Press Release: March 27, 2007

2007 Critic's Desk Award Winners

Arc is pleased to announce the winners of the Fifth Annual

Critic’s Desk Award

FEATURE REVIEW CATEGORY

Triny Finlay

for her feature review “Back to the Modern: Three Ottawa Poets,” published in Arc 57

and

BRIEF REVIEW CATEGORY

Christopher Doda

for his brief review of Bill Kennedy and Darren-Wershler Henry’s apostrophe in Arc 57

Judge:
Frank Davey

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Triny Finlay

Back to the Modern: Three Ottawa Poets

Feature Review

Laura Farina. This Woman Alphabetical.
Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2005.

Andrew Steinmetz. Hurt Thyself.
Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005.

Tony Cosier. The Spirit Dances.
Manotick: Penumbra Press, 2005.

In her recent book 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, American critic Marjorie Perloff wonders “what if, despite the predominance of a tepid and unambitious establishment poetry, there were a powerful avant-garde that takes up, once again, the experimentation of the early twentieth century?” Perloff’s definition of the avant-garde in Anglo North-American poetry foregrounds technical and formal invention; a preoccupation with the materiality of language; and the genre-breaking, non-representational innovations of early Modernists like T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. In Canada, this type of avant-garde poetry is generally given short shrift, limited to occasional media frenzies surrounding such anomalous, popular phenomena as the procedural poetics of Christian Bök. And this is a contentious matter in contemporary Canadian poetics, this quest for the “new” in a forest of old growth. Open almost any anthology (or anti-anthology) of new Canadian poetry published in the last five years—tellingly, there are several—and you will indeed find a considerable amount of “establishment poetry.” But there are unexpected, unexposed avant-garde roots among many contemporary Canadian poets, which just might signal a paradoxical return to the “new.”

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Christopher Doda

Christopher Doda on Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry's apostrophe

Brief Review

Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry, apostrophe, Toronto: ECW Press, 2006

Thirteen years ago Toronto poet Bill Kennedy wrote an apostrophe, a poem in a series of statements meant to address absent people, ideas, or entities as though actually present. The piece amounted to a lengthy group of “you are” lines of an increasingly bizarre, obscure and allusive nature: “you are a pretense to universality,” “you are a B- grade on a C paper,” “you are a piece of performance art that deep down inside wants to be a bust of Beethoven sitting on a Steinway grand piano,” running the gamut from high to low culture, from Robert Southey to Robert Plant. Some years later, he and fellow poet Darren Wershler-Henry created a Web site that could trawl the Web seeking out other “you are” statements. When each of the original lines was inputted, the ‘apostrophe engine,’ as they call it, would amass an entirely new poem comprised of “you are” lines. The outcome is apostrophe, a highly entertaining and truly innovative book that operates with a panopticon view of the Web, removing sentences from their sources and jamming them together…

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Press Release: June 19, 2006

2006 Confederation Poets Prize and Critic's Desk Award

Elizabeth Brewster’s “Moody Weather” winner of Confederation Prize
Farman and Wells earn critic kudos

Arc announces this year’s Confederation Poets’ Prize and Critic’s Desk Award!

Confederation Poets’ Prize: Given for the best poem published in Arc in the preceding calendar year, the 2006 Winner of the Fifteenth Annual Confederation Poets Prize goes to Elizabeth Brewster for her poem “Moody Weather,” which appeared in Arc 54, Summer 2005. The judge was Molly Peacock.
About prize

Critic’s Desk Award: Inaugurated in Arc’s 25th-anniversary year, the Critic’s Desk Award—now in its fourth year—honours excellence in book reviewing. This year’s winners are Abou Farman for his feature review “History’s Hollow,” published in Arc 54, and Zachariah Wells for his brief review of Harold Rhenisch’s Free Will in Arc 54. The judge was George Elliot Clarke.
About award

Zachariah Wells

Harold Rhenisch's Free Will

Brief Review

Harold Rhenisch. Free Will. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2004.

