I was very pleased to learn that Arc magazine has awarded me their Confederation Poets Prize for 2017, given for the best poem published in the magazine during 2016.

Arc, which is published in Ottawa, says the $250 prize “is named in recognition of a group of Canadian poets who were born around the time of… Confederation” (Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott are mentioned).

My poem, “Literally,” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue. The poem gently argues with a negative stance toward writing in a literal fashion taken by two poets I very much admire, Washington state’s Joseph Powell and poetry icon Robert Bly. “How does an orange,” my poem asks, “arrive for breakfast on even a cosmologist’s plate?”