 Does Canada have a national poet laureate?
Yes, Federal legislators created the position of Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2001. If you are going to speak truth in public places
You may as well take wing from the earth.
Robert Hass, US poet laureate, 1995-97  this project
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Poet Laureate Map of Canada
Thoughts on PoetryFor many thousands of years language has stored up not just a map of all the places the human mind and heart can go but an instinct, a hunger for those routes and places – like a dog’s hunger to go running and sniffing. Poetry is language off the leash, exercising its muscle and intricate skills. After a lot of dull usage – political speeches, sales pitches, literary theory – it can hardly restrain itself and it pulls us along into the fresh air and strange twilight colours, into sudden memories of our early lives. It can take us to the limits of our world, into griefs and ecstasies, even out into madness and non-human experiences, if we want it to and it’s in the mood. Poetry is an ageless ancient guide we can team up with to discover vantage points that reveal the broad landscape we’ve been living in blindly, piecemeal; with its keen senses it brings the world to life for us with more intensity than we’ve ever known; it surprises us with the energies in wild things, including our dreams and passions; it elicits from deep within us our appetite for play, adventure, love and invention, and our capacity to be at home in the ever-changing world as it really is. John Steffler About Poetry
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight. Ion E.E. Cummings
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little — somebody who is obsessed by Making. E. E. Cummings
Poetry in my view is a defense of the individual against all the forces arrayed against him. Every religion, every ideology and orthodoxy of thought and manner wants to reeducate him and make him into something else. To sing from the same sheet is the ideal. A true patriot doesn't think for himself, they'll tell you. I realize that there's a long tradition in poetry of not speaking truth to power and, in fact, of being its groveling apologist. I just don't have it in me. Charles Simic, US poet laureate, 2007-09
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Groucho Marx
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