Poet of the Month
Poet of the Month: Don Domanski
Posted by Words At Large Admin on December 09 at 09:22 AM
Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest work, All Our Wonder Unavenged (Brick Books) recently won the Governor General's (GG's) Literary Award for Poetry. He has published eight books of poetry, two of which (Wolf Ladder and Stations of the Left Hand) were previously shortlisted for the GG’s. In 1999 he also won the CBC Literary Award for Poetry. Published and reviewed internationally, Domanski’s work has been translated into Czech, Portuguese and Spanish.
What does it mean to you to win the Governor General's Literary Award?
Of course I'm very honoured and pleased. It's a very good feeling to have your work acknowledged by your peers. However, I have to temper that with the reality that awards are momentary gestures from a world of facts and opinions, which the poems themselves know nothing of. There's no vox populi when it comes to poetry, nor should there be, some people will think my book deserves this award, while others will adamantly disagree. The truth lies somewhere between those two positions, lies down with the poetry itself in the end, and that is an entire other world. Poetry has nothing to do with voting, it is not a democracy after all, but an act of nature.
Poet of the Month: Susan Gillis
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 15 at 11:59 PM
Susan Gillis has lived on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada, and now lives most of the year in Montreal, where she teaches English. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Her first book, Swimming Among the Ruins was shortlisted for the 2001 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Re-Lit Award, and in 2003 she won the A. M. Klein Award for Volta.
There are often references to food in your poetry. What is the significance of food in your writing?
I grew up in a family of six whose meals were almost always shared, all three meals every day, so my sense of the centrality of food was ingrained early. And the food that came with us on every outing would be planned and re-planned, often involving long telephone conversations with my cousins’ families as well. Our meals were not very experimental, and I didn’t really learn much about cooking or the amazing variety of food at home—I didn’t eat spaghetti till I was 17, though I sort of knew what it was, when my then-boyfriend’s sister had us over for dinner and served it. How ridiculous I looked, trying to eat it like they did, twirling the strands on a fork so effortlessly! But I didn’t care, I loved it. And the first time I tasted garlic bread I ate so much I made myself sick. Anyway, I fell in love with food then, in late adolescence and my early twenties, which eventually led to my quitting smoking and learning how to cook. The stress of quitting smoking drove me away from poetry for awhile, and when I came back to it, it was with my new love….
I don’t see myself as someone who has to feed everyone she knows in order to feel satisfied, though I do enjoy cooking for, and (maybe especially) with, other people. And I’ve never seen myself as the person in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Memoirs of a Mad Cook, fearful and anxious that I might not be up to the task of nourishing those close to me. Does food in my poems stand for that larger idea of nourishment? It’s hard to resist supposing so. But I haven’t consciously meant to lean on it as symbol or metaphor in this way. It’s just that there tends to be food around when important moments occur.
When I’m writing well I often forget to eat. Maybe a subconscious hunger conjures a plate of olives or a ripe tomato and slips it onto the page. I can’t think of many desserts in my poems; my tastes run more along the savoury salt/fat axis.
Food is playful, another mode of creative expression. And it’s culturally fascinating in so many ways. For instance, it’s one of the first things we communicate about in places whose language we don’t speak: trying to find pepper in a tiny village shop in Turkey, the shopkeeper’s delighted aha! when together we work it out. Shaking hands with the woman who helped me find apple juice in a busy grocery store in Kusadasi. The gift of fruit of a kind I’d never seen before from three strangers when I was alone in a small café. Learning the trick of rolling flatbread from women who were busy but not too busy to share their knowledge. Being stopped by an elderly widow who had me hang a bead curtain in her doorway then invited me in for a plate of cake.
Formalized as the meal, food becomes a form of love. Even a small meal is a feast, and the revelry and celebration that go along with feasting are important parts of our lives. The fast can also be a form of love, but I haven’t explored that idea so much. The shared meal as a ritual expression can be enjoyed, celebrated, manipulated, damaged, broken, and so on, like any such expression. In this sense, I mean food to be itself in my poems, with all its obvious and underlying associations.
And there’s no denying the irresistible pull of those direct, unmediated senses of taste and smell. That’s probably the short answer to your question: food’s erotic.
Poet of the Month: Ken Babstock
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 05 at 11:08 AM
Ken Babstock is the author of three books of poetry. His first, Mean, won the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People's Poet Award. His second, Days into Flatspin, won a K.M. Hunter Award. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, been anthologized in Canada and the United States, and translated into several languages. His most recent collection, Airstream Land Yacht, was a finalist for both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, and won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
In your latest collection Airstream Land Yacht you have different voices narrate your poems. How did this shifting point of view affect the content or tone of the poems?
This collection, in some important ways, is actually about "shifting points of view" so I felt obliged to carry on not being myself, which turned out to sound much like myself, only more so. Meaning I consciously wanted the poems to try everything from song, to murmur, to whimper, to wander, to arguments and evasions. They gained a playful raggedness and tone of self-invention that wasn't there in the earlier books. I call it a 'gain'. Others have disagreed.
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