Like the rest of us, words have baggage. Through eons of usage, they take on new meanings and often bring only a shade of their origins into modern parlance. If you’ve never given etymology (the origins of words) much thought, Howard Richler’s “Strange Bedfellows: The Secret Lives of Words” may give you an interesting sense…

Since the internet encourages scanning over true reading, it is more true than ever that we often take words for granted. This is a difficult environment in which to be a writer, but it is also, in a sense, a call to arms. I admire any poet who struggles to rock the reader out of…

I like to think that I invented a poetic form that I call The Diatribe, a poem, usually free verse (who has time for meter when they’re really pissed off?), that rants self-righteously and directly against one or more objects of scorn. Once in a while, though, I run across a poem that proves that…

Poetry anthologies can be tough reading. They sometimes seem motivated by an indulgent, overly simple impulse, as though someone read a really great poem about, say, gardening, and instead of thinking, I wish I could read a whole book of really great poems, thought, I wish I could read a whole book of poems about…

On Monday, May 17, carte blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, will launch its eleventh issue. I’m honoured to contribute a poem to the issue and to read at the party celebrating its official launch! carte blanche issue 11 readings and more May 17, 7:00pm Kaza Maza 4629 du Parc, Montreal The…

All poetry is at some level about what words keep us from saying. It tries to leap the chasm between the world that is and the world that is effable. But what if the spaces between words and utterances are also speaking? In her new collection, R’s Boat, Lisa Robertson spreads her lines across the…

I always get excited when Montreal’s Erín Moure releases a new collection of poems, but it’s an excitement very different from what I feel about other poets’ work. Most of us probably look forward to a new book by a favourite writer like a visit from a friend who lives far away. We anticipate long…

Wittgenstein said, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This makes me suspect that philosophy and poetry are incompatible modes of inquiry, the former seeking to reveal the truths that language obscures, while the latter…does pretty much the same thing? Or something different entirely? Kate Hall plays with…

Funny things can happen by accident — flatulence, Freudian slips, falls on errant banana peels — but jokes happen on purpose. Like poetry or music, jokes are composed, usually to provide pleasure, often a profound, unconscious pleasure that we might otherwise forbid ourselves. As Freud wrote in his abidingly unfunny treatise on the subject, “A…