Edward Carson Writers in Residence Archives
Edward Carson, writer and photographer, is twice winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal in Poetry and author of Knots, Birds Flock Fish School, and Taking Shape, as well as his most recent collection, Look Here Look Away Look Again. He lives in Toronto.
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April 29, 2019The Fireflies of Poetry
“At the heart of the universe is a steady, insistent beat: the sound of cycles in sync.” (Steven Strogatz, Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, 2015)What might ...
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April 24, 2019What a Poem Does, Not what it Means
In an earlier post, I wrote that both writer and reader should focus more on how a poem comes to be.We seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to understand what a poem means as opposed ...
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April 19, 2019The “Place” of Poetry and the Brain's GPS
And so in poetry we again come around to the notion of “place” – a map composed in the size of the world.Poetry explores, pulling itself through the filter and modifying axis of the brain adapting ...
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April 16, 2019A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection
We shape and are shaped by language. It orients who and where we are.The operational shape of a poem’s plan is always emergent; its layering is a rhetoric of substance and selection:POETIC LAYERINGdiscovery ...
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April 12, 2019A Map of Reading From Zero to Infinity
“Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually.” (Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading)Around ...
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April 09, 2019In Poetry, Some Assembly is Required!
A poem becomes a self-organizing model of the media and a mind’s neural networks.Each new electronic/digital medium through which we communicate has become a critical new partner in the evolution in ...
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April 05, 2019Don’t Stand Too Close to this Poetry!
Your computer/tablet/phone are listening . . . and learning . . . and not always in the way you might expect it to benefit you.Bruce Schneier wrote that “Surveillance is the business model of the internet.”Search ...
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April 02, 2019Poetry Intelligence and the Intelligence of Poetry
In fifty years, poetry will no longer resemble what we read today. Let’s riff a bit on some serious, playful, and radical thinking about how poetry, language and reading are changing, as well as ...