jwcurry

Marilyn Irwin’s poetry has been published by above/ground press, Arc Poetry Magazine and Bywords and has or will appear in ottawater, The Peter F. Yacht Club, New American Writing, and Matrix Magazine, as well as the anthology Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013). The winner of the 2013 Diana Brebner Prize, her fourth and most recent chapbook is tiny (In/Words Press). A fifth chapbook is imminent. She lives with her two cats in Ottawa.

Writer, sound performer, publisher, editor, artist and urban printer jwcurry has lived in Ottawa since 1996, after moving his archive/bookstore, said to be one of the largest collections of small press publications and ephemera in Canada, from his long-time home base in Toronto. His ongoing bibliography of the late Toronto poet bpNichol, a project he’s been working on for a couple of decades, include much that’d been missing even from Nichol’s collection of his own work. His influence in the city as a resource, performer, poet, enthusiast and contrarian has been both subtle and considerable, and his presence alone has encouraged a number of Ottawa writers and publisher to push well beyond their comfort levels and limits, influencing the work and performances of just about anyone who has worked with him.

What I’ve always found interesting about Ottawa poet Roland Prevost’s poetry is in the lengthy, detailed process that brought him to where he is now. For an hour or three a day, he composes in what he refers to as his “logbook”: composing journal entries, drafts of fiction, poetry and essays, and notes on recent reading. It has only been over the past decade or so, upon emerging to engage with Ottawa’s community of writers, reading series, publishers and performers, that Prevost has begun to shift in his composition, becoming more deliberate about writing poems-as-poems, all of which has culminated in his first book of poetry, Singular Plurals (Chaudiere Books, 2014).