Hardscrabble: bracken, western hemlock, Bony crust of ocean, tacks of mapsThe greater landscape curates, across The margins of Stanley Park (rob mclennan, from Four Poems for Lunch Poems SFU) It has been an exceptional year, this 2020. Exceptional for the immense grief, suffering and upheaval the global pandemic has brought with it — the travel restrictions, the ongoing ban on in-person gatherings and events of all and every kind, here in British Columbia, across Canada and globally. So, it’s certainly a difficult endeavour, if not a fool’s errand, to extract very much humor from this 2020 year. On Twitter, early-pandemic, […]
Below are some excerpts from Kyle Flemmer’s introduction to Contemporary Haiku, a folio for periodicities journal. This is follow by a couple of haikus from Rob Taylor and Gary Barwin. Read the whole folio for yourself, which includes visual- and text-based work, here. To my mind, haiku is a living form rooted in and responding to, though not bound by, tradition. It is more a philosophy of transformation than it is constraints upon a poem, asking: how can one thing become another, or many something others, with the least possible movement? Haiku is a slight of hand free from deception, […]
Tim: Honestly, Rob, there’s no plan. I mostly let the process take me where it takes me. You probably know Frost’s famous line, “The poem should ride the force of its own melting, like an ice cube on a hot stove.” That’s the way it is for me. Of course, Frost doesn’t mention here just how much preparation (in terms of listening, attention, patience) goes into that melting process. But he probably mentions it somewhere. Showing not telling? In grade one, we had show AND tell, and that always seemed the logical combination. Besides, I love direct statement in poems. […]
Kain Stewart: All writers revise their work. Some, more than others. What does revision typically look like for you? Kayla Czaga: I revise a lot while I’m writing a first draft. I have to read my new poems out loud to myself many times. I catch a lot of awkward stuff that way. Typically, I look at a new poem over and over for the first week or two and then I let it sit. I also always ask for a second opinion. Sometimes my partner’s, sometimes another poet’s. I do more focused editing in bursts, once or twice a year. I’ll […]
So, 2020 is here. And the new year has me thinking of new ways to expand or grow in my writing practice. For me, the ways that I experience my writing of poetry are largely informed by what I have been reading or what I’m currently reading. And with this, I’m thinking more deeply about what it is that I’m reading and these thoughts are crystallizing into what I’m calling “notes on poems.” These “notes on poems” are precisely that, my notes and general take-aways from each chapbook I read then review. So, my vision is that these will be […]
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