From The Guardian:

A Burmese author known for his love poetry has been arrested after penning a Valentine’s Day verse carrying a hidden message about the leader of the country’s military junta, Senior General Than Shwe.

The poet, Saw Wai, was arrested on Tuesday, a day after his poem “February 14″ was published in the popular weekly entertainment magazine A Chit, according to friends and colleagues who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The eight-line poem in Burmese is about a man broken-hearted after falling for a fashion model, whom he thanks for having taught him the meaning of love. But if read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase: “Power crazy Senior General Than Shwe.” Than Shwe, 74, who has headed the junta since 1992, has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his remote, newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the country’s interior.

We sincerely hope that Saw Wai is freed soon.

(We must note, however, that this is yet more proof that Oulipian constraints are nothing but trouble with a capital T+7.)

Last December, Quillblog noted a spat between Toronto Small Press Book Fair organizers Myna Wallin and Halli Villegas and one of the event’s founders, poet Stuart Ross. The controversy stemmed from comments posted by Ross on his blog criticizing Wallin and Villegas for poorly promoting the November event. The debate was then continued in various online forums, becoming increasingly personal and nasty.

According to a recent article on the website Reading Toronto, the disagreement has taken an even uglier turn, with Villegas and Wallin threatening legal action against Ross.

Wallin and Villegas allege that Ross has engaged in a campaign of “defamation of character and interference in our professional lives.” They also claim that Ross has conducted a “two-month campaign of personal and public harassment and defamation” and assert that he has done so “with clear intent to ruin our professional reputations.”

This information has come to light in a singularly unusual manner: it was made public by Wallin and Villegas themselves in a mass email to the Lexiconjury discussion group. Inevitably, their email has subsequently achieved a far wider circulation by being forwarded by various members of the group to parties beyond it.

The article is exhaustive and fleshes out some of the issues at play regarding free speech and community-building. And it illustrates how a whole lot of people are in a tizzy over the affair (just read the comments sections here and here). This bit, toward the end of the article, gives you a good sense of the escalating stakes in the debate:

In the absence of any substantiation of these very serious allegations, it is unclear how much Wallin and Villegas are demanding Ross recant, and how much control they now seek to dictate not only over his involvement in small press publishing and the Small Press Book Fair, but over his writing career – his blog, his widely read “Hunkamooga” column, his past and forthcoming poetry books and novel, his participation in literary events, his work as a literary editor and instructor, his collegial and personal relations – more broadly. Given the duration and extent of Wallin and Villegas’ campaign against Ross, it is unclear how much further they intend to go – or how Ross might respond upon provocation.

(Thanks to Bookninja for the link.)

The folks at Véhicule Press have posted a story from Wednesday’s Montreal Gazette on their web page, about a high-speed car chase that took place on the highway between Longueuil and Montreal and involved police and an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Though it’s not apparent from the story why Véhicule would want to post it, their reasons become clearer in the follow-up commentary:

While poet Asa Boxer was in Toronto on a Signal reading tour, his 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass was being pursued by police across the Champlain Bridge. It did not end well, and our hearts go out to Asa, who as of today will be using public transportation.

Apparently, some dude stole Boxer’s car, and the chase ended after the thief collided with an SQ Cruiser. The perp was arrested and charged for fleeing police and car theft.

All we could think after hearing this was: poets can afford cars?

According to The Guardian, the venerable but somewhat fusty New Yorker magazine has appointed a new poetry editor, for the first time in 20 years. The new guy is Irish-born Pulitzer-winner Paul Muldoon, who takes over from Alice Quinn starting this November.

The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, explained that it was not only Muldoon’s skill as a prize-winning poet which had made him ideal for the post, but also his wider appreciation of contemporary poetry.

“It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,” he told The New York Times. “It’s also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who’s not in Alaska.”

Though new blood is surely a good thing, we have to ask: wouldn’t it have behooved Remnick to appoint a new cartoons editor first? Those things are godawful.

MtvU, a branch of MTV that broadcasts on 750 U.S. college campuses, announced this week that it has chosen its first poet laureate, The New York Times reports. And while names such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen spring to mind as poets already in the music world, mtvU chose John Ashbery, a celebrated 80-year-old poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and continues to publish prolifically.

Excerpts of Ashbery’s poems will be shown in 18 promotional spots on the channel and its website (which will also have the full text of the poems).

Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”

The station is also sponsoring a poetry contest for students. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will select a winner, who will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of its national poetry series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU….

Quillblog suggests keeping quiet about the fact that there is significantly less bling involved in being a poetry star than a rock star.

Jason B. Jones at Bookslut has kindly decided to share with us one of his most prized possession: an out-of-print audio recording of Alec Guiness reading T.S. Eliot poems.

What’s hilarious about the recording is listening to the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi reading The Waste Land. (When I started playing the tape at home, my 4-year-old cocked his head and asked, “What’s Ben Kenobi saying?”) […] But what’s really splendid about the recording is hearing Eliot’s poems read by someone who knows how to act.

Jones includes an mp3 snippet from Guiness’ Waste Land reading, and a further snippet of Eliot himself reading from the same poem.

(Also, just for kicks, he includes a link to an old, nonsensical Wikipedia entry for The Waste Land, which appears to have since been altered.)

Because there is nothing more important going on in the world than the drunken, drugged-up antics of a talented young actress barely out of her teens, below is a version of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL,” adapted specially for Ms. Lohan. “I’ve seen the best actresses of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, drunk,/driving through the streets of Beverly Hills at dawn looking for a place to crash.”

Weirdly enough, or perhaps appropriately enough, it ends up being kind of sympathetic.

It’s not new or anything, but Clive James’ poem “The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered” is a Quillblog favourite that will undoubtedly resonate with anyone who works in the book biz.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.

Those are just the opening lines. The New York Times‘ book blog, Paper Cuts, has posted the poem in its entirety; the hook is Norton’s announcement that it will issue a retrospective collection of James’ poetry, to be called Opal Sunset, next year.

This is a big week for Metric singer Emily Haines. She is releasing her second EP with the band Soft Skeleton, What is Free to a Good Home? as well as a book: a collection of writings from her father, Paul Haines, who died suddenly in 2003. Haines, who was very close to her father and credits him as a major influence on her own music and Metric’s, was driven to create a book of his work in her grief after his death, The Globe and Mail reports.

Secret Carnival Workers is the first collection of writings by this gregarious, elusive man, whom jazz critic Stuart Broomer (who edited the book) aptly calls a “verbal musician.” Its launch this week coincides with a new EP of songs by Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton, including one song adapted from a short poem called Sprig. It’s the first time she has made music with her father’s words, though, in a more general sense, he’s in everything she has done.

She also wrote an essay for The Toronto Star, which included this interesting anecdote and insight into her reasons for creating the book.

The day Paul died all the appliances in the house stopped working, confirming at once my suspicions that the man was a conductor of electricity. In his absence I often feel like a tired machine myself. I hope that by releasing What is Free to a Good Home? and Secret Carnival Workers together this summer some aspect of Paul’s presence – ideally his sense of humour! – will send a jolt to the living.

Haines self-published the book with a company called H. Pal, but it is printed and distributed by Coach House Books.

Zach Wells – poet, Canadian Notes and Queries review editor, and frequent Q&Q contributor – reacts on his blog to a Books in Canada essay entitled “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” by The Malahat Review editor John Barton. Barton says he is saddened and confused by the lack of poetry submissions he’s receiving of late; Wells replies, in effect, that the Malahat makes suitors jump through too many hoops for too little reward.

Wells takes a spin through the myriad reasons he doesn’t submit to the Malahat: no electronic submissions (and SASEs required for the written ones), a likely sluggish turnaround time by the editors (who discourage simultaneous submissions), and little financial recompense. All of that, Wells concludes, is compounded by the fact that no one really reads the journals anyway.

His suggestion? Poetry editors need to stop overfarming the fields and get out there and grow some new potatoes – er, solicit more submissions.

Y’know, if I was an editor and I wasn’t getting many high quality unsolicited submissions, I might just, oh, I don’t know, SOLICIT SOME SUBMISSIONS!! If you’re a poetry editor, part of the job description, it seems to me, is scouting, keeping an ear to the ground and seeking out work that will distinguish your publication from all the others. Boohoo, no one sends us stuff anymore, what are we to do? What will become of our poor little magazine? Why are my potatoes so puny and few? Oh well, guess I’ll go out and get the ploughing done before winter.

