Category: Uncategorized
-
Alice Notley in ‘mercuryfirs’
“Our attention has always existed before we were it was like a lake of space…” (“The House Gone”, Alice Notley) The above is a quotation extracted from “The House Gone”—a poem found in Alice Notley’s forthcoming The Speak Angel Series (Fonograf Editions, February 2023). In the book’s introduction, she writes: “I offer a future made […]
-
[infinite grids]
A collaborative video poem based on Vancouver Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam’s poem “Utility Pole”. This poem can be found in Odes & Laments (Caitlin Press, 2019). “Utility Pole is a poetry film collaboration between poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and poetry filmmaker Mary McDonald. Utility Pole explores the transformation of trees into the poles that […]
-
[Peacock Blue]
For anyone interested in the work of the late, great Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, here is a podcast in which Stephen Collis discusses Webb’s work with Isabella Wang and Fred Wah. For a link to the Phyllis Webb SpokenWeb Podcast episode, click here. For audio content, literary recordings, poets reading their work, and more, find […]
-
[aversion to your “actual life”]
An excerpt: Rob Taylor interviews Steve Heighton for The Walrus. Link to the full interview here. RT: You talk about this aversion to your “actual life” in one of your earliest poems, “Sailing, Gulf Islands.” SH: I wrote “Sailing, Gulf Islands” in 1986, about events that supposedly took place around fifteen years earlier. But I’ve […]
-
[All these ships]
Joey Yearous-Algozin, author of A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat Books), interviewed at The Believer. JYA: “There’s that beautiful Williams poem I wish people knew better called “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” In that poem he has this argument about the ships of Troy—it’s a large catalog of ships, it’s super boring, in The Iliad. Williams’ argument […]
-
But not poetry…
One cliché when speaking about poetry is to say that it’s a form of writing that is cryptic, inaccessible. In school, for past generations, many were put off of poetry primarily because of how it was taught. Rigid and rote. Today, organizations like Poetry In Voice and local poets laureate, along with many educators themselves, […]
-
Jung and creative writing
Podcast: Jung in the World: C. G. Jung & the Modernist Revolution with Roula-Maria Dib Talking about the linkages between Jung, Modernism and creative writing, this quote from Roula-Maria Dib: “We do tend to pay special focus to the symbol because symbols are a language that give creative writing this quality of non-fictiveness, the quality […]
-
Present tense
Below, a quote from Arthur Sze, his thinking on the qualities of the present tense in his poetry): “ … the present tense of the verb is an essential part of its power. Of course, the present is always becoming the past, so I like to use a present tense where the present is like […]
Michael Edwards 