J.A. Weingarten : John Newlove’s Life in Letters: Notes on the Publication of The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003

 

 

 

  

Back in 2004, I was an undergraduate student reading Sam Solecki’s Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy. I found it thrilling to read the past as a fly on the wall, reading words that were never meant to be read. In graduate school, I began visiting archives around the country in order to write my dissertation, but always in the back of my head was a thought: “whose letters will I find and then edit?”

And then, in 2010, I came across a vicious letter in the Canadian poet John Newlove’s archives. Newlove (1938-2003) sent the letter to the literary critic and writer Frank Davey in the early 1960s shortly after Newlove reviewed Davey’s City of the Gulls and Sea (1964) on CBC Radio. Newlove’s review upset Davey so much that he contacted a local CBC producer and suggested that Newlove wasn’t qualified to review books. The producer, Allan Campbell, then shared Davey’s comments with Newlove. Newlove confronted Davey in a long, angry letter: “Now, this business of untrained reviewers or ones with vested interests. You’re the boy with the vested interests, and you’ve shown it in your letter; a second-rater crying because someone has drawn attention to his incompetence. And what do you mean by untrained? Do you think your fat little M.A. means you know anything? Or that no university means no knowledge? Don’t give me that horseshit routine” (98). After reading that explosive exchange, I decided to look further into Newlove’s archives to see what else was there.

His archives contained a treasure trove of correspondence that demonstrates the cultural function that letters served for twentieth-century writers. The American poet John Taggart reminded me of this function when I interviewed him while editing Newlove’s letters: “I’m struck by it now,” he told me. “[Letters were] how writers made contacts. That’s how they fought poetic battles. Letters were a medium that the current generation has no clue about.” Literary correspondence, Taggart said, “is filled with hopes and aspirations … These are life documents. They’re life vessels” (1). Newlove’s correspondence exemplifies those aspects of letter writing: they give insight into the financial conditions, social and political networks, and the struggles (emotional, psychological, and physical) of artists (especially those contemporary with Newlove). Newlove’s letters reveal much, generally, about what an artist may face: alternating moments of self-doubt and self-confidence, depression and addiction, oscillation between literary vigour and paralysis, and general existentialism.

When I began writing and editing The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, I thought it was a project entirely about Newlove and not much else. But gradually I came to appreciate that this book is a microcosm of an era, a glimpse into a time in which letters were not just the stirring fragments of a letter writer’s life, but also the sites in which life-changing introductions took place, mutual admiration societies formed, career-defining decisions were made, philosophies were developed and refined, personal struggles were faced, and fights were fought.

That’s what readers will find in The Weather and the Words: they’ll sneak, unseen, into the life and times of Newlove and live like that proverbial fly on private walls in the past. From this vantage point, readers will see far beyond Newlove’s individual experiences; they’ll also see the state of the world in which this remarkable author lived and wrote. Indeed, letters preserve a wide-reaching history to which the letter writer continually gestures, knowingly or unknowingly, simply by inhabiting their specific era. Read Newlove’s letters as more than the story of his remarkable writing and troubled life: they are vestiges of a particular moment in time when letters were essential to the existence and cultivation of a literary culture.

Of course, it is also a gift to (re)discover the poet John Newlove. Though his name may today be less familiar than others, he was, like those literary figures, widely read and hugely influential during this lively period in Canadian history.

If you were an aspiring writer in the 1960s and you wanted to write poetry about the Canadian prairies (its landscape, its people, its cities and towns, its culture), you would have had an extremely difficult time finding a single poet of note on which to model your writing or to whom you could look for inspiration. Newlove was arguably, if not the first, one of the first prairie-born poets to achieve nationwide popularity by publishing modern poems about the prairies.

Newlove was also immediately recognized by emerging poets and his contemporaries as a trailblazer for writing unapologetic, engaged poems about a region of the country largely unrepresented in modern poetry. It may be hard for readers today to imagine the profound loneliness many aspiring prairie poets felt before they discovered Newlove’s poems, but it was a very real sense of isolation and even shyness—it was a feeling that you couldn’t write about the place in which you lived, grew, and learned to be a poet. Newlove’s poetry alleviated some of those feelings for aspiring writers.

