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    Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling
    Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling
    Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling
    Ebook104 pages45 minutes

    Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling

    By George Fetherling

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    About this ebook

    The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place—often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs.

    In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of “communion-in-isolation.” He contrasts Fetherling’s contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider’s fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political.

    Fetherling’s afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches—“the desire to create new codes of hearing” and “writing-to-heal”—and how they are reflected in the collection.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2012
    ISBN9781554586493
    Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling
    Author

    George Fetherling

    George Fetherling is a poet, fiction writer, and voyager. Among his many books are Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties and Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter. He published under the name Douglas Fetherling until 1999, and thereafter under the name George in honour of his late father. He lives in Vancouver.

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      Book preview

      Plans Deranged by Time - George Fetherling

      Plans Deranged by Time

      The Poetry of George Fetherling

      Plans Deranged by Time

      The Poetry of George Fetherling

      Selected

      with an

      introduction by

      A.F. Moritz

      Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Fetherling, George, [date]

      [Poems. Selections]

          Plans deranged by time : the poetry of George Fetherling / selected with an introduction by A.F. Moritz and an afterword by George Fetherling.

      (Laurier poetry series)

      Includes bibliographical references.

      Issued also in electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-55458-631-8

         I. Moritz, A. F. II. Title. III. Series: Laurier poetry series

      PS8561.E834A6 2012        C811’.54         C2011-908429-5

      ––––––

      Electronic monograph.

      Issued also in print format.

      ISBN 978-1-55458-648-6 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-55458-649-3 (EPUB)

         I. Moritz, A. F. II. Title. III. Series: Laurier poetry series (Online)

      PS8561.E834A6 2012        C811’.54         C2011-908430-9

      © 2012 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      Cover photograph by Joe Lepiano. Cover design and text design by P.J. Woodland.

      This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

      Printed in Canada

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      Table of Contents

      Foreword, Neil Besner

      Biographical Note

      Introduction, A.F. Moritz

      Alleycat

      Harry’s New York Bar in Paris

      Border Catechism (excerpts)

      Subroutine

      The Dark Grid

      The Six O’Clock News from Buffalo

      Moving towards the Vertical Horizon (excerpts)

      Memorandum for the File

      Pre Texts

      Radio

      Ancient Beliefs

      Telegraphic Instructions

      Beginning with North

      The View Keeps Reminding Us of Flags

      With the Name Goes Great Responsibility

      Opportunities for Redemption

      Chinese Anthology (excerpts)

      Mother Goddess

      Art Criticism

      Juice

      Ice Ages

      Old Chinese Poem

      Bush Architecture

      0930

      Letter Two (excerpt)

      Singer, An Elegy (excerpts)

      First Signs of Wartime Spring

      Navigating Chinatown

      Confusion of Themes Not of Motives

      Mappamundi

      Postdated

      Afterword, George Fetherling

      Acknowledgements

      Foreword

      Early in the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.

      But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there need to be more, and more different kinds, of publications that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.

      The hope that animates this series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes help to create and sustain the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.

      Our idea is to ask a critic (sometimes himself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet himself—in this case, George Fetherling—write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology is much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as

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