Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets

by John Barton

Book Overview

A groundbreaking, comprehensive anthology of Canadian gay male poetry, the first of its kind, that reveals a national queer poetics, both dandyesque and eloquent. The material ranges from the 1890s to the present day and comprises poets from every region of the country, including Quebec, translated into English for the first time. For many, the queer experience is central to their aesthetic, offering works of startling beauty and originality that...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551522179
• ISBN13: 9781551522173
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Only the Best

I don't know how much titling this collection SEMINAL is going to help sales of the book, it is the sort of title you might think twice about applying to a book people are going to be holding in both hands. I'm still feeling sort of sticky after many, repeated, complusive readings of SEMINAL, one of the best anthologies of poetry I've read in quite a while. Editors John Barton and Billeh Nickerson are to be commended for going in wide and pulling out deep, and their research is a marvel of compression and understanding. I learned more facts from SEMINAL than I've learned otherwise in the whole month of February. I had no idea, for example, that Clint Burnham was even gay, so that this book serves as a sort of "coming out" ceremony for (I assume) many of its contributors, sort of the way its American equivalent, WORD OF MOUTH edited by Timothy Liu, effectively outed one of the great US poets, William Bronk, by including him among the contributors. SEMINAL has an enormous sweep, and you can trace the rocky path of Canadian modernism through its hills and valleys, and the occasional barbarisms which attend the birth of something huge and inhuman. Modernism, like homosexuality, was viewed by the Canadian poetry establishment as something of a foreign taint, and if you had it, you had been infected by a grave outside spectre. The spectacle of John Sutherland "reviewing" Patrick Anderson's poetry in 1943, in a "little magazine" called PREVIEW, was itself a preview for another half century of witch hunting and homophobia; suddenly the terms were on the table, "cosmopolitan" (bad) versus "native" (straight), and to a certain extent their meanings continue to proliferate, in politics and inside the poem itself, the Canadian poem. The editors give us some interesting poets here, and some who aren't so good somehow redeem themselves by the interestingness of their lives and legends. And the good ones are brilliant, from Emile Nelligan through R. M. Vaughan and beyond to the present day. I was glad to see John Barton and Billeh Nickerson have included their own work in the anthology, up against the likes of Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Brion Gysin. Too many editors just sit in the background, making shadows out of their own light; claiming a false modesty that is somehow very Canadian. The truth is, Barton and Nickerson should be encouraged to publish more and more of their work. I cannot agree with the other reviewer who said there were too many Canadians in this book.

Quite a Collection

Barton, John and Nickerson, Billeh, editors. "Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets", Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007. Quite a Collection Amos Lassen and Literary Pride Reading poetry can be a very rewarding experience and it becomes that much more rewarding when we read poets of our own. John Barton and Billeh Nickerson have assembled the first anthology of gay male poetry from Canada and it is not to be missed. Their comprehensive work gives us all kinds of poetry--from the funny to the most romantic, translated from the French or written in English--it is all here and it is a wonderful way to muse over life. Covering the time span from 1890 to the present, there are poems for every occasion. The central motif is queerness and reading the poetry gives us a sense of beauty and originality not unique to just Canada but universal. Poetry can also give us a sense of history for whatever is learned by the past poetic tradition in many cases remains true to the present day. Traditionally the poetry we read in school is heterosexual as our poetry has been hidden for so long. Even now, when we have achieved so much in the societal sphere, our poetry, unlike other forms of our literature, has been missing. The poet has a hard time finding an audience and a publisher so poetry has been kicked to the side. Barton and Nickerson worked to make that poetry visible and here it is in one beautiful volume. If you have ever been interested in reading gay poetry, you know how difficult it as been to find it with the exception of those crossover poets like Mark Doty and others. Poetry appeals to the emotions, it affexts us and we naturally respond to it. Poems aesthetic reflections of the times in which we live and is perhaps the most open and erotic of all forms of literature. "Seminal" has that central commonality in which all of the poems are gay men who write beautifully about the gay subjects about which we know and care and it deals with the human condition. Because our human condition is a shade different from everyone else's, it is appropriate and necessary that our poets bring this home. We want to belong to the larger picture but we also want our unique traditions-one of which is our poetic language. "Seminal" has one fault and that is that it deals only with Canadian poetry--but that is its goal so it is not a point to be argued. It is a starting point and hopefully the publication of this book will present a challenge to others to bring forth their poetry as well.