Biography
Dave Margoshes is a Saskatoon-area writer. He’s appeared six times in Best Canadian Stories and been a Journey Prize finalist. He’s published some twenty books, including six volumes of poetry; the most recent, A Calendar of Reckoning, appeared in 2018. His previous poetry title, Dimensions of an Orchard, won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards Poetry Prize. He’s taught creative writing and led workshops at various locations, and for various age groups. He was writer in residence in Saskatoon in 2001-02 and Winnipeg in 1995-96. For several years, he was involved with Writers in Electronic Residence (WIER), which linked professional writers with high school students via the Internet.
His poetry leans toward the narrative, with an emphasis on detail and concrete imagery. He values precision of language, emotional content and clarity above all else.
Micro-interview
Not very much. My school experience was not very poetry friendly. But I did start writing poetry in high school, and that led me to start reading it (a cart before the horse kind of thing).
As mentioned above, I started writing poems in high school. I did it in hopes of impressing a certain girl, who was writing poems. It didn’t work, but I did fall in love with poetry. But I didn’t start thinking of myself as “a poet” for a number of years, not till I started getting occasional poems published in little magazines.
A poem is a bit of a snapshot – of a certain moment, a scene, a feeling, a story (compressed). The poet’s “job” is get that snapshot as perfectly in focus as possible. Oh, and as beautiful as possible, for good measure.
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.“ I love that poem for its simplicity and wisdom.