Wells also recommends openness to e-mail submissions, and improving web presence in order to increase readership. Hey, the Malahat says on its website that it has a Facebook group – isn’t that enough? It’s good enough for Michael Winter…

Paul Gessell in The Ottawa Citizen has this story about a revival of sorts for a dozen long-dead, long-forgotten poets, including B.C.’s Paul Potts, who died in 1990, and who, apparently, stank.

Potts cared little about the cleanliness of his clothes or body. As a result, he stank. This peccadillo, combined with some other eccentricities, did not, apparently, help his career.

“He became a creature of derision, mocked and shunned,” according to Nova Scotia publisher Ronald Caplan, who has been busy trying to resurrect Potts’s work.

When the 1986 British book Portraits of Poets, by photographer Christopher Barker, appeared, Potts was termed “the most shamefully neglected” of the century’s poets. The photographic portrait of Potts in the book makes the bald, bearded man look like a derelict who just crawled from a ditch.

Actually, he may have just crawled from a bed, soiled from his own waste. Friends would stop by from time to time to clean up him and the bed.

Potts’s work is being published in anthology form by Nova Scotia’s Breton Books, and will be included in a special “dead poets” issue of ARC magazine, prompting Gessell to write what may be the most eyebrow-raising journalistic segue in recent history: “In death, Potts perhaps smells a little better.”

The annual Griffin Poetry Prize gala is a chance for poets and poetasters alike to dine, drink, dance, and let their lines run right to margin. This year’s event, held June 6 at The Stone Distillery in Toronto’s Distillery District, was no exception. For the story in Q&Q Omni, click here. For pictures from the event, scroll down. (Photos by Tanja-Tiziana Burdi)

Kitty Lewis of Brick Books arrives at the gala.

Griffin jury member and past nominee Karen Solie arrives with her husband, poet David Seymour.

The CBC’s Lisa Godfrey, author Gil Adamson, House of Anansi’s Laura Repas, Griffin nominee Ken Babstock, and Anansi publisher Lynn Henry assemble near the bar. (Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht was in the running for the Canadian prize.)

Novelist Austin Clarke, The Walrus’s Ken Alexander, the Canada Council’s Melanie Routledge, and poet Earl Lovelace chat and quaff.

Ladies and gentlemen, the white stripes.

Nominated poet Priscila Uppal with her brother.

Charles Wright, winner of the international prize, expresses himself at the podium.

The prize’s founder, funder, and namesake, Scott Griffin, angrily shushes the crowd. (Kidding.)

Don McKay, the Canadian winner, addresses the largest number of media microphones ever simultaneously aimed at a poet in this country, ever. (Again, kidding.)

This week’s Friday Photo comes courtesy of critic, editor, and poet Carmine Starnino, who took this shot at the launch of new books by Montréal poets Eric Ormsby and Robyn Sarah. We think it shows that, sometimes, you don’t need a big room to launch a book. Having spent, in our salad days, many hours in The Word bookstore (located in McGill University’s student ghetto), we can attest that getting this many people in the place at one time is an impressive feat.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

The Guardian reports that Newsweek Poland this week turned a spotlight on the record of journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, claiming that under communist rule he was allowed to travel freely in exchange for collaborating with the regime. The denunciation is the latest in a recent push by the current government, allegedly to purge Poland of every trace of communism.

Kapuscinski, who is widely regarded as one of the last century’s great reporters, died earlier this year, and thus isn’t around to defend himself. So Ian Traynor is doing it for him here in the Guardian Books blog.

Traynor thinks it’s not surprising that Kapuscinski, who worked for the Polish state’s news agency for most of his career, signed something to make his many travels easier. Traynor wonders if Kapuscinski had to deliver on his end of the bargain, but says he sees little evidence now to condemn the late writer.

The decades he spent on the road were mainly as an employee of PAP, the state news agency of communist Poland. It was a privileged career and it is hardly surprising that a price had to be paid. Unless he signed a piece of paper for the security service, noted Ernest Skalski, a friend of the writer and a founder of the communist bloc’s first independent newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw, Kapuscinski would not have been Kapuscinski, free to exercise his reportorial genius.

The real moral question is, how did he deliver on the Faustian pact? The evidence is scant that he delivered much at all. But the current Polish regime is eager to tarnish the reputations of almost anyone who thrived under the communists. By definition, any such person is suspect.

Windsor, Ontario, publisher Biblioasis will release The Things of This Earth, the first volume of Kapuscinski’s poetry to be translated into English, in the fall.

