Vowel Colour

Alex Boyd has been busy archiving content from his now defunct Northern Poetry Review mag. Some nice rediscoveries to make, including a lovely interview with Elise Partridge which includes this interesting observation:

Can devices like vowel-color and so on really express meaning? There’s something inexplicable about it all, but I would certainly agree that syntax and sound can. Would the Duke in Browning’s “My Last Duchess” have such icy control of his syntax if he were despondent about his late wife, rather than angry enough to have had her murdered? If you look at the syntax and listen to the sound in sections of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H.” or his “Now sleeps the crimson petal,” for example, you can make an argument about how vowels, consonants and syntax help convey such emotions as resignation and despair or tenderness and eager anticipation.

(Photograph of Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Poet Portraits

Over the last couple of years, Norman Allan has been sketching some of the poets who have appeared in Toronto's Art Bar reading series. Below are examples of his work. You can check out the series here.

Aisha Sasha John

Alex Boyd

Alexandra Oliver

Susan Gillis

Karen Shenfeld

Ewan Whyte

Jan Conn

Rhea Tregebov

Steven Price

Sunday Poem

SUMMIT

This isn't the light we wanted, the weather

we're supposed to be having. But it's still

sometimes all we have to talk about. We

put all our little fingertips in the sky

and changed the climate—those are your

fingerprints on the moon, and mine. Now

we've made room for these leaders,

appointments moving like flocks of birds

down the calendar. The police get sweeping

new powers to sweep us away, and we hope

this particular patchwork of leaders will give

a little thought to the little people, some

blank-eyed woman behind a window holding

a sandwich to her face like gauze to a wound.

Not to worry, there are key initiatives,

discussions. I know change, it's like a coin

we take out and toss again and again. All

we're doing is hanging like a water droplet.

From The Least Important Man (Biblioasis, 2012) by Alex Boyd.

Verbatim

"We’re just animals (my three-year-old son is currently fascinated by this thought)—dominant because of our ability to generate adaptive technologies, but still animals that eat, shit, fuck, and die. This may seem like a bleak outlook, but I don’t consider it so. We’re part of something larger than ourselves, which is not god but the long and varied history of life on this planet. When we die, we’ll feed more life; we’re little pieces of the cosmos. There’s something beautiful in that."

Mark Callanan on the absence of God in his book Gift Horse.

Northern Poetry Review

April was the five-year mark for the online lit mag NPR, founded and edited by Alex Boyd. They've just updated the site with new material, including an interview with Giller-winner Johanna Skibsrud and poems by Linda Besner from her first book The Id Kid. Also on offer is Jacob McArthur Mooney's review of four chapbooks by Cactus Press. I was sent these titles last year, and enjoyed them, and fully intended to blog about them. Alas, life intervened. So I'm happy that NPR is giving the books some deserved attention (you can shop for them here). My favourite poets in the group were Marc di Saverio and Sarah Teitel (photo above). In fact, Teitel's poems so impressed me that I'm happy to announce her first book will be appearing with us in the very near future.