Maxine Gadd

Maxine Gadd, way back when. Photo Elaine Briere.

Our guest was long time Vancouver Poet, Maxine Gadd. I came across a great article on the Tyee website by Grant Shilling that features a quote from New Star Publisher Rolf Maurer about labelling Maxine's poetry:

I like her humour, and the fact that her poetic experiments, the arrangement of text on the page, her made-up words and her play with sounds (of words) were all related to something beyond just poetics: they were related to her desire to document, describe, write about her world in a way that might be recognizable by others.

"Maxine's work represents a poetic tradition that tends to be (subtly) disparaged, both by the more conservative lyric poets who until quite recently dominated the writing about Canadian poetry as well as the prize lists (and juries), but also by the more theoretically inclined, Euro-American-influenced poets that include the motorcycle gang also known as the Kootenay School of Writing, which is where my own tastes were forged.

"'Hippie poet.' 'Street/urban poet.' She's actually a damned good poet, whose 'hippie,' 'gritty urban' poems have actually been influenced by a very broad range of writers. Maxine, I discovered not just from her writing but her attendance at many readings over the years and her genuine interest in all kinds of other writers, including many not very much like her at all, allowed a lot of influences in. Her style is unmistakably her own, but her wide reading has given her the licence, or courage or madness or whatever, to push what she's doing, so that her work tends to stretch whatever category she's working in."

Read the whole Tyee article here...

Audio from the show to follow.