Arc aims to rehabilitate reputations of forgotten and neglected Canadian poets

Arc Poetry Magazine is this month launching a special Forgotten and Neglected issue featuring poetry by 13 “forgotten and neglected” Canadian poets. Photographs and essays by many of Canada’s best contemporary poets and critics illustrate their arguments why the featured writers' work ought to be revered and remembered. (The kickoff is a reading on on Saturday, June 23, 2007 at 5 pm at the Manx Pub, 370 Elgin Street in Ottawa, just in time for Canada day.) Podcasts by the various essayists will be featured on the poetry magazine's website.

A release from the magazine encapsulates explanations of the entire lineup. Among them is Audrey Alexandra Brown, a west coast Romantic poet, rediscovered by Kim Blank of Victoria, a fellow westerner, poet, playwright, and frequent media consultant on pop culture. Blank is a professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Victoria.

Literary history suddenly dropped Audrey Alexandra Brown (1904-1998) like a hot potato. Despite the accolades, the awards, and the best wishes of those who early on championed her work—and those who may have played upon the fact that she was crippled by rheumatic fever—she was bull-dozed by modernism and professional literary critics. She was aware of what was happening, but helpless to stop it. Her failing, she claimed, was that she had no real experience of life.

In their introduction to the special issue., co-editors Anita Lahey and Matthew Holmes write:

“All the poets you will read about in this issue of Arc are dead. With each, a potential legacy has also died, or is in full-blown demise. Though ordinary mortality is beyond our powers to correct, we take issue, as our theme ‘Forgotten and Neglected’ implies, with these secondary, literary deaths. We contend that each of the 13 poets whose work appears in these pages has received less credit than was his or her due for either literary accomplishments, the enrichment of Canadian poetic history, or both”

Arc Poetry Magazine was founded in Ottawa in 1978 and is the oldest and most established national journal of Canadian poetry.