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HELLO, 2023
Paul Rode, Brenda Reading (oil on board, circa 1985)During 2021 and 2022, serving on two Canadian poetry awards committees, I was stirred in wide-ranging ways by more books and individual poems than...
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FRAGMENT, PUNCTURE, TIME: GILLIAN SZE IN CONVERSATION
Poet-scholar Gillian Sze's Quiet Night Think fuses prose and lyric into a hybrid whole that meditates on place, identity, tradition, adaptation, what to hold and how, and the language these things are...
View ArticleSHERI BENNING: FIELD REQUIEM, THREE PARTS
SHERI BENNINGfrom Let Them Rest (Field Requiem) …dies illa Solvet sæclum in favilla - Dies Irae1 Zephaniah It’s true what they say. We were warned: everything will be swept away,...
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DAVID O'MEARA: A POEM
David O'MearaDAYSWe keep forgetting something back there, don't we?We pop out the door, turn corners, the shops unchanged,but data nags like a black box has signalledfrom the wreckage, or a high voice...
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On David O'Meara's "Days"
Ottawa poet David O'Meara taking a short breakThe question that launches David O'Meara's poem "Days" turns on how we move through time and what we carry with us, as knowledge and memory of place, event...
View ArticleSarah Yi-Mei Tsiang: A Poem
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang#METOO"Language is the house with lamplight in its windows / visible across the fields...." --Anne MichaelsLanguage is the house with lamplight in its windowsbut the body is...
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Tolu Oloruntoba: A Poem
Tolu OloruntobaAD79 The Vesuvius horse --a gelding, obviously --harnessed still and petrifiedthese 1940 years,is saddled for the ridethe masters never madeto the mountains.All that grooming and...
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Maria Gacesa: A Poem
Maria GacesaARIA ON THE 3:50 TO ST-LAMBERTAll of this from two hands one heart phrases discourse digressnever one direct line rarely the bombast of surety music is insecure maybeit revisits things like...
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The Answer is Purple: Maria Gacesa in Conversation
Maria Gacesa chatted with me about her creative practice and her poem “Aria on the 3:50 to St-Lambert.” SUSAN GILLIS: How did you find your way to poetry--or it to you? MARIA GACESA: Ms Mitchell had a...
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A Certain Day: Beth Follett and the Intimacy of Voice
I begin this practice by choosing three poems—the two below, and a third, “Beads,” by Olga Sedakova, translated from the Russian by Martha Kelly. I read each one aloud, to experience the poem through...
View ArticleDreamy Liquidity: Frances Boyle Reads Gwendolyn MacEwen
Gwendolyn MacEwenDark Pines Under Water This land like a mirror turns you inwardAnd you become a forest in a furtive lake;The dark pines of your mind reach downward,You dream in the green of your...
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Frances Boyle: A Poem
Frances BoyleThe Sky is UnnaturalShrovetide, the banishing of winter A morning of dawn-treading, a rented cottage, a marshy lake. Yawning noon after sleepwalking. A paradeof tiny ants, redolent of old...
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Also No Fear: On Carl Phillips's "Cathedral"
Carl Phillips CATHEDRAL And suddenly - strangely - there was also no fear, either. As a horse in harness to what, inevitably, must break it. No torch; no lantern - and yet no...
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Hello from the Ocean: Ecotone 33
Vanessa Barragão, Bleached Coral, 2022Repurposed/discarded wool & lyocell, jute, LED lighting "Hello from the ocean," reads the first line of editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell's letter in a recent...
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Hideko Kono: Three Poems for Hiroshima
Yumie Kono, "Zone of Atomic Blast, Hiroshima, 1945 August 6, 8.15 A.M." YAKEATO MO MANATSU NO AME WA FURI SOSOGU NURE...
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In Memoriam, Louise Glück
13 October, 2023 -- Today I am mourning, like many, and in the midst of many griefs, the loss of the great poet Louise Glück. Her poems have been my steady companions throughout my writing life. Her...
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Conyer Clayton: One Question & A Poem
Conyer Clayton's beguilingly-titled, award-winning But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves is a collection of prose poems that visit dreamscape and the surreal. The title's line-up of...
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Jessica Moore: In ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper,...
JESSICA MOOREIn ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper, all your memories will be erased I would keep the dark basement, and I would keep the eye of the furnace. I would keep the...
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Sort of Sorcery: A Brief Q&A with Jessica Moore
SUSAN GILLIS: The poem “In ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper, all your memories will be erased” emerges from a speculative proposition, assembling a wonderful (and...
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