Arc Poetry Magazine is happy to introduce the reading world to its new baby. Beginning in August 2009, Arc Poetry Annual 2010 will be added to Arc’s two great annual issues of poetry, reviews and prose that have been a major fixture on the Canadian literary landscape for over 30 years. The Annual delves deeply into poetry and poetic practice, and is an in-depth exploration of How Poems Work. Arc Poetry Annual 2010 will be available at newsstands and booksellers, or through the Arc website at www.ArcPoetry.ca.

Arc Poetry Annual will also pair 44 Canadians with Canadian poetry. Highlights of these unlikely literary encounters include:

*A budding lawyer’s take on a poem about a bitter unemployed clown.
*A snarky chocolatier’s response to a cryptic concrete poem by the famous bp Nichol.
*A romantic archivist analyzing a sonnet about a busker.
*A Health Canada Bureaucrat (who has a view of Halifax Harbour from his cubicle) critiquing a pastoral poem by Michael Ondaatje.
*A lapsed Canadian Catholic and a lapsed Lebanese Muslim’s reading of a tiny poem called “Moses Wisdom.”
*A political scientist, a 12-year-old, an advocate for the homeless and an investment advisor’s take on a lyric ode to a flower-laden corpse.
*A furniture manufacturer worried by heart problems looking at Alden Nowlan’s famous lyric “In the Operating Room.”
*A Yellowknife nurse’s view of a poem about Robert Latimer.

“The Arc team is very excited to present the dialogue that forms on the pages of Arc Poetry Annual 2010,” said Arc Poetry Magazine’s Editor Anita Lahey. “We at Arc chose to believe that Canadians from all walks of life love poetry. We went looking for them, and we found them. The fascinating dialogue in the pages of our first Arc Poetry Annual is proof that people outside the literary community of poets and critics are lovers of poetry. They enthusiastically read it and had memorable and thought-provoking things to say.”

HOW POEMS WORK

For the premier edition of the Arc Poetry Annual, Arc has chosen to address the question of: How Poems Work. Think of it as a sort of New Year’s Eve top one-hundred Much Music Countdown for poetry lovers, featuring such leading poets as Stephanie Bolster, Ross Leckie, Roo Borson, George Elliott Clarke and Tim Bowling writing about the poetry of such notables as Don Coles, Margaret Avison, Robert Kroetsch, bp Nichol, Jan Zwicky, Alden Nowlan and Michael Ondaatje. In order to attempt this investigation, Arc brought together highlights of its very popular “How Poems Work” webzine, which ran from 2003 to 2008. Each of the 21 poems appearing in the Annual (including a ballad, a “chubby” sonnet, an anti-sonnet, a blues “song,” two concrete poems, a nursery rhyme, and a variety of free-ranging and more formal lyrics) is accompanied by an essay by a poet of note, explaining not only the mechanics of how they think the poem works, but also how the poem works for them. Throughout the annual is the quirky, irreverent and often humorous, work of Vancouver-based photographer Sabrina Oveson, which she created in response to specific poems in the issue.

“A well-constructed poem,” says Arc’s How Poems Work Editor Chris Jennings, “is like a vintage watch, beautifully and carefully made. All the machine requires in order to work is the human energy to wind it up—not the poet’s but the reader’s. Delving into the question of “How” this mechanical magic occurs, though is dicey and dangerous stuff. Talk about “how” and you’re Marlow streaming up the river in the Heart of Darkness.”

44 Canadians from all walks of life, from all over the country, interpret the poems

Arc found and enlisted real-live readers of poetry: men, women and children from all walks and stages of life. The experiment went as follows: Arc forged a list of dozens of people from a wide range of professions, geographical locations and educational backgrounds, and invited them to participate in the Arc Poetry Annual. Their job: read a selection of 3 poems randomly assigned from among the 21 poems appearing in the Arc Annual, and respond to a handful of questions about them. Numbering among the 44 Canadians who interpreted the poetry are an accountant, a hobby farmer, an entomologist, two visual artists, a retired dean of arts, a family doctor, a translator, a film critic, a nurse, a Parliamentary reporter for Global TV, a civil servant or two, a political scientist, a schoolteacher, a chocolatier, a 12-year-old, a retired credit controller, a realtor, an archivist, an actor, a physiologist, a pure water technologist and the chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada. Their responses are as interesting and diverse as these readers are themselves.

“So, why attempt this grand experiment?” asked Arc Poetry Magazine’s Editor Anita Lahey. “To remind ourselves that poetry is not a private club. It’s an intimate dialogue. The kind of tête-à-tête that happens at a really great dinner party where great conversation includes both the unexpected and the shocking, and where it becomes apparent that there are as many points of view on a subject, as there are eyes to perceive it.”

About Arc Poetry Magazine and ArcPoetry.ca

Arc Poetry Magazine nurtures and promotes the composition and appreciation of poetry in Canada and abroad, with particular but not exclusive emphasis on poetry written by Canadians. In addition to publishing and distributing the work of poets, Arc Poetry Magazine organizes and administers awards, contests, public readings and other events. ArcPoetry.ca is one of the most comprehensive sources for information on Canadian poetry with an extensive network of links related to poetry, presses, online poetic sites, journals, grants, writing retreats, blogs and academic institutions.

Media contact: Suki Lee, media@arcpoetry.ca, 416-529-7979.

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