Poets’ Pastime Paradise
by Sarah Freel

[Scene: Midnight at a cemetery.]
REIKO, a poetess: Why are we treading on the ground of the ancestors?
PARA-RIDDLE, an American rapper: We have come to the Dead Poets’ Graveyard to dig up a few old souls.
[They dig. A hand reaches up from the dirt and grabs Para-Riddle’s shovel.]
EZRA POUND: What on earth do you think you are doing?
PARA-RIDDLE: Un–earthing.
[Reiko uncovers another body.]
W.B. YEATS: What lunar phase am I in?
[Para-Riddle uses the shovel to pry open the heavy brass door of a crypt. He finds a man curled in the corner.]
T. S. ELIOT: Are you an angel? Have you come to take me to heaven?
PARA-RIDDLE: You’re on Planet Earth. It’s 2025.
ELIOT: No, not the future! It must be even worse than the present I endured. We have lost our way. How I wish we could return to the past. How I long for paradise! I was much obsessed with death. The world was full of sin and seediness. I longed for the redemption of heaven. I would have taken damnation over the acedia of modern life. I have scratched and scratched but cannot escape the limbo of this stone vault.
PARA-RIDDLE: We have a bone to pick with you.
POUND: There is no shortage of bones here.
REIKO: We have come to discuss poetry and exclusion.
ELIOT: I doubt we can help you. Things of time can never be resolved with things outside time.
YEATS: If you wish to speak with us, you will have to pass the test. You must prove you know something of tradition and form. Give us a Villanelle.
POUND: In tetrameter.
[Para-Riddle pulls out his iPhone and looks it up.]
Para-Riddle’s Villanelle
Art is the Ark of cultural transmission.
The Captain chooses what to frame
In his obsession with poetic expression.
A portrait projects a biased conception.
Art can twist and bend and maim.
The Ark is a canon of cultural transmission.
Ethnic abstraction is a traumatic condition,
Not apolitical, neutral or tame,
And so the obsession with poetic expression.
Pound’s invention of stichic organization
Made wordplay seem an open game,
But unicorns are lost in cultural transmission.
Ezra dabbled in masks and depiction.
Touted troubadours he brought to fame,
To sate his obsession with poetic expression.
‘Others’ erased through the art of omission,
Faces given no stanza or name.
Art is the Ark of cultural transmission
And so the obsession with poetic expression.
POUND: I did not only tout troubadours — I wrote of Cathay! I wrote of the Ancients. No one poet can write about every last person who ever lived. How could I write about the Civil Rights Movement that had not yet happened?
PARA-RIDDLE: You could have written about the American slave. You wrote about things that would only be comprehensible to other elite intellectuals.
REIKO: And you did not write kindly about women, though you might pin that on the persona you created, Cino. You forced people to consider Chinese culture beyond Yellow Perilism, but you did not accurately translate Chinese-ness. Your vers was so libre, you created something separate and apart from the original. The Western tradition of misrepresenting other cultures was upheld.
POUND: Look at what happened in visual art, when the post-modernists broke every rule, and refused realism, beauty, colour, perspective and all the tenets of art learned since the Renaissance. I did not want to throw everything away. I wanted to break out of iambic pentameter but not murder the sonnet altogether. I wanted to translate Chinese characters, not in a literal way, but in a poetic, visual way – I wanted to translate the image, not the static definitions of words. Everything is interpretation. Translation demands alteration, some change in fidelity. The only way I could please your philogistic standards would be to reprint the original. I draw from a grand tradition. I make no apology for inhabiting an exclusive world. I did not set out to right social injustices. I am not interested in educating readers. My poems stimulated an appreciation of your culture.
REIKO: China is not my country. I am from Japan. Some of your interpretations are indeed beautiful and their influence has been felt by poets from Japan and China and other countries, but you did not honour Confucian tradition. You honoured the grand Western tradition of appropriation. If I wrote a stichic sonnet, to honour tradition and make it new, I would not say what you had to say.
POUND: What would you say?
YEATS: And why are you speaking at all? You have not passed the test. Give us the sonnet.
