Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays and Interviews

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

Tim Lilburn, an excellent contemplative poet, has assembled essays by a
several writers exploring the nature of poetry as a kind of knowledge.
Some of the essays—his own, and those by Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and
Anne Michaels—are superb, while others seem baffled or perfunctory,
with nicely turned phrases or paradoxes substituting for thought. Robert
Bringhurst writes at length about Chinese thought. More interesting is
Jan Zwicky’s essay on Bringhurst himself, a long piece that dominates
the book. Zwicky uses Bringhurst as a means of discussing her very
interesting theories about poetry and philosophy. Perhaps the oddest
piece in the book is the interview with poet and physicist Kim Maltman,
who didn’t want to contribute but was pressured into doing so by his
interviewers, Roo Borson and Andy Patton. The book as a whole is a
mixture of good essays and forced ones.