Category Archives: Poetry

First Letters First

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Phil Hall ends “Adios Polka” the opening poem of Killdeer with the observation   there is nowhere to go off but wordward And so it is no great surprise that a line from earlier work (White Porcupine) comes to mind: that … Continue reading →

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Algebra Builds Homes

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I have blogged before about Sachiko Murakami’s online poetry project http://projectrebuild.ca and now I have the pleasure of quoting from the book Rebuild. Let the home stand for us Let the beauty of our form be complex. Let our complexity … Continue reading →

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Wonder of Words

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba in their translation of selections form the poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński (I Wrote Stone) render a stanza from “The Laws of Nature” with economy and attention to the sparseness of the gesture being described. We … Continue reading →

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What Poets Do

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Francois Lachance

There are some wonderful passages to lift from Guy Davenport The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. One occurs in “Spinoza’s Tulips” [an essay on Wallace Stevens] where the world nourishes the work of cogitation: [O]nce it is understood […] … Continue reading →

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Markers Sartorial

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Recently, Clint Burnham has provided us with an image of Turban Turbulence in these lines from Buddyland a hardhat over a turban isn’t anywhere so funny as a sheet over a suit The lines came back to mind when I … Continue reading →

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Toying

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Francois Lachance

I am arrested by two words. toy river The juxtaposition creates this tension between the small and the vast for it is not a stream nor a creek but something larger, a river. And “toy” brings one to the miniature … Continue reading →

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OED versus OCR

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Paul Dutton, “Solitude,” from Horse d’oeuvres: Four Horsemen (Toronto: General Publishing 1975) is reproduced in Caroline Bayard’s The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism. It is a concrete poem that functions by substraction. [First line, middle, … Continue reading →

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Viscera

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Francois Lachance

As I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje I was struck by how one particular passage of hallucinated anatomical rendering was like the viscerally-inflected passages that one finds in Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. … Continue reading →

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Paratexts Entries Replicas Epitaphs

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Francois Lachance

No reprise. From the back of the box that houses a folding fan of text: WHEN MY BROTHER DIED I MADE AN EPITAPH FOR HIM IN THE FORM OF A BOOK. THIS IS A REPLICA OF IT, AS CLOSE AS … Continue reading →

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Clashes

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Reprise from Clint Burnham The only poetry that matters: reading the Kootenay School of Writing: [T]he work we do as critics, as teachers, as readers, turns out to have implications for our everyday lives, as well as for the social … Continue reading →

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