John Newlove documentary screening & book launch, SaltSpring Island

Hosted by Brian Brett, with readings/talk by Brian Brett, poet/critic Jay Ruzesky and poet Joe Rosenblatt;

Wednesday, April 16, 2008; 8pm
ArtSpring, 100 Jackson Avenue, SaltSpring Island

John Newlove Documentary Screening / Book Launch on Salt Spring Island

Filmmaker/editor Robert McTavish in attendance.
Garry Oaks Winery Wine Tasting 7pm
Co-sponsored by ArtSpring.

Come celebrate the life and work of poet John Newlove with a screening of the documentary What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove, and the Salt Spring launch of Chaudiere Books' A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove.

About What to make of it all? The life and poetry of JohnNewlove: ' Robert McTavish provides a deeply textured portrait of the great Canadian poet of the sixties. Sometimes as sparse yet dense as Newlove's poetry, the film uses floating text, family photos, conversations with fellow poets, friends and family as well as late-life interviews with Newlove to capture the complex soul tormented by depression and alcoholism, yet still able to write with, as George Bowering says, a 'confidence and sufficiency that is so beautiful.'' -- Globe and Mail

About A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove: "A Long Continual Argument, the first comprehensive edition of Newlove's poems to be published since his death in 2003, is a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration." -- Globe and Mail

A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove has been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in thewords of Phyllis Webb, 'doesn't struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking.'

John Newlove (1938-2003) was born and raised in Saskatchewan. He began publishing while working various jobs in Vancouver in the 1960s. His many honours included the 1972 Governor General's Award for his book Lies, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Founders Award. His works have been internationally published and translated.

'Newlove was the best of us, the great line, the hidden agenda, tough as nails and yet somehow with his heart on his sleeve. There was always a double-take involved when reading his work. His lyrics, such as 'The Weather' were faultless. I devoured and loved his work. --Michael Ondaatje

To call him 'the voice of prairie poetry' misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton 'the voice of Cromwell's London.' This was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetry delivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. It will be see again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place. --Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove: Essays on His Works, forthcoming)

For information on the Salt Spring event, contact Robert McTavish at rmctavish@hotmail.com
or check out www.artspring.ca

For information on the book, contact the publisher, rob mclennan, at az421@freenet.carleton.ca

Ordering information on the book here:http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2007/09/long-continual-argument-selected-poems.html

an interview with Michael Bryson (12 or 20 questions),

soon-Chaudiere Books author (2009);

an interview with Robert McTavish,

editor of A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, up at The Danforth Review.

John Newlove reviewed in The Globe and Mail

by Toronto poet/editor Paul Vermeersch;

[...] John Newlove was a major poet whose life's work has long deserved such careful attention, and thanks to editor Robert McTavish, it has finally received it. A Long Continual Argument, the first comprehensive edition of Newlove's poems to be published since his death in 2003, is a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration.
In its time, not long ago, Newlove's poetry was among the most commanding work being written in Canada. It is stark, brutally honest and deceptively complex. As such, it is a lot like the man who created it. In his introduction, McTavish describes his first impression of that man: "I found him self-deprecating and sly, his low tone punctuated with cigarette pauses." The same could be said for a great many of Newlove's poems, like the fretful Blue Cow Phrases: "If I'm disgusted with my life I'm disgusted with yours too./ All we do is invent blue cow phrases dripping thin vapid milk."

Newlove never attempted to hide his disappointment with the world, at least not in his poetry. He often expressed an antipathy that many people feel but lack the nerve to express themselves. He was the pinch-hitter for our secret bitterness, the darker and more forthright part of our conscience. His raw material was the ugly truth; from it he forged poems that demonstrate the intrinsic beauty of all human emotions, not just the comfortable ones, and he understood, as Aristotle and Shakespeare did, that the grandest of them all, the most poetic, is our melancholy. Few have given voice to human sadness as eloquently as Newlove did, as he demonstrates in his poem She:

She starts to grow tears, chemical beast

shut in a dark room with the walls closing

behind her eyelids, all touches hateful,

the white sweep of clean snow death to her,

the grey naked trees death to her. [...]