Category Archives: big time

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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The Poets and the Occupists

By jso | Published: 27 December 2011

Obser­va­tions made at the Vancou­ver Poetry Confer­ence in Octo­ber, 2011, during which some two hundred poets and friends of poetry descended on the city at the same time as the Occu­pists were setting up on the lawn in front of the Art Gallery

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Digested!

By jso | Published: 20 October 2010

In the mail today a copy of Read­ers Digest arrived contain­ing a cheque and a story of mine published ten years ago and collected in 2007 in an anthol­ogy called Body Break­down. The orig­i­nal story appeared on www​.open​let​ters​.net, the epis­to­lary venture under­taken by Paul Tough after his tenure as editor of Satur­day Night, the general inter­est magazine […]

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Ten thousand, a million copies in America

By jso | Published: 14 February 2010

Paulo Coehlo, whose books had sold in excess of 65 million copies before one of them fell into my hands in a used book store in the spring of 2009, is described in the biograph­i­cal note as having suffered torture at the hands of the para­mil­i­tary in Brazil in the late nineteen-​sixties, an expe­ri­ence that […]

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