Winding Down, Revving Up

It's National Poetry Month, so every Friday in April I'm writing something about Canadian Poetry.

Well, today is the last day of of National Poetry Month and it's been a pretty good month, I think. And, even though the emphasized, focused look at poetry is winding down (not in all circles of course), it looks like this month has spawned some pretty good things to help keep poetry in the spotlight for a little longer.

First, the Poet Laureate of the Internet project. It was a democratic process, but in the end, the Internet couldn't decide and it was a tie: Canadian poet Sina Queyras and American poet Robert Lee Brewer. Both poets have blogs where they post not only poetry, but also about poetry and poetics and influences, etc. It makes for good reading and they both work to engage people in the greater discourse of poetry, as well as in the poems themselves. So congratulations to both Sina Queyras and Robert Lee Brewer; I'm interested to see how this year of Internet poetics will unfold.

The other post-April poetry movement I'm excited about is Influency Salon, an online poetry magazine. The magazine/website just launched its first issue, featuring reviews of poetry books, essays and poetry discussions. The site itself looks really sleek and the content is well crafted, with many of the contributors published poets themselves (Sina Queyras pops up here as both a reviewer and a reviewed).

So, National Poetry Month may be over after today, but poetry (and poets) don't seem to have any interest in giving up the attention they've been receiving this month. And neither should they. New and interesting things are happening in the world of poetry (Canadian and otherwise), and confining our attention to just one month would be a waste.