Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy subtitled their book carefully, for these
interviews are most definitely conversations in which the two
interviewers bring a great deal of knowledge and understanding of both
innovative poetry and the theories and ideologies that ground its
varieties to bear. As the authors of the important critical history
Writing in Our Time, they know the subject and their subjects very well
indeed.

Anyone interested in the work of these writers will find much of
interest in Poets Talk. Although they approach their art and the
political contexts in which they write in diverse ways, they share a
delight in articulating their poetics, how they came to write, and what
they think their writing does. Each interview is prefaced by a short but
thorough introduction to the poet’s life and work and to any important
studies of that work. Each interview follows the logic of that poet’s
work and interests, so there is little repetition of the sort that often
happens in collections of interviews in which every interviewee must
respond to more or less the same set of questions. Questions of race,
gender, sexual politics, community, and the many divergent ways poetry
might explore and respond to such questions arise in highly different
ways in the seven conversations, but always in a way that allows for wit
and intelligence to play across the ongoing discussion.

As Butling and Rudy state in their preface, “The interviews more than
fulfilled their purpose in providing a language for talking about some
of the innovative writing of the decade [the 1990s]. Taken together,
they offer a forum on poetics, a dialogue on the what and why of poetry
during a decade of seismic shifts in poetic thought and practice.”
They are also highly entertaining, and offer readers a sense of the
poets as people one would enjoy talking with. Poets Talk is a necessary
conversation.