Mentor's Canon: Poems About/For/After Writers

Alain Létourneau is a librarian in the J.N. Desmarais Library at
Laurentian University.

The 69 poems that make up this collection were inspired by literary
mentors such as Leonard Cohen, Bronwen Wallace, T.S. Eliot, Joe
Rosenblatt, Allen Ginsberg, and Ezra Pound. As in every collection,
quality varies. Some poets achieve genius as they play with their
mentors’ styles. Others simply revolt against them. Still others
produce mere venerations.

A familiarity with the poets referred to—or at least with their
poetic style—is essential to an appreciation of some of the poems
here. You may not need to know about Steve McCaffery’s experimental
poetry to appreciate D.G. Jones’s tribute “Steve McCaffery on
Pataphysics,” but if you are not familiar with Alfred Jarry’s
irreverent theatre and humorous technique of inverting (or, sometimes,
replacing/adding) letters in a sentence, you will miss all the fun in
“the addy’s sentence ooks / re-markably ike daddy’s dooded over /
with some many spendourd pensis.” This intriguing collection is
therefore recommended for readers with some knowledge of Canadian
poetry.