Writer-in-Residence BlogTag
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February 12, 2019
Poetry School: The insincerity of Louise Glück
In my invitation for you to join me this month at Poetry School, I promised to offer up morsels of wisdom about writing poetry from an assortment of essays on the topic. Today I dig into an essay by American ...
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February 08, 2019
Poetry School: Keeping it real with Wordsworth
Lyric poetry. We say it casually, but what does it mean? The musical connotation is there, even if we don’t accompany our lyric poems with music. An inherent music, then. The lifts and falls. Rhythm. ...
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February 04, 2019
Poetry School: An invitation
Over the next month I invite you to join me at Poetry School. I will not be the teacher, but merely the messenger, a fellow student. Though the balance may one day shift, for me writing poetry is about ...
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August 14, 2016
Why I Led a Boycott Against Stuart Ross
I spent the first forty-five minutes of my own Toronto book launch this past spring standing outside the venue holding up a sign calling for a boycott of myself. This led to an enthusiastic round of jeers ...
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August 12, 2016
Pleasant Days … with Stu and Crad
My basement excavations — the chaotic and ecstatic unpacking of dozens of boxes of cryogenically preserved books — recently produced a copy of a chapbook I haven’t thought about in decades. Pleasant ...
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August 09, 2016
Doing My Song and Dance
I sent out my first godawful poem for publication when I was ten or eleven years old. I sent it to the Toronto Daily Star; I obviously hadn’t done my market research, since they didn’t publish poetry. ...
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August 07, 2016
Introducing Zalman Nehemiah Razovsky … Maybe.
I’ve been wrestling with it for years, and I pondered it a bit in my essay “How Jew You Do?” in Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2015). Should I change my name — Ross ...
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August 05, 2016
Debby Florence on Canadian Poetry
As someone who was crazy about a lot of American poets from a very young age, I'm still caught off-balance when an American turns out to be a big fan of Canadian poetry. debby florence is one such American. ...
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August 02, 2016
THE Incredible Shrinking Writer
It’s almost six years now since, after nearly half a century in Toronto, I moved to Cobourg, pop. 18,500. My adopted home — "Ontario’s Feel Good Town" — is just a ninety-minute commute east by ...
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July 31, 2016
Service Industry Hell (Part 6): Service Industry Heaven!
A lot of the inspiration for my new book, Congratulations On Everything, came from the things I saw while working in bars, restaurants, and hotels, and from the experiences of friends who did the same. ...