Arcana
Here you can find introductions, features and oddities from special issues of Arc.
Web Archive—Poetry, Reviews, Audio Podcasts, Press Releases, and other Arcana
Anita Lahey
Two parts joy, one part torture
“In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them.”
—Ted Hughes, from the essay “Capturing Animals,” Poetry in the Making
Editor’s Note
Last winter I sat on a literary grant jury. I spent the months of January and February reading 157 50-page excerpts from manuscripts-in-progress in four genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young adult fiction. The manuscripts were sent to me without their authors’ names. In principal, I was impressed by this system, which aims to judge work purely on merit, thereby avoiding bias related to track records, reputations, histories with jurors, and so on. Nor was I new to blind reading: Being part of the Arc crew means spending part of each summer reading nameless entries to our Poem of the Year contest (the results of which appear in this issue). But eight weeks immersed in work written by unknown hands proved unsettling. The growing sensation, each time I grabbed a new manuscript from the seemingly bottomless box on the floor of my office, was of pawing through darkness. While at first I found it exciting, I increasingly longed for something to see or to hold. The contours in the letters of a name. Real people to whom to attach these homeless words.
Here at Arc, we pride ourselves on what we hope is our openness to work written by anyone, previously heard of or not, published or not, lauded or not. We strive to disregard a poet’s “name” while assessing his or her poems. In this light, my reaction to the grant applications gave me pause, for I realized how much, by nature or instinct or learning—or all of the above—I rely on what I know of an author to ground my reading. I realized, too, that one of the things I love about reading is the relationship one builds—privately, amid lamps and shadows and bookshelves—with one’s favourite authors. The habit, for me, reaches far back into childhood, when I methodically made my way through the entire oeuvre of Dr. Seuss available at the Appleby Branch of the Burlington Public Library before venturing on to other authors, such as L.M. Montgomery. In Montgomery’s case, my unabashed love of Anne of Green Gables allowed me to forgive failings in its sequels. For the benefits I accrue by returning to certain authors like old friends, in effect going home, this is a trade-off I’m willing to make. If the alchemy that takes place during an act of reading is pinned in that space between the mind and the page—where reader, writer and imagination meet—is this a problem? Is there any such thing as pure objective judgment of a literary work anyway?
Now there’s a question we thought worth passing on to our readers—in, quite literally, a hands-on fashion. Thus, there is something missing in this issue of Arc. I should say, something will appear to be missing when you flip to the poetry. You will of course find lines and stanzas. You’ll find verb, metaphor, enjambment and variations on metre. What you won’t find is any evidence of the poets responsible for these compositions, save the words they have pieced together. Atop each poem, in the space usually reserved for the author’s name, we offer only white space.
Press Release: June 24, 2008
Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
The Celebrated Journal of Canadian Poetry Marks 30 Years of Publishing with a 30-Themed Issue Featuring 30 Canadian Poets
Release Dates: July through December 2008
(In Bookstores, Newsstands or Order On-line through www.ArcPoetry.ca)
Arc Poetry Magazine celebrates 30 years of publishing the best Canadian contemporary poetry with the Thirtieth Anniversary Issue, 1978-2008. Arc’s 30th birthday issue features well-crafted, spirited, engaging and compelling poetry and essays by 30 Canadian poets. Topics include being 30, turning 30, activities or aspects of life that seem particularly thirtysomething in nature, objects that have been owned (or lost) for 30 years (or by 30 people), and anything that has lasted three decades.
“Arc Poetry Magazine has never failed to show off what it has held between its varied covers for nearly three decades: the finest new poetry, and the most comprehensive selection of poetic discourse and criticism in the country,” said Arc Poetry Magazine’s Editor Anita Lahey. “With Arc’s 30th birthday looming, we decided it would be a good idea to poll today’s poets on the state of being 30. We set the parameters wide. The essence of 30 is a dubious quality to grasp.”
