Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT In the spring of 2020 Jamie Sharpe was in New Brunswick, purportedly studying the famed Magnetic Hill outside Moncton. A dog-walker discovered Sharpe in a ditch, naked except for a…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT : poetry is like swallowing the whole world and pulling it back out piece by piece. when i was a kid growing up in Ottawa my parents took me to…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT I grew up in Saskatoon and have spent most of my adult life in Winnipeg. Despite having spent a significant part of my life existing in that stateless, nebulous place…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. Un-statement: Memory — a simultaneously shared and solitary phenomenon — is partly composed of a collective experience of being and partly of an individual’s unique perspective. The murky line that distinguishes…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT I took at least a 30-or-35-year break from writing poetry. Back when I was 21 or so, I wrote poems, handing them to pretty girls at bus stops and in…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT The following poem, in its last lines, attends to Robert Hayden’s wonderful, What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays The Beloved’s Home…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT Richard Diebenkorn referred to his paintings as exercises in seeing, and I often think of writing this way — mediation to see or sense again, differently, through ineffable sensing and…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT I am interested in the relationships between all sentience — crow, river, rock — and the two- legged ones, many of whom inhabit aki, earth, with little regard for our…

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month. STATEMENT I’m always trying to figure something out when I write poems. What I’m trying to figure out mainly is how to live. All poems know before they’re even written that…