Welcome to my Web site!

photo by: Elisabeth Feryn
 

Born to an Armenian father and an Anglo-Indian mother, Keith Garebian holds a doctorate in Canadian and Commonwealth Literature from Queen's University. The author of nineteen books and a chapbook, he is a widely-published writer. His reviews and articles have appeared in over a hundred  newspapers, journals, magazines, and anthologies. In 2000, he became the first critic-at-large to be appointed by a public library, when he was contracted to post theatre and book reviews for three years on the website for the Mississauga Public Library. His poetry has been published in Impulse, Echo, Inscape, The Antigonish Review, Literary Review of Canada, Exile, Quarry, Grain, The Malahat Review, and various anthologies. The winner of the 2000 and 2008 Mississauga Arts Award for Writing, he won First Prize in the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Contest in 2009, writing grants from the Ontario Arts Council, and top prizes for free verse and haiku from the Ontario Poetry Society and the Scarborough Arts Council/Lakeshore Arts Council. Some of his work has been translated into French, Armenian, and German. A member of the League of Canadian Poets and The Writers’ Union of Canada, he is available for public readings and symposia.
 

*See my c.v.

Readers are urged to read the very best interview I have ever had. This one, conducted by Elana Wolff, covers some of the most significant books I have written. This is the link:http://www.openbookontario.com/news/elana_wolff_interviews_keith_garebian

My new book of haiku (with illustrations also by me) has just been published by Guernica Editions. Here is the full spread cover showing my paintings on front and back. The illustrations within the book (including the running emblem of wild grass at the bottom of each page) are in black and white on special paper. The price is $15.

KEITH GAREBIAN to introduce best-selling Armenian-American novelist Chris Bohjalian and offer comments on his latest novel The Sandcastle Girls at the Armenian Cultural Centre, 45 Hallcrown Place, Willowdale, ON on Monday, October 22, 2012, 8 pm. Admission is free, and there is a brief hospitality session at 7.30 p.m. Mr. Bohjalian will speak about his novel that tells a story of the Armenian genocide. Mr. Bohjalian has won plaudits from major critics and has been featured on Oprah, in addition to making the New York Times best-seller list. He will autograph copies of his novel.

CHILDREN OF ARARAT
BOOK LAUNCH
SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010, 2-4 PM
EDWARD DAY GALLERY
FREE ADMISSION
www.edwarddaygallery.com
952 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON M6J 1G8, Canada
(416) 921-6540
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO BOOKSTORE
WILL HANDLE SALES OF MY BOOK

CALGARY INTERNATIONAL SPOKEN WORD FESTIVAL
DEKTET READING
http://blip.tv/play/AYHiwQUC

July 24, 2012, 8 p.m.: Art Bar, Paupers Pub (2nd Floor), 539 Bloor Street West,
Toronto. I shall read selections from my poetry books to illustrate the use and scope of voice in poetry. Please note the correction in the date of the reading. I had named the wrong month previously.

April 3, 2011, 3.30-5 p.m.: Gallery 96 at Factory 163, 163 King Street, Stratford.  Short presentation of my Frida Kahlo poems as part of poetry readings for "The Lyrical Goddess"

April 7, 2011, 7 p.m.: Will be reading from Indian Voices at the official Book Launch , Supermarket Art Bar, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto.

 

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO ATTEND THE BOOK LAUNCH
FOR Indian voices, volume one and
HEARTS & SOULS BY LEOPOLDO PARADELA
SUPERMARKET ART BAR,
268, AUGUSTA AVENUE,TORONTO M5T 2L9
AT 7.00 P.M, ON 7^TH APRIL, 2011
 

Sunday, May 1, 2011, 4 p.m. sharp. The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St. West. I shall present a sequence from my Frida Kahlo poems for a fundraiser at the Mayworks Festival. Admission free.

Saturday, June 18, 2011. 2-4 p.m. Reading/presentation/book signing. The Making of 'Cabaret' (Oxford University Press). A question-and-answer session will be included, so come and find out how the great Broadway show came to being and changed with sub-sequent reinterpretations. This book has just been advertised in the New York Review of Books. Mississauga Central Public Library. Free admission and Refreshments.

IMPORTANT NEWS FLASH!!

My new, revised, considerably expanded edition of The Making of 'Cabaret' is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York) in April 2011. This replaces the first edition done by Mosaic Press, so all libraries, schools, colleges, and universities should order the new edition that has  37 illustrations and has received glowing reports from eminent American readers.

The next anticipated title for OUP is The Making of 'West Side Story' .All forthcoming editions are my officially sanctioned ones and are to be used instead of the first editions from Mosaic that suffer from weak production values.

 What the critics have said:

*Samson’s Hair and Other Satirical Fantasies (chapbook) (2004)
“Satire is alive and scintillating in Samson’s Hair. One minute Eve is calling God a snake, the next it’s Dracula sharing his foreplay tips. And that’s just a glimpse of Keith Garebian’s playfully lurid imagination. In a book where both John the Baptist’s head and Monica Lewinsky’s dress have a lot to say, the writing is fevered, funny and venomous, often all at the same time.” (Barry Dempster, Governor General’s Award nominee)

“In his latest collection, Samson's Hair, a chapbook of 17 intelligently irreverent poems that draw on literary and popular subjects as far-flung as Hamlet and Dracula, Salome and Kong, and God and Monica, Keith Garebian is as penetrating in the voice of the other sex as he is in the voice of his own....Satire--a technique which often employs ridicule in the service of censure--and fantasy--a form which entails role-playing--are seemly vehicles for Keith Garebian's aims...”
(Elana Wolff, Surface & Symbol)

