Companionship: Between Wading and Plunging

Molly Peacock
Prologue
The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008

She points out a concern to reach and embrace:

What I see, from poets from diverse backgrounds, provinces, ages and personal categories, is a unity, a core, something identifiable as a gesture in Canadian poetry itself, not in the poets' backgrounds or personalities, but in the poems they produce, poems that presume a kind of companionship with their readers and assume their readers's willingness to undertake a tandem adventure.

And she goes on to offer an analogy to swimming

Think of this volume as a swimming pool. Poet and reader go in together. Finally they hit the place where their feet leave the bottom and then they swim, experiencing something they both know is over their heads. That is what poetry is trying to stay afloat in a element in which you might sink, and which is surely over your head.

In our imaginations, diversity is reintroduced: back stroke, breast stroke, butterfly.

And so for day 2342
12.05.2013