::Arc Poetry:: Log Entries - Arc 51 Winter 2003 Archive ::

Press Release: June 10, 2004

Critic's Desk Award 2004

Inaugurated in Arc’s 25th-anniversary year, the Critic�s Desk Award honours excellence in book reviewing. This year�s winners are Bruce Whiteman (feature review) for his critique of Charlotte Gray�s Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake in Arc 51, and Christopher Doda (brief review) for of his critique of Kevin Connolly�s Happyland in Arc 51. The judge this year was David Staines of Ottawa.

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posted by Arc on June 10, 2004 permalink
cats: Press Releases | Critic's Desk Award | Arc 51 Winter 2003 | Arc 52 Summer 2004

Bruce Whiteman

Her Paddle Song: Charlotte Gray's Pauline Johnson

Feature Review

Charlotte Gray. Flint & Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002.

On Friday, May 26, 1882, Oscar Wilde boarded a Grand Trunk Railroad train in Toronto for a trip to Brantford, Ontario, one hundred kilometres away. He apparently visited the Six Nations Reserve there, where he was given a fan made of feathers, before delivering one of his standard lectures in the local opera house. He stayed overnight and returned the following day to Toronto, where he spent the remainder of the weekend before travelling on to Woodstock on Monday. At the time of his lecture, Pauline Johnson was twenty-one years old and had not yet published her first poem. That she had started by then to write poems is certain, and she was already a devotee of Swinburne, among others of the moderns. Wilde’s tour of Canada and the United States was not a poetry reading tour, although his first substantial collection had been published just the year before in 1881. It was, rather, a lecture tour; “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful” were among his subjects. All the same, it would have been surprising if an aspiring young poet in Brantford had not taken pains to be in the audience to hear one of the up-andcoming British writers. How much literary stimulation can there have been, after all, in a southern Ontario town of 12,000 people in the early 1880s? …

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Christopher Doda

Kevin Conolly's Happyland

Brief Review

Kevin Connolly. Happyland. Toronto: ECW, 2002.

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Press Release: April 21, 2004

2004 Summer Awards

Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry

The 19th Archibald Lampman award goes this year to David O�Meara for his book of poetry, The Vicinity (published by Brick Books). 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.

Jury members Brian Bartlett of Halifax, Stephanie Bolster of Montreal, and Aislinn Hunter of Vancouver, had this to say about O’Meara’s book:

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Press Release: November 28, 2003

Changes At Arc

After a combined 31 years of service, John Barton and Rita Donovan are stepping down as co-editors of Ottawa-based Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in print in 2003. After seeing the magazine’s two anniversary issues—Don Coles at 75, Arc at 25 and Ottawa Poetry Now—into print, John and Rita feel that this is a good time to pass the gauntlet to the next generation of Ottawa’s aspiring poets, editors, and publishers.

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posted by Arc on November 28, 2003 permalink
cats: Arcana | Press Releases | Arc 51 Winter 2003

Press Release: November 25, 2003

2nd Annual Diana Brebner Prize Reading

Arc presents the winners of the 2nd Annual Diana Brebner Prize Thursday, December 4, 2003 at Collected Works

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posted by Arc on November 25, 2003 permalink
cats: Press Releases | Diana Brebner Prize | Arc 51 Winter 2003

John Barton

The Ottawa 13

‘Highlights’ from Ottawa Poetry Now: The Questionnaire

Introduction

In the spring of 2003, Arc, as part of its tribute to the poets of the Nation’s Capital, decided to engage with them, as directly as it dared, through a survey posted on its web site and, when possible, enclosed with returned submissions. Taking its cue from Statistics Canada, the magazine’s local mentor and better in all things datarelated, Arc compiled Ottawa Poetry Now: The Questionnaire, which it envisioned to be a non-invasive diagnostic tool that could lift a veil (as freighted with ambiguity and controversy as the Shroud of Turin) from the inscrutable, sometimes scruffy face of the community from which it sprang, humbly, a scant 25 years ago and among which it still ‘strives’ to ‘thrive.’ The survey’s 40 “irreverent, rude, and occasionally apposite questions,” which Arc hoped would garner the most pragmatic, even the most inspirational of insights, touched delicately on shoe size, favourite watering holes, financial solvency, and recognition’s frailties. Arc believed that such questions would allow respondents to “wax poetic … on the state of being a National Capital poet.”

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posted by Arc on November 01, 2003 permalink
cats: Arcana | Arc 51 Winter 2003
tags: Ottawa poetry | poetry