Category Archives: poetry

(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 […]

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.