CoCoPoPro: Steve Luxton Dissolves the Barrier Between Man and Nature

Yesterday may have been Earth Day but today we’re celebrating the environment with eco-poetry by Steve Luxton from his newest collection, In the Vision of Birds: New and Selected Poems  (DC Books, 2012). Exploring the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Luxton invites us to walk through forests, fields, and streams with him as he attempts to dissolve the barrier between man and Nature.

Q&A with Steve Luxton

What are you reading right now?  
I am reading Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Robert K. Massie. What epic drama!  

If you wrote a memoir what would it be called?
MEM-NOIR  

Where is the oddest place in which you have ever written (or been inspired to write) a poem? 
In a Kentucky Fried Chicken bathroom (latrine?) in Xian, China.             

Why should people read poetry?  
Because, like Sex, Enchantment is good for you. 

Who are your favourite poets? 
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Robert Hayden, James Wright, Charlotte Mew, Ted Hughes, Robert Allen, Don Mckay, etc., etc. 

What’s one poem everyone should read? 
Ecclesiastes. 

What’s your must-read literary magazine or website? 
I’m eclectic and omnivorous as a raccoon.  

What’s your guilty pleasure (when it comes to reading)? 
Eighteenth and nineteenth century journals by nobodies. i.e. especially notoriously unreliable "travellers’ tales". 

***** 
 

Steve Luxton has made a living by teaching literature and creative writing in Montreal, Quebec. An original editor of both Matrix and The Moosehead Review, his first complete book of poems the hills that pass by was published in 1987, his second Iridium in 1993, and his third Luna Moth and Other Poems in 2004. He lives with his wife, Angela Leuck, in a two hundred-year-old farmhouse south-east of that city.

To learn more, visit Poetry Quebec to read an interview with Steve Luxton.

_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog