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Stop! Look! Listen!

Stop! Look! Listen!

Stop! Look! Listen! is your one-stop destination for The Fiddlehead's cultural engagement.

Russell Thornton's Reading Recommendation

I’ve been reading Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 for the past month. I’ve put it down to go to other books and then invariably come quite quickly back to it — I can’t stop reading and re-reading this English language collected poems of Alejandra Pizarnik. I’d found other translations of bits and pieces of Pizarnik’s writing over the years (and tried in my stumbling way to read her work in the original Spanish); it was exciting to me to get hold of this comprehensive collection.

UNB Reading Series Presents 13th Annual Poetry Weekend

The University of New Brunswick invites you to our 13th annual Poetry Weekend, a celebration of Canadian poetry that features seasoned and new poets alike!

Join us on Saturday, October 1st and Sunday, October 2nd at UNB Fredericton’s Memorial Hall for a series of readings by Canadian poets and authors. Readings take place at 11am, 2pm, and 8pm both days.

Fredericton poet M. Travis Lane will be our presiding spirit for Poetry Weekend, and is set to have her new collection of poetry entitled The Witch of the Inner Wood release just in time for the festivities.

The Fiddlehead Interviews: Birgül Oğuz, Karen Villeda and Betsy Warland

Rachel Rose

By Rachel Rose

Three writers: Birgül Oğuz, Karen Villeda, and Betsy Warland. Three different countries: Turkey, Mexico, Canada. Each writer grapples with gender and identity, with loss, with the limits of language, with persistence against the conspiracies of silence, with responding to violence as part of the quotidian, as part of civilian life. On the surface these writers appear to have little in common, and yet their answers, though written separately and thousands of miles apart, seem part of the same conversation.

Charmaine Cadeau's Reading Recommendations

My obsession with persona, especially in the lyric, and with writing the self brought me to Eileen Myles' I Must Be Living Twice. The poems are resplendent with sex, humour, and reflection — a kind of inquiry that is dramatized further by the fact it's a selected works, and she employs herself as a kind of third person. On writing poetry, she writes about the discovery of "something deeply anonymous about the self." 

Darren Bifford's Reading Recommendations

Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution is a classic study of the French and Industrial revolutions, and their subsequent impact. I've also been rereading Nietzsche's earlier works and Walter Kaufmann's study on his thought. I'm going through the Greek Tragedies, especially Euripides, as well as David Ferry's translation of Horace's Odes. I'm also finishing Stephen Spender's memoir, World Within World, which I picked up for a dollar and which gives us a vivid sense of the preoccupations and experiences of those British poets who came of age in the 1930s.

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