Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics

Bart Vautour · Erin Wunker · Travis V. Mason · Christl Verduyn

Jun 2015 · Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

About this ebook

Public Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing “publics,” “poetry,” and “poetics” from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as “publics” in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics.

Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of “poetics” as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets.

This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.

About the author

Bart Vautour is an assistant professor at Dalhousie University. His research considers Canadian cultural production, literary history, textual studies, and modernism. He is the editor of a critical edition of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (2015). He co-directs, with Emily Robins Sharpe, the Canada and the Spanish Civil War project.

Erin Wunker is the chair of the board of the national non-profit social justice organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder, writer, and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches Canadian literature and culture at Dalhousie University. Her book The Feminist Killjoy Handbook will be published in the fall of 2016.

Travis V. Mason teaches ecocriticism and postcolonial and Canadian literatures. He received both a Mellon and Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is the author of Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay (WLU Press, 2013).

Christl Verduyn is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, where she holds the Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and is the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. Most recent publications include Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, co-edited with Eleanor Ty (WLU Press, 2008), Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape, co-edited with Kathleen Garay (2011), and Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, co-edited with Jane Koustas (2012).