REIKO: I would choose my own symbols from my own culture and reject descriptions assigned to me. Consider some of the labels that get applied to cultures, labels that homogenize diverse societies and individuals into one amorphous mass, such as ‘Asian.’ Tags often reference the position of the one assigning the labels, such as ‘Orient,’ which is Latin for ‘to rise,’ because ‘Asians’ were from ‘over there’ where the sun rises, not ‘here’ where the universe pivots.

Reiko’s Sonnet
My name is Reiko, not Rosa.
I am not made of cherry blossoms and silk.
I do not subsist on rice and gyoza.
My skin is not porcelain milk.
I am not Asian.
My birth did not cover a continent.
I am not a compass equation.
I am not from the Orient.
I am not from the exotic, mysterious East,
Or the land of the rising sun.
Every evening the light on my roof is decreased
For no metaphysical reason.
I am not an emotionless mask, a nerveless thief.
I am a wild Hokusai ocean, a haiku that speaks of grief.
POUND: There is an art to writing in iambic pentameter though, and you must know how to practice this art before you break its rules. Perhaps you are ignorant of form. You must be well-versed in tradition before you can add anything of value to it.
REIKO: Well-versed… a poor pun. I will give you a sestina, in iambic pentameter, five feet per line. I believe the sestina is traditionally used to express a complaint. I will lament about an ‘oft’ used subject in poetry: love.
Reiko’s Sestina
I lie on the grass and green of a willow’s shadow.
The sun paints my legs with pearls of light.
Leopard spot flares are pools of water
That stream down my curves in rivulet whispers.
My ears tingle with sultry sounds of love.
I think of the day I received a velvet rose.
I did not love the man who held the rose.
He stood awkward in my Lover’s shadow,
Offering the flora but not the fauna of love,
He bathed me in a sweet but fireless light.
In my heart, conscience-ridden whispers
Could not effervesce flat water.
My Lover burned me like scotch without water.
His eyes shone and my fool heart rose.
He did not speak but I heard crimson whispers.
We kissed under the skirt of willow’s shadow
Until the sky was full of fuchsia light,
The blades of grass beneath us tight with love.
Dopamine attraction, not limbic love,
The musk-scented oil turned to water.
My heart filled with thick black light.
Cheeks flushed with flooded capillaries of rose.
Now I wrap in rough blankets of shadow
A once-touched body that still whispers.
The solar plexus sense I had muffled, whispers
Of the illusion and delusion of feather down love.
My heart burns through its ash shadow
And sizzles the perfumed pericardial water
Laced with pink, lilac, lavender and rose,
Now infused with a wise and willowy light.
My eyes open and beam a wave of light
That bounces back to me in particle whispers.
I think of the magnolia boy who gave me a rose
In a cut crystal vase filled with love,
And the mirage lust that spilled pure water.
I think of his eyes filled with glittering shadow.
In the willow leaves, shadow plays with light
And water pours down on me in honey whispers.
I long for the hybrid love of fire and the rose.

YEATS: Isn’t Reiko beautiful? [He sighs.]
ELIOT: Women are all promise with no substance, a flash of pleasure followed by shame. It is better to stay detached and escape from emotion.
BERTRAN DE BORN: Bah!
PARA-RIDDLE: Where did he come from?
POUND: His name is Bertran de Born. He haunts me.
PARA-RIDDLE: The girl’s got form, Ezra. If you are a master of form, can you learn a new one? Can you rap? Can you rock the house? Not just a house in Paris full of elite poets, but a club in New York? Poetry and music go together and your poems don’t exactly sing like Yeats.
POUND: Yeats yodels his poems. I spit mine out. [Pound raps.]

Pound’s Rap
Neither would I warble of Titans, nor of Ossa
I sing of Cathay because o’ Fenollosa
I’m a virtuoso, not a virtuosa
Breaking heavy rhyme, giving you a dose o’
Truth in poems, not just prose, a
Rose by any other name… still a Rosa.
My rhymes are gloried and storied,
Dug from rock, my words are quarried.
They call me an Orientalist, into Orientalism;
In the Cantos, a metaphysicist, into metaphysicism.
You’re a flimsy shelled Phantastikon
That may or may not contain sun.
Use your whole bag of tricks,
But this battle, I already won.