That is not, however, to reduce Newlove’s achievement to “first through the gate” or to say his reputation has rested strictly on his choice of content; his poetry is extraordinary. Contemporary reviewers singled him out frequently as one of the rising stars of the 1960s, and In Newlove’s literary archives (mostly at the University of Manitoba), one will find dozens of letters from younger writers such as Lorna Crozier, David Zieroth, Robert Bringhurst, Barry McKinnon, Michael Ondaatje, and Rob McLennan, each of whom praised Newlove’s talent and learned from his craft. The fan mail, student letters, and correspondence with poets in Newlove’s archive are compelling evidence of a wide-reaching reputation as a masterful poet, by any standard.

The Weather and the Words (which includes a preface by Lorna Crozier and an afterword by Dr. Laura Cameron) celebrates these achievements by giving readers a chance to read the world in which Newlove lived and to observe his life and career as they unfolded from 1963 until his death in 2003. The letters are vibrant, alive, funny, heartbreaking, witty, and profound. They trace the career of one of Canada’s best poets from his promising beginnings to his tragic end.

 

The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2025.

 

 

 

Dr. Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten is a professor and writer living in Guelph, Ontario. He is the author of Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry (2019, UTP), co-editor of Unpacking the Personal Library (2022, WLUP), the co-founder and co-editor of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism (2011-2019), and the editor of The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 (2025, WLUP).

Tea Gerbeza : How a poem begins

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

When I first started learning paper quilling, I twirled the foundational shapes over and over again—coils, teardrops, marquise, squares—covering my tiny coffee table with them. Practicing my tension when rolling coils, some would have tight centres while others were so loose you could only see the strip edges in shifts of light. But to practice these shapes, I needed an end point to work toward, something tangible that my bodymind could achieve. This is also how my poems begin: at the end.

          The poem forms around an end that has either been sketched, felt, or whose body is blurry, but its edges appear. There is no poem I’ve written without knowing what kind of ending I want to get to, even if that ending drastically changes or needs more shape after the initial writing is finished. When creating a paper quilled piece, the artform requires me to begin a project with a semblance of an end, even if it is as simple as “I’m making a daisy.” An ending helps me plan what shapes are needed. What shapes compliment, fit well together. An art of building is one that takes many shapes and entangles them into something bigger. What are poems than endless entanglements?

I am also obsessed with the lyric. This preoccupation makes sense to me—much of my practice revolves around amplifying experiential knowledge, a knowledge that directly stems from the “I.” Paper quilling is an experiential act; I physically spool a strip to create something other than itself. The same can be said for poetry. Working from an “end” makes me ask of my poem or paper quilling: what came before? What shape is necessary? What lines shine through when there is disruption to my imagined end? A poem begins at this point of disruption; it is where the unexpected forges a path. When it’s time to glue the quilled shapes to a canvas, the pieces never fit together how I first imagined. The paper attaches to the canvas the way it wants, the way it needs to in order to reach its ending. Even when I work towards a specific knowing, my endings are always a surprise with what they become. They are never what I think they will be. This surprise is the magic. This surprise is what makes poems resonate beyond the page, beyond the canvas.

 

 

 

 

 

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is the author of How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2025). She is a neuroqueer disabled writer and multimedia artist. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in English & Creative Writing from the University of Regina. Most recently, her poem “Body of the Day” was a People’s Choice Award finalist in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2024 2-Day Poem Contest. She also made the longlist for Room magazine’s 2022 Short Forms contest. Tea won the Ex-Puritan’s 2022 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. New work appears in ARC magazine, Action, Spectacle, The Poetry Foundation, Wordgathering, and Contemporary Verse 2. She is one of four Pain Poets. Find out more on teagerbeza.com.

photo credit: Ali Lauren Creative Services

Laura Kerr : Unfixed Readings : Resisting Resolution

Writing experimental poetry criticism could be revolutionary—steeped in academia’s legacy, yet wide open for reinvention. My background? Visual art, not literature. That’s exactly why it’s thrilling. I’m not trying to be Greenberg or Saltz—but like them, I aim to break conventions, redefine critique, and shake up the whole scene.

With computers comfortably at our fingertips and AI no longer speculative but integrated into our daily practice, now is the time to experiment—with both traditional and computational poetry.

I write criticism in collaboration with AI trained on my own critical writing, poetry and visual art. It’s a partnership suited to the world we live in. This creates a self-reflective loop, where my critical voice evolves and morphs through machine reinterpretation.

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.