The Dusty Bookcase

For the month,  the fifth of ten poems I  find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating. To think I once worked to celebrate this horrible m...

For the weekend, Thanksgiving verse from James McIntyre, the poet who gave us 'Ode to the Mammoth Cheese'. This version, taken f...

The Toronto Daily Mail 25 May 1881 John Wilson Bengough's poem on the wreck of the Victoria  on Victoria Day, 1881, off the banks ...

I could not let National Poetry Month pass without presenting verse by James Gay, Poet Laureate of Canada (self-proclaimed) and Master ...

Cheese Poet James McIntyre's celebration of the naming of Victoria Park in his adopted hometown of Ingersoll, Ontario, from his M...

One hundred and forty years ago today – May 7, 1872 – the small Ontario town of Ingersoll lost Oxford Street, then its main commercial...

The Robert Burns Memorial Square Dorchester (né Dominion), Montreal Photograph by Wally Gobetz BURNS  The following ode wa...

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889) Returning to James McIntyre – for the final time, I think – this poem...

James McIntyre's obituary in the the Globe of 2 April 1906, two days after his death. Not a word about his verse. Poems of James McInt...

The end of National Poetry Month approaches, and with it the stragglers in the parade of things McIntyre. I suppose he'll always be ...

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

Three or so years ago, I happened upon a newly installed bust of Robert Gourlay in Toronto's St. James Park. It was a pleasant surprise;...

P oems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889) It seems they were forever fishing bodies out of Toronto Bay in the 19th century....

In this hectic week it took me three days to realize that Thomas Conant's cautious praise of James McIntyre was part of an exchange of ...

Five weeks after publishing "The Evolution of the Hog", James McIntyre returned to the pages of the Globe with this mysterious, se...

James McIntyre published a good number of poems in the Globe , most of which have never been republished. The most interesting, "Th...

Newspaper editor John Stephen Willison was an admirer of James McIntyre, which may explain the position of the poet's name above those o...