PARA-RIDDLE: Not bad, not bad. I don’t think you’ll be asked to open for Jay-Z anytime soon.
POUND: Not a burning dream of mine. If one can rhyme willow and overfilled and zanze with swanzig, then I can make the opprobrious rhyme of Ossa and Fenollosa. Many rules can be broken and still produce unquestionable poetry, although I think you need to be familiar with the tradition of poetry to add anything of real value to it. But as I said before, I have no interest in rocking a mob. I prefer a meeting of the minds with a select few, but anyone can read my poetry, if they are informed enough to understand it. I don’t stand in their way.
REIKO: But you do not stay in your ivory tower. You invade other times and cultures and loot them.
POUND: I bring them back to life! I resurrected Bertran de Born and gave his shadowy ghost crimson bloodlust and the foul breath of life! History makes everyone seem grey and dry. Perhaps I did not accurately champion the Chinese culture, but I made something beautiful and that was my aim. I made it new. I brought something into being. I am not a scribe, a cleric, a translator. I am a poet!
DE BORN: Bah! Womanish rot. Damn it all! Give me a sword and I’ll lop all your heads off!
POUND: If you give me a hand, I think we might stuff Bertran back into his grave now. [Bertran de Born eyes them all malevolently and they back away.]
ELIOT: You are not a poet Para-Riddle. Poets are educated.
PARA-RIDDLE: Education does not require ivy. There is an education in the streets. Real life is an educator.
ELIOT: I am speaking of craft. With my poetry, I was creating what it feels like to be in the world, through crafted language. You have not been trained in the art of poetry.
PARA-RIDDLE: That’s what rap is about! You may not be from the world we live in, but we are using language in a stylized way to describe our experience of life. Maybe our experience is raw but art can include different aesthetics. It doesn’t have to be pretty to be art. I think James Joyce would appreciate the spirit of rap – we are trying to tell it like it is. The art of poetry is not something that can be monopolized. The more I play with language, the more I learn the art of words. Is rap poetry? Is it art? You exclude it because I have not had conventional training, but the art of poetry may be learned through unconventional means, through practice. There are dub-poets who perform spoken-word poetry that borders on rap. Rappers are following your prescription: in the face of a complex civilization, they are dislocating language to force it to express their meaning. We are trying to find the verbal equivalent to convey our state of mind. I read about Vorticism, Pound. You admit that many mediums, including music and visual art, can convey emotion. Rap is a medium.
YEATS: Pound, Eliot and I have been published. Dub-poets send their ethereal, improvisational words into thin air.
PARA-RIDDLE: You have a limited definition of art. You set conditions. A poet must be educated and published? The bars you set are exclusionary and I reject them. There was oral poetry before there was written poetry. Rappers meet half your criteria – if they record, their words are copyrighted and they collect royalties on each sale. Rap lyrics were published by ego trip in his Book of Rap Lists. He called rap a postmodern continuum of oral and musical traditions, African American folk songs and spirituals. But rap does not have to be copyrighted or published to be art. Theatre and dance are live, ethereal spectacles and they qualify as art. How many people appreciate poetry through the eye? Poetry is for the ear, the heart, the mind. Typography and the printed word can be appreciated – they have an aesthetic of their own – but poetry is more than lines on a page. It is verbal music. Poetry is read aloud for a reason – it has a voice, a human voice. Poetry has meter and rap has rhythm. There are distinctions between ‘song’ and ‘poem’ but they both have lilt. As far as ethereality goes, graffiti is put on a wall that can be painted over – it is temporal and was considered illegal defacement of property until someone tagged a canvas. Then graffiti artists had shows in galleries and their pieces sold for serious money. But art isn’t only about the surface you apply it to – it’s also about the act itself, the process.
POUND: Poetry is the dance of the intellect. It has meaning beyond simple wordplay. It is not a pastime.
ELIOT: Yes, the more intelligence a writer has, the better the poetry.
