Book Review: Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah

Authors

Alison Calder, University of Manitoba

Date of this Version

2006

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:3 (Summer 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Reading Poets Talk is like overhearing an interesting conversation in a café: you eat up the discussion, but you also want to jump in and ask your own questions. The poets would be fascinating tablemates: diverse in terms of sexuality and race, they are united by how they understand language's relation to social power structures, and how they challenge the "rules" of language to subvert or expose other, often implicit, social rules. They're also united by what I'll call, not condescendingly, generationality: they're established writers with long personal and political histories. The result is a collection of interviews that are engaged and illuminating, but also marked with a nostalgia that in some cases creates the impression of a poetic energy located in the past.