news | Tuesday April 1, 2014

It’s Poetry Month!

National Poetry Month kicks off today! The League of Canadian Poets has announced its awards shortlists (which include Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps) and its winners (one of whom is our very own bill bissett!); the Council of Arts for Ottawa has nominated Talon poet rob mclennan for its Mid-Career Artist Award; and the B.C. Book Prizes have included The Place of Scraps on their shortlist for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Evidently the celebration of poetry is well under way!

Talon, too, has good poetry-related things in store this month: pre-order Corked, Downverse, From the Poplars, or Thrum today; they are due to arrive from the presses over the next few weeks. Later this month, catch all four of our Spring 2014 poets – Cecily Nicholson, Nikki Reimer, Natalie Simpson, and Catriona Strang – who will launch their new books in Calgary on April 28 (at the Palomino Smokehouse) and in Vancouver on April 30 (at Pyatt Hall). The wonderful M.A.C. Farrant will also be at these launches, reading from her new book of miniatures, The World Afloat.

What more can we say for now? Perhaps we could share this clarion call, in the form of excerpts from the first poem in Internodes by Ken Belford (published Fall 2013):

Give the word, and disperse early
and displace often. Let gaps fly
open.
…
… and breathe,
and be something more than
the immediate, repetitious sample.

Happy Poetry Month!