Editor's Notes

Greetings Dear Readers,

This month’s issue features musings on time, mortality and incubation. I hope you enjoy the issue.

At Bywords.ca headquarters, we are hip-deep in planning the forthcoming John Newlove Poetry Award. Would you believe it will be our 21st annual celebration of John Newlove? We hold the award to remember the poetry of this former Ottawa resident and Prairie poet, who died in the year that Bywords.ca began. One of the activities I look forward to during the Newlove award ceremony and reading each year is the reading of his poems by participants. Every year, I read “Then, If I Cease Desiring” from Newlove’s first poetry book, Moving in Alone, published by Contact Press in 1965 and its second edition by oolichan books in 1977. “You may allow me moments,/not monuments. I being/content. It is little/but it is little enough.” I always hope that our commemoration of John Newlove’s poetry each year is a moment of rembrance and a reminder of his great skill as a poet.

Each year as part of the prize, the recipient and honourable mentions of the award receive a copy of “A Long Continual Argument, The Selected Poems of John Newlove,” published by Chaudiere Books in 2009 and now available from Invisible Publishing. It is my hope that both emerging and established poets alike will gain inspiration from his work.

Stay tuned for more details about the 21st Annual John Newlove Poetry Award Reading and Ceremony which will take place as part of a stellar Ottawa International Writers Festival pre-festival event at Club Saw, taking place on October 14, 2025.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about John Newlove, you can also get a copy of The Weather and the Words, The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 recently published by WLU Press.

For more information on the John Newlove Poetry Award, please go to “Newlove” on the left-hand side of the Bywords.ca site. See you in October!

Thanks to our selection committee this month:

Dan Boland
Sarah Kabamba
Andrew Lafleche
Stephanie Mason
Colin Quin
Jade Riordan
Marjorie Silverman
JC Sulzenko
Kuna Zero

If you have questions, comments, suggestions or a small walk to a café to offer, please e-mail me at amanda@bywords.ca

Amanda Earl
Managing Editor

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