Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling

Biographical Note

viii Biographical Note George Fetherling, a wide-ranging and prolific figure in Canadian literature, was born in 1949 and has lived and worked as a writer in London, New York, and, for the past forty-five years, Toronto, the city with which he is most closely identified. He began publishing poetry in the mid-1960s and works in both the long-form mode, as in Singer, An Elegy (2004), and in the lyrical, as in The Sylvia Hotel Poems (2010). He also has written four book-length fictions , the best known of which is the novel Walt Whitman’s Secret (2010). He has been intimately involved with cultural commentary, independentpress publishing, book culture, and book history. He has often been called a man of letters (“an accusation I take pleasure in denying”) simply because he has published in so many different genres. These range from works on Canadian history (for example, The Gold Crusades: A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1997) to travel narratives such as Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma (2004) and Indochina Now and Then (2012). Among his dozens of other books is a biography, The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock, which appeared in 1998, three years after its subject’s death. Fetherling’s most popular prose work remains Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties. First published in 1994, it concerns his contemporaries in the great Canadian cultural renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s and his own heavily textured background (“I have no lifestyle, only a modus operandi”). Fetherling is also a visual artist. He has received the Harbourfront Festival Prize “for a substantial contribution to Canadian letters” and a D. Litt. honoris causa from St. Mary’s University for “an instrumental role in the development” of Canadian writing. He has been writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, the University of New Brunswick, and the University of Toronto. He is widely anthologized. The Montreal Gazette has called him “a mercurial, liberal intelligence [. . .] the kind of which English Canada has too short a supply.” Xtra described him as “something of a national literary treasure.” ...