Site Profile
About the Bookmark
On Thursday, October 21, Toronto received its second Bookmark at the corner of St. George and Bloor, right across from the St. George subway station. The plaque bearing the text of the poem “Essentialist” from Ken Babstock’s Trillium Award-winning collection Airstream Land Yacht (House of Anansi, 2006) was unveiled by poet Ken Babstock and Toronto bookseller and Project Bookmark Canada President Ben McNally.
The installation is part of Project Bookmark Canada, a national initiative to create a network of tributes to site-specific literature across Canada.
Bookmarked poet Ken Babstock says he’s very pleased to be included in the initiative. "What I find really exhilarating about Bookmark is the phenomenon whereby our shared, built and unbuilt landscapes begin to lay claim on these bits of cultural striving,” he says.
“A poem seems now partly owned by the neighbourhood that gave it a ground to stand on in the first place. The architecture and infrastructure swallow or absorb a little song and they each seem happy enough to coexist. Or at least I don't hear them complaining."
"House of Anansi is honoured to publish Ken Babstock's poetry, because of the ways he urges us to reconsider our assumptions and connections,” says Sarah MacLachlan, House of Anansi President and Publisher. “How wonderful that through this Bookmark for 'Essentialist,' hundreds of people everyday will be inspired to look more deeply—at these surroundings and within themselves.”
This Toronto Bookmark is the fourth in the national series.
About Toronto
The city of Toronto is home to more than 2.7 million people. It is the seat of the Ontario government, as well as the cultural, entertainment, and financial capital of Canada. It is comprised of many neighbourhoods and areas, each featuring any number of attractions. The Ken Babstock Bookmark is located in downtown Toronto, just north of the Financial District, where most of the nation’s banks have built towering office buildings.
The plaque itself can be found across the street from St. George Station. The station was opened on February 28, 2023 and is the second busiest station in the TTC subway system, serving approximately 239,660 people per day.
Other attractions found in this area include the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto. The ROM was founded in 1912. It is situated east of the university’s Philosopher’s Walk and was actually under the management of U of T until 1968. It contains more than six million items of world culture and natural history. In 2007, the controversial Michael Lee-Chin Crystal was opened. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it houses the new main entrance of the museum, a restaurant, a gift shop, seven galleries, and Canada’s largest temporary exhibition hall.
The University of Toronto was originally founded in 1827 as King’s College. It is a public research university, comprised of twelve different colleges. It was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research and is known for influential movements in literary criticism. It is also home to a number of athletic teams known as the Varsity Blues. The football team plays in Varsity Stadium, which is a former home of the Toronto Argonauts, the host of the soccer semifinals of the 1976 Summer Olympics, and one of the area’s attractions mentioned in Ken Babstock’s poem “Essentialist.”
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Landmark curated by Cailey Cavallin and Lindsey Shaw.
Cailey received her Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Ottawa and just completed the Creative Book Publishing Program at Humber College. She loves literature, travel, and history and is therefore thrilled to be a part of this project.
Lindsey received her Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Toronto and has recently completed the Creative Book Publishing program at Humber College. She is excited to be part of such an important initiative that promotes literacy and celebrates literature and travel in Ontario.
As the Ontario Read It Here editorial and marketing interns, we are excited to travel across our fine province to promote the stunning works of literature that have come out of the region. It is our goal to draw national and international attention to the amazing, talented authors that this country has produced.
Author Profile
Poet Ken Babstock was born in Newfoundland and raised in Pembroke, Ontario. He began writing poetry as a teen. “I was one of those adolescents who scribbled in little private notebooks, which I think a lot of people do. It’s just a function of being a teenager I think, being self-obsessed. But then later in high school I came across some poetry books in my little hometown library and it dawned on me that this was something that could happen, something that I could pursue.”
After one year of university, where he “stumbled into” Irving Layton’s creative writing class, Babstock began sending his poems to journals and magazines. His work has appeared in several publications, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, and Canadian Literature.
In 1997, he won gold at the National Magazine Awards. Two years later, his first collection, Mean, was published. It won him the Milton Acorn Award and the 2000 Atlantic Poetry Prize. For his second collection, Days into Flatspin, he won the K.M. Hunter Award.
His most recent collection, Airstream Land Yacht, won the Trillium Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2007 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the 2006 Governor General's Award for poetry.
Babstock’s work has been anthologized in both Canada and the United States and has been translated into several languages, including Dutch, Serbo-Croatian, and Latvian.
He lives in Toronto with his wife and son.
Book Profile
“Essentialist,” from Ken Babstock’s award-winning collection Airstream Land Yacht (House of Anansi, 2006), is a wonderful poem about human nature, consciousness, theories of thought, and so much more.
It is, Babstock explains, the first poem in the book as well as “the first poem of a sequence that appears intermittently through the book.” The sequence consists of five poems, each with a “conceptual egg-headed title”: “Essentialist,” “Pragmatist,” “Materialist,” “Verificationist,” and “Compatibilist.”
“Essentialist” plays with “the notions of transcendental thought or essentialist thought or idealist thought, which have taken a bad rap in the past thirty years or so in theory and politics and whatnot.”
Babstock goes on to explain that the book “swims in circles around materialist views of consciousness” and begins by positing “the possibility that there is some kind of spirit or essence to the human.”
He also says that “things get worse from there.” Things get thrown into crisis throughout the book; however, “Essentialist,” the opener, “has a bit of a tentative, celebratory note.” It is about “humans and what they are capable of.” The poem’s narrator works through the idea that the cadet he sees on the subway is also a human, someone with consciousness. “It’s a tough thing and a kind of truism and everyone behaves as though everyone were humans but they also at the same time will often behave as if everyone weren’t humans.” The thought-provoking poem is meant to serve as a reminder that all those people we see on the street everyday possess “internal worlds” very much like our own.