Monthly Archives: January 2012

Approaching Toronto, pre-winter

By jso | Published: 16 January 2012

Approach­ing Toronto on the last day of Octo­ber. In a new city, every­one you meet partakes of this qual­ity of the denizen, of the holder of a secret: they deport them­selves “natu­rally” with­out appar­ent self-​consciousness, cross­ing streets and walk­ing along side­walks, rather as chil­dren in Quebec are able (mirac­u­lously) to speak French with­out having to think about it.

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Poets, Occupists, NaNoWriMo-ists

By jso | Published: 13 January 2012

(part 3: excerpted from a longer essay in Geist 83) The moment from which poetry emerges is often a moment of crisis: in the Gold­Corp Centre for the Arts (where the confer­ence concluded), crisis perme­ated the air we were breath­ing. Poetry is the strug­gle between language and time, said one of the poets on the […]

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The Poets and the Occupists, part 2

By jso | Published: 3 January 2012

Poetry lacks the focussed atten­tion of a large public; it is forever seek­ing an audi­ence with ears to hear; its prac­ti­tion­ers are dedi­cated to clar­ity rather than mean­ing, and the strug­gle for clar­ity is itself trou­bling and uncom­fort­able, and can lead into the arcane, the complex and the weird.

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