George Elliott Clarke’s contribution to Arc’s Thirtieth Anniversary Issue is an excerpt from a lengthy autobiographical poem on his first 30 years as a poet. Mary Dalton contributed a “cento,” which is a collage of the 30th line of 30 other poems by literary legends, such as T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Joseph Brodsky. Carmine Starnino imagines the early mid-life crisis of a gladiator. Steven Heighton composes a free translation of a piece from 1830 by the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Montreal poet Asa Boxer, whose first collection The Mechanical Bird recently won the CAA Poetry Award, offers a harrowing descent into “Dante’s Ikea”—an experience most Canadian thirtysomethings will find painfully familiar! Entertaining and thoughtful essays by notable poets Sonnet L’Abbé and Adam Sol explore 30 poetry books that most influenced them. Gary Geddes (poet, teacher and editor of the widely known “15 Canadian Poets” anthologies and Oxford’s 20th Century Poetry and Poetics) contributed an essay on the battle of “Story versus Song” over the past 30 years in Canadian poetry. Poetry on the age, experience and mindset of 30-year-olds also includes works by acclaimed poets Robyn Sarah, Stephanie Bolster, Susan Gillis and Alison Pick.
Launch
Thirty years of Arc Poetry Magazine will be celebrated at the launch of the Thirtieth Anniversary Issue at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 7:30 pm (Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa). Canada’s top poets will commemorate three decades of Arc’s existence at a celebration that will include readings by some of Arc’s most notable contributors over the past thirty years. For tickets and information, please visit www.ArcPoetry.ca.
Sonnet L'Abbé
My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
Excerpt from Feature Essay: L’Abbé’s Top Thirty
… The other morning my friend Reza and I were on a bus in Vancouver, and as we turned from East King Edward onto Kingsway, he told me that when he first came to the city he had taken a room in one of the houses nearby. “This,” he said, indicating the small, boxish bungalows and stamp-sized lawns we were passing, “is my first impression of Canada.” He has been in B.C. for four years, I for less than six months. Strange, that a relative newcomer from Iran should be showing the Canadian around East Van. Reza has also been on several Transcanada trips, as far as the Maritimes, all the way up to Labrador; I have never been east of Quebec city. Which of us can say they know Canada?
Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
Arc 58 Canada’s Forgotten & Neglected got a blast off last Saturday, June 23rd at the Plan 99 Series at the Manx Pub in Ottawa. Listen to audio recordings from that evening as contemporary poets read poems from the forgotten & neglected poets now found in Arc 58. Also find bonus tracks from far away readers.
You can listen now online (run individual podcasts with Adobe Flash Player), subscribe to podcast, or download mp3s from this announcement.
Anita Lahey and Matthew Holmes
Our lost poets: Bring them back
an introduction to “Canada’s Forgotten and Neglected”, Arc 58, by the editors
All the poets you will read about in this copy of Arc are dead. With each, a potential legacy has also died, or is in full-blown demise. Though ordinary mortality is beyond our powers to correct, we take issue, as our theme “Forgotten and Neglected” implies, with these secondary, literary deaths. We contend that each of the 13 poets whose work appears in these pages has received less credit than was his or her due for either literary accomplishments, the enrichment of our poetic history, or both. The contributions made by these poets have faded too quickly from our collective memory and seem doomed to archival obscurity, if that.
This issue, known among our crew as F&N, was born out of a knot of frustration, a knot that thickened even as our excitement also grew over the lost and near-lost poets re-emerging—in what for most of them would have seemed a bizarre and foreign incarnation—through our inboxes and on our computer screens.
In the spring of 2005, three members of Arc—the two of us from Ottawa and Sackville, New Brunswick respectively, and our webmistress Stacey Munro from Vancouver Island—converged at the Associated Writers and Publishers conference and book fair in downtown Vancouver. Amid an intoxicating few days of seeing such poets as W.S. Merwin and Anne Carson give readings to jam-packed ballrooms at the Fairmont Vancouver Hotel, we also attended a session called Forgotten and Neglected Poets, and were curious to see which Canadians would appear on the roster (the panel giving the presentation was American). To our amusement and dismay, Gwendolyn MacEwen was the sole Canadian deemed in need of resurrection. As MacEwen’s been neither F’d nor N’d in this country, we began to wonder who might truly fit the category. By the time we’d returned to our table at the book fair, this special issue of Arc was already unofficially underway….
