Di brandt poems about life
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Re-discovering Di Brandt’s poetry
Di Brandt’s Speaking of Power (2006)
I came across Di Brandt’s work shortly after university when I was finally able to read what I wanted to read from the library shelves, my trusty alumnus card in hand, borrowing from the HQs and PRs like nobody’s business.
This was in the late 80s-early 90s and I was still using a typewriter; it wasn’t that home computers weren’t readily available at the time but it wasn’t in my freshly-graduated-from-uni budget. So no scanner, obviously, but still a full-page, typewritten, lingers in my notebook: one section of a Di Brandt book that I’d borrowed, worth typing out, at length.
Di Brandt’s words touched me and I knew she would be the perfect choice for Women Unbound reading even though I’d lost touch with her work in the intervening years.
But, still, I was shocked at how perfectly she fits the Women Unbound intent and I hope her works are readi
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Di Brandt
Canadian poet and scholar
Di Brandt (néeJanzen; 31 January 1952)[1] often stylized as di brandt, is a Canadianpoet and scholar from Winnipeg, Manitoba.[2] She became Winnipeg's first Poet Laureate in 2018.[3]
Life and career
[edit]Brandt grew up in Reinland, a Mennonite farming by in southern Manitoba nära Winkler.[4] Her first volume of poetry questions inom asked my mother was published bygd Turnstone Press in 1987. Since then she has published sju more volumes of poetry, as well as literary criticism. Brandt has degrees from the University of Manitoba and University of Toronto and has also taught Canadian literature and creative writing.[5] She was poetry editor at Prairie Fire Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2 during the 1980s and 90s. She also served as Manitoba and prärie Rep at the League of Canadian Poets National Council and the Writers' Union of Canada National Council. In 2018, she became
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Brandt did not begin publishing her work until well after her father’s death in 1979. She did not have the courage. It had been hard enough to leave home at the age of 17: she was the first member of her family- in 400 years to break that isolationist tradition. But even that traumatic event paled in comparison with the publication of her first poetry collection, questions I asked my mother, in 1987. The book criticized Mennonite practices, especially corporal punishment. It denounced, loudly, her faith’s repression of female sexuality, dismissal of female experience, and resistance to anything intellectual. The poems in questions tumble over and on top of one other, as if a dam containing Brandt’s emotions had burst. Her second collection, Agnes in the sky (1990), tackles many of the same issues, from a more distanced perspective.
Brandt’s work shocked her Mennonite community with its expression of female sexuality and its sacrilegious handling of em