{"id":10639,"date":"2019-05-11T15:57:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-11T10:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/next-wave-jim-johnstone\/"},"modified":"2023-02-20T22:36:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T17:36:33","slug":"next-wave-jim-johnstone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/next-wave-jim-johnstone\/","title":{"rendered":"Rich and Impossibly Legion: The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry<\/em> edited by Jim Johnstone"},"content":{"rendered":"

With The Next Wave<\/em>, Johnstone presents a handful of work by 40 early-to-mid-career poets from across Canada. As he writes in his critical introduction, he deliberately focused his selections on poets who began publishing trade collections after 2001, and have since published no more than three collections. I find the range of the poets in The Next Wave<\/em> more varied than I might have expected. He includes poets such as Luke Hathaway, Jason Guriel, Linda Besner and Alexandra Oliver, but also Jordan Abel, Aisha Sasha John, Sonnet L\u2019Abb\u00e9, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Sadiqa de Meijer. On the surface, including Abel\u2019s work, which is incredibly powerful, experimental and radical, might seem like an outlier, but the way the book is shaped allows for a broader range than what I had considered to be Johnstone\u2019s field of poets. The book presents itself in the best way possible: here are poets doing something amazing, and you should be paying attention to them. More often than not, I would entirely agree.<\/p>\n

The beauty of this collection is that it knows it can only highlight a small part of what has become wonderfully rich, diverse and impossibly legion. Gone are the days of a singular canon, or the McClelland and Stewart anthologies that attempted to provide an overview of emerging or established Canadian poets, simply because the range and number of contemporary writers are too large and too varied. Eli Mandel\u2019s Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970<\/em> (1971) might exist as a paperback small enough to slip into one\u2019s pocket, but Dennis Lee\u2019s follow-up, The New Canadian Poets 1970-1985<\/em> (1985), has enough heft to stun any burglar, and I\u2019ve rarely seen a copy without a mangled binding (my copy is literally torn in half under its own weight). The only reasonable response in our current literature is to present multiple anthologies from different editors, each with their own particular fields of expertise and interest (with whatever overlaps between them).<\/p>\n

Still, while I understand Johnstone\u2019s initial caveat of excluding those he has put through Palimpsest Press, forcing his attention to go beyond his immediate pool of poets, I do think that by holding to that rule, he shortchanges his own judgement, his editorial accomplishments, and his own poets, any of whom would have easily fit into such a selection.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan<\/strong> won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty<\/em> (Mansfield Press, 2019), Household items<\/em> (Salmon Poetry, 2019) and Life Sentence<\/em> (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ARC<\/a> HITS THE HEART HARD.
<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a while now, I\u2019ve been comparing poet Jim Johnstone\u2019s editorial work\u2014from his chapbooks through Anstruther Press to trade titles through Palimpsest Press\u2014to that of fiction editor John Metcalf (formerly of The Porcupine\u2019s Quill and currently at Biblioasis): you might not be interested in everything they offer, and the work has a distinct flavour to it, but much of it is of a high enough quality to impress. As editors, I trust their judgement, even if I might not care for the work of every writer or title on their roster. From what I\u2019ve seen of the books and chapbooks he has edited, Johnstone\u2019s interest appears to focus on highly crafted first-person metaphor-driven narrative lyrics. With Johnstone, there doesn\u2019t seem to be anything in the way of, say, language-driven or ludic sentences or anything more experimental in those directions. While I\u2019m not always personally drawn to such work, I\u2019ve been drawn to a number of the Anstruther titles, simply due to the high quality of the writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2944,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"1881","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"9907,10131,10066,10681","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1640,1744,1881],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[158],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10639"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}