Anne Michaels named city’s poet laureate
Toronto’s new poet laureate hopes to amplify the city’s “huge international library” of multilingual poetry and literature.
Anne Michaels, author of five acclaimed poetry collections and the novel Fugitive Pieces, was named Wednesday as George Elliott Clarke’s successor in the three-year honorary post.
Michaels wants to focus on Toronto’s many tongues.
“How do we make a space for all these literatures that have come to us in such tremendous largesse, such tremendous richness?” she said in an interview at city hall. “We need Torontonians to bring their cultures, bring their poets to us, so we have access to that huge international library.”
She also hopes to highlight the writings of Toronto students.
Michaels’ collections include The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers and Poems.
Her most recent collection, Correspondences, was shortlisted for last year’s Griffin Poetry Prize.
Michaels officially becomes Toronto’s fifth poet laureate on Dec. 1. The position, which carries a $10,000 annual honorarium, was created in 2001. The first poet to hold the post was Dennis Lee of “Alligator Pie” fame.
Elliott Clarke, a renowned poet and playwright, said it has been “wonderful to represent the city in so many different ways.”
The University of Toronto professor, who focuses on African-Canadian works, rhymed off his many initiatives.
They include: helping Jane-Finch students celebrate their graduates every June; helping to launch the Pan Am Games; representing Toronto at a New York City competition for creative thinking and culture; contributing to library events commemorating the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, and Black History Month.
“It’s been a wonderful position from which to be able to inject poetry into what might be thought of as relatively mundane political activities,” Elliott Clarke said.