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June 14, 2019Poetry Reigns at the Trillium Prize with Winners Dionne Brand and Robin Richardson
Dionne Brand and Robin RichardsonIt's was an all-poetry year for the Trillium Book Awards, announced last night in Toronto. Both the Trillium Book Award (an open genre prize) and, of course, the Trillium ...
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February 04, 2019Poetry 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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February 28, 2019Poetry School: Dana Gioia on the matter of poetry
Twenty-eight years ago US poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” was published in the Atlantic, sparking “a firestorm of debate and discussion” over the role of the poet in contemporary ...
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February 16, 2019Poetry School: Denise Levertov on form as a revelation
After reading poet Denise Levertov’s 1965 essay “Some Notes on Organic Form,” I had a revelation: I write poetry mainly in organic form. Given that the notion of the work of art as a self-germinating ...
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February 22, 2019Poetry School: Feminist re-vision with Ms. Rich
Feminist revisionist mythologies represent a vibrant stream in mid-to-late 20th- and 21st-century poetry. I’m thinking of Muriel Rukeyser’s Orpheus; Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and Feminine ...
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February 24, 2019Poetry School: Getting specific with Amiri Baraka
Writing is reading, teaching is learning. As I said in my invitation for readers to join me this month-long online Poetry School, I expected to benefit the most from these researches into the craft and ...
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February 08, 2019Poetry 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 20, 2019Poetry School: Rilke’s advice against advice
My aversion to the poetry workshop grew quickly many years ago. Let me correct that: my aversion to the untutored, undisciplined poetry workshop.Although I’ve been writing poems off and on since I was ...
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February 12, 2019Poetry 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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October 05, 2021Poetry Should "Be Surprised By What it Says": David O'Meara on Why Poems Shouldn't Try to Be Poems
Canadian writers know Ottawa-based poet David O'Meara not only for his acclaimed collections but also his contributions to the community. From serving as the founding Artistic Director for VERSeFest ...