Margaret Christakos
Biography
Margaret Christakos lives in Toronto. Her poetry collections are Sooner (Coach House, 2005), Excessive Love Prostheses (Coach House, 2002), which won the ReLit Award, Wipe Under a Love (Mansfield, 2000), The Moment Coming (ECW Press, 1998), Other Words for Grace (Mercury, 1994) and Not Egypt (Coach House, 1989). Her novel Charisma (Pedlar Press, 2000) was shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Award. In 2004–2005 she held a Canada Council writer's residency at the University of Windsor. A new chapbook, Adult Video, has been published by Nomados Editions. In her recent collection, Sooner, a wide range of short poetic fragments and longer, narrative poems negotiate the sonars of expectation, desire, arousal, sequentiality, and perception.
Poet's Note
Through the writing of my last two collections of poetry, Excessive Love Prostheses and Sooner, I became enamoured of using recombination and numerical constraints to build poems as narrative structures in which multiple intersecting storylines reside, much as they do in bustling urban, techno-mediated culture. The outcome comprises poems that manipulate and represent time, velocity, and ambient domesticity in ways I find interesting. I often insert surrogate narrative perspectives, swapping moments of confession and gender drag. I am a mom raising three kids, so some people don't expect this kind of representation play in my poetry. Using a variety of formal strategies I liken to sculptural collage techniques, I work with notions of extreme voice, interiority and hysteria, alongside my inquiry into sexual subjectivities. I strive for a narrativity in this work, which feels clearly inhabited by human and humane presences moreso than specific individualized personalities. It is not autobiography but invested in bringing into play fiction’s conceit of the self. Polyvocality is a value I’m working with and for. The aroused body and intellect are conditions of this work’s composition and hopefully of their performance and reception. As well, my aesthetic sensibility for the overembroidered, the excessive, the thicknesses of the senses engaged simultaneously (all very unfashionable in Canadian poetry, eh) stirs my writing of these labrynthine pieces.
Sample Poems
The Hoity Toity Supplements (pdf)
External Links
Emily Carr Institute video reading (mov)
Test Recording
26 April 2006
Margaret Christakos (39:55, 36.5 MB, info.)
Brian Joseph Davis (15:19, 14.7 MB, info.)
Question and answer session (46:50, 45 MB, info.)
We acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the League of Canadian Poets for Margaret Christakos's appearance.