Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker.
Bill Bissett is a Canadian poet known for his unconventional style.
Barrie Phillip Nichol, known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, writer, sound poet, editor, Creative Writing teacher at York University in Toronto and grOnk/Ganglia Press publisher. His body of work encompasses poetry, children's books, television scripts, novels, short fiction, computer texts, and sound poetry. His love of language and writing, evident in his many accomplishments, continues to be carried forward by many.
Canadian poetry is poetry of or typical of Canada. The term encompasses poetry written in Canada or by Canadian people in the official languages of English and French, and an increasingly prominent body of work in both other European and Indigenous languages.
Frankland Wilmot Davey, FRSC is a Canadian poet and scholar.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing and Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bovê was published by Duke University Press and boundary 2 in 2021.
Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.
Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.
From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960–1990 is a poetry anthology published in 1994. It was edited by American poet and publisher Douglas Messerli – under his own imprint Sun & Moon Press – and includes poets from both the U.S. and Canada.
Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Stephen Cain is a Canadian poet and academic.
Paul Dutton is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist, and oral sound artist.
Outriders Poetry Project, started in 1968, is a privately funded organization operating in Buffalo, NY that sponsors readings and publishes books by poets and writers based in the greater Niagara-Erie region.
grOnk, or GRoNK, was a Canadian literary magazine begun in 1967 by bpNichol and others (for example, David Aylward, David W. Harris, and Rah Smith. After the primary 8 series of 8 issues each were published, it was Nichol's efforts that maintained the irregular periodical, with guest editors including Nelson Ball, jwcurry, Steve McCaffery and R. Murray Schafer. An offshoot of Ganglia Press's Ganglia magazine, grOnk began with material gathered for Ganglia's sixth issue and became a monthly publication focusing on concrete poetry and "the language revolution" underway in Canada at the time, publishing a wide variety of "extralinear" writing from an international cast of contributors anchored in a context of parallel developments in Canadian literature. "GrOnk brought together British, Czech, American, Canadian, French and Austrian concrete and experimental practitioners..."
Steven Ross Smith is a Canadian poet, sound poet, fiction writer, arts journalist and arts activist. He is best known for his fluttertongue poems, which have been published in six volumes. One of them, fluttertongue 3: disarray, won the 2005 Book of the Year Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. The fluttertongue poems have been described as a dance with words that pushes the boundaries of both language and poetry.
Adeena Karasick is a Canadian poet, performance artist, and essayist. Born in Winnipeg of Russian Jewish heritage, she is the distinguished author of 13 books of poetry and poetic theory, as well as a series of parodic videopoems, such as the ironic "I Got a Crush on Osama" that was featured on Fox News and screened at film festivals, Ceci n'est pas un Téléphone or Hooked on Telephonics: A Pata-philophonemic Investigation of the Telephone created for The Media Ecology Association, "Lingual Ladies" a post-modern parody of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies", and "This is Your Final Nitrous" a poetic response to the Burning Man Festival., and White Abbot, a parodic videopoem Karasick created during the writing of Salome: Woman of Valor, dedicated to the impossible anguish of forbidden love.
The Four Horsemen was a sound poetry group of Canadian poets composed of bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery that also performed concrete poetry. The group was active from 1972 to 1988. They released 2 12-inch vinyl records of their collaborative sound poetry, 2 cassettes, as well as 3 print collections & the unique broadside Schedule For Another Place (1981). The Four Horsemen also appeared in Ron Mann's 1982 documentary film Poetry in Motion.
