They came! Re: “How to lose the audience”, I think I just did this today on a conference call (keeping it real). My thanks to the mighty ‘manse, to Mary and Brian, & to the magazines (Malahat, Fiddlehead) and editors (Iain, Rowan) that gave me a chance to lose more audiences
An incredible week. While home in New Brunswick, teaching medical educators how to foster learning amongst non-neurotypical learners, I received TWO notices of inclusion in the Best Canadian Series: poetry, for “How to lose the audience” originally published in The Malahat Review, & essay, for “Diagnosis Day” from The Fiddlehead. Both of these pieces concern difference, and it was a spiritual experience to read “How to lose the audience” to the assembled physician audience in the Miramichi. My thanks to Rowan McCandless and the ‘hat’s editorial board for selecting my work, and to the team at Biblioasis for keeping the ‘best’ series going.
A record of lifelong dedication to poetry criticism.
1 (retractable devil horns: criticism 1999-2018):
“Poisonous Frame”; “Public Hanging”; “Harbourfront Pigs and Lipstick”; “Rules of Thumb for an Aspiring Critic”; “Pretending to be Great”; “High School Confessional”; “Measured Advice”; “Reaching for Al Purdy”; “Solway the Sad Balladeer”; “Critics at Large”; “The Invisible Man is in your Caesura”; “Introduction to The Pre-Poem Moment“; “Eventual Development”; “McCartney Sings the Blues”; “Recovering the Stars”; “Beauty and Representing Mental Illness”; “Interpreting the Interpreter of Dreams and Culture”; “True Words in the Word Cloud”
2 (personal investments): “Time and Fever”; “Freedom”; “Language on Holiday”; “The Festival of No More Words”; “Explosions”; “Finnegan’s Wake in the Porridge Universe”; “Borrowing Magic”; “David Shields and the Laziness Inherent”; “Coda”; “The Poetics of Plot”; “Zero Chronology”; “But Transcendence”; “How Bad is this Book?”; “It’s Not All About the Brain”; “Healey and Goliath”; “The Paradox I’m Really Pulling For”; “Anticlimax”; “Nice Try, Dostoevsky”
3 (marginal): “How Not to Represent a Region: Coastlines and Overfishing”; “The Backwoods Sobriquet”; “Regionalisms 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond: Reading Maritime Poetry Anthologies Backward”; “Foosty Boost: The First Two Books of Anne Compton”; “Dr. Acorn, or: How I Joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and Learned to Love the Stern Nurse Fusion Bomb Sun”; “We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Progressive White Male & Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems“; “Heroes & Legends: Finding John Thompson with Peter Sanger”; “Visiting Lane”; “Visiting Wayne Clifford”; “Crossing the Campus”; “Clifford the Not-Sonneteer”; “A shared text is an act of friendship”; “Math, Satire, and Sense: David Helwig’s Seawrack“; “In Some More Distant Key: an Interview with David Helwig”; “Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: on J.J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds“; “Return to Scoudouc: A Review of Chaisson’s To Live and Die in Scoudouc“; “Rabbittown Press, David Brewer, Prop.”; “Obituary”; “Angelic Salutation.”
4 (the negative review season one):
“Return of Thematic”; Spoiled Identity and the Frozen Now”; “Crito Revolta”; “Missing Vision”; “Like My Dad, Rapping”; “Dionne Brand is the Most Powerful Poet in Canada”; “The Rebranding”; “CanLit Twitter Matchmade me and Holy Wild“; “The Protest is this Way”; “The Neilson Ratings”
5 (the negative review season 2): “Rocky Mountain Opportunity”; “How the Hell Did Waldo get Published by Dionne Brand? A Tetraptych”; “Sharing and Staring: I Give Best Canadian Poetry 2021 a 1/3 of a Pea rating on Goodpeas (max 5 peas)”; “The Topic of Whiteness in Canadian Poetry”; “Reviewing Reviewing”; “Runaway Griffin Jury 2022”; “Imaginary Griffin 2022 Conversations”; “Can Kevin Connolly Do Anything Right?”; “Maybe . . . Recuse?”
6 (the negative review season 3): “Trend Unsettler”; “Behind the Progressive Times”; “Science Flowers”; “Essaya*ona*Selecteda*Poemsa*ina*Threea*Partsa*”; “The Mid to Mild Kinglet”; “Unpublishing the Archive”; “Men at Play”; “Repetition and Gallstones”; “No Joke”; “On Wunker’s The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth-and-Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry“; “All’s Punny in Ding-Dong Land”; “Marred by Association”; “Losers Gotta Lose: Smile for the Screenshots”; “The Marvel Superhero Movie Post-Credits Scene: TNR Project Debrief”
Shane Neilson 