Rose Maloukis
These Weeds
Spasms trouble a tired body, little flesh, no hunger.
Leaves cycle, vanish, more and more empty sky.
Dishes fallen to the floor. A mouthful of beaten rice — I cannot swallow!
A purple balloon buffeted by slow circulation, no direct draft.
Surface highlights, rotations wobble, roll then lull, they are imbalanced.
Are you alive if your breath — the balloon, under the blouse, senseless —
vacant.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poem "Fabric" won the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem as part of The Fiddlehead's 26 annual literary contest. You can read an interview with Bernier-Cormier here.
Fabric
October 31st, 2016
This past weekend, Fiddlehead contributor Doyali Islam was on CBC's Sunday Morning talkiing with Michael Enright about "her childhood, the role of poetry in political resistance, and why she became a practitioner of parkour." As part of the discussion, she read "poem for your pocket," which we published last Autumn (The Fiddlehead, no. 269)!
You can listen to the interview here!
Very recently, The Atlantic published “The Greatest Poet Alive: The Feral Genius of Australia’s Les Murray,” a gushing, appreciative overview of Murray’s career disguised as a review of his latest book Waiting for the Past. It is far from alone in its adoration of Murray’s distinguished career. Though he does have his detractors, and he was a major figure in Australia’s “poetry wars,” his name is regularly included on lists of potential Nobel Prize winners, and Joseph Brodsky’s claim that Murray is “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives” is oft-quoted.
I was thrilled to work with Katie Fewster-Yan to select poems from across the career of Mary Jo Salter. Together we debated, tussled, and celebrated over the choosing of this selection, which we hope you will enjoy.
By Steven Suntres In my mind, the palate for both techno and poetry is a massive suggestion for the two to fuse together and to create on a blank canvas. I foresee an opportunity, both in content and cultural relevance, to create something that is beautiful and authentic in both of these mediums coming together. They are both emotional experiences that could synthesize into a superpower of an emotional medium.
By Steven Suntres With electronic music’s meteoric rise over the past decade, the culture infiltrated the mainstream conscious, which came with its faults but ultimately benefited the culture as a whole. Techno became a cultural force taking over the lifestyles of the party demographics all over the continent. . . .
By Steven Suntres Poetry and techno are like two of my mind’s closest friends that continually flirt with each other to the point that I’m confused as to why they don’t just quit playing around and start dating. For a while, I thought this was something that only made sense to me, and that I should just keep my opinions to myself; however, when I came across an article in The Atlantic, titled "The Death of the Artist” by William Deresiewicz, I began to think that this is a match that is more plausible than I first thought it would be in a real world setting.
