Occupation writer / artist Name Joe Rosenblatt | Citizenship Canadian Role Poet | |
Alma mater Central Technical School Genre poetry, fiction, drawing Notable works Bumblebee Dithyramb,Top Soil, Poetry Hotel Awards Governor General's Award for English-language poetry or drama Books The sleeping lady, Dark Fish and Other Infernos, Snake City: A Novel, A Tentacled Mother, Beds & consenting dreamers | ||
Poetry and Socialist Politics
Joseph Rosenblatt (born December 26, 1933) is a Canadian poet who lives in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia. He has won Canada's Governor-General's Award and British Columbia's B.C. Book Prize for poetry. He is also a talented artist, whose "line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets’ books of poetry."
Contents
Life and writing
Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Rosenblatt grew up in the city's Kensington Market area and attended Lansdowne Public School. Later he went to Central Technical School, but dropped out and worked in a variety of blue-collar jobs. In 1956 he became a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
A Joe Rosenblatt ran in the Toronto municipal election, 1958, for city council in Ward 1 (Riverdale), receiving 521 votes.
He began seriously writing poetry in the early 1960s. "He became interested in writing through his association with the worker poet Milton Acorn in the early sixties and the metaphysical poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen." He "got his start with the help of other poets: Milton Acorn, Al Purdy and Earle Birney."
His first book, The L.S.D. Leacock, was published in 1966. In the same year he received a Canada Council grant that allowed him to quit his railway job and write full-time.
Since then, in his 40-year career, "Rosenblatt has written more than 20 books of poetry, several autobiographical works and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry.... He has traveled widely giving readings of his poems in Europe, Canada and the United States."
Books in Canada wrote of him in 1988 that, "street smart, water wise, heaven bent, Joe Rosenblatt is a talented man, fisher of gods, and a school in himself. He makes you feel things that are hard to touch: bee fur, tadpoles, and the human heart."
Rosenblatt sums up his philosophy of writing in this way:
I write to escape hyper reality – genocide of man, elephants and fish – the death of the ozone layer, the industrial degredation [sic] of the earth – My affordable opiate is my Muse. It allows me to float into a dream state and create an escapist literature. Let the prose-fanciers, the dog people as opposed to poetic feline fancier – indulge in grim reality. The very thought of reality gives me hives.Recognition
A 1976 book of selected poems, Top Soil, won Rosenblatt the Governor General's Award in 1976.
A decade later, another book of selected poems, Poetry Hotel, won him the B.C. Book Prize for Poetry (now the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) in 1986.
"Rosenblatt has been writer in residence at several Canadian universities, as well as the University of Rome and the University of Bologna." "Several bilingual volumes of his poetry have been published in Italian with translations by Prof. Alfredo Rizzardi of the University of Bologna, and Ada Donati of Rome" (one being a book of his sea sonnets, A Tentacled Mother). "His poems have also been ... translated into French, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish."
Poetry
Fiction
Except where noted, bibliographic information courtesy University of Toronto.