B.W. Powe



Bruce William Powe (born March 23, 1955) is a Canadian, novelist, and essayist.

Life
Powe lived in Toronto from 1959 until 1996; he attended York University for English studies where in 1977 graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Powe received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1981; he studied there with Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. He received his Ph.D from York University in October 2009. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Literature at York in July 2010. His Ph.D is on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, their crossings in history, their agon and complementarity (their conflicts and harmonies), and the stirring alchemy of their thought. The thesis was also concerned with the role and position of these visionaries in Canada, and the role and position of guides and mentors.

Powe currently teaches in the Department of English at York University. He lectures on visionary literature, teaching writers from Hildegard von Bingen and Dante to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and conducts honour seminars on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Powe continues to teach first year introduction to literature courses.

In 1997 he moved to Stouffville, Ontario, where he still lives. His two children, Kate and Thomas (twins), enrolled at York University in 2010.

His father is Bruce Allen Powe, author of the novels, Killing Ground, The Aberhart Summer and The Ice Eaters. His uncle is Joe Schlesinger, senior correspondent for the CBC news.

Powe was most recently featured in The New York Times in an article reflecting on Marshall McLuhan on the centennial of his birth.

An article on Powe's work on McLuhan's centennial and of his most recent book, These Shadows Remain: A Fable, was featured in York University's YFile Daily Bulletin.

"The Spectral Ball of Theory: A Lyrical Essay", an essay originally intended for Powe's upcoming book, was featured in York University's community newspaper, Exalibur.

The website for Ottawa'a Writer's Festival recently published an article on Powe's contribution to the festival this year.

Works
Powe has written books of thoughts, poetry, essays, and fiction (long and short). He has also written nationally-seen columns for The Globe and Mail and "The Toronto Star". This is what the press has said over the years: He has been called "way cool" by the Globe and Mail, "one of our finest cultural commentators" by the Toronto Star, a poet who can write "hair-raising lines" that seem to come "fully formed from the cosmos" by The Globe and Mail and who takes "considerable, unfashionable risks" by The Malahat Review, "a visionary--a modern day Magellan" by The Montreal Gazette, "an intellectual terrorist" by Barbara Amiel in MacLean's, and "enigmatic...and necessary..." by The Edmonton Journal. Kenneth J. Harvey said Powe's "Heart beats against the current... [and in his work] at its ultimate core invents something original--and oftentimes breathtaking... To say brilliant would be an understatement..." (Ottawa Citizen) About Outage, the Calgary Herald said, "Powe has created something remarkable...a sort of video novel, a hybrid of genres and media that transcends the ordinary and offers a new vision in a enw way of a society dancing to electronically generated signals..." Pico Iyer said his writings represented "a soaring alchemical vision." R. Murray Schafer called Outage "a fully realized work of art." Canadian Literature said of his poetry that "[his] subtly textured themes...affirm the importance of the romantic voice in these troubled times." The Montreal Gazette, in 2007, said that his essay prose style is "like well-chosen brush-strokes on a canvas." At IdeaCity in 2001 Moses Znaimer called B.W. Powe's stances, public lectures and writings "a combination of poetry and rock'n'roll."

Elana Wolff, poet and critic, in her book Implicate Me: Short Essays on Reading Contemporary Poems (Guernica, 2010)calls Powe "a prescient writer on the cyber-age and codes and patterns.... there is actually no neat genre-division in Powe's writing.... His prose frequently reads like poetry.... The Unsaid Passing is ...[an] emotionally unshielded selection of pieces that range in length from five words to several sections.... Powe wants both transpersonal and transcendent connection from poetry ... unabashedly spiritual, and passionate ... uncommon for our age. He wants us to acknowledge our capacity for deep feeling, our vulnerability and authentic need for each other, and for the sacred.... In the poems of The Unsaid Passing, B.W. Powe goes where he has not gone in any of his previous work ... and written luminous, numinous pieces of mystical and humanistic sensibility." (Pages 119-121)

His work has been profiled on CBC-TV, TVO, CITY-TV, Bravo-TV, ACCESS and CTV.

Towards a Canada of Light (2006; the third revision of the Canada of Light theme) and Mystic Trudeau: The fire and the rose (2007) were conceived as companion pieces, part of his contemplation of the visionary possibilities of Canada and its cultural legacy. In Charles Forans's October 2007 review of Mystic Trudeau in The Walrus, he said of the book: "[it] likely makes of its subject only what Trudeau privately made of himself. Powe knew him in his final years and kept records of their conversations. Expanding on Trudeau's pithy remarks, Powe offers a reading of his character and legacy that is as challenging as many of Trudeau's own public assertions. The book is determined to credit Canada with a mystical tradition and to deliberate in that tradition's arguments, employing language that is poetic, emphatic... Wait for the book's kicker: a call for the establishment of a republic in a twenty-first Canada that has...pirouetted away from 'the last vestiges of colonialism and empire.'"

