ZACHARIA WELLS Takes the Oath of Allegiance to Poetry

ZACHARIA WELLS was born and raised in Hazel Grove, PEI, and left there at age fifteen, subsequently living in Ottawa, Halifax, Montréal and Vancouver. From 1996 to 2003, I travelled back and forth between the territory of Nunavut and southern Canada, working as an airline cargo handler and agent. I now live in Halifax and work for VIA Rail as a service attendant. I am also the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes & Queries, possibly the finest literary magazine in the country. (Subscribe here.) When time permits, I write poems, reviews and essays, and read whatever I can get my hands on.

What time does permit, is a prolific body of poetic work which follows his writing philosophy:

“From Wilfred Hughes, who told me one badly hungover morning that I looked like I'd just chased a fart through a bag of nails, and from Dan Rintoul, who told me about moonshine that tasted like old cunts and boxing gloves, I learned the vitality of vernacular speech and the illuminating power of a well-built metaphor. From Clifford Collins I learned the concussive power of spondaic stress clumping and assonance each time he called me a stunned cunt—lessons I would learn often and would only relearn from G.M. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas later.”

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