Gertrude Stein - If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (MP3)

The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry

Watch Christian Bök and Carmine Starnino duke it out in their discussion of contemporary Canadian poetry. Filmed at Mount Royal University, Calgary, 26 November 2009. Moderated by Kit Dobson, organized by Kelly Hewson, Micheline Maylor, and the Department of English at Mount Royal.


The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry from Kit Dobson on Vimeo.

Third Factory Notes to Poetry 2009 - Links

An Excerpt from Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch

Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch began writing a column called "Poet’s Choice" in the Washington Post Book World in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry. Poet’s Choice includes the work of more than one hundred poets from ancient times to the present—among them Sappho, W. B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Amy Lowell, Mark Strand, and many more—and shares them with all of Hirsch’s inimitable enthusiasm and joy. Rich, relevant, and inviting, the book offers us the fruits of a life lived in poetry.

Here is a poem from the collection Scars by Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova.

Ars Poetica
Write each of your poems
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
charged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have no right to lie,
no right to play pretty little games.
You simply won't have time
to correct your mistakes.
Write each of your poems,
tersely, mercilessly,
with blood — as if it were your last.

How Smokes the Smolder by Todd Boss

How Smokes the Smolder by Todd Boss

at neck, at

shoulder, that

stokes a man

as he grows

older. Nothing

rages, nothing

fumes. No one

races through

the rooms,

alarmed. How

casually he's

armed. How

gradually arises

what surprises

in his mirrors.

Unawares, as

fall runs colder,

pulls he only

slightly tighter

his good wool

sweater, thinner

than ever now

at elbow,

at shoulder.

Call for Submissions: Magma 47 ‘the devil and all his works’

Is the devil you know better than the devil you don’t? Does the devil take you? Do you speak of the devil? Have you been having a devil of a time and was it the devil to pay? Was the devil in the detail? Are you playing devil’s advocate? Is the devil he, she, both, or neither? Are you caught between the devil and Deep Blue Sea? Are you in limbo? Are you in Purgatory? Did you ever make a Betty Crocker Devil’s Food Cake? Is your hell private or public, and at which station on the Circle Line do you get off? Why does the devil have so many names and why does he have all the best tunes? Are you one of the beautiful and the damned?
Annie Freud, Guest Editor of Magma 47, with Roberta James as assistant editor, invites you to submit poems stimulated by anything connected with the devil and all his works.
The deadline is 28 February 2010. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.