Lost and Found Poet #1
Louise Morey Bowman, Early Canadian Modernist
Rediscovered by Aislinn Hunter, poet and essayist
Let’s say Virginia Woolf was right when she wrote that part of the poet’s task is “to find the relations between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly.” Reading the Canadian poet, Louise Morey Bowman, it is the word “fearlessly” that stands out. This early modernist wrote with a sense of abandon, an exuberance, a friendly relationship with the exclamation mark. She published three books of poetry that displayed a bold experimentation: this earned her criticism from the literary circles of the time but also paved the way for such writers as Gwendolyn MacEwen and Elizabeth Smart. Yet, Bowman has all but vanished from our literary sight. How is it, this essay asks, that we can come so close to losing writers like Bowman so soon after they’ve set down a portrait of their time and place on the page?
Lost and Found Poet #2
Avi Boxer: 1950s Montreal East-end Poet and Protégé of Irving Layton
Rediscovered by Avi Boxer’s son, Asa Boxer
Avi Boxer was a Montreal East-end poet who flourished during the 1950’s literary foment alongside A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudeck, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. In his review-essay of No Address (Avi Boxer’s only collection of poems), Asa Boxer discusses the successes and failures of his father’s work in the context of The Montreal School of the past and of today. “The Branch from which I Fell” is an essay that works to define a branch of the Montreal School and its ambitions, struggling to establish the author’s own place within the nascent tradition. Boxer’s evaluation of his own father’s work is at once respectfully honest and movingly heartfelt.
Lost and Found Poet #3
Audrey Alexandra Brown: Bestseller, West-coast Romantic
Rediscovered by Kim Blank, fellow Westerner
Literary history suddenly dropped Audrey Alexandra Brown (1904-1998) like a hot potato. Despite the accolades, the awards, and the best wishes of those who early on championed her work—and those who may have played upon the fact that she was crippled by rheumatic fever—she was bull-dozed by modernism and professional literary critics. She was aware of what was happening, but helpless to stop it. Her failing, she claimed, was that she had no real experience of life.
Lost and Found Poet #4
Cheng Sait Chia: Chinese-Canadian Maritimer Imagist
Rediscovered by George Elliott Clarke
Cheng Sait Chia, the Singapore-born, Chinese immigrant whose spare, beautiful poetry should have placed her among the great Canadian imagists, alongside her fellow Maritimer John Thompson, published only one book posthumously, and has never been anthologized, not even in collections of work by Chinese-Canadians, East Coast poets, or Canadian women poets. Cheng died of cancer in 1981, at the age of 41, and her work, though infused by her illness with the theme of death, exhibits an exhilarating refusal of luxury, heroic stoicism, and a stern and bracing morbidity.
Arcana
- Arcana
- Two parts joy, one part torture
by Anita Lahey - Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
- Line 30 (collage)
by Mary Dalton - My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
by Sonnet L'Abbé - Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
- Our lost poets: Bring them back
by Anita Lahey and Matthew Holmes - Lost and Found Poet #1
- Lost and Found Poet #2
- Lost and Found Poet #3
- Lost and Found Poet #4
- Lost and Found Poet #5
- Lost and Found Poet #6
- Lost and Found Poet #7
- Lost and Found Poets #8 and #9
- Lost and Found Poet #10
- Lost and Found Poet #11
- Lost and Found Poet #12
- Lost and Found Poet #13
- Arc Poetry Magazine Launches Portage: A Map to the Poetry Ecosystem
- Archibald Lampman Award merges with Duncan Campbell Scott Foundation
- Great Scots! Online Exchange Launch
- Editor's Note: Couplets in bowler hats
by Anita Lahey - PM reads Arc (1)
- this combination of ballet and murder
by Rob Winger - Beta Release: www.arcpoetry.ca
- Changes At Arc
- The Ottawa 13
by John Barton - Arc Readership Survey 2003
- And The Winner Is
- Back to the Future: A Foreword
by John Barton and Rita Donovan - Introductions: Don Coles Special Issue
by Jake Kennedy and Christopher Wiseman - Getting to Know Don Coles
by Michael Hulse - Silver
by Caroline Adderson - ARC Conducts First-Ever Survey
- The History of Arc
by John Barton
- Two parts joy, one part torture
- by Form:
- Arc Dozens (2)
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- Essays (2)