His writings have been translated into French by Derrick de Kerckhove and Michelle Tisseyre. His writings have also been translated into Czech. He has been the program director or co-director for three significant events at York University in Toronto: Marshall McLuhan: What if He Was Right? (1997), The Trudeau Era (1998) and Living Literacies (2002). He is scheduled to become the Creative Writing Program Coordinator at York University in the summer 0f 2013.

He is currently at work founding the McLuhan Initiative for the Study of Literacies at York University, to be housed at Founders College.

He read from this work at The Northrop Frye International Festival in Moncton in April 2011, and in Barcelona, Spain, at the McLuhan 100 conference, in May 2011. He spoke on Vico, Bruno, Joyce and McLuhan in Naples in June 2011. In the autumn of 2012 he was scholar/writer in residence at IN3, the University of Catalonya in Barcelona. He spoke at the University of Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, in October 2012.

His non-fiction study,Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye -- Apocalypse and Alchemy, has been accepted by the University of Toronto Press for publication in the fall of 2014.

He will be returning as Scholar/Researcher in Residence at IN3 at the University of Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, in the spring and summer of 2013. There he will be collaborating with Cristina de Miranda (artist and professor) and Matteo Ciastellardi (technologist and professor) on the development and production of an e-book, "Opening Time: On the Energy Threshold."

He has three other works in progress--new poems, a collection of essays,and a gathering of fragments and aphorisms and parables and thoughts.

These Shadows Remain
These Shadows Remain: A fable is a novella published by Guernica Editions in April 2011. It has garnered praise for its original concept and visionary story. Guernica Editions has summated the story, "Images overrun the world. Toons filled with rage and hate hunger for life. A war between simulations and humans. People besieged in a castle of dreams. A mysterious knight shifts between worlds, holding the secret that could save all. Orphaned children lead him to the whirlwind, the terrible faceless source."

These Shadows Remain is a work of vision. Powe says the story came intact in a recurring dream. When he first had the dream, he wrote down and outline. The more the story appeared in his dreams, the more he added.

Author Charles Foran has said, "...(I) am quite haunted by the book. It is, to say the least, intriguing, and its resonances are only settling in.  The form itself is fascinating: a parable?  A fable?  A story for children, via their parents, or for parents, via their children? As per the Powe aesthetic, it is resolutely NOT of our time and our, ahem, literary culture, and belongs somewhere deep in a European literary tradition, where Carroll and Grimm sit alongside Musil and Amis.  But I am also aware of the strong visual component to the tale, its cross of children's cartoon with anime... Likewise, its themes, or preoccupations, with how we've been so altered, chemically, spiritually, by those toons, those simulations. THAT is North American, of course, Canadian-McLuhan-Gibson, if also, I suspect, Eastern, Japanese.  An enigmatic, striking piece of writing, one I shall return to."

Critic Marshall Soules acclaimed:
 * You've captured something important about our culture in These Shadows Remain.... It's a compelling allegory about the mutual influence of the parallel worlds we live in, how we don't pay attention to important matters, how children are being sacrificed to a realm of fantasy. As a fable, it's of-a-piece with (Powe's) other work, coming at familiar themes in a different mode and register. Its poetry comes from fairy tale, romance, and pop culture.


 * There are mysteries remaining, such as the migration between the screen and human world. The knight's confrontation with the wizard seems inconclusive and lacking in confrontation and resolution, but I appreciate this outcome. The wizard is also confused, and his power is limited. I like that. Reminds me of the Wizard of Oz - all smoke and mirrors and bluster. And recalls Edwin Abbot's satirical Flatland. I also enjoyed the role and character you gave the children. It's a caring and inspiring story that reflects directly on our confusion over fantasy and reality. On Hollywood Blvd., it's clear that fantasy is winning the battle for mindshare!

Recognition
His novel, Outage, was listed as one of the best ten novels of the year by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star, in 1995/96. It was also an editor's choice novel in the Globe & Mail in 1995.

His book, A Tremendous Canada of Light was selected as a notable book of the year by the Globe and Mail in 1993.

His book of poems, The Unsaid Passing, was shortlisted for The ReLit Prize in 2006.

These Shadows Remain was longlisted for the ReLit Prize in 2012.