Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Last week, I posted an image of Northrop Frye with a dump of snow on his head. I forgot to mention that Northrop Frye’s statue has a neighbour: Al Purdy’s statue sits across the road in Queen’s Park. Norrie and Al can’t see each other, and for three reasons.
Kevin, do you remember our tripto the Science Centre when we stoodat our separate consoles playing tictac toe against the computer?Monolith displays half-way acrossthe gallery, light-bulb arrayslike movie marquees while vacuumtubes chugged out the next moves?And you said you had a friendsmarter’n me, betchure life,who come here one time an’ beat it.And I said, in…
The last time I was in Edinburgh, I dropped in to the Scottish Poetry Library and picked up a copy of The Poem Goes To Prison, edited by Kate Hendry. This is an anthology of poems selected by prisoners for prisoners. It was curated by Kate Hendry while she was teaching at HMP Barlinnie, Scotland’s largest prison, located just outside Glasgow.
once upon a timean emergent timean Ecclesiastes timea rising sun time that shines warm on the cheeksa fresh time blossoming from the emptiness and greening into historyan epochal timea seasonal timea calendrical timea time of minutiae ticking left wrist shackled timea global market shekel timea metred timea banging bongo timea pulsing time of poems and…
In his 2011 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett offered some wisdom on gold as an investment option. For some reason, that little section of his letter (which you can download here as a pdf document – see page 18) has gained renewed interest in the media.
1) mmmm you tell me to say the wordall your friends, theirs say the worddrumming fingers on your hipswaiting, waiting, waiting on my lips you want to play the lear with medemand that i profess it, dearlear? get real, early oni thought we’d gotten past the word sing to me the way you used to…
Dionne Brand’s volume of poetry, Ossuaries, is my 22nd book of 2013 & the 3rd book of my February reading list to mark Black History Month. In light of recent reports that the remains of Richard III have been discovered beneath a Leicester car park, a reading of Ossuaries seems timely.
why do extrovert and beautifulget three syllablesbut poor plain gets just oneif plain was polysyllabicit would get more opportunitiesvacations in majorcatanning topless in a thongwhile beefcake verbs look ona mojito by the poolthen another and anothertil plain (no longer plain) shoutslook at me i’m populartrisyllabic like all the restlatinate pronunciationno more the blunt teutoni use…
In chapter 32 of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë offers a curious passage, in which St. John Eyre Rivers offers Jane a volume of poetry. The volume, it turns out, is Scott’s Marmion, which was published almost forty years before Jane Eyre.
Every day I walk past the Ontario Fire Fighter Memorial on the northeast corner of College & University. I’m grateful for the service these people perform. I’m also astonished at the sacrifice they make in performing that service.
I reread pieces long after the fact. At the time of their writing, they seemed persuasive; they could have moved people to see the world as I do. But now they seem clunky. I want to cut the facets of a diamond with my prose, but my only tool is a sledgehammer.
A couple weeks ago, as part of Glasgow’s Doors Open Day, volunteers offered tours of the Necropolis. Located behind Glasgow Cathedral, the Necropolis is a crumbling celebration of Victorian Glasgow’s elite.
Two lines in a (chubby) chapbook of 35 poems is pretty damn good. That’s, oh, maybe an average of one in 350 lines or 0.29 % of the chapbook. I’m talking about Peg Duthie’s poetry chapbook, Measured Extravagance, from Upper Rubber Boot Books, and the number I’m citing is the number of lines in it that drive me crazy.
I wanted to write a protest songthen realized how, all alongI’d been beating time with my pulse. My cardboard sign was turned to mushin the rain, and the slogan, gone in the rushof feet pounding it into the mud.\ My chant was the choked hello I gaveto the Mumbai caller who said I’d savea lot…
Blueshifting is a physics phenomenon – the Doppler effect applied to light: if the source of the light is approaching, the light waves get scrunched together so they have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency) which shifts them to the blue end of the colour spectrum.