writing matters.

So Scott Griffin recently announced his sponsorship of a new poetry competition for high school students across Canada (read the G&M article on it here ). Naturally enough, I'm in favour of it, particularly so because it emphasizes the performance of poetry and not simply the reading of it. When you are forced to think about how a poem (or any work of art) is communicating its meaning, you gain a better understanding of it ( Ruth Padel's meditation on a Bruegel painting illustrates this point well). Beyond that, thinking about how to speak a poem (or any piece of literature) in such a way that you can actually keep an audience interested forces you to see the beauty of a poem, or its lack. Despite what has been said in some critical/theoretical circles, there must be an inherent connection between beauty and art. Art cannot be anything (a mass-produced urinal comes to mind as a good example). The point of art is to force someone to reach out beyond themselves, so that the...

I'd simply like to direct your attention to an excellent article in the Guardian. Enjoy!

A quick word of warning: this is a work of entertainment, filled with hyperbole, and is not intended to be taken in complete seriousness. With that in mind, enjoy! Tempus tacendi, et tempus loquendi. It has long been an Observation of mine that our World is little occupied with the Practice of Listening, and upon much Reflection, I have decided that there is a Moral Obligation for myself to expound on this most pressing Problem. In each Place, each Mode of Discourse, each Matter of Importance, I cannot help but be made aware of the Clamour created by a Miriad of Voices, each Shouting in a vain attempt to be heard above the Din of Others; not One realizing that their own Voice is simply Another Part of the Cacophony. Sirs, we seem to have lost the Art of Listening, and whereupon, our Manners and all things which proscribe to our very Humanity. As each Voice, each Opinion, each Insight piles ever higher upon the very Heap of Garbage that is swiftly accumulating within the Great Sphere of...

‎"More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." - Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold published his essay "The Study of Poetry," back in 1865. It seems that 145 years later, some things have changed similarly to this prediction, while others remain the same. Physics in particular seems to have discovered an afinity with poetry that could only have been imagined by Arnold. Some of the brightest physicists in the world can only fall back upon metaphor and allegory to explain their findings and research. The idea that science must rely as much upon preception as anything else has started to remove some of its aloofness from the arts, although it is still slow going. Poetry as an art may be fading into the background in society, but its methods of expressing...

I've always felt that the best piece of advice that is always given to writers is to read as much as you possibly can, in as great a breadth as you possibly can. The more exposure you get to differing styles and voices, nevermind the appreciation and knowledge of history that comes with it, provides endless inspiration and direction for your own work. The modernists and post-modernists are innovative beyond belief. Read e.e. cummings and compare him to the poets who came before and afterwards. It's quite possible that he's been a more influential figure for poetry than Shakespeare. Before that, Byron and Tennyson show what can be accomplished through formal poetry, and if you're looking for satire, Swift is the master (and has been for centuries). And as much as cummings may have changed the poetic landscape entirely, it's impossible to overstate the impact the Renaissance had upon literature. What fascinates me, as I look backwards for my own inspiration, is how th...

There's an interesting phenomenom I've noticed with the release of the first issue of The Oral Tradition: people go to the magazine's submission's page nearly as often as they look at the issue itself. This could mean any number of things, but I think it says something about writers nowadays. We seem to be more concerned with finding a place for our own voice to be heard than listening to other voices . . . and then we complain that no one is listening. This leads to the market being supersaturated, and brings me to a question I think will soon become essential to contemporary literature. A certain question can come to define a certain age. Post-modernists asked "What should a poem be?" and modernists asked "Why should we continue to write the same way?" Before this, the typical question being answered in literature was "How should we live?" or "What is the good life?" I believe ours is "Why should we write?" More people...

Why do the boundaries between poetry and other art forms matter? I ask in order to follow up on your timely proposal to see what changes technology can bring to literary magazines like The Oral Tradition and The Writers Block . There are so many digital technologies available nowadays to writers that media players with voice recordings seem almost conservative by comparison. See Dakota by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries or the Inanimate Alice series by Bradfield Productions, for example. Both of these examples seem innovative in a very literary fashion, even though they combine a variety of media. And I would argue that the questions about whether or not they qualify as poetry doesn't really matter to their value and force as an effective, verbal art form. That's not at all to suggest, however, that sound recordings like those utilized by The Oral Tradition, Blackbird , and 2RiverView are archaic or not extremely effective. I think that being able to hear the voices of...

One of the things that annoys me most as a reader is when an author decides to get experimental. Now, don't get me wrong, finding new ways of writing and expressing yourself is a good thing. However, it's probably not the best idea to use symbols that vaguely resemble the letters you're trying to use to spell out words. Yes, it looks snazzy and very hip, but it distracts from what's really going on in the poem. A poem's form and its subject should compliment each other. It's rare that such extreme formal experimentation actually improves a poem's effect. I think that bill bisset is a great example of taking formal experimentation too far. Drawing cartoonish pictures, titling them, and calling them “visual poems” seems ridiculous. I just don't see how visual poetry becomes different from visual art. Poetry and art aren't simply categories that we fit things into. They're mediums that we use to express our thoughts and feelings. This means that the...

As the Editor of a literary magazine called The Writers Block, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the amount of submissions I receive about the phenomenon of writer's block. But I am. With one or two exceptions, these pieces (usually poems) go like this: 1) The writer is confronted with a blank page, 2) This terrifies and frustrates them, 3) They lament and grapple with words, struggling through the darkness until, lo and behold, 4) The blank page is no longer blank and they've produced a poem after all. Up until this point I am 100% supportive of such processes. All writers go through this on a regular basis, and the best way to get through it is to just write, no matter what you write about. Usually when you're stuck you end up writing about how you're stuck. I get it. What I'm not supportive of is 5) Gushing with relief at their new-found liberation, the writer slaps a writer's block-related title on their new poem and sends it to a literary magazine (...

Most writers, when asked, will tell you that they write because they can't stop, can't help themselves. This is a great answer, except that they seem to have misunderstood what was being asked of them. The question isn't “Why do you write?” but rather, “Why should you write?” It's a very convenient, romantic notion of the suffering writer, who writes because he cannot stop, despite being ignored by all (I can't help but think of Dylan Thomas' “In My Craft or Sullen Art”). Unfortunately, this is useless, and largely untrue. No longer do writers have patrons, like Yeats, nor can any but the most successful make a living off their art (and do not choose their art over their worldly existence). Nearly every writer you read nowadays holds a job separate from their art, and although it may not sing to their souls in the same fashion, it is the lifeblood that shapes their experiences and, in turn, their art. Yet again literature is struggling to reinvent itself. This i...