Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s coming February 21st to Ottawa at the NAC… Each year the national government’s public broadcasting CBC hosts a poetry slam competition, the Poetry FaceOff. It has already come to a close in a few cities. Competitors from coast to coast to coast will be hosted to strut their poetic stuff again as this round […]

Currently reading Ron Silliman‘s The Chinese Notebook where he ponders what effects what we think fits the page, or suits it. He gets into zen stream, 21. Poem in a notebook, manuscript, magazine, book, reprinted in an anthol- ogy. Scripts and contexts differ. How could it be the same poem? It bothers me to be […]

How long has Portage been going at Arc? How had I missed this portal to all kinds of poetry organizations and events until now?

“Self-consciousness in writing, as it does in life, open up a kind of delay between impulse and action, between thought and word. That pause—as these examples show—offers the opportunity for calculated intensifications and angularities that would never occur in “natural,” uninformed speech.” — Tony Hoagland [via Brian Campbell]

Sonny Williams in Contemporary Poetry Review talks about various collections of Mary Oliver and how the unflagging optimism makes for one note that fatigues the way Easy Listening can. She creates amiable closeness through questions and second person. The tone is conversational, in the sense of sitting down with tea speaking in iambic rounds, even […]