ROSENBLATT, Joe

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Joseph Rosenblatt, Toronto, Ontario, 26 December 1933. Education: Central Technical School, and George Brown College, Toronto. Family: Married Faye Smith in 1970; one son. Career: Worked as a laborer, factory worker, plumber's mate, gravedigger, and civil servant until 1958; worked for Canadian Pacific Railway, 1958–65. Visiting lecturer, University of Victoria and University of Western Ontario, 1980; writer-in-residence, University of Western Ontario, 1979–80, Universities of Rome and Bologna, 1987, and Saskatoon Public Library, 1985–86. Senior editor, Jewish Dialogue, Toronto, 1970–83; associate editor, Malahat Review, University of Victoria, 1980–82. President, League of Canadian Poets, 1983–85. Artist: individual show of drawings, Gadatsy Gallery. Awards: Canada Council grant, 1966, 1968, 1973, 1980, 1986, 1992; Ontario Arts Council award, 1970; Governor General's award, 1976; British Columbia Book prize, 1986; British Columbia Arts Council project grant, 1991. Address: 221 Elizabeth Avenue, Qualicum Beach, British Columbia V9K 1G8, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Voyage of the Mood. Don Mills, Ontario, Heinrich Heine Press, 1963.

The LSD Leacock. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1966.

Winter of the Luna Moth. Toronto, Anansi, 1968.

The Bumblebee Dithyramb. Erin, Ontario, Press Porcépic, 1972.

Blind Photographer: Poems and Sketches. Erin, Ontario, Press Porcépic, 1973.

Dream Craters, edited by John Newlove. Erin, Ontario, Press Porcépic, 1974.

Virgins and Vampires. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1975.

Top Soil. Erin, Ontario, Press Porcépic, 1976.

Loosely Tied Hands: An Experiment in Punk. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1978.

Snake Oil. Toronto, Exile, 1978.

The Sleeping Lady. Toronto, Exile, 1979.

Brides of the Stream. Lantzville, British Columbia, Oolichan Books, 1983.

Poetry Hotel: Selected Poems 1963–1985. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1985.

Gridi nel Buio (Poems in Italian and English). Abano Terme, Italy, Piovan Editore, 1990.

Beds & Consenting Dreamers. Lantzville, British Columbia, OolichanBooks, 1994.

A Tentacled Mother. Toronto, Exile, 1995.

The Rosenblatt Reader. Toronto, Exile, 1995.

The Voluptuous Gardener. Vancouver, Beach Holme Press, 1996.

Recording: Joe Rosenblatt, High Bamet, 1971.

Play

I Get High on Butterflies (score), music by Nancy Talfer. Waterloo, Ontario, Waterloo Music, 1984.

Short Stories

Tommy Fry and the Ant Colony. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1979.

Other

Doctor Anaconda's Solar Fun Club: A Book of Drawings. Erin, Ontario, Press Porcépic, 1977.

Escape from the Glue Factory: A Memoir of a Paranormal Toronto Childhood in the Late Forties. Toronto, Exile, 1985.

The Kissing Goldfish of Siam: A Memoir of Adolescence in the Fifties, Toronto. Toronto, Exile, 1989.

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Manuscript Collections: Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa; University of Toronto.

Joe Rosenblatt comments:

My own verse and prose poems basically attack the human condition and society with its crass materialism and phony value structure.

My poetry is traditional and influenced by American poets such as Hart Crane and Robert Frost. My poems are concerned with the Moloch or mammon monster of society and the insatiable appetite of the creature. The monster finds its expression in my animal poems. For example, in my bat poems the psyche of man is found in this terrestrial animal of darkness. Therefore my kinship is with Swift and misanthropes. My superhero is Ambrose Bierce. In nearly all my poems the quest of man is spiritual cannibalism—soul theft and the protein of money.

I use the traditional devices of poetry in my work such as rhyme, assonance, and metric extension.

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For the most part Joe Rosenblatt "is a poet of the small presses," but he is, nevertheless, well known in Canada. At times he has seemed, superficially, more interested in the world of plants, insects, and animals than that of human beings, but this is more an aspect of his fascination with the unusual, the rare, and the minute than a lack of sympathy with the race of man. He has said, "I only deal with the bizarre," but he adds that his later poems are "more directly confessional poems, written without the intervention of imagery or my old animal disguises." Rosenblatt draws as well as writes, and in the drawings images of grotesque and curiously human, though debased, animals and reptiles abound. He has had exhibitions of his drawings in several Toronto galleries, and his 1973 book Blind Photographer might more properly be called a book of drawings illustrated by poems than the opposite. He has said that "drawings are the lazy man's way to writing anti-poems, poems without intellectualizing and verbalizing."

It is typical of Rosenblatt to hint that he is not much interested in thoughtful technique; in fact, in both poems and drawings he is always meticulously careful of detail. His interest in "insect and plant sexuality" is extraordinary, and Norman Snider has said rightly that "Rosenblatt is a miniaturist in his sensibility, his poems are minute and exquisite observations of the tiny phenomena of nature." It remains only to add that wit, in the true meaning of the word, is the prime mark of his work.

—John Newlove