The Canadian Poetry Festival (1980)

The event and its print rendering suggest how scattered Canadian poetry can be — even amongst the closest of poet-friends or within a given generation. Some participants aren’t even interested in the “Canada” question so much as in localism or the phenomenology of language or literary community. Some participants seem, at times, completely uninterested in or marginalized by the parameters of debate altogether. (Atwood, it’s reported, didn’t even stay for the full festival and when she was there wasn’t much of a “presence.” D.G. Jones has the thankless task of trying to remind festival-goers of the burgeoning formalist movement in Montreal.) In the end, mercifully, there doesn’t appear to be any desire to dutifully represent the “cause” of CanPo as a unified Maple-syrupy front of sweet golden goodness for the pancake of Buffalo...