I have written before–here and elsewhere–about fear of heights and the sublime, so I won’t go on at too great a length. But, in the spirit of this blog’s origins, I’ll say something about what I’m thinking today. Driving across the bridge over the North Saskatchewan this afternoon on my way to the college where […]

Recently, an interviewer from The Malahat Review asked me this question. He meant to ask about the effect on a writer’s life of being awarded a significant prize, but of course I always take these questions personally. A year ago I could never have predicted the place I’m in now. Life is amazing. Beautiful and […]

Saddened to hear this morning of the death of Seamus Heaney. Rest in peace. “It [the poem] knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze […]

I’ve been reading sonnets aloud in the mornings. Listening for the ‘turn’ or volta–that moment when what a poet is saying shifts direction–when the sonnet’s argument expands, or contracts. In one way, or another, the poem’s question resolves itself (formally, this resolution–however provisional–is required). Sometimes, of course, the problem a sonnet raises is more interesting […]

“‘Prose’: the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.” -Milan Kundera, from The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

“We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature’s most moral act.” -Marjorie […]

I’m honoured to be included in the Literary Press Group’s 30-day Coast-to-Coast Poetry Project. They’ve included a poem from my full-length poetry collection, One crow sorrow, and they’ve also posted my answers to a few brief interview questions. Every day for the rest of the month, LPG is posting a new poem and interview with […]