| Red Deer poet Leslie Greentree may be starting to disprove the axiom that Western-based writers have a harder time getting noticed east of Manitoba. She has already been noticed in Calgary, where she was recently picked as winner of CBC Calgary’s 2004 National Poetry Faceoff. Now she’s not only getting ready for national exposure in the finals of the CBC event later this month, she’s also one of three Canadians on the seven-poet shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. That means reading from her book go-go dancing for Elvis in Toronto on June 2 and then waiting for the award announcement the next day.
Go-go dancing for Elvis is Greentree’s second book from Calgary’s Frontenac House. The local publisher offers four poetry books every year under its Quartet rubric. Frontenac is up for Publisher of the Year at the Alberta Book Awards, too. You can read excerpts from both of Greentree’s Frontenac House books, plus work from the publisher’s other writers, including Weyman Chan, Nancy Jo Cullen, Bob Stallworthy and more, at www.frontenachouse.com.
Vancouver’s Michael Turner claimed an original place for himself in Canadian writing and publishing during the 1990s, with his books Hard Core Logo, Kingsway, Company Town, American Whiskey Bar and The Pornographer’s Poem. While we haven’t seen much of him live and in person lately, he’s been busy enough, editing anthologies (The Notebooks, Story of a Nation and Lost Classics) making films and writing an opera libretto. Now he’s heading back to Calgary on Thursday, April 15 with a new edition of American Whiskey Bar. His reading is at McNally Robinson at 7:30 p.m.
Randomly generated subject lines in spam e-mail: are they poetry? Sort of, suggested the Boston Globe recently.
"Strangely compelling subject lines" like "hiroshi getty histrionic incise" or "impetus palindrome shiver" have that genuine surrealist ring to them, the newspaper finds. And they’re created by random-word generators hoping to bypass your computer’s filters against references to "mortgage rates" or "free Viagra." Now isn’t that sort of like the way surrealism hoped to use chance, and strange juxtapositions of images, in order to bypass your psyche’s filters and open a channel to all kinds of unconscious thingies? Hmmm. |
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