Signaling

Be sure to check out two excellent new interviews with Signal poets.

Anita Lahey speaking about the challenges of editing one of Canada's best poetry magazines.

Jason Guriel on the lovely light generated by burning bridges.

Spring Poetry Tra-La

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be hosting a great evening next Thursday featuring poets from Gaspereau, Signal and Anansi.

Come hear Michael Harris (Circus), Susan Briscoe (The Crow's Vow), Michael Lista (Bloom), Johanna Skibsrud (I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being) and Paul Tyler (A Short History of Forgetting) read from their new books.

See you there? Hope so.

April 29, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore
201 Bernard Ouest
Montreal, Quebec

The Jig is Up

Zach Wells sniffs out some execrable prose in the Lampert jury bumpf.

This isn't a hard exercise: crappy poetry criticism is maybe the lowest of CanLit's low hanging fruit. In my six years editing the poetry review section for Books in Canada, I learned that most Canadian poets -- especially the new crew of academicized eco-philosophers -- are congenitally unable to write clear, crisp sentences. Anita Lahey touches on this issue in her mixed review of Anne Simpson's The Marram Grass (unavailable online).

W.S. Piero, in a notebook essay for Poetry magazine, explains what bad prose reveals about poets.

"I meet a successful middle-aged poet curious, or bemused, about the prose I write (have written for as long as I've written poetry) as if it were a subtropical, carnivorous plant. I never knew any better. The poets I read early (Shelley, Keats of the letters, Leopardi, Yeats) developed prose styles, so I took it on faith that a poet had to be a writer. It's best to do it mostly for money -- resistance sharpens things. Some shy from putting prose out there because it's a giveaway. You can't fake it. It reveals quality of mind, for better or worse, in a culture where poems can be faked. Find a faker and ask him or her to write anything more substantial than a jacket blurb, and the jig is up."

'Among the finest of Indian writing': Irish Times on Jaspreet Singh's Chef

The Bloomsbury edition of Jaspreet Singh's Chef, launched in London earlier this month, is making the right kind of splash (that we from across the pond in the Véhicule Press family are watching with interest and Rogan Josh-warmed hearts). Chef was first published by Esplanade Books, Véhicule's fiction imprint, in 2008. Eileen Battersby writes in Irish Times:

Chef is an elegant, angry novel, and curiously European in tone. It is worthy to stand among the finest of Indian writing, while also being different. It is bleak, solitary and intense. There are none of the familiar set pieces, none of the exasperated exchanges.

See also: Times, BBC interview, Metro.UK, The Independent, Guardian, The Australian

Book Trailer

Here's a terrific teaser for Cartoon Review of the War: Louis Baratgin's World War II Album, a collection of war cartoons due out this May. The trailer was produced by Little Animation. For a better look (I don't know how to resize the video to fit the main column), go to our website. More info on book here.

Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Oh My!

Still Waters

I've just learned that Donald Winkler's luminous 1990 documentary on P.K. Page "Still Waters" been been made available on the NFB website.

You really should stop whatever you're doing and watch it.