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April 11, 2017
Alice Burdick on Poetry Exercises
My next few posts as Writer in Residence here at Open Book will feature short interviews with Canadian poets discussing their relationship to poetry prompts and exercises. They'll talk about what they ...
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April 13, 2017
Canisia Lubrin on Poetry Exercises
Next up in my interview series with poets on their relationships to poetry prompts and exercises is Canisia Lubrin. She was born in St. Lucia and serves on the editorial board of the Humber Literary Review ...
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April 17, 2017
Susie Berg on Poetry Exercises
The latest poet featured in this series on poetry prompts and exercises is Susie Berg. She's the author of two full-length poetry collections from Piquant Press, including her most recent, All This Blood. ...
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April 16, 2014
Puzzle
At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my students a Seamus Heaney poem, “A Personal Helicon,” cut up into a puzzle of words, running the gamut from eight “a’s” to one “you” and “your” ...
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April 15, 2014
The Best Words
Sometimes I’m haunted by Coleridge’s nifty definition of a poem as the best words in their best order. If I try to say it quickly several times in a row, “order” starts to sound like “odour.” ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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April 04, 2014
Fame
Patrick Friesen is a true lyric poet, open and honest, singing more often than talking. His poems are almost bodiless, his words slowly turning into rivers. In “Earth’s Crude Gravities,” language ...
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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 ...
