Category: Poetry

Another side of the Kinneret

“We’re just about to cross the River Jordan,” says our guide, Mike Rogoff, as our van approaches a bridge traversing a gulley of greenery. “So don’t blink and don’t sneeze, or you’ll miss it. This is not the St. Lawrence. The people who wrote those marvelous spirituals — ‘the River Jordan is deep and wide’…

Profile: Poet Seymour Mayne

One needs a “strong sense of perseverance” to be a poet, says Seymour Mayne, the Ottawa professor and wordsmith whose recent slim volume September Rain (Mosaic Press) is the 29th book of poetry he’s published since 1964 — “ken eina hora, almost 41 years ago.” Educated at the Talmud Torah in his native Montreal, Mayne…

Rafi Aaron on Osip Mandelstam

This year’s Jewish Book Fair (2006) features Toronto poet Rafi Aaron, whose few published volumes to date have traveled surprisingly far and gained impressive renown in the world. On November 12, Aaron and friends are due to present a celebration in words and music of the life and poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the legendary Russian-Jewish…

Obit: Miriam Waddington (2004)

To the many friends and critics who feel that Canadian-Jewish poet and writer Miriam Waddington did not get the recognition she deserved in life, her recent death in Vancouver seems especially sad and ironic because it occurred only weeks before she would have gained what may very well be her largest popular reading audience and…

Sugarman’s Forms of Gone

Toronto-born poet Yerra Sugarman has won a prestigious American literary award for a debut collection of poems, Forms of Gone, that captures the experience of being a daughter of Holocaust survivors growing up in a survivor community in north Toronto. A university instructor who has lived in New York for more than 20 years, Sugarman…

Simchovitch’s Fiery Mountain

Readers of the Yiddish Forward may have noticed several published notices in the New York-based newspaper a while ago congratulating Toronto poet and writer Simcha (Sam) Simchovitch for passing the milestone of his 85th birthday. Simchovitch is known as one of Canada’s senior Yiddish writers, yet he’s also achieved recognition for his literary contributions in…

Libby Scheier’s “seething inferno of words”

In “Why Poems Should Not Be Fictions,” one of the pieces in Libby Scheier’s Kaddish For My Father: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1999 (ECW Press, 1999), the Toronto poet seems to imply that there’s already too much artifice in the world and that the poet should perform her art unmasked, without resorting to a narrative…

Mayne’s September Rain

One needs a “strong sense of perseverance” to be a poet, says Seymour Mayne, the Ottawa professor and wordsmith whose recent slim volume September Rain (Mosaic Press) is the 29th book of poetry he’s published since 1964 — “ken eina hora, almost 41 years ago.” Educated at the Talmud Torah in his native Montreal, Mayne…

Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam

This year’s Jewish Book Fair (2006) features Toronto poet Rafi Aaron, whose few published volumes to date have traveled surprisingly far and gained impressive renown in the world. On November 12, Aaron and friends are due to present a celebration in words and music of the life and poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the legendary Russian-Jewish…

Emma Lazarus bio

Emma Lazarus, who died 120 years ago at the premature age of only 38, fixed her place in American literary history through her poem “The New Colossus,” which famously graces a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Some of its stanzas are too well known to bear repeating even today, but,…