E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

BEING EMPIRICAL ABOUT POETRY   As someone who has perhaps wrongly invested most of his life so far in the editing, publishing, teaching, promotion, and writing, of poems, I feel entitled to finally write this brief essay and get a few things off my chest.   It has become something of a joke (in some circles) to note the ongoing tendency to claim that Poetry Is Dead.   For instance, Don Share, the inspirational editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, regularly posts such articles on Facebook with a virtual sigh.   Well, maybe it isn’t. But I am tired of the claims made for poetry by the poets I know.   And tired of the claims I myself have made for poetry, and perhaps continue to make, every time I write a poem.   This is because nothing in my own experience, in what I would like to grandly call the empirical realm – what is sometimes known as reality – confirms those claims.   I suppose the major claim is that most people real...

This is an excerpt from an essay taken from Best Canadian Essays 2009 , edited by Alex Boyd and Carmine Starnino .  The 2010 anthology will be out soon, edited by Boyd and Kamal Al-Solaylee .  Worth investing in, I'd say. Get A Real Job In Grade 8, I joined an extracurricular social studies club called Project Business, designed to help young people learn about supply and demand economics. I signed up because Krista Copper was in it. She had brown feathered hair, eyes like a stunned deer, and wore a corduroy jacket buttoned right up to her chin, which gave her a look of impenetrability that I found alluring. We were to make peanut brittle and sell it at lunch hour, calculating the cost of the peanuts, sugar, molasses and labour time, and fixing a price that would recoup our costs or, even better, make a profit. The club was divided into three competing groups. I made sure I was in Krista’s, and she set the strategy. The key, she said, was the quality of our peanut brit...