What’s It All For? Poetry, Partnership, and Parenthood on Bowen Island

An Interview with Poets Daniel Cowper and Emily Osborne, and Reviews of Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) and Osborne’s Safety Razor (Gordon Hill Press, 2023)

by Bill Neumire

Almost to the point of absurdity, What’s it all for? is the central question of our lives; it echoes deep in all other questions, catches us in the car as we realize we’ve been working too much and forgetting what we’re working for, whispers to us as we make our art.

A Conversation with Jason Camlot

Jason Camlot is a Montreal-based poet and an English professor at Concordia University. Over the course of his formidable career, he’s published four poetry collections and several academic texts. Camlot’s scholarly research ranges from Victorian literary style to contemporary sound poetry. He runs SpokenWeb, a collaborative research project interrogating literary practices from an interdisciplinary perspective, and has recently published two new books, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings, and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. We spoke with Camlot about the intersection of research and creation, the meaning of the archive, and his many ongoing projects.

FEATURED REVIEW The Waste Land Project reviewed by George Elliott Clarke

T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetic suite, The Waste Land, of 1922, was born of the Götterdämmerung that was The Great War.  Its voices (personas) recount the loss of faith, the rubble-proven absurdity of European (colonial) ‘superiority,’  and the brazen (sexual) amorality afflicting its civilzation, i.e., the displacement of Jesus by jazz, of classicism by capitalism, and of law-and-order by the orgasm.