An Article about the Project

Powell River Live Poets’ Guild struck out boldly in a new direction in January, with Parallel: Forty-nine Canadian poets speak to Obama. More than five hundred poets across Canada were personally invited to respond to a competition for forty-nine poems that would tell the new American president, who is strongly arts-oriented, something essential about Canada and being Canadian.

A strong response from poets famous, infamous, and unknown brought in several hundred poems from across the country. Governor-General’s Award winners and Poets Laureate mingle with private closet poets who have never before shown their verse to a soul. The variety of submissions is wonderful and the quality high, says editor Eva van Loon. “I love this anarchic, populist project, not least because only rarely does the literary voice of Canada speak from the West. It pleases me that tiny Powell River has the red-haired, swashbuckling gumption to try this on. Usually these initiatives come from Toronto or Montreal.”

Parallel is planned to be the first book entirely digitally published and manufactured in Powell River. The Guild, which published its first book in 2008 as the Youth Peace-Poem Contest anthology PRIPPA 2008: Friendship Never Ends, decided to try to end dependence on out-of-community sources by starting niche publishing on a local basis. Parallel will be the first book along the learning curve, but the Guild may also re-publish special editions of the collection as local publishing catches on and opportunities arise for special editions for special books like this one.

“Some of these poems are heartbreakers and some are hilarious,” says van Loon, who lived in the US for about a decade. “We’re asking our first, second, and third-round judges to try to put themselves in Obama’s shoes–or slippers, if the First Puppy hasn’t chewed those up–and consider which poems would speak to them about Canada and stick in their minds. That’s what sets this collection apart from any other collection of Canadian poetry. We are at a point in history when we must tell our enormous, powerful neighbor who we really are, and what our vision is. It would have been a waste of time to present the previous American administration with this collection. But this President may just listen–and hear.”

The Guild sent nine of the poems to Obama just before his Canadian visit and will send the book as a gift as soon as it comes off the press in the next two months. Powell Riverites will have first crack at buying a copy from the Guild’s website or at the still-to-be-announced book launch at $15 plus applicable taxes. “For once,” grins van Loon, “the rest of the country is going to have pay a little more–ferry costs, you understand.”

Advertisement