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- Reviews (59)
- All Log Entries Archives (242)
- by Contest:
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- Confederation Poets Prize (12)
- Critic's Desk Award (16)
- Diana Brebner Prize (29)
- Poem of the Year Contest (41)
- Readers’ Choice Award (5)
- by Issue:
- Arc 63 Winter 2010 (9)
- Arc 62 Summer 2009 (7)
- Arc 61 Winter 2009 (10)
- Arc 60 Summer 2008 (7)
- Arc 59 Winter 2008 (16)
- Arc 58 Summer 2007 (39)
- Arc 57 Winter 2006 (17)
- Arc 56 Summer 2006 (13)
- Arc 55 Winter 2005 (12)
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- by Month:
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- Recent Entries:
- Arc launches Issue #63 (the three-legged issue)
- The Night of the Apocalypse Yahweh Tinkles the Ivories
by Patricia Young - Canadian Gothic
by Jim Johnstone - Crow, of the family Corvidae
by Gillian Wallace - Advisory
by Steve McOrmond - Fidelities
by Chris Jennings - Excerpt from essay "On ending a poem"
by Barbara Myers - Katia Grubisic on Matthew Tierney's The Hayflick Limit
by Katia Grubisic - Poet in Residence, October 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011 - Call for Proposals
- November 2009: Three calls for entry, and one new way to get Arc
- Calls for Entry coming up early in 2010
- Arc Digital Edition Now Available
- Lampman-Scott Award 2008 Winner
- Reactions to selections from Arc Annual 2010
- Frederick Ward’s blistering blues - Excerpt
by George Elliott Clarke
- Last Commented:
- PM reads Arc (1)
- more
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Log Entries Archives
- Recent Entries:
- Arc launches Issue #63 (the three-legged issue)
- The Night of the Apocalypse Yahweh Tinkles the Ivories
by Patricia Young - Canadian Gothic
by Jim Johnstone - Crow, of the family Corvidae
by Gillian Wallace - Advisory
by Steve McOrmond - Fidelities
by Chris Jennings - Excerpt from essay "On ending a poem"
by Barbara Myers - Katia Grubisic on Matthew Tierney's The Hayflick Limit
by Katia Grubisic - Poet in Residence, October 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011 - Call for Proposals
- November 2009: Three calls for entry, and one new way to get Arc
- Calls for Entry coming up early in 2010
- Arc Digital Edition Now Available
- Lampman-Scott Award 2008 Winner
- Reactions to selections from Arc Annual 2010
- Frederick Ward’s blistering blues - Excerpt
by George Elliott Clarke
- Last Commented:
- PM reads Arc (1)
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arcpoetry.ca
- Log Entries:
- Log Entries home
- Two parts joy, one part torture
- Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
- Line 30 (collage)
- My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
- Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
- Our lost poets: Bring them back
- Lost and Found Poet #1
- Lost and Found Poet #2
- Lost and Found Poet #3
- Lost and Found Poet #4
- How Poems Work:
- HPW home
- Two parts joy, one part torture
- Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
- Line 30 (collage)
- My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
- Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
- Our lost poets: Bring them back
- Lost and Found Poet #1
- Lost and Found Poet #2
- Lost and Found Poet #3
- Lost and Found Poet #4
- Transpoetry:
- Transpoetry home
- Two parts joy, one part torture
- Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
- Line 30 (collage)
- My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
- Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
- Our lost poets: Bring them back
- Lost and Found Poet #1
- Lost and Found Poet #2
- Lost and Found Poet #3
- Lost and Found Poet #4
- Great Scots:
- Great Scots home
- Two parts joy, one part torture
- Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
- Line 30 (collage)
- My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
- Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
- Our lost poets: Bring them back
- Lost and Found Poet #1
- Lost and Found Poet #2
- Lost and Found Poet #3
- Lost and Found Poet #4
- Portage:
- Portage home
- Two parts joy, one part torture
- Arc Poetry Magazine Turns 30
- Line 30 (collage)
- My Inner Cities: Thirty Landmark Books In My Personal Poetic Geography
- Canada's Resurrected: Podcast Special
- Our lost poets: Bring them back
- Lost and Found Poet #1
- Lost and Found Poet #2
- Lost and Found Poet #3
- Lost and Found Poet #4
Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine
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