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: March 22, 2007

2007 Confederation Poets Prize Winner

Arc is pleased to announce

Michael Trussler

is the 2007 winner of the Sixteenth Anuual
Confederation Poets Prize
for his poem in Arc 56, Summer 2006

“Asleep”

selected by
Anne Simpson

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Press Release: February 13, 2007

Fifth Annual Diana Brebner Prize Reading

Please join Arc Poetry Magazine in celebrating the fifth annual Diana Brebner Prize at a literary event where the winners will read from their work, including their award-winning poems.

Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar (1242 Wellington at Holland) will once again play host to the event, which takes place Thursday, February 22nd, at 7:30pm.

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posted by Arc on February 13, 2007 permalink
cats: News | Press Releases | Diana Brebner Prize | Arc 57 Winter 2006

Shane Neilson

Ken Babstock's Airstream Land Yacht

Brief Review

Ken Babstock. Airstream Land Yacht. Toronto: Anansi, 2006.

I really wanted to like this book. Love it, in fact. I wanted to love it like I fell in love with Mean, Babstock’s first book. Mean was glorious, it was the way and the light, and as I read it years ago I kept thinking, this is poetry one could emulate, this is poetry worthy of putting forward on the world stage, this is the best book of Canadian poetry I’ve read in years. Mean stuck with me, and it’s stuck with others: it’s the yardstick for a certain generation of poets. I know of what I speak: I’ve asked dozens of poets, in the midst of flagging polite conversation, “But what do you think about Babstock’s Mean?” And the reaction is often one I myself can identify with: unadulterated awe…

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posted by Arc on February 13, 2007 permalink
cats: Reviews | Arc 57 Winter 2006
tags: Ken Babstock | Shane Neilson | poetry criticism | poetry reviews

Tanis MacDonald

Interview with Di Brandt

an excerpt from

Reparative Strategies: An Interview with Di Brandt

I met with Di Brandt on April 6, 2006, in the Academy Café in Winnipeg, a few days after hearing her read from her new series of poems, “Nine River Ghazals.” Brandt has been working with the ghazal form since “Dog Days in Maribor” in her Griffin-nominated Now You Care, and because I had just included “Dog Days” in Speaking of Power, a selected works of Brandt’s poetry published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, I wanted to ask about her use of the form.

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