National Poetry Month 2014: Joe Blades,

writers’ guild agm

writing writer

not a wrote ...

bused banff to calgary

for writers’ guild of alberta

annual general meeting

with war correspondent

compact typewriter

in daypack and sat

before floor to ceiling

windows overlooking

grassland hills to write

to typewrite when not

in meetings of 

so new organisation

—with its book lovers

never go to bed alone

buttons coined by

a woman who said

“my husband is

an accountant”—

while meeting writers

from all over alberta

decades later

in dimitri’s restaurant

downtown fredericton

bob (robert on his many

books) kroetsch tells

—at a table of mostly

university of new brunswick

english graduate students

and profs i am not one of—

how he remembers

and can never forgot

the sight of me

and my typewriter

in front of that glass

wall facing the world

Joe Blades lives in Fredericton, NB, Canada. He is a visual artist–writer, educator, producer–host of the award-winning, long-playing Ashes, Paper, & Beans community radio program at CHSR 97.9 FM. The editor of ten collections, and the author of seven poetry books, including Prison Songs and Storefront Poetry (Ekstasis Editions, 2010), Casemate Poems (Collected) (Chaudiere Books, 2011), with three books translated, his most recent book, Iz knjige koja se ne zatvara, was translated by Tatjana Bijelić into Serbian and co-published in 2012 by Broken Jaw Press and Art Print in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.