The Abrupt Edge with Chris Banks is a regular column of poems and poetry news.
Marvin Bell died yesterday. A poetic giant has fallen. His Dead Man poems are everything good poetry is about: deeply imagistic, humane, formally ambitious, culturally significant, political without pretension, and on and on. It is the work of a lifetime. His death made me realize most of my poetic mentors are now gone. Hayden Carruth. Mark Strand. Philip Levine. And now Marvin Bell.
When my first book came out, I was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as “an up and coming young Canadian poet to watch out for” simply by having the good luck to land on a few awards lists. My book Bonfires, published by Nightwood Editions, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award and won the …
[dropcap]It[/dropcap] is April 1st and Poetry Month is upon us. Art seems more important than ever as people are sharing free music concerts and homebrewed poetry videos around the world. During these unprecedented times, I think of a little poem by the poet Hayden Carruth that goes like this: Hey Basho, you there! I’m Carruth. …
One of the last books the late American poet Tony Hoagland left us with was his slim volume of essays and writing exercises called The Art of Voice. In its contents, he says a convincing poetic voice, “can be embodied through a kind of stuttering hesitation, or by a spontaneous uncensoredness, or as a deepening …
In this new series, we will begin publishing unpublished poems by prominent Canadian poets, young and old. For our first entry, we have “The Konami Code” by Mathew Henderson which is featured in his upcoming collection Roguelike out with Anansi Press this Spring.
We wish to introduce Chris Banks as The Miramichi Reader’s new Poetry Editor, and his new column, The Abrupt Edge. It will be a regular feature here at TMR and will feature poetry, poetry news and whatever else Chris wants to tell you about.
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Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
