about poemeleon : the Canadian issue,
edited by rob mclennan : Summer 2018
When considering a potential “Canadian issue” of Poemeleon, I thought a worthy focus might be the poets who are still emerging, centred on poets with but a single full-length poetry book or two to their credit. Some on this list have first books scheduled for this year, or even second collections; some have but a single chapbook or two to their credit; still others in this collection have published a bit more than that, but not enough to be considered “mid-career.”
Attempting any list of “emerging” is always tricky, given one has no idea where some of these poets might end up – I think of the number of poets in Al Purdy’s second Storm Warning anthology (1975) that didn’t end up achieving what most of the poets in the first volume of his “new Canadian poets” anthology did – and then there’s the knowledge that there are poets I might have inadvertently overlooked. It’s all speculation, really.
While attempting to contain a mix of geography and style, this is simply a list of some two dozen or so poets across Canada I think are doing work worth paying attention to; each writer’s work contains a freshness, vibrancy and maturity that makes their work unique. Is this list exhaustive? Certainly not. I could easily have produced a list of over a hundred emerging poets across Canada worth paying attention to, and still missed out on someone.
One hopes that such a collection will simply entice the reader to go further, and seek out who else might be out there.
I suppose one might call this a sampling. A taste.
I hope you enjoy.
rob mclennan
Ottawa, Canada
Summer 2018