It’s a truism that books come from other books. Shakespeare, for instance, borrowed storylines from classical antecedents. In the hands of a good writer, such appropriations become original works in their own right. I’m thinking here not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of such brilliant latter-day adaptations of them as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Aimé Césaire’s post-colonial version of The Tempest. Sometimes, however, adaptation takes on a parasitic tinge, either trivializing or leaning too heavily on the source material. Harold Rhenisch’s Free Will belongs, unfortunately, to this latter class…

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Abou Farman

History's Hollow

Feature Review

A.F. Moritz. Night Street Repairs. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.

Carmine Starnino. With English Subtitles. Kentville (NS): Gaspereau Press,
2004.

Phil Tabakow. The Mechanics of Submission. Montreal: DC Books, 2004.

History is unwieldy matter for poetry, yet it’s both seductive and essential. It amplifies the present, lends gravity to the personal, subtracts from the provisional and adds to a poem’s moral depth. Or, rather, it might do all that if handled with care. The historical must somehow meet the lyrical on equal footing, bringing vision, subject matter and language together in the poem’s struggle for meaning. If not, history will flatten the poem with its weight or hollow it out with its phoniness. …

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Press Release: May 28, 2005

2005 Summer Awards

Fruitfly takes Lampman
‘Brave’ winner of Confederation Prize
Rhenisch and Wells earn critic kudos

The 20th Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry goes to Stephen Brockwell for his book, Fruitfly Geographic (published by ECW Press). The award is given annually by Arc, Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, for the best book of poetry written in English during the preceding calendar year by a writer living in Ottawa.

Stephen Brockwell is also the author of The Wire in Fences and Cometology, and is the co-editor of the online journal www.poetics.ca.

Jury members Jeanette Lynes of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, matt robinson of Fredericton and Russell Thornton of North Vancouver chose Brockwell’s book from 11 entries, out of which the following shortlist was named:

Fruitfly Geographic by Stephen Brockwell
Imaginary Origins by Cyril Dadydeen
Until the Light Bends by Susan McMaster
Ricochet by Seymour Mayne

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Zachariah Wells

Stuart Ross's Hey Crumbling Balcony!

Brief Review

Stuart Ross. Hey Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected. Toronto: ECW, 2003.

When a poet publishes a selected at mid-career, it should mark a definitive achievement. Such a book should insist: this is great stuff—read it. Far too often in our culture of promiscuous publication and conspicuous consumption, this is not the case; far too often a mid-life selection of a sanctioned versifier seems destined to be just another piece of tomorrow’s trash. The upside of such a climate is that it makes a book like Hey, Crumbling Balcony! that much more remarkable. Stuart Ross is an unusual poet and this collection establishes with authority the heretofore well-kept secret (at least outside of Toronto) that he is also one of the best Canadian poets writing today. Ross’s poems refuse to be pigeon-holed…

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Harold Rhenisch

Five Laureates on the Red Earth Road

Feature Review

Maryanne Bluger. Early Evening Pieces.
Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 2003.

Cyril Dabydeen. Hemisphere of Love.
Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2003.

rob mclennan. red earth.
Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2003.

Colin Morton. Dance, Misery.
Hamilton: Seraphim Editions, 2003.

David O’Meara. The Vicinity.
London: Brick Books, 2003.

If George Bowering had phoned me from Ottawa during his term as poet laureate and had told me that the city has poets laureate the way Hamilton has Timbits, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’d always thought that a poet laureate was a plaster bust, a figurehead for a National Literature, a dream in the eye of the Canada Council in a country patched up out of a bunch of regional poetries. I was wrong. Such things do exist. If George had stood in Parliament and said, “those laureates are hoofing it with Jack Kerouac; their poems are graffiti lipsticked in every gas station washroom from St. John’s to Sooke and spray-painted on Canadian Wheat Pool grain cars clattering down the VIA line,” I would have thought, “Whoa, too much Black Mountain moonshine for you, George,” and left him for the performance poets to nibble on like a pack of soynuts. But he would have been right there, too…

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Press Release: June 10, 2004