B. W. Powe - Works

Works

Powe has written books of thoughts, poetry, essays, and fiction (long and short). He has also written nationally-seen columns for The Globe and Mail and "The Toronto Star". This is what the press has said over the years: He has been called "way cool" by the Globe and Mail, "one of our finest cultural commentators" by the Toronto Star, a poet who can write "hair-raising lines" that seem to come "fully formed from the cosmos" by The Globe and Mail and who takes "considerable, unfashionable risks" by The Malahat Review, "a visionary--a modern day Magellan" by The Montreal Gazette, "an intellectual terrorist" by Barbara Amiel in MacLean's, and "enigmatic...and necessary..." by The Edmonton Journal. Kenneth J. Harvey said Powe's "Heart beats against the current... at its ultimate core invents something original--and oftentimes breathtaking... To say brilliant would be an understatement..." (Ottawa Citizen) About Outage, the Calgary Herald said, "Powe has created something remarkable...a sort of video novel, a hybrid of genres and media that transcends the ordinary and offers a new vision in a enw way of a society dancing to electronically generated signals..." Pico Iyer said his writings represented "a soaring alchemical vision." R. Murray Schafer called Outage "a fully realized work of art." Canadian Literature said of his poetry that " subtly textured themes...affirm the importance of the romantic voice in these troubled times." The Montreal Gazette, in 2007, said that his essay prose style is "like well-chosen brush-strokes on a canvas." At IdeaCity in 2001 Moses Znaimer called B.W. Powe's stances, public lectures and writings "a combination of poetry and rock'n'roll."

Elana Wolff, poet and critic, in her book Implicate Me: Short Essays on Reading Contemporary Poems (Guernica, 2010), has this to say about Powe's writings: "...a prescient writer on the cyber-age and codes and patterns...there is actually no neat genre-division in Powe's writing. ...His prose frequently reads like poetry... The Unsaid Passing is... emotionally unshielded selection of pieces that range in length from five words to several sections. ...Powe wants both transpersonal and transcendent connection from poetry. ...unabashedly spiritual, and passionate...uncommon for our age. He wants us to acknowledge our capacity for deep feeling, our vulnerability and authentic need for each other, and for the sacred. ...In the poems of The Unsaid Passing, B.W. Powe goes where he has not gone in any of his previous work... and written luminous, numinous pieces of mystical and humanistic sensibility." (Pages 119-121)

His work has been profiled on CBC-TV, TVO, CITY-TV, Bravo-TV, ACCESS and CTV.

His novel, Outage, was listed as one of the best ten novels of the year by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star, in 1995/96. It was also an editor's choice novel in the Globe & Mail in 1995. His book, A Tremendous Canada of Light was selected as a notable book of the year by the Globe and Mail in 1993. His book of poems, The Unsaid Passing, was shortlisted for The ReLit Prize in 2006.

Towards a Canada of Light (2006; the third revision of the Canada of Light theme) and Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose (2007) were conceived as companion pieces, part of his contemplation of the visionary possibilities of Canada and its cultural legacy. In Charles Forans's October 2007 review of Mystic Trudeau in The Walrus, he said of the book: " likely makes of its subject only what Trudeau privately made of himself. Powe knew him in his final years and kept records of their conversations. Expanding on Trudeau's pithy remarks, Powe offers a reading of his character and legacy that is as challenging as many of Trudeau's own public assertions. The book is determined to credit Canada with a mystical tradition and to deliberate in that tradition's arguments, employing language that is poetic, emphatic... Wait for the book's kicker: a call for the establishment of a republic in a twenty-first Canada that has...pirouetted away from 'the last vestiges of colonialism and empire.'"

His writings have been translated into French by Derrick de Kerckhove and Michelle Tisseyre. His writings have also been translated into Czech. He has been the program director or co-director for three significant events at York University in Toronto: Marshall McLuhan: What if He Was Right? (1997), The Trudeau Era (1998) and Living Literacies (2002).

He is currently at work founding the McLuhan Initiative for the Study of Literacies at York University, to be housed at Founders College.

He read from this work at The Northrop Frye International Festival in Moncton in April 2011, and in Barcelona, Spain, at the McLuhan 100 conference, in May 2011. He spoke on Vico, Bruno, Joyce and McLuhan in Naples in June 2011. In the autumn of 2012 he will be scholar/writer in residence at IN3, the University of Catalonya in Barcelona. He spoke at the University of Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, in October 2012.

He has four works in progress--new poems, a collection of essays,and a gathering of fragments and aphorisms and parables and thoughts.