Lenny Everson

As a teen I discovered I was a poet, which was rather unfortunate given the small place poetry has had in Canada in the last half of the twentieth century. I should have gone into writing novels and songs, but that realization came later; a poet I was, and a poet I have remained, all my life.

 

My younger years were squeezed between the hills of eastern Ontario and the waters of the Trent Valley. I was a solitary kid, but I found meaning, even contentment, in roaming the hills and building boats for the waters. Still do. No poem I've ever written or read has matched the feeling I get when I stand on a ridge and see in front of me a valley or lake that is new to me.

 

I gave up on poetry many times, but found my way back sooner or later. Eventually I founded Passion Among the Cacti Press and Poetry and Good Times Press, producing some fifty chapbooks for myself and other poets. That was good for a few years, but it passed, as all things must. Most of my poems go online now, free for the taking to anybody who can download them.

 

Although I've written long poems and deep poems, my favourites are still the shorter ones, the simpler ones, and, more often than not, the rhymed poems.

 

My major works are The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer, , The Tavern of Lost Souls, Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont in Purgatory, and, of course, the canoeing poems. My best long poem is the legendary Encounter in a Small, Old Cemetery. (Note: I caution my readers that I often change the names of my works and may put a poem into several different collections, perhaps altered slightly.)