Introduction: Canadian Poetry: Traditions/Counter-Traditions Poésie candienne: traditions/contre-traditions.

The article presents the authors views on Canadian poetry. In the 1970's, when Studies in Canadian Literature began publishing, the phrase "Canadian poetry" connoted something of an official discourse in English Canada pertaining to questions of "Canadian identity" and nationalism. If one were to attempt to unravel all the threads and filaments of current Canadian poetry written in English, one would almost certainly be left with a hopelessly decentred tangle of poetic and cultural ideas. It is as if Canadian poets are not so much anxious about the "question" of Canadian identity as they are desirous of exploding the very notion of a Canadian poetry, of seeking to imagine all possible worlds, of attempting to think through every imaginable way of conceiving what Canada might be. It is not surprising that critics of Canadian poetry have trouble keeping up. Among the many reasons for this new multiplicity are, of course, Canada's changing demographics and the increasingly sophisticated and nuanced way of speaking about racial and sexual identities. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the francophone context of poetry writing and criticism, the foremost subject appears to be the poetic genre itself, its innovations, the overt break from all constraints of versification, yet also the servility to a French European tradition, at least on the part of nineteenth-century poets who, perhaps for that very reason, have failed to leave their mark on the literary history of French Canada.