We’re burning up the planet – for absolutely no reason except profit and a horrible kind of avarice. Blue because of the materials of writing – the ink and the pen – blue because of a certain melancholy about the world, particularly now. Her clerk is blue because, she says, it’s the best colour in the world. “If I’m not thinking all the time, if I’m not putting my thinking through a set of rigours, political or aesthetic, then I’m not doing anything.” “I’m always questioning what it means to bring an idea into the world and what its impacts can be,” she says at the Penguin Random House offices, snappily dressed in a black striped shirt and sporting a highly structured new coif. In Brand’s new prose poem The Blue Clerk, a poet engages with the clerk who has taken serious inventory her work, probing it, challenging it. The city’s former Poet Laureate, Toronto Book Award winner for What We All Long For and Griffin Prize winner for Ossuaries has no problem with that either. The Unpublished City (Book*hug), a collection of short works by emerging writers that she curated, has been shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, which is being presented October 10.īrand’s other central theme is the question of how to write with integrity. She’s releasing two books this fall, the prose poem The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart) and the novel Theory (Knopf), both launched at the AGO on September 12. Because plainly she has no problem with that herself.

It’s beautifully ironic that Dionne Brand’s main literary theme lately is how hard it is to write. DIONNE BRAND at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West), Wednesday (September 12), 7 pm.

Theory by dionne brand