Canadian Poetry + Shameless Self-Promotion Since 2006
When my husband was in the late stages of his terminal illness, he asked me to read him poetry. He didn't ask for short stories, or essays, or news articles, or the first crisp pages of a novel, with its unfolding narrative weight. The request was unexpected. Despite his five (almost five and a half) decades on this earth, he'd never been much of a reader, though he was incredibly knowledgeable…
As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel…
2025 was a very quiet year here at Roll of Nickels, as life and work demands derailed my grand ambitions. I only managed to post five quotes on writing , and archive three of my favourite pieces of critical prose that I've written in recent years: an essay on poetry and companionship ; my companion piece to my book Weather , " Some Notes on Writing Haiku "; and my recent interview with Ben…
I'm in my third year coordinating the Fraser Valley Writers Festival, and we're very excited about this year's lineup! The festival will take place on November 7th and 8th at the University of the Fraser Valley's Abbotsford campus. To open the festival, we'll have keynote addresses by Charlie Demers and Evelyn Lau. The next day we'll have an array of panels, workshops and two Page Fright podcast…
The following interview was originally published in the Hamilton Review of Books in August 2024. I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site. --- Ben Robinson: I’m curious about the origins of this book in relation to your earlier work. You have a haiku in your first collection that begins: I can’t help but hate haiku.…
Karan Kapoor: Your poems live inside questions — and often leave them unanswered. “Where do we go from here?” you ask, before pivoting into a description of clouds, oil changes, and personal injury law ads. I love that refusal to resolve. Do you think poetry should resist the impulse to provide answers? Is uncertainty an aesthetic position for you? Chris Banks: I like uncertainty in poems and I…
The long poem has a somewhat singular history in Canadian literature. It proliferated among my generation of poets in the 70s and 80s, and Michael Ondaatje's and Sharon Thesen's anthologies of the Canadian long poem attest to its abundance. VIU's own student poet Délani Valin's Malahat Review prize-winning long poem "No Buffaloes" is evidence of its continuing popularity. There are several formal…
The great masters both of the East and the West never forgot the value of suggestion as a means for taking the spectator into their confidence. Who can contemplate a masterpiece without being awed by the immense vista of thought presented to our consideration? How familiar and sympathetic are they all; how cold in contrast the modern commonplaces! In the former we feel the warm outpouring of a…
The following essay was originally published in the online poetics magazine The Woodlot in May 2024. I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site. --- Across the street from my apartment there is a park, and in the middle of that park there are a number of logs, cluttered amongst the living trees which abut the eastern tip…
The following essay was originally delivered as a talk at the 2021 Fraser Valley Lit Fest. It was later published by the League of Canadian Poets . I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site. --- My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories…
Art can be defined as whatever an artist says it is - and anybody can declare themselves to be an artist. This... people find disconcerting, and annoying. Meantime, certain individuals, anxious to have their unusual artistic practice recognized as falling under the definition of their art form, often announce exaggerated claims for what they produce. Such claims frequently include an insistence…
2024 saw the publication of nine interviews here on the blog - seven originally published over at Read Local BC and one each from Arc Poetry Magazine (with Matt Rader ) and The Antigonish Review (with Gillian Sze ). I'll have at least as many new interviews coming your way in 2025, as I release my sixth-annual Read Local BC interview series , along with a couple other interviews elsewhere: Rhea…
I decided I wanted to write poems on July 16th, 1999. I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Chester, Nova Scotia. It was four fifteen in the afternoon (this is Atlantic time); I was helping friends to put on a play that week but had the day free until my call time. My mother was listening to a news article about the decision to rebury the Romanovs. Our dog was sick, but would eventually get…
The work, in the small press, is more than the poem you are trying to write. To be engaged in the small press is to be intimately involved in a network of activities, and it is to direct those activities to a communal project. Small press writers are also small press editors, and publishers, and readers, and booksellers, and reading series coordinators, and audience members, and researchers, and,…
Sitting in Michael [Dennis]'s library [of some nine or ten thousand books of poetry] after he died, I though how different it feels as a reader compared to how it feels as a writer. That was something I wasn't prepared for after my first book came out. I am sitting here in my own library with a stack of books by ______ next to me, and so I have this sense as a reader of an ongoing conversation…
The following interview is part seven of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- Excerpt from Wet - Leanne Dunic A singer from Tainan takes the stage. She wears a polka-dot…
The following interview is part six of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- Evening Prayer - Onjana Yawnghwe Between sleep and dream from the pull of mouth muscle the…
The following interview is part five of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- Perennial - Donna Kane All day, birdsong tills the air. By evening, stars push through the…
The following interview is part four of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- mclean drive, - Samantha Nock i break loose in isolation crashing upon the rocks of myself.…
The following interview is part three of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- September - Jess Housty We are in the time of radiant rot; berries drop from the stems when…
The following interview is part two of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- Six Bottles of Wine - Rodney DeCroo I haven’t washed the dishes for over a week. The sink and…
The following interview is part one of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca . This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here ). --- Sockeye - Meghan Fandrich People are fishing today the Nlaka′pamux dipping their nets into…
This interview was first published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Antigonish Review . Kindling – Gillian Sze And after days of rain, it suddenly stops and we peer out the window, watch the grey lift. Across the street, someone from the city has set up around an old stump. The grinder whirrs away as chips spit out, amass into a velvet pile. My son, who has learned to climb, clambers onto a stool and…
An excerpt from this interview was first published in the Fall 2022 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine . Lightwell – Matt Rader The morning after you left, the sun was a dim white light that didn’t make me think of anything, not angels, not death. I couldn’t look directly at it but its effects were everywhere: the swarm of raindrops alive in the lilac, the metallic skyscape floating in my truck’s silver…
I had a wonderful time launching my new book, Weather , across BC in May, culminating in a hometown launch in Port Moody, hosted by Raoul Fernandes and featuring a reading by Kayla Czaga from her new book, Midway . Raoul Fernandes' hosting was so entertaining that hardly anyone was playing Monopoly when he spoke. Thank you to everyone who came out to any of my events or picked up a copy of the…