Best Canadian Poetry is a terrific annual event, a celebration of some of the best poetry published by Canadian poets every year. The editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2016 (in English) is Helen Humphreys, who has brought together a stunning collection of work by poets including Julie Bruck, Dani Couture, Lynn Crosbie, Kayla Czaga, Sally Ito, Jeff Latosik, Evelyn Lau, Lee Maracle, David McGimpsey, Elise Partridge, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and so many more. It's a fantastic book, and a particular highlight is the introductory essay on "the side-effects of reading poetry" by Anita Lahey, who (along with Molly Peacock) is BCP Series Editor. We so pleased to feature an excerpt here.
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I approach poems that are new to me with trepidation, the way children are taught to be wary of strangers. Before steering my eyes to the lines on the page, before taking in the shape of the text and how it’s held within the white space, I straighten my posture. Blink, and breathe. I’m dimly aware that I’m preparing my whole self, within and without: girding it. This is not an undertaking for someone fatigued, distracted, or in any way less than alert.
I wouldn’t presume that every reader of poetry habitually warms up with a mind-and-body tune-up. But I do believe that the experience of reading a poem, no matter its style or form, no matter the nature of the reader, is fundamentally unlike that of reading prose. The two pursuits are so distinct that to lump both activities under the label of “reading” feels insufficient, even misleading, as if we were to place leaping off the dock into a cottage- country lake on a hot summer afternoon in the same category as diving down deep in a wetsuit, breathing from an oxygen tank, to investigate the lake’s ecology.
Think of prose as a string of sentences moving forward. To read those sentences, even those that buck against traditional narrative or linear constructs, is to allow yourself to be led: down the page, over the hills, through the wood. You can follow a line of prose and, on some level, though you are engaged, and may even be changed by what you are reading, you can leave yourself behind. You disappear into the words and the reality they construct, phrase by phrase, moment by moment, along those endlessly wrapping lines of text.
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