PARA-RIDDLE: Publishing something allows it to be distributed. It allows it to be bought and sold. If the content has been accepted and vetted by a respected and capable editor, the piece may have more credibility. But the point is that poetry does not need to be written down to be intelligent, meaningful or full of political force. I read a line from Oral and Written Poetry in African Literature Today, “…poetry has been and still is a fighting weapon. The poets too often speak from prison.” In a way, that is what rappers do – they speak from the ghetto prison. Pound, I would think you’d have an appreciation of how imprisonment can inspire a person to sing poetry.
POUND: While I appreciate the allusive quality of that last remark, I would hardly compare the ghetto – a place you can leave – to a cage and an asylum. But I have said what I have to say about that in The Cantos. Para-Riddle, you challenged me to a rap. Reiko, you gave me a sestina. I challenge us all to a haiku. But there is one condition: you must make it your own.
Reiko’s Haiku
starless rain vapour
blue clouds, orange horizon
hold hands with the wheat
Para-Riddle’s Haiku
Message and Delight
the politics in the drums
manacled man snaps
Pound’s Haiku
masquerade scattered
dunes turned to grains in the wind
petals peel and fall
Yeats’ Haiku
mystical Emerald
gyres o’ertaking the lover
reign of rosy moon
Eliot’s Haiku
a staircase turning
disconnection dissection
caught in a cat’s teeth
de Born’s Haiku
head severed from neck
a river of crimson blood
damn the fire dragon
POUND: I did not understand your haiku Para-Riddle.
PARA-RIDDLE: I’m referring to The Message and Rapper’s Delight, two of the cornerstones of rap. You said that a person must be familiar with the tradition of poetry to add anything of value to it. But who gets to define tradition? What is included in the canon? Eliot, Yeats and you? For a rapper to be included in the pantheon, they would have to study all the ‘immortal poems’ and then refer to them. Okay, the canon might include your Cathay poems, but you’re an English-speaking American, Ezra. Can you really speak of Chinese identity with any authority? Your rap referred to your own poetry and Shakespeare, but rap created its own tradition. It’s a language that expresses a sense of exclusion. You said you ‘made it new’ but your ‘it’ is not my ‘it.’ My haiku also refers to George Lipsitz. Rap is a fusion of Africa, the West Indies, and the east and west coasts of America. Lipsitz thinks politics is embedded in the drums and in the coded words of reggae and rap. Actually, we are elitist too because we only intend to be understood by a certain audience. We make poetry. We just don’t relate to Grecian urns. What does your canon have to do with my reality? We rhyme. Rap has meter. It has wordplay and pushes language forward.
ELIOT: You must consider Grecian urns. You must consider everything that has come before. It takes effort. Art has a simultaneous existence – the timeless and temporal together. When a new work of art is created, it alters the works of art that preceded it. Relations, proportions and values are readjusted. Two things are measured by each other.
YEATS: I used the myths of Ireland early in my career. Then I developed my own system. Then I cleared my mind and was truly free to write poetry. Rap might be considered its own system. It has a mythology of its own, a vernacular. Poetry was written about Ireland rebelling against the heavy hand of England, and rap is a language born out of oppression. I’m not fond of rap music, and the lyrics are a bit rough, but I would not count it out as poetry. But what Pound and Eliot are trying to tell you Para-Riddle, and I agree with them, is that you might improve your rhymes if you became familiar with all the forms that have been thus far developed. If for no other reason than saving yourself the trouble of discovering what has already been discovered. You did not invent alliteration. There is much to be gained from reading Shakespeare. You exclude yourself from some fine examples of mastery. What audacity to think you will equal the great masters fresh out of the gate.
PARA-RIDDLE: You assume I haven’t read Shakespeare. But I concede that not all rappers have an immediate interest in it. Actually, George Lipsitz made another interesting point about ‘turning the guns around.’ He suggested that there is no way for a weak party to fight a superpower head on. Too much firepower – the little guy just gets wiped out. So, he said the most potent weapon would be subversion – to take the technology of the superpower and use it against them. So, if you are showered in consumer advertising, become an adbuster. Reiko answered you with a sestina, so you can’t charge her with ignorance of form. I will turn another gun around by saying that if I need to read Shakespeare as part of my poetry education, you need to listen to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
POUND: Rappers just rattle off their rhymes. Poetry requires the application of technique.
PARA-RIDDLE: A rapper can spend hours on his rhymes and it is part of the culture to try them out in front of other rappers before you bring them to the club. Rappers battle each other and get shot down. There is nothing easy or instant about rap. It has to resonate with the audience. Boasting and bragging has to be delivered in style. Braggadocio is a tradition.
POUND: My early poems were self-indulgent. I cut them when I edited Personae. For rap to reach the level of art, it has to talk about more than me-me-me.
ELIOT: Yes! Poetry should be depersonalized. The poet must erase himself. He must be a conduit, a filament of platinum that acts as a catalyst but is untouched. Poetry is not about what happened to you. The poet strikes a balance between contrasted emotions, tones and floating feelings to create an ‘art emotion’, a catharsis for the reader. The point is to escape emotion and personality. Anyone who knows the painful weight of emotions wishes to escape them. I am not interested in what you have to say. If you are to be a poet, you must continually surrender yourself. It is about the effect of the whole, not the individual rapper.
YEATS: For a poem to have any staying power, it must touch on the universal.
PARA-RIDDLE: The Message is all about struggling with a lack of options – an experience so many people related to that a music form exploded into being. Rap is about a people, not just the individual. It’s about human experience. Yeats, sometimes you write in a grand voice about airy themes, but you also write about simple, immediate things. It’s not all grand themes. You show different sides of yourself. Rap manages to provide the listener with cathartic anger and avoids sentiment. Hip Hop is a relatively new form – maybe it will expand to cover more subjects.
ELIOT: I agree that rap is not romantic. Shelley and Keats are turning in their graves under my feet as we speak. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited. You must turn your interests into poetry.
POUND: If rap does not expand, it will fall away. Poetry must build upon a foundation, but also continually reinvent itself to persist. I had to strip away mask after mask to build a body of work.
DE BORN: I have something to say. My dear Pound, I have tried to live up to your representation of me — how did you put it? — as a bloodlusty, foul-breathed type. To be frank, Reiko and Para-Riddle have convinced me to eschew my mask. You placed it there, Pound, but it is not really me. There were only so many options open to me as a Baron. My mother wanted me to wear armour – she liked the way it glinted in the sunshine. My father pushed me. It was all about land, endless conquering of land and more land with him. “What is a man without serfs?” he would say. I was good at hacking and slaying, but in my heart, I just wanted to be a poet. Smiting is all very nice, but I prefer to have a pen in my hand.

POUND: But you were so much more interesting the way I wrote you. Sestina Altaforte would suffer with the truth. ‘Damn it all! My feather quill runs dry/My dear fellow. Let’s to the library!’ Art should be dramatic – it should elevate.
YEATS: I elevated Maud Gonne and look what happened to me. I ended up taking dictation for a woman pretending to commune with the spirits.
POUND: Para-Riddle and Reiko, you disturb my eternal rest to grouse at me about poetry. You elevate me! What difference does it make what I think?
REIKO: You were not simply a poet. You were also a critic. You, Eliot and Yeats wrote some of the rules of poetry. If you set yourself up as an authority, you must accept that authority will be challenged.
POUND: I have been endlessly challenged! I said three simple things: Direct treatment of the thing, to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. I had no idea Imagism would invoke such debate. I have been defending and clarifying ever since. Even Death does not protect me! Why don’t you just write poetry and develop your own ‘ism.’ In my day, everyone had an ‘ism.’ Start Rapper-ism or Hip-Hop-ism. Hokusai-wave-ism. Call it whatever you like but let me rest. If I am wrong, let me be wrong in peace. Do your own thing and have confidence in it. Do not let critics or readers or anyone sway you. Develop your own definitions. Get your own canon. If you set yourself up as excluded, you must accept exclusion. Reiko, you may have a point. I tackled a subject that may not have been mine to tackle. Perhaps, I should have stayed in America and written about wheat fields. I wrote about whatever interested me.
YEATS: I stuck to Ireland and had no less criticism. I wrote about Irish myths and they asked me for war poems. One cannot escape criticism. Maud said I was not political and rebellious enough for her taste. But if you are aware of the critical discourse and the tradition of poetry, at least you will be informed enough to join the discussion. Pound set himself up for naysayers.
