...with Poetry (Ep. 81)

What on Earth is Going on?

Do music and poetry share the same roots? How do you write poetry that embraces complexity, history, beauty and atrocity? How can literature confront the self with the past, and the events that seem out of our control with the urgent need for a new language to understand them? What is creativity, and is there some kind of salvation there?

Ben joins poet and teacher Canisia Lubrin for a fascinating conversation at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she currently works as writer-in-residence.

About the Guest

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, critic and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University. Lubrin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her upcoming book, The Dyzgraphxst, featuring seven inquiries into selfhood, will be published in 2020.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Lesley Belleau, Anishnaabekwe writer from Ketegaunseebee Garden River First Nation (Ojibwe), near Bawating/Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
• Kaie Kellough, Canadian poet and novelist based in Montreal
• Robin Richardson, Canadian poet and founding editor of the Minola Review
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, a nearly 4000 year-old text from ancient Mesopotamia, widely regarded as one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature
• "Obama on Call-Out Culture: 'That's Not Activism'", article in the New York Times by Emily S. Rueb and Derrick Bryson Taylor
• Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes
• A quote from poet Mary Ruefle: "Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world"
• The shooting of Philando Castile, July 2016
• Dionne Brand, renowned Canadian poet

The Quote of the Week

“Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.” Dionne Brand