Search
-
April 14, 2014
Ideas
I keep a list of things I think I want to write about. Back when the list was a more manageable size, I’d tackle my ideas at enough of a distance for me to have processed the simple stuff, the details, ...
-
April 11, 2014
Revision
It’s a risky thing to put a poem out of sight in order to let it germinate or steep, whatever the science of hope might call the process. Some poems only turn up posthumously and are declared masterpieces ...
-
April 10, 2014
Perfection
I’ve been running a writing workshop all winter and, once again, marveling at the courage that it takes to tackle the tricks and complexities of the English language. The writers are exposing themselves ...
-
April 09, 2014
Madness
Catching up on the frippery of “Downton Abbey,” I enjoyed Maggie Smith’s trenchant Dowager Countess of Grantham listening to her son wax a mite lyrically about land and history and then exclaiming ...
-
April 08, 2014
Touch of Class
The other day, I agreed to read one of my own poems at a sixtieth wedding anniversary. There were fewer trees on the main street of the small town just north of Toronto than the last time I’d been there, ...
-
April 07, 2014
Compression
In Stephanie Bolster’s “A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth,” the writing is acutely compressed, each word standing in for what in another poet’s hands might take pages. There’s no room ...
-
April 03, 2014
Voice
Maureen McLane’s book, “My Poets,” goes beyond poetics and criticism into a kind of channeling of the poets themselves: her versions of their work, her obsessions with their obsessions. She not ...
-
April 02, 2014
Poetics of Place
I’ve been thinking about the poetics of place: Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills; Don Domanski’s wilderness of a cosmos; Karen Solie’s truck stops and motels; Tim Bowling’s fishing boats. It’s ...
-
April 01, 2014
Welcome to National Poetry Month
I always feel a bit uncomfortable when Poetry Month commences. It’s like I’ve had a secret for the last eleven months, no one really interested in how I’ve spent my days, successfully managing to ...
-
December 10, 2017The Moth
I do not nominate the moth, pallid creature of night, to be any sort of talisman or totem. Moths are vandals, eating your heirloom woolens. These Visigoths deserve summary execution. No last meal of tartan ...
