The Hamilton Spectator
Photographs by Cathie Coward , The Hamilton Spectator
A perfect storm of poetry, struggle and library science by Hamilton poet/librarian Paul Lisson
by Jeff Mahoney
The Hamilton Spectator
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“His art has always been a blend of the humourous and sly, the dry and the colourful, but always the disorienting, cryptic and often macabre, and in The Perfect Archive there is also a kind of Orwellian, perhaps Kafka-esque, foreboding that hangs over the proceedings.”
“It is the job of librarian/archivists to codify, catalogue, embalm as it were, the literature that is entrusted to them and to their institutions, reducing it in a way — all its richness, life, beauty and freedom — to a Dewey decimal number or the digital equivalent thereof. To preserve a butterfly, glorious in flight, is to pin it to a table. It is Paul Lisson’s particular drama, as a librarian/archivist who also is a poet, that the official side of him is, arguably, duty-bound to systematize, institutionalize and render sepulchral, almost banal, that which the artist side wishes to ravish lovingly. The text. The consuming fire of inspired word, of story. His newly published book, The Perfect Archive, 25 years in the making, takes the conflict a step further. What happens when the custodial faculties of the librarian get mixed up with, perverted by, the pressures of propaganda and censorship?”
THE NANCY DUFFY SHOW
Photograph by Fiona Kinsella
On Reading The Perfect Archive by Paul Lisson
Culture Critic post by J.S. Porter
THE NANCY DUFFY SHOW
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“I read for strangeness, imaginative power and mystery. Are they present in Lisson’s book? Yes, yes and yes.”
“The archivist writes playfully, experimentally, ironically, even subversively. I want to read what he has written playfully, experimentally, ironically, even subversively. I will make many beginnings, many attempts just as the author is constantly re-presenting his book, cataloguing and re-cataloguing anew, forever beginning again, starting over. The book coils and uncoils and recoils—then it springs. Then it bites.”
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Photograph by Jason Avery
World Exclusive: Introducing poet Paul Lisson
by Judith Fitzgerald
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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“In my opinion, Lisson’s work – difficult, demanding and utterly transfixing – requires work, hard mental work on the part of its readers; it also requires a polymathic widely read mind and a stalwart heart; in short, it requires a poetry lifer, someone who knows the greats and how to differentiate between today’s flavour and tomorrow’s fixture on the landscape of the highest art form granted this gawd-fersaken planet, praise Him.”
“How did I come to his work? Through a (now) mutual friend, another McLuhanatic whose taste (in the highest sense of that word) I trust. He casually mentioned, in an email, that he thought the best poet out there – Hands down! – was this guy he knew from Hamilton, Ont.”
Paul Lisson 