Introduction
Canada is rife with poets. Maybe as a retreat from our endless dark winters and summers blazing with black flies. Maybe to answer the wide spaces with a few quiet words rather than a restless urban chatter. Whatever the reason, we proliferate—and after almost three decades of writing, editing, and publishing poetry, I know a large number of fine poets, many represented in this special issue of SugarMule.com concentrated on Canadian poetry. Not all of them are here, of course. If you've ever tried to put together an anthology like this you know it can be a real headache. A migraine. So I decided to take a simple course, and simply present some poets whose work I like and admire. A number are more or less of my generation, and have numerous publishing credits; a second group are either substantially younger, or not yet substantially published—but are intriguing harbingers. The collection of poems thus idiosyncratically gathered is not complete, it is not authoritative, it doesn't cover every region and province and official language, as our federal government documents are required to do. It does not include poems by all the important poets writing in Canada today—among them Margaret Atwood, of course, Don Mackay, Elizabeth Brewster, P.K. Page, and Phyllis Webb. It includes no poems by writers who are gone—Bronwen Wallace, bpNichol, Anne Szumigalski, John Newlove, Al Purdy, George Johnston, Dorothy Livesay—though we don't forget their voices. I urge the interested reader to sample the works of these and other internationally acclaimed Canadian poets, which are widely available. This selection also sidesteps the performance and intermedia collaborations that have engaged me for a substantial part of my creative life—as expressed by the Four Horsemen, Owen Sound, Lillian Allen, Penn Kemp (though some of her poems appear), my own music-and-poetry groups SugarBeat, Geode, and First Draft, and the expanding crowd of slam poets and rap poets and hip hop poets and performance poets who strut and dance across our not-so-barren wastes. If that's what gets you jumping, you'll find numerous recordings, videos, and intermedia works on-line and elsewhere. (Max Middle's ABSeries.org is a good starting point). What this Canadian issue does present is poems and poets that twinge my sense of the strange. The beyond. That take me above, below, inside, outside the ordinary and the known. Poets who've written something I'd never imagined, and now can't forget. Maybe some of what follows will surprise you too, and will stay. —Susan McMaster, Ottawa, Canada, November 2009
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