Posted on March 11, 2024
I came to poetry through music: strange rhyming songs and lullabies as a kid, an absolute obsession with lyrics as a teenager, and now as an eclectic collector of songs that remind me of poems in some way. So I’m recommending music—interesting music that you may not have heard before, Joshua Burnside’s Ephrata.
Posted on March 5, 2024
For more than a year now, I have not read a book of my choosing for myself.
Reading remains, in its many facets and prisms of accessibility, a privilege – and the freedom to read what one wishes continues to be a luxury.
Posted on February 27, 2024
Having devoured Catriona Wright’s first collection of poetry I was very excited to hear her second collection would be out in May 2023. True to her brilliance, Continuity Errors makes me thankful I have been so lucky to come across Wright’s work and thankful she continues to contribute her voice to Canadian poetry. Go Catriona Go!
Posted on February 20, 2024
Is a poet’s life the support for poetry, or is poetry a support for the poet’s life? As much as Santoka Tenada, a mendicant Zen priest and haiku poet of the twentieth century, tried to live a good life according to the Tao, his inveterate love of sake and general need to carouse left him with poetry as the only means of perfecting what he was unable to perfect in life: mainly, the thing in us that wants to be better, the thing which, for a host of competing reasons, we are usually unable to achieve in life.
Posted on February 6, 2024
I’ve read a lot of great and varied books this year so far, everything from queer romance noir fantasies to nonfiction about moss, but the work that has stuck with me the most is You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.
Posted on January 30, 2024
I learned of Lucky Lo’s album, Supercarry, by happy coincidence.
Needing a weeknight drink, I went to a friend’s café in Odense, Denmark, only to find the café already stuffed with guests–young and old, plain and flamboyant–hunched around the tables, a buzz of anticipation in the air.
Posted on January 23, 2024
The irony behind the “Doodling for Writers” catchphrase, “If you can write, you can draw” is that I was introduced to this book during a workshop I took because I was in a slump and could not write. My need to create pushed me to explore alternate means of expression, which led me to a comics workshop and this book.
Posted on January 18, 2024
While I’m happy to write, I’m just as pleased to read. This is what Poetry Weekend means to me. My poems, my friends’ poems, the moving words of professionals and colleagues and artists are all the better heard echoing from the walls of Memorial Hall. I’ve only attended in-person twice; I started reading my own work during the Zoom years. I’ve been writing my whole life but poetry only for three years, and I know I have so much to learn and catch up on. This makes two days of poets and their work so valuable and so fulfilling.
Posted on January 12, 2024
Posted on January 9, 2024
In the 25 years since it was given to me as a birthday present, I’ve recommended Time and the Art of Living more often than The Sixteen Pleasures or Mao’s Last Dancer.
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