Trillium Book Award Author Readings June 16

Poets in Profile: Daryl Hine

 
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Open Book is celebrating National Poetry Month with daily profiles of today's "unacknowledged legislators of the world." Find out what inspires, confounds and delights the poets behind this spring's new releases by following our series.

&: A Serial Poem (Fitzhenry & Whiteside), the first new collection by Chicago-based Canadian poet Daryl Hine in almost twenty years, was shortlisted for the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. The book is a taut culmination of 303 ten-line stanzas that flow through and between the sign of the ampersand. "At the centre of this hailstorm of rhyme is a calm — one made of seeming trifles, yet with thinking that is profound," writes the GG Jury. "It is a reflection on civilization as a whole, and is the summing up of a life in particular weighed against eternity."

Open Book:

Can you describe an experience that you believe contributed to your becoming a poet?

Daryl Hine:

The death of my mother when I was thirteen.

OB:

What is the first poem you remember being affected by?

DH:

Wallace Steven's "The Idea of Order at Key West."

OB:

What one poem — from any time period — do you wish you had been the one to write?

DH:

Ovid's Metamorphoses.

OB:

What has been your most unlikely source of inspiration?

DH:

Science Fiction.

OB:

What do you do with a poem that just isn't working?

DH:

Abandon it.

OB:

What was the last book of poetry you read that really knocked your socks off?

DH:

Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s Supernatural Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000).

OB:

What is the best thing about being a poet…and what is the worst?

DH:

Best — the solitude, worst — the solitude.

Daryl Hine was born in British Columbia. He studied at Mc Gill and at the University of Chicago. He is former editor of Poetry (Chicago) and has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and Northwestern. He has received three Canada Council Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among many other honours. He has published eleven books of verse and six of verse translations.

For more information about &: A Serial Poem please visit the Fitzhenry & Whiteside website.

Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.

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