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April 25, 2019What Agents Are Looking For: Interview with Marilyn Biderman
One afternoon, when I was feeling particularly angsty, I tweeted out to my followers, “How do BIPOC writers get agents?” I received some encouraging responses, as well as some that had me questioning ...
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April 24, 2019Ben Ladouceur on Finding His Title Through Art and Tomatoes, Alice Munro, & the Allure of a Bossy Title
Ben Ladouceur, author of the acclaimed poetry collection Otter (and former Open Book columnist!) returns this spring with a characteristically smart, witty, emotionally sophisticated collection, Mad ...
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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 18, 2019Brenda Leifso on the "Wonderful Odd Ordinariness" of Poetry & an Act of Kindness that Led Her to Writing
Brenda Leifso's lush new poetry collection Wild Madder (Brick Books) delves into the strange, long process of finding one's way. Leifso is unafraid to let the rawness of disorientation, loss of identity, ...
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April 17, 2019Read Three Powerful Poems from Treaty# by Armand Garnet Ruffo
What does the word treaty mean? Deceptively simple, it's a word with great weight and Armand Garnet Ruffo spreads the word and its meaning open in his powerful new poetry collection Treaty# (Wolsak ...
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April 17, 2019Creative Life
I was asked to give a keynote address at the launch of the student literary journal, Scarborough Fair at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The theme was “The Creative Life”. As their Writer in ...
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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 10, 2019Ian Thomas Shaw on Drawing on his Work and Travel in the Middle East to Write His Debut Novel
Ian Thomas Shaw's debut novel, Quill of the Dove (Guernica Editions), follows French journalist Marc Taragon, a seasoned pro who has been reporting on and from the Middle East for decades. Just as he ...