Two years ago in Vancouver, five Canadian poets got together for a panel discussion on the state of the art, and tried to hash out whether Margaret Atwood’s seminal CanLit study Survival has energized or inhibited Canadian writing. Over the past several months, the website Northern Poetry Review has been posting the papers presented at the discussion by the individual panelists – Barbara Nickel, Chris Patton, Ross Leckie, Stephanie Bolster, and Eric Miller.

And now, poet, critic, and regular Q&Q contributor Zach Wells has capped the discussion with his own thoughts on Survival, contemporary poetry, and the panelists’ papers.

There are probably too many highlights to pull out of Wells’ piece – we really recommend reading the entire thing – but we’ll grab a couple of thought-provokers anyway.

Hermeneutic (as opposed to evaluative or aesthetic) criticism has certainly long been a stock-in-trade of the academic study of literature. It is not in and of itself a wrongheaded way to plumb a poem — unless we make the mistake of placing it ahead of artistic merit as grounds for close reading. In order for a book’s themes to gain a purchase on our imaginations — without benefit of scholarly intervention — it must first give us a thrill of emotional and aesthetic pain or pleasure.

[…]

Whatever the case, we cannot let Atwood off the hook for her role in disseminating and legitimizing the study of a nation’s literature through the lens of a single overarching theme, particularly now that her dated piece of nationalist propaganda, at best a historical curiosity, has been re-issued. It’s heartening to read these panel contributions and realize that poets with such different backgrounds and sensibilities can more or less agree that the victim morality of Survival has done more harm than good to the cause of Canadian poetry, both at home and abroad.

[…]

The most comforting – and consequently most harmful – idea in Survival is that literature can be the product of a nation, when in fact a country’s poetry should be one of the things that shapes it. America did not produce Whitman as much as Whitman has created America – as, for that matter, has Emily Dickinson in a completely different way.

Contributors to our Q&Q Flickr photo group have been busy on the book beat in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto.

Poet Carmine Starnino posted some pics, including the one above, from the April 27 launch of Language Acts: Anglo-Quebec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule Press) in Montreal. Poets in attendance included Todd Swift, Michael Harris, Mary di Michele, Robyn Sarah, David McGimpsey, Jason Camlot, and Victoria Stanton.

Literary photoblogger John W. MacDonald recently added a sizable cache of images from the Ottawa International Writers Festival to his Flickr page. Big-name celebs include David Suzuki, Barbara Gowdy, and Dennis Lee. Above, poets rob mclennan and George Bowering go for some always crowd-pleasing “bunny” hijinks while George Murray (far left), and host Stephen Brockwell (far right) look on, with what looks like mild bemusement.

At a Toronto event on April 19, editor Rosemary Shipton was honoured for her 17 years at the helm of Ryerson University’s Publishing program. Photo by Flickr member Lú (Stephanie Fysh). Here, Shipton (right) wonders if it was wrong to impose such a stringent dress code.

For photos from these events and more, pay a visit to the Q&Q Flickr group.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

As reported by the CBC, William Shakespeare is making a posthumous contribution to his poetry collection. Thirty years after its discovery, To the Queen by the Players, an 18-line poem, will be published for the first time.

Scholars believe the Bard may have delivered the poem himself in a performance for Queen Elizabeth I in 1599.

“When plays were put on at court, it was a requirement that there should be a prologue and an epilogue tailor-made for the occasion,” Jonathan Bate, co-editor of the new edition [of the Complete Works of Shakespeare published by Macmillan], told the Daily Express newspaper.

“Shakespeare was probably in the habit of dashing some lines down on the back of an envelope and then chucking them away.”

The publication of the poem is a fitting present to all Shakespeare fans, fresh from their celebration of his birthday on April 23.

Photographers from across the country have been contributing to our new Quill & Quire Flickr Pool. Below is just a sampling of recent additions.

Poet Don McKay – who was just nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize – took to the stage on March 27, 2007 as part of Ottawa’s long-standing Tree Reading Series. Photographed at the Library and Archives by John W. MacDonald.

On the same evening in Toronto, fellow McKay — this time the unrelated Ami — signed books at Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction event at the Gladstone Hotel. Also in attendance were this year’s New Faces, Neil Smith and Jen Sookfong Lee. A detailed and fascinating description of the night can be found on photographer Karen (Sassymonkey)’s own blog.

