Poet Laureate Map of Canada
Who was the first provincial or territorial poet laureate?

PJ Johnson was formally invested as the Yukon Territory’s first Poet Laureate on July 1, 1994.

Glen Sorestad, poet and publisher, was named Poet Laureate of the Province of Saskatchewan in 2000.
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2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Winners

2010 Canadian and International winners of the tenth annual Griffin Poetry Prize. [details]
Write what should not be forgotten.
Isabel Allende
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Poet Laureate Map of Canada

Map Candice James - Poet Laureate of New Westminster, B.C. Roger Nash, Sudbury, Ontario Jill Battson, Cobourg, Ontario pj johnson, Poet Laureate of the Yukon Kristan Anderson, Owen Sound Ontario Roland Pemberton - Poet Laureate of Edmonton, AlbertaBrad Cran - Poet Laureate of Vancouver, B.C. Poet Laureate of Newfoundland: Agnes Walsh Linda Rogers - Poet Laureate of Victoria, B.C. Douglas Lochhead, Sackville, New Brunswick Shauntay Grant - Poet Laureate of Halifax, Nova Scotia John B. Lee, Brantford Ontario Dionne Brand, Toronto, Ontario Pierre DesRuisseaux - Parliamentary Poet Laureate - Ottawa Hugh MacDonald, Prince Edward Island Robert Currie, Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan Gary Hyland, Poet Laureate, City of Moose Jaw, SK Poet Laureate of Cobalt Ann Margetson

Thoughts on Poetry

For 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
21 January, 2008

About Poetry

 

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice.
Mary Oliver
The Journey
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg
A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one's desire to elevate it.
Wallace Stevens
The Necessary Angel
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore
Poetry
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.
E.E. Cummings

 
 
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© 2010 Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library | All Rights Reserved