Café Review 2019 Spring Canadian Issue

Our latest Spring 2019 Issue of The Café Review continues our mission to bring Maine poetry to the world and poetry from around the world to Maine featuring poetry by Canadian poets Cameron Anstee, Nelson Ball, bill bissett, Conyer Clayton, Stephen Collis, Neil Flowers, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Don McKay, Barry McKinnon, Sandra Ridley, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Carolyn Smart, Sharon Thesen, Aaron Tucker, Chris Turnbull, Andy Weaver and Bruce Whiteman. This issue features work by artists Jim Andrews and Judith Copithorne with a review by Dana Wilde.

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Foreword to a Canadian Issue of The Café Review by Robert Hogg

Bob Hogg is a retired English professor and organic farmer who now devotes his life to writing. He has published several books and his work has appeared in numerous periodicals. He is currently working on four collections: Lamentations, The Cariboo Poems, American Postcards, and The Vancouver Work. Two chapbooks: Ranch Days — for Ed Dorn, from battleaxe press, Ottawa, and Ranch Days — the McIntosh, from hawk/weed press, Kemptville will be out Spring 2019.

When I went to hear Steve Luttrell read in Ottawa last fall, along with poets Cameron Anstee and Natalie Hanna I was struck by resonances in his poems which led me to think of other American poets whose work has affected me as well. We enjoyed a lively discussion after the reading in which the names of several poets came up, notably Robert Creeley and Michael McClure and those Black Mountain poets whom we’d both read and listened to attentively. A few weeks later he wrote to ask me if I’d consider editing a Canadian issue of The Café Review.  

It’s that kind of serendipity with regard to poetry which has been at play throughout my now rather long life, and I’ve come to accept it as the norm. So, when I accepted and began to think, OK, who gets in, I realized that the choices were manifold and the politics of choice excruciating. No twenty poets could properly represent the scope of contemporary Canadian poetry and not in some way do a disservice to those left out. How to decide? Well, I took the easy way out — or the hard way in — and simply asked myself, who’s on my mind of late. And does that mean anything? Probably not, I thought, but here goes. 

The result was twenty or so people whose writing has engaged my attention because I heard them read recently, or whose work I’ve encountered in the numerous small publications in circulation.

Some of their writings I have known now for a lifetime, while others have come to my attention relatively recently. And some I just started thinking about again of late, and found myself drawn back to their published work — not having seen anything for a while. They were on my mind. 

Who knows what sets these forces in motion? One young writer who read from a recent novel in Ottawa so challenged my ear that I picked up a book of his poetry after the reading to see what he was really about. To my delight, the melos that I’d heard in his prose was amplified in his poetry. I wrote and asked him for a submission. An established poet who read alongside myself recently struck a chord with her narrative structure that wouldn’t leave me alone. I wrote her too for a submission. That kind of thing. I wasn’t disappointed. 

So the driving force in choosing material for this mini anthology of Canadian poetry has really been, what poetry — not which poets — has so bothered me of late that I would want to share that itch to hear and learn more with others! The result is a collection demonstrating a wide range of interests, styles, and tastes which at least hints at the brilliance available in Canadian poetry today.

At the last moment I was asked if I could provide work by two visual artists. This allowed me to include two West Coast visual poets whose work I encounter weekly on Facebook, although their work can be more readily found on Flickr. This was a great joy for me, particularly when one of their submissions tied my own history in writing, teaching, and publishing into the conversation through two great friends, my colleague George Bowering through his Beaver Kosmos chapbook of 1969, and our mutual mentor, Robert Duncan. So we come full circle once again.