Poetry Workshop welcomes American writer

Poet Victor Infante of Worcester, Massachusetts willl be the guest reader at the Cobourg Poetry Workshop's 3rd Thursday Readings on Sept. 16.

A writer, journalist and editor covering such diverse subjects as politics, business and pop culture, Infante has read his work across the United States and the United Kingdom. Cobourg will be his first reading in Canada.


"I always wanted to be a writer, always delighted in language and stories, and then I won a poetry competition in second grade. Well, it was half-plagiarized from The Star Wars Christmas Album, but there you are," he says. "Later, as a teenager, I began reading a hodgepodge of poets, from Shelly to Eliot -- whatever looked interesting on the bookstore shelf -- and I found myself infatuated."

How would he describe his work?

"I'm very much an image-driven writer," he says. "I'm looking to capture the essence of an emotional reaction; I want the reader or listener to feel something, and I keep looking for new ways to do that."

One aspect of poetry that hasn't reached Cobourg yet is Slam Poetry -- a reading where poets perform their work in front of an audience and judges score them from zero to 10, Olympic style.

"It's a great deal of fun," Infante says, "but it's not novel anymore. But at the core of all this silliness is a steadfast belief that poetry can be read aloud or performed in a way that is engaging and interesting for an audience."

So what is "poetry" in 2010? "I'd hesitate to say it's any one

thing," Infante says. "We live in an age of fusion. English is an adaptive language. It learns from other languages or cultures it encounters, and changes to fit its needs. English-language poetry never stays stagnant as an art form for terribly long."

Infante will be reading from his latest book, City of Insomnia.

"Will I be reading any new work? When you're reading in new place, the poems are new everyone anyway," he says. "I'll have some written since City was published, including one paying homage to Tom Stoppard. It'll be a mixed bag."