POUND: Yeats! You cut me to the quick. You were my hero!
YEATS: Were, but you tired of me and went your own way. And we are both of us, no longer ‘quick.’ I mean that if you define terms, you will get someone to argue with you every time. They will say you did not include this, or you misunderstood that. An American throwing around words like melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia, and you had no idea you had painted a target on your back?
DE BORN: Bah! Oh, sorry. I forgot I was out of character.
POUND: I was trying to move poetry forward by providing simple hallmarks of good poetry. I wanted poetry to be visual, musical. It is not my fault if someone cannot speak Greek. Poets were constricted by meter. Whitman could never have yawped in a voice triumphant if he had to count feet.
YEATS: I wanted to replace Greek and Roman myths with Irish ones. You did not like Whitman.
POUND: I came to appreciate him. I had detested him long enough. I have had enough of this conversation. I am headed back to the grave. Come along, Bertran.
DE BORN: I’m weary of you, Pound. Do not rest easy. I may return to haunt you again. I am going to find a library. I hear they have thousands of books there and if you pour a little wine on a manuscript, the ink does not run.
YEATS: [turning to Reiko and Para-Riddle] You don’t mind if we leave you in this haunted place?
PARA-RIDDLE: I’ve been in scarier places than this.
REIKO: We are not here. We are not anywhere. We are not having this conversation. We are rattling off poems as though they came to us in a sudden flash of inspiration, but it takes time and effort to write poetry. Some of us are dead, the rest fictitious. The author puts words in our mouths.
Eliot’s Encoded Coda
I am not here
I am not
I matter not
It matters not
The matter is clear
The mind is a place
A mental place
A placement
Dreamscape, escape, a scape,
A scrap of woven wool,
A cable-knit psyche.
Time turns back, afraid to go on.
It is four.
It is three.
It is one.
Never two.
Petticoated cats smirk behind silk fans.
Petty-coated cats sneer and snarl.
Silken voices throw a sinister shadow.
Silk fans cast silhouette whispers.
The cats surmise.
The catty cats despise.
Never two.
We flesh out the gods,
Make them in our image,
Make them in our imagination.
Turn this way and that,
That way and this,
We turn the image of the gods until they take shape.
We are shaped by the gods,
Formed by the formless,
Faith in the faithless,
The gods do not believe in us.
We believe in them.
We do not believe in ourselves.
We live on a page.
We grow old on a stage of light and dust.
A parade of particle floats.
Hollow atomic motes.
Flesh scalped from bone,
Bone made of dusty motes
That float in a dry current of wounded error.
Infinitesimal weightless stones
Made of sand and grass and terror.
I am not here
I am not
I matter not
It matters not
The matter is clear
[Author’s Note]
Pound’s Rap is drawn from ideas in two of his poems in Personae, both written in 1917: Homage to Sextus Propertius and the first of the Three Cantos. Language pulled from Pounds’ poems has been italicized. Further inspiration regarding breaking the rules of poetry related to rhyming, was provided by Stephen G. Yao in Toward a Prehistory of Asian American Verse: Pound, Cathay, and the Poetics of Chineseness.
Other texts referenced:
The Metaphysical Poets,by T. S. Eliot
Tradition and the Individual Talent,by T. S. Eliot
Hamlet,by T. S. Eliot
A Retrospect, by Ezra Pound
How to Read, by Ezra Pound
Vorticism, by Ezra Pound
ego trip’s Book of Rap Lists, by ego trip
Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context, by Ruth Finnegan
Brutus, by Soyinka Jacinto. Eds, Eldred Durosimi Jones, Eustace Palmer, and Marjorie Jones
Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place, by George Lipsitz

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Sarah Freel‘s day jobs have included a repertory cinema, a newspaper, an internet company, cruise ships, the Vancouver Aquarium, the David Suzuki Foundation, Simon Fraser University, and the Architecture Foundation of British Columbia. Her pieces of paper include a BA in music and publishing, and an MA in literature and philosophy. She writes, sings, and plays for her own joy. She is an art-loving epicurean decadent Buddhist, but is open to suggestions. She is especially fond of sleep and vanilla bean ice cream, but never mixes the two.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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