My poem, Cancel Culture, is in BEST CANADIAN POETRY 23!
What inspiring company! Everyone’s kidding me about publishing poems from the future.
Cancel Culture
Between earning and learning lies
kerning, the name for the space
between letters of type to please
the eye in a proportional font both
natural and polished.
Not to be confused with tracking
where spacing adjusts uniformly over
a range of characters. And then
there is leading. And leading on.
*
To cancel a person now
means to remove
respect.
Check your Latin for
cross-hatching. Words
rendered illegible by
drawing lines through
blacked out offending phrases.
Cancello, cross
out. Erasure rules.
Redacted. Where
do we draw
the line?
Leaving mere
palimpsest left
to scratch literate
out of obliterate.
Thank you John Barton, Anita Lahey @Biblioasis!
“‘My goal,’ writes guest editor John Barton of his long career as a literary magazine editor, ‘was always to be jostled awake, and I soon realized that I was being jostled awake for two—myself and the reader… I came to understand that my job description included an obligation to expose readers to wide varieties of poetry, to challenge their assumptions while expanding their taste.’
In selecting this year’s edition of Best Canadian Poetry, Barton brings the same spirit to his survey of Canadian poems published by magazines and journals in 2021. From new work by Canadian favourites to exciting new talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems to challenge and enlarge your sense of the power and possibility of Canadian poetry.”
Thanks to Karl Jirgens for reading “Cancel Culture” at the Toronto launch of the anthology!
#BestCanadianSeries #BestCanadian2023 #BestCanadianPoetry23 #BCP23
Penn Kemp 