South of the border, Canadian poet Sarah Dowling reads in Philadelphia as part of the March 24 launch of arts journal EOAGH’s third issue, dubbed “Queering Language.” This photograph was taken by fellow poet Sina Queyras, whose own Flickr account has a sizable collection of Canadian writer and poet portraits.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Matrix magazine’s newest issue features a 30-page tribute to poet and professor Robert Allen, who died last November from brain cancer. Allen was the editor of Matrix for a decade, working out of his office in Concordia University’s creative writing department.

Matrix’s tribute features prose, poetry, and photography from Golda Fried, David Solway, Anne Stone, Conundrum Press’s Andy Brown (who is also Matrix’s art director), current editor Jon Paul Fiorentino, and more. It also features previously unpublished poetry by Allen.

Click here to read Q&Q’s story on Allen’s passing. (OMNI subscription req’d.)

Talent show TV is as popular in Arab nations as it is in the West, according to a report in The Guardian. An Abu Dhabi-based show estimates it has an audience of 17 million. It’s just as glitzy as American Idol – with a beautiful, leggy host and winners chosen by viewers sending SMS text votes – but the contestants are not singing. They are reciting their own poetry.

Instead of the familiar mix of R&B ballads and selections from the Broadway songbook, contestants drawn from all the Arab nations recite their own poetry, composed in a traditional Bedouin style called Nabati that dates back to the fourth century. Even the judges are different: respected academics and poets who weigh the contestants use of metre and imagery with unfeigned sincerity, and none of the personalised slurs or gushing pronouncements of star quality one expects from Simon Cowell and his cohorts.

An audience of 17 million people watching the recitation of original verse….Do you ever get the sneaking suspicion that Western culture might be in decline?

Kenneth J. Harvey’s novel Inside won the 2006 Winterset Award at Government House in St. John’s, Newfoundland on March 29.

The International Board on Books for Young People’s biennial fundraiser was held at Toronto’s Lula Lounge on March 21.

Toronto novelist and poet Emily Schultz launched her new book of poems, Songs for the Dancing Chicken, with a This Is Not a Reading Series event at the Gladstone Hotel on March 29.

For the complete list of Q&Q’s event photos, go here.

Bookforum has posted an enjoyable interview with U.S. literary agent Ira Silverberg, in which he and the reporter simply sit and sift though Silverberg’s book collection. Some of the most interesting and/or amusing titles are the long-forgotten ones by various minor-league celebrities and future literary stars. But the one Silverberg takes the most relish in displaying is a youthful work of poetry by fellow agent Andrew Wylie.

Students of publishing lore know that Andrew Wylie used to be a poet, but few have had the chance to peruse Yellow Flowers, a 1972 chapbook that collects some of the vaguely Mephistophelian superagent’s youthful versifications. “There’s a rumor that he has tried to buy up all of the copies,” says literary agent Ira Silverberg. It’s easy to see why: Thumbing through Silverberg’s copy of Yellow Flowers, one can only imagine what a Wylie client like, say, Benazir Bhutto would make of such poems as “Hands up Your Skirt,” “Warm, Wet Pants,” and the determinedly unlyric “I Fuck Your Ass, You Suck My Cock.”

Hearing of Wylie’s rhapsodic exertions, Quillblog was reminded of another agent, one closer to home, who attempted the art of poesy in her past: Denise Bukowski, who published a collection with Beach Holme in 1992 called Road Works. Only one alleged sample is available for perusal on the web, and it indicates that Bukowski’s no stranger to literary licentiousness herself. For her ode to “A Mexican Conquistador,” click here.

And if you’re interested in reading more of Wylie’s work, Gawker has a few excerpts up.

The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear has written an excellent (and meaty) piece about the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. In 2002, Poetry and its accompanying foundation was bequeathed the staggeringly ridiculous sum of $200-million by the Indianapolis poet and heiress Ruth Lilly, and ever since they’ve been trying to figure out ways to use the money to return poetry to a state of prominence in the public sphere.

One of the first changes to the Poetry Foundation was the hiring of a new president, John Barr, a former Wall Street executive with literary aspirations. According to Goodyear, Barr and his staff are trying to turn the magazine and its website into “the Billboard or the Entertainment Weekly of the poetry world, reflecting everything that’s happening without a dogmatic point of view.” This, of course, has put a number of poets’ noses out of joint, as has the foundation’s plan for the $200-million, which will apparently not be spent on grants to poets.

