Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics

by Bart Vautour (Editor), Erin Wunker (Editor), Travis V. Mason (Editor), Christl Verduyn (Editor)

Overview

Public Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing “publics,” “poetry,” and “poetics” from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as “publics” in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics.

Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of “poetics” as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets.

This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771120494
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2015
Series:	TransCanada
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	375
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Bart Vautour is a writer, editor, and a teacher at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He is the editor of Invisible Publishing’s Throwback Series of books.

Erin Wunker is the chair of the board of the national non-profit social justice organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder, writer, and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches Canadian literature and culture at Dalhousie University. Her book The Feminist Killjoy Handbook will be published in the fall of 2016.
Travis V. Mason teaches ecocriticism and postcolonial and Canadian literatures. He received both a Mellon and Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is the author of Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay (WLU Press, 2013).

Christl Verduyn is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, where she holds the Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and is the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. Most recent publications include Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, co-edited with Eleanor Ty (WLU Press, 2008), Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape, co-edited with Kathleen Garay (2011), and Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, co-edited with Jane Koustas (2012).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, edited by Bart Vautour, Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn

Introduction: Public Poetics | Erin Wunker and Travis V. Mason

Section I: The Contemporary Field

1. Public Poet, Private Life: 20 Riffs on the Dream of a Communal Self | Sina Queyras

2. The Threat of Black Art, or, On Being Unofficially Banned in Canada | El Jones

3. The Counter/Public in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of Poetry in Canada | Tanis MacDonald

4. Writing the Body Politic: Feminist Poetics in the Twenty-First Century | Heather Milne

5. Rewriting and Postmodern Poetics In Canada: Neo-Haikus, Neo-Sonnets, Neo-Lullabies, Manifestoes | John Stout

Poetry I

The Sturdiness | Sina Queyras

The Sexual Politics of Bluestockings | Tanis MacDonald

Routine | Amanda Jernigan

Volume | Shannon Maguire

September Still | Rob Winger

The inevitability of gravity on glass | Vanessa Lent

Section II: The Embedded Field

6. The Ingeminate Eye: Peter Sanger's Public Poetics | Amanda Jernigan

7. Reading for a Civic Public Poetic: Toronto in Raymond Souster's "Ten Elephants on Yonge Street" and Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies | Will Smith

8. To the Bone: The Instrumental Activism of Dionne Brand's Ossuaries | Geordie Miller

9. Rearticulate, Renovate, Rebuild: Sachiko Murakami's Architectural Poetics of Community | Emily Ballantyne

10. "We jimmied the radio": Gillian Jerome, Brad Cran, and the Lyric in Public | Kevin McNeilly

Poetry II

Hungry | Kevin McNeilly

Potter's Hearing Is Not Khadr's Ruling | Kathy Mac

The House Which Is Not Extension but Dispositio Itself (from Insecession, and echolation of Secession, by Chus Pato) | from Insecession by Erín Moure

The Avian Flu | Brad Cran

Section III: Expanding the Field

11. Formal Protest: Reconsidering the Poetics of Canadian Pamphleteering | Andrea Hasenbank

12. Radio Poetics: Publishing and Poetry on CBC's Anthology | Katherine McLeod

13. The Public Reading: Call for a New Paradigm | Erín Moure and Karis Shearer

14. We Are the Amp: A Poetics of the Human Microphone | Michael Nardone

15. Canadian Public Poetics: Negotiating Belonging in a Globalizing World | Diana Brydon