I cringe when I recall an incident so many years ago in New Orleans, reading poetry for quarters on Bourbon Street.  I fancied myself a wandering bard, a poetic luminary, a traveler without the confines of society’s dictates of what home should mean. In reality, I was perhaps just a delusional street kid at worst and hippie at best, but it stung nonetheless when an irate passerby, with more important margarita and daiquiri matters to attend to, hissed at me that I should get a job. It was a significant chance for me to defend poetry’s importance in illuminating diverse perspectives of humanity, but I flubbed it by sputtering out something about poetry being work. “That’s not work,” the man yelled. “It’s frivolous!”

And work it ain’t: few poets have pocketed more than a few ten-spots if they’re lucky, even those with books. You may labour over it, you may polish and edit and muse. But you don’t do it for bread. I likely made more money selling readings for spare change than I’ve made before or since from my scribbling in a rather lengthy poetry publishing career. But that’s beside the point for most of us: we write because we have to. We write other things for money, or sweep floors or serve coffee or prescribe pills or fix engines. Even Shakespeare knew the burn of the unpaid art- he made his living in the theatre, and thankfully so, but though his sonnets linger centuries later in classrooms and hearts around the world, he wasn’t paid for those.

But frivolous? Yes, I suppose the man was right. It isn’t food and water, and after my pathetic attempts to fund my cross-continent travels reading poetry, I discovered you could do a lot better by scrawling Spare Change for Booze on a cardboard box. For the masses, alcohol is more necessary to daily life than poetry is.  Still, in the beginning of English literature was poetry, and in the end it will remain. From Homer to the Bible to the ubiquitous poetry slams, poetry will never die. There’s something about how bare it lays the human heart. There’s something almost religious in starving for your art. Man cannot live by bread or booze alone.

Perhaps you are a proud supporter of Canadian poets and want to expand your library and put a little sugar in the bowl. Perhaps you know what it means to poets just to be read, even if you can’t fork out a twenty for every new release. If you want to sort the flotsam from the jetsam, there’s a marvelous web site to help you out. That site is www.poetryreviews.ca. The brainchild of Alberta poet Eric Barstad, the site is dedicated to reviewing poetry collections by Canadian authors only, from a variety of presses. Barstad also runs Shadow Box Creative Media, a graphics company that supports non-profits and the arts, and so, for once, we have a lit site that is intuitive- a joy to navigate.

With a whole roster of reviewers who are published poets and editors, www.poetryreviews.ca avoids having a limited voice. Barstad doesn’t want posted reviews to read as hate mail, but is not afraid of supported criticisms, or of praise with the high beams on.  Reviews are thorough, ranging from 600-1500 words. Stephen Morrissey tackles Leonard Cohen’s The Book of Longing, and hipster Canuck literati will rejoice at the proliferation of rob mclennan’s reviews.  Readers will be happy to stumble across the thoughtful reflections of Helen Zisimatos, editor of the gorgeous Vallum, where every poet drools to appear.  Every single review is a quality piece of writing that adds to our understanding of Canadian poets and poetry.

The site itself is so well crafted that the search feature actually works, so you can type in your favourite reviewer or poet and see what comes up. I was thrilled to find a review of George Murray’s A Rush to Here. You can also search by publisher or by date of posting.

One last detail that merits mention is the comments feature, letting readers share their own view of the poetry or of the reviewer’s opinion.

www.poetryreviews.ca provides an invaluable service to Canadian literature by giving us an intelligent and thought-provoking forum. With diverse opinions by a multitude of different literary professionals, and a chance for the public to have their say, we can be guided to explore new or familiar terrain in the Canadian poet’s landscape. It may be trendy to jump a particular bandwagon in verse world, or to trample on certain styles, but poetry is subjective and everyone has different taste. This site helps you find yours, and maybe sample something different. Poetry might be “frivolous,” to the miserable bloke who didn’t break my spirit 15 years ago, but to me it follows caraway rye and gin on the necessity list I keep on my fridge.  For we must also feed the soul, my friend, and that is what I should have said to you.

Lorette C. Luzajic is a Toronto writer and poet. Her poetry has appeared in Quarry, White Wall Review, Caffeine, The Fiddlehead, Geez Magazine, Grain, Erbacce, and many anthologies. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, of Handymaiden Editions, available through Indigo or Amazon online. She is also the editor of Idea Factory: an Exquisite Quarterly at www.ideafactorymagazine.net. Contact her through www.thegirlcanwrite.net.