Category Archives: Poetry

Thoroughly Rough

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Francois Lachance

I first became alive to the potential of word splitting by reading Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology. This I came across years later and with no less thrill in the dis/covery. indigenous culture was tho/roughly                                                 disrupted by From Garry Thomas Morse in … Continue reading →

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Constant Constatation

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Francois Lachance

I once commented on the structure of the grid in Garry Thomas Morse’s “Petroglyph” from Discovery Passages and so it is not perhaps surprising that my eye would be arrested by the mention of stones in an eddy off to … Continue reading →

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Narrative Bent: Within Reach

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Goran Simić’s poetry runs by narrative drive which is often pulled short by poem’s end to provoke the reader into reflection. Take “Airport” from Immigrant Blues translated by Amela Simić where the regular repetition “we are flying … we are … Continue reading →

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The Complicities of Genre and Greatness

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Francois Lachance

1978. Ekbert Faas in Towards A New American Poetics on dramatic monologue via Robert Bly To be sure, Bly’s criticism, if taken cum grano salis, is not entirely irrelevant. For a poet using personæ without the techniques of multiperspective fragmentation … Continue reading →

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Three Temporalities of Agony

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Janine Beichman. Masaoka Shiki (Boston: Twayne Publications, 1982). From 1895 on, though he was uncertain when death would come, Shiki lived each day with its presence unbearably close. Time as he experienced it had qualities it does not have for … Continue reading →

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Galloping Lope

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Slide into image and mind-set. GENTLE SLOPE INTO BOOK You be the person who sweeps and I’ll be the one who turns off the lights at the end of the poem. Sweepings. Nations used to center on individuals, then on … Continue reading →

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Earth Spell

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Francois Lachance

The opening lines of “With the Earth of the Garden Still on Them” My hands with the earth of the garden still on them, dirt worked under the nails, into the creases of knuckle, palm, life line, heart line. Sullen … Continue reading →

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In the land of “attar of carexhaust catcorpse and cookinggrease”

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Francois Lachance

How not to love a poem that begins with the word “Dawndrizzle” and ends with a series of other compound words or kennings? Slumbers now slumtrack unstinks cooling waiting brief for milkmaid mornstar and worldrise In the middle there is … Continue reading →

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Dialogue des Courgettes

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Francois Lachance

The third of the garden poems “Zucchini” in A Gathering Instinct by Betsy Warland. you admire the zucchini’s proliferation i think it incapable of discretion I like how the observations in dialogue almost an imbroglio is peppered on both sides … Continue reading →

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Behold the Fan

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Janine Beichman. Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry Discussions on what form we should translate tanka into have focused until now on tanka in its printed forms. One argument for … Continue reading →

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