Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah (Currents (Inactive))

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About Poets Talk: Conversations With Robert

Product Description Seven poets of diverse region, gender, sexual orientation, race, and generation. Seven poets linked by experiment and opposition. Robert Kroetsch discusses postmodernism's history, Fred Wah talks about ethnic hybridity, and Dionne Brand muses on postcolonial struggle and community. Erin Mouré encourages "excessiveness" while Daphne Marlatt speaks of "salvaging". On writing, poetics, and culture, Marie Annharte Baker and Jeff Derksen share their personal perspectives and experiences. Poets Talk brings new insights to the value of inspiration, imagination, and poetic re-invention. Review "In a landscape that seems to favour fewer and fewer reviews of Canadian poetry, poets talk is an impressive and essential collection of critical interviews with poets conducted by Butling, Lecturer Emeritus at The Alberta College of Art and Design, and Susan Rudy, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Published as a companion to their anthology Writing in Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003), forthcoming in March 2005 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, the interviews are built over long processes of what makes their work work..More and more lately, the gap has been widening in Canadian poetry between those working the innovative poetic and those in the fixed idea, so a collection of interviews with seven poets with very little overlap, yet all working opposition and the innovative poetic, makes for an interesting read. Each interview begins with a short critical introduction of each of the poets; I think everyone should own this book." rob mclennan, blog, http://robmclennan.blogspot.com, March 11, 2005 "Reading interviews, I often skip the questions and skim for juicy bits in the answers. Not so with Poets Talk. For Butling and Rudy are active participants, confronting these writers with their blind spots, or prodding and cajoling them into risky and marvelous territory." Meredith Quartermain, Terminal City (Complete review at http://www.interchange.ubc.ca/quarterm/reviews.htm) April 11, 2005 "The poets of Poets Talk's title.all share an interest in formal innovation and, to a lesser extent, in constructing a theory of poetics to inform their writing. They spend at least as much time, though, discussing how being part of a community, whether literary, political or both, has influenced their work. This makes a pleasant change from the emphasis on the individual writer...and also reveals, in passing, the genealogy of self-consciously innovative writing in Canada." Alex Rettie, AlbertaViews, April/May 2005 "Readers of these conversational interviews will want to explore the poetry and a bibliography of "Works Cited" will be most helpful for this purpose. The papers of Robert Kroetsch and Fred Wah can be found at the University of Calgary Archives, for inveterate researchers." Prairie Journal, Fall 2005 "Reading Poets Talk is like overhearing an interesting conversation in a café: you eat up the discussion, but you also want to jump in and ask your own questions. The poets would be fascinating tablemates: diverse in terms of sexuality and race, they are united by how they understand language's relation to social power structures, and how they challenge the 'rules' of language to subvert or expose other, often implicit, social rules..[T]he collection usefully counters the popular image of the poet as a figure working in romantic isolation: the work of these writers is rooted in the social and continues to both reproduce and question that space." Alison Calder, Great Plains Quarterly, Summer 2006. "[T]hese interviews are most definitely conversations in which the two interviewers bring a great deal of knowledge and understanding of both innovative poetry and the theories and ideologies that ground its varieties to bear..They are also highly entertaining, and offer readers a sense of the poets as people one would enjoy talking with. Poets Talk is a necess