As Ethel Kaplan, a lawyer at a wealth-management firm and the chair of the board, put it, “Nobody wanted to sit back and read grant proposals—especially from poets.”

Instead, it seems, the plan is to use the money to make inroads in the popular media. One of the Poetry Foundation’s most interesting efforts of late has been to offer its services as an external poetry editor:

Over the past year, it has sent a dozen magazine editors mockups with poems superimposed on actual layouts from those magazines (a Basho haiku in a Good Housekeeping spread showing how to “pair old china with fresh blooms”; Lucille Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips” on a fitness page called “Love Your Curves”). To Details, the foundation suggested an essay by Jim Harrison: “If Jim Harrison, poet, novelist (Legends of the Fall) and walking vat of testosterone, needs a daily shot of poetry, it must not be for sissies. . . . A good hed for the piece might be ‘Don’t Be Afraid of Poetry.’ A better one might be ‘Read Poetry. Get Laid.’”

Now if the Poetry Foundation can only get Maxim to publish a spread featuring “There Once Was a Girl From Nantucket,” that’ll be $200-million well spent!

The continuing rumours of poetry’s demise are pretty much on the money, according to an article by James Adams in Monday’s Globe and Mail. The problem, according to Adams, is that while the stuff still gets written and published in relatively large amounts, very few of the books sell more than 100 copies — a number that corresponds roughly to the demographic known as “friends and family.” While big-money awards help, they can only do so much.

Poets, poetry publishers and readers like to believe that the G-G generates “a bit of media fanfare for [the] genre,” as Barbara Carey, a Toronto poet, wrote recently on CBC.ca. But mostly that fanfare resonates within a decidedly itty-bitty world. Even the six-year-old Griffin Poetry Prize, which each spring splits a whopping $100,000 between a Canadian poet and an international poet, has yet to discover a vast reservoir of unplumbed readerly demand. And the Griffin Prize, in the words of one Toronto publisher, “is definitely bigger than the G-Gs.”

A possible clue for why this may be can be found in the words of one of the GG-nominated poets, who is quoted in the article describing veteran poets as “artisans of the oblique trajectory.” Sad though it may be, oblique trajectories just don’t get people as excited as they used to.

Related links:
Read the article in The Globe and Mail.

Miraculously, Felix Dennis can somehow lay claim to being both a published poet and one of the richest men in Britain.

Rich he may be, but selfish he ain’t: in his forthcoming book, How to Get Rich, he shares his blueprints for achieving success in the business world with the rest of us.

Along these same lines, he’s provided The Guardian’s top 10 list for the day: the top 10 anti-poverty books. Now before you think that his list includes pragmatic treatments of world poverty and how to end it, know that these are the top ten books “that goaded [him] into abandoning poverty.”

Noteworthy titles on Dennis’ list include Dickens’ Great Expectations, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, and An Anthology of World Poetry. Somehow, reading a collection of “wide-ranging, eye-opening” poetry inspired Dennis to “make lots and lots of money” so as to avoid what he calls “the usual, dreary poet-in-the-rat-infested-garret syndrome.”

Not quite the typical response to great verse, is it?

Related links:
Read the full story here

A new website devoted to Canadian poetry has recently been launched. Edited by poets and reviewers Dani Couture and Alex Boyd, who also organizes Toronto’s IV lounge reading series, the Northern Poetry Review bills itself as “an online home for reviews of poetry books, articles and interviews, with emphasis on the Canadian poetry scene.” With an aim to include work and reviews from writers from across the country and a design that exudes an air of sophistication, the site currently features a lengthy review of Anne Carson’s most recent collection, Decreation, by American poet James Arthur, and an interview with poet and frequent Q&Q contributor, Zach Wells.

Related links:
Click here to visit the Northern Poetry Review

The CBC website has an item on a most unusual poetry tour organized by Tate Young, an Edmonton-based Book TV producer and poet (who released a collection this year under the nom de plume Mingus Tourette). The Write the Nation campaign will see Young and other poets, including Saskatoon’s Glen Sorestad, road-tripping to several Canadian cities in a bright pink ambulance. “Young says that the brightly coloured ambulance – a 1986 Chevy C-30 that was transporting patients as late as August – symbolizes the idea that Canadian poetry is in a state of crisis.”

Related links:
CBC.ca story on Write the Nation tour