CoCoPoPro: Questions in Bed with Stewart Cole

Named one of Salty Ink’s Dozen Best Books of Canadian Poetry from 2012, today’s second featured poem is from Stewart Cole’s debut poetry collection, Questions in Bed (Goose Lane Editions, 2012). David O’Meara says “… Curious and sensual, Questions in Bed is a book rich with memorable phrases and new ways of seeing.” Definitely worth a read!

Q&A with Stewart Cole

What are you reading right now?  
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). I want my next book to be a political book, but I’m not sure what I mean by that yet, so I’m returning to classic literary works that deal explicitly with politics to see what I can glean. 

Why should people read poetry? 
Because language is what we think and talk and wish with, and poetry is language in its most potent form. By extending language’s possibilities, poetry opens new horizons to thought, and hopefully, eventually, habitation.  

What’s one poem everyone should read?  
Today? W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone.” Then let’s all get together and explain it to each other. 

What’s your guilty pleasure (when it comes to reading)? 
The internet’s many little soapboxes: comments threads, online forums, twitter feeds. Though I wouldn’t quite call it “pleasure”; it’s more like a form of fatality-free rubbernecking, voyeurism through a wince.

*****

Stewart Cole is the author of the debut collection Questions in Bed, released in 2012 by Ice House, the new poetry imprint of Goose Lane Editions. His work has appeared in a variety of publications across Canada, and his chapbook Sirens was published by Cactus Press in 2011. Stewart reviews Canadian poetry on his blog The Urge. He lives in London, Ontario.

Open Book Ontario featured Stewart in their Poets in Profile series.

_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog