Thursday, April 26, 2007

Comment on arcpoetry.ca - Arc's Forgotten and Neglected Issue

(As submitted for approval to be posted along with other reader comments on the above site).


Not sure what I'll find in the issue, but hoping to see writing on Diana Brebner as well as Candis Graham (though as an aside for the blog reader, my proposal to write on the latter was not acknowledged). Of our passed poets, it's hard to say who has been forgotten and neglected more than the next poet in a country where even the published, living authors have trouble not being forgotten and neglected. And in a society where news media's ephemeral daily reinvention of What We Should Think Is Important has a definite (but mostly unacknowledged) affect on our judgments, the new might be valued over the old simply for its newness rather than its quality. Guess who could be included or ignored depends whether it’s the lit community memory or the country's memory we're talking about jogging; if just the lit community's, then which genre communities get included, since the lyrical poets might forget and neglect the experimental poets dead or alive, and vice-versa. Should Arc seem to be advertising that they are presenting an overview of forgotten and neglected Canadian poets on the whole, I would hope for (but not expect to find, given Arc’s usual mandate) a fair-as-possible cross-section of authors from various genres if possible. Will be interesting to see this issue.

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