the poem is transcribed from the muse, pure dictation, the poet is gulled into thinking that the writing will be lasting, will be a contribution, and the poet, heady, not yet coming down, has the manic state of his art:
-from Maisonneuve

Beth Powning launching The Sea Captain’s Wife (Knopf Canada) at Sussex, NB Royal Canadian Legion. Yes that’s a boat prow.

“Why aren’t Canada’s top literary prizes employing actual literary critics on their juries?” asks Thomas Hodd in The Globe and Mail’s Tuesday Essay

“Recently, the National Post printed an opinion piece by staff writer Marni Soupcoff on the subject of the new Toronto Poet Laureate, Dionne Brand. Entitled ‘A Job No Outspoken Poet Would Want,’ the article essentially claims that the $10,000/year that the city will spend on the Laureate position would be better used elsewhere, that having a poet Laureate is gratuitous, and that Brand herself is a poor choice for the position, because of her ‘Marxist feminism,’”
Adam Sol/Bookninja

On the door to the gallery was a hand printed note stating simply, “Event Cancelled”. At that, I told myself at least I was saved from the reading part. But by the time I got home I was far more disappointed than relieved. I quickly checked my email and answering machine expecting some sort of message explaining what had gone wrong, but there was nothing. And that nothing continued day after day.