After Villon, the new book from Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist Roger Farr, is a book of contemporary verse translations and “queer variations” based on the work of 15th century poete maudit Francois Villon.
Villon’s poetry, written in medieval French and incorporating the argot of the Parisian criminal underworld, is notoriously bawdy, opaque, and resistant to “straightforward” translation. For this reason, Villon’s work continues to be of considerable interest to poets, artists, and scholars working today.
After Villon is informed by previous ventures into Villon’s work by Ezra Pound (who invented a new poetic form, the villonaud), Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams, and, especially, Jack Spicer, who similarly “translated” Lorca in his influential After Lorca (1957) and Jean Calais (Stephen Rodefer), whose chauvinist / “beatnik” version of the poet stepped forward in Villon (1987).
Roger Farr’s new re-workings capture the in-group opacity in Villon’s work by mingling slangs from a variety of discourses and sites, everything from prison, theatre, culinary, military, to carnie slang. In his translations, Farr subverts sex and gender designations by shifting pronouns, changing names, and refusing heteronormative assumptions about the copious “gaps” in meaning of the original texts.

Described as "a poet of great heart and aesthetic/political commitment", Roger Farr is the author of five books of poetry: Surplus (2006), Means (2012), IKMQ (2012), a finalist for the BC Book Prize in Poetry in 2013, I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be (2019), and most recently, After Villon (2022). The Amorous Comrade, a collection of essays on anarchism and sexual politics, is forthcoming in 2024.

A former member of the artist-run Kootenay School of Writing collective, his critical writing on avant-garde poetics and radical social movements has appeared in Anarchist Studies, Armed Cell, Fifth Estate, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, The Poetic Front, West Coast Line, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He edited the three-volume anthology Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century (2008-2013), and was Critical Editor for Alice Becker-Ho's The Essence of Jargon: Argot & the Language of the Dangerous Classes (2015). Recent writing appears in Geist, SOME, SUBterrain, and Tripwire.

Since 2001, he has taught at Capilano University, where he has acted as a Board Member and Advisory Editor for The Capilano Review, Curator of the Open Text Reading Series, Editor of CUE Books, and Convenor of the Creative Writing Program.

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