Peter Norman: The pursuit

This past weekend, one of Ottawa’s celebrated reading series played host to one of the city’s former residents made good. Author Peter Norman spent three years here at the beginning of his career and found them to be incredibly formative. “I got off the ground in poetry there. It was in that community that I started to write with concentration. I’d write for the open mic nights at reading series and then use the feedback to see what captured peoples’ attention.” He left Ottawa but took with him a long list of friends, supporters and burgeoning projects. “I did a tally once,” he muses, “and about 63 percent of my poems were written in Ottawa.”

Rhodes scholar

W.H. Auden once described a poem as “a well-made verbal object.” Brilliantly, Auden wanted us to realize that the poem is not a catalogue of something, but is in fact a creation made out of the material of language. The most tedious poets are invariably the ones who forget this, and bury the crafting of language under gimmickry or confessional melodrama. At the other end of the spectrum are authors like Shane Rhodes.

Love of lightness

There is room in this world for the serious poetry built out of timber and stone. And there is also room in this world for poetry that gathers in clouds and flutters, that is fun and fresh. Pearl Pirie’s first trade collection of poetry, Been Shed Bore, is most definitely the latter. READ MORE

Alberta bound

Wild Horses is rob mclennan’s 21st book of poetry, written while the incredibly prolific Ottawa author spent 2007 as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Mclennan is a poet of place, always finding his voice out of the material of his surroundings, the continuity of its existence through history. “It’s an Edmonton book,” he says. READ MORE

Steve Sauvé

Steve Sauvé The spoken word community mourns his passing When members of the spoken word poetry community here in Ottawa talk about Steve Sauvé’s writing, and his life, the first word that pops up is “genuine.” “When you see some great performers you think, ‘I have to step up my game.’ But when you watched…

Dead poets

Latest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine resurrects the “forgotten and neglected” The unseen wisdom of the world tells us that life is sometimes awful. Man is always subject to the ultimate vicissitudes of death and decay; it is the single constant star in our often carefully navigated lives. We feel this most keenly when it…