Ken Norris : CULTURAL MARGINALIA

from Report from the Brockwell Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

              for Stephen Brockwell

The Great American Poet read his Lana Turner poem.
Robert Lowell didn’t like it at all.
His response winds up in the dustbin of history. 

Sometimes I’m just producing cultural marginalia.
Poetry comments, about everything.
The trivial and the grand. 

Louis said we were kibitzers,
and I guess that’s true. My poems have never been
broad cultural statements. 

Someday someone will realize I was speaking
to them, for them.

It’s the 21^st century, and everyone’s
distracted. Somehow culture goes on.

 

 

 

 

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. For thirty-three years he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Maine. He currently resides in Toronto.