dumbfoundry

You are also involved in the publication and promotion of poetry as the poetry editor at Insomniac Press and as the long-time host of the I.V. Lounge Reading Series in Toronto. Your various hats give you a strong vantage point in who’s publishing what in Canadian poetry these days. What’s your sense of what’s happening out there? Do you see any major trends or issues?

PV: Poetry in Canada is all over the map. I’m not certain there is any one defining trend at the moment; the various schools of style and aesthetics are too fractured. I could start listing the geographical stereotypes, like prairie poets all write endless craft-worthy treatises on rivers and irrigation while Toronto poets are all post-post-modern cleverphiles "mapping out new lexicons" for some inexplicable reason, but what good would it do? It’s simply not true on the whole.

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Other than that, I suppose it’s important to acknowledge that our literature is still in its youth. That has its pros and cons. We don’t have any foundational traditions to live up to, which gives us a lot of inventive wiggle-room, but by the same token we don’t have a preset bar of literary accomplishment that we are all working collectively to raise. I think many people are perhaps too eager to publish without giving much thought about what they’re contributing, or contributing to. I certainly get a lot of manuscripts submitted to me through Insomniac Press that were clearly written by people with little or no knowledge of poetry, and some of them come with publishing histories. If the situation is going to get any better—if our juvenile national poetry is going to grow and develop into a big, strong national poetry—then poets and editors alike are going to have to get more discerning and work a little harder, and I do not exempt myself from this opinion.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Saturday, June 11, 2005 at 4:49 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.