Biography & Autobiography Literary
Playlist
a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems
- Publisher
- Anvil Press
- Initial publish date
- Jul 2024
- Category
- Literary, Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781772142280
- Publish Date
- Jul 2024
- List Price
- $20
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Description
Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems documents the life and practice of a writer who grew up in a musical household, spent his early adult years as a touring musician and his later years programming nightclubs, hotels, galleries and festivals. Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks' contextual introductions and ends with the songs - or in this instance, poems - to which they refer. In Playlist, introductions can act less as supporting words than as discrete stories, while the poems they are in service of can appear indifferent to story, sentiment and a writer who, in claiming to contextualize them, can only reduce them further.
The approach championed here is derived from Angela Carter's writings on burlesque - the exaggeration in this instance born from binaries our progressive liberal culture claims to deplore but, often whimsically, deploys on its social media platforms, too often without regard for consequence. Though these poems aren't expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.
About the author
Michael Turner was born in North Vancouver, B.C. in 1962 and spent his teenage summers working in the Skeena River salmon fishery. After high school, he travelled through Europe and North Africa, eventually to the University of Victoria, where he completed a BA (anthropology) in 1986. Between 1987–1993 he sang and played banjo in Hard Rock Miners; upon his retirement from touring, he opened the Malcolm Lowry Room (1993–1997). His first book, Company Town (1991), was nominated for a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His second book, Hard Core Logo, was adapted to feature-film. Kingsway (1995), American Whiskey Bar (1997), The Pornographer’s Poem (1999) and 8x10 (2009) followed. A frequent collaborator, he has written scripts with Stan Douglas, poems with Geoffrey Farmer and songs with cub, Dream Warriors, Fishbone and Kinnie Starr. He blogs at this address mtwebsit@blogspot.com.
