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| Young Man |
Swift's family, through his maternal grandmother, Melita Fraser, emigrated from Scotland and settled in the Maritimes, where they were granted the Matapedia Valley by royal charter, including the salmon-rich Restigouche river. He is related to Simon Fraser, the explorer of Canada, as well as Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the last man to be beheaded in the Tower of London, in 1747. The Humes were granted land in Ireland after service in British India, where one of his relatives was Secretary to the Viceroy of India in the 19th century.
Swift was a champion debater in high school, at Marianopolis CEGEP and then Concordia University, where we was elected President of CUSID, the national body of student intercollegiate debating. He won the Top Speaker prize two years in a row at the prestigious McGill Winter Carnival Debating Tournament, and won Top Team at Toronto's Hart House tournament, with Gordan H. Buchan. He was Second Place Speaker at the Canadian Nationals, and placed 9th at the McGill Worlds.
In 1987 Swift visited Belfast to research his first anthology, Map-Maker's Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (1988), co-edited with Martin Mooney. In 1988 he founded the New McGill Reading Series with poet William Furey. In 1990 he joined The League of Canadian Poets, and was twice elected its Quebec representative. His poetry series Vox Hunt ran from 1995-1997, and was called "Brechtian. Virtually unique in North America" by The Globe and Mail.
In his twenties, Swift was a screenwriter (WGC member). He has written over 100 hours of TV for Hanna-Barbera, Cinar, HBO, Fox, CBC and Paramount, among others, often with Thor Bishopric or Stanley Whyte. He was a story editor for Sailor Moon. He received a Young Quebecer of the Year award (Arts and Education category) in 1997 in recognition of his achievements. He was shortlisted more than half a dozen times for the Irving Layton Poetry Prize. In 1997, Swift moved to Budapest. In Hungary he was Visiting Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), 1998-2001. In 2001 he moved to Paris. In 2003, he moved to London, England.
Swift was poetry editor of award-winning online magazine Nthposition from 2003 to 2008, and a contributing editor of Matrix, Quebec's longest running English-language literary magazine. Swift's own poetry has been collected in seven collections, Budavox (1999), Café Alibi (2002), Rue du Regard (2004), Winter Tennis (2007), Seaway: New and Selected Poems (2008), Mainstream Love Hotel (2009) and England Is Mine (2011). His 8th collection is out in 2012 from Tightrope Books, Toronto, and is concerned with the poet's exploration of male infertility.
Swift's poetry ranges across a variety of themes and styles, but a few core concerns reoccur, including childhood, Christology, Freudian analysis, narcissism, queerness, especially transvestism, love and marriage, travel and nostalgia, cinematic and historical violence, the failure of poetry, stylishness, beauty, flamboyance, and desire. Death, and humour, are also often allied. His goal is to combine the confessionalism of the Alvarez era with the modernist panache of the Forties poets he admires. Terence Tiller, Nicholas Moore, FT Prince, and Joan Murray are some of his precursors.
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| Todd Swift, summer 2011, photo by Derek Adams |
His poems have been published internationally, in places such as: Agenda, The Daily Telegraph, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Jacket, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Prism International, The SHOp, and Stand. The Chronicle of Higher Education has compared his work to "that of Ezra Pound's in the 10s and 20s of the last century, in Paris and London". Swift's poetry has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBC, and RTE radio (The Enchanted Way and The Poetry Program). In 2002 he released a CD on the Wired On Words label, with composer Tom Walsh, titled The Envelope, Please. In 2003, Swift edited the chapbook series (In English, French, German and Brazilian versions) 100 Poets Against The War. He was one of the special guest poets at the Frankfurt Book Fair's International Poetry Evening in 2003.
Swift's poetry has appeared in many anthologies, including Radio Waves (Enitharmon, UK, 2004), Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, New York, 2005) and The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Véhicule, Montreal, 2005), as well as The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope, 2008).
He was Oxfam Great Britain's Poet-in-residence in 2004, and has since edited several poetry CDs and a DVD for them. He ran the Oxfam Poetry Series from 2004-2011. He has reviewed for Books In Canada, The Dubliner, The Globe and Mail, LRC, Magma, Poetry London and Poetry Review. He is a tutor with the Poetry School. His PhD, from the University of East Anglia, is in Creative and Critical Writing, and is concerned with poetic style in the 1940s.
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| Todd Swift On Hydra, Villa Melina, June 8, 2010. Photo by Sara Swift This bio updated on December 21, 2011 |