*Frida: Paint Me As A Volcano/Frida: Un Volcan de Souffrance (2004)
“Along with hard-edged clarity and succinct imagery, the language in this collection is often surreal and lustrous as befitting its subject matter about a painter's mistress who finds herself defined and given her raison d'etre by her promiscuous artist-lover. ...Garebian's images are plastic and flowing and preeminently visual as the colours in the paintbox that become Diego's medium, and Franciere's translation not only captures the essence of the original work but also preserves much of the energy and lyricism with lively images that pulse and resonate throughout...this amazing series of poems...”
(Gillian Harding-Russell, Event, Vol. 3, No. 2)
>>>>>> SAMPLES

“...powerful images...Garebian's words evoke the vivid colours and intense emotions of Kahlo's surreal paintings, which evoke the flora and fauna, folklore and traditions of Mexico. Poetic allusions to actual self-portraits interspersed with brief prose passages express Kahlo's physical pain, her love and admiration for Diego Rivera, and the suffering caused by his affairs.” (Roseanna Dufault, Canadian Literature, Vol. 191, Winter 2006 )

*Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (2008)
“Keith Garebian has created an innovative introduction to a great filmmaker, his work, and his world.”
(Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg, May 22, 2008
>>>>>> SAMPLES

“.a beautiful and evocative tribute...Garebian's poetic take on Jarman's life riffs on a variety of influences and inspirations...Graced  by degrees of subtle allusions to other works, Garebian's poetry is, at times, reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's love poetry and Ginsberg's call to America during intense political moments....Garebian's romantic alliterative play...moves this collection beyond beautiful gestures and into a powerful and highly original space...Garebian's work both defies and defines an important poetic canon as he moves through the life of another artist, within another medium, striving for beauty and excellence within a marginalized form, yet simultaneously reaching out toward a world of experience.”
(David Bateman, Xtra!, September 25, 2008)

“He can vivify relatively straightforward realism or abandon it altogether: presenting sensuous tableaux that swirl magically into gymnastic action. He can shift abruptly yet convincingly between the ornate and the coarse, the ethereal and the nightmarish, the wittily cerebral and the violently brutal. A sensibility both filmic and painterly is fully operative, and in passage after passage a sinuous energy joins an uncanny clarity of expression. There's a rare urbane panache and aplomb in scene-setting, in characterization, in narrative drive and in thought....Blue is an outstanding, sustained achievement and takes us places, full-frontally, which most poetry lacks the imaginative and stylistic resources to do more than flirt with.”
(Allan Briesmaster, Letter to the 2008 Mississauga Arts Awards jury)
 

“What I find refreshing about Keith Garebian's Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems is that upon reading this volume, one gets the sense of Jarman's life without getting bogged down in detail. It is the sort of biography that suits a man whose life was centered on art and sex...Blue is an enjoyable and engaging book of poems that will have you rushing out to your indie movie store to rent some of Jarman's unique and fascinating films.”  (Vincent Ponka, Broken Pencil, July 1, 2008)

“Graced by degrees of subtle citation...powerful and highly original...”
(The Gay and Lesbian Review, January-February 2009)

“Garebian’s virtuoso trick is to only once or twice in the entire collection slip into a description of Jarman's desires not expressed through action....Garebian's skill comes in the activation of the eyes: with this choice he creates the illusion of observed fact rather than speculation and authorial commentary. The 'tension' then between Garebian's subect and the way it is shown has everything to do with the illusion of autonomy he creates for Jarman, the character, from author and reader alike.”
(Matt Rader, Event, 37-3)

“Keith Garebian’s Blue is a haunting elegy to an artist whose films left an indelible mark on queer consciousness, as much because of Jarman’s brashness at a time when we were all battening down the hatches and doing damage control in our own lives, both public and private, because of the onslaught of aids, as well as because of Jarman’s uniquely personal vision as a filmmaker.

The poems reverberate with an intimate and cumulative knowledge of the artist’s work seen in hindsight. At times, they achieve a visionary quality that stems from a critical perception of Jarman’s oeuvre, coupled with Garebian’s personal imagining of the man behind the work. In this way, the poems serve as both biography and critical exegesis of the films. Edward II: A Queer History, for instance, is as much a snapshot of Jarman’s film as of his imagining of the misbegotten monarch who bears its title, while the multi-part Caravaggio serves as a series of vignettes illuminating both the historical artist and his modern-day artist-biographer.

While not lengthy, Blue is a full work. The book is cleverly divided into a biographical Prologue, a critical Corpus, and a final section, Blue, that serves as a meditation on the dying Jarman and his final work, Blue, a non-imagistic “film” that provided a backdrop for Jarman’s ponderings on life, death and art.

These works contain both vibrant imagery and richly imagined drama, and are a pleasure to read. They should be—they were written by a masterly word-artist and inventor who might, had the two met, have mesmerized Jarman with his own creativity.”
(Jeffrey Round, www.jeffreyround.com)

*Children of Ararat (2010)

“It’s a passionate and angry collection of poems focusing on the massacre of ethnic Armenians in Turkey in June, 1915. ...The book, though, is more than a catalogue of atrocities....the book opens with a selection of poems that reflect on his father’s story, ‘the whole mad history of it.’ Other poems explore the effects of the genocide on the survivors and on the descendants of victims. Garebian also comments on how the genocide has affected artists of Armenian descent and their works: the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the plays of William Saroyan, and the films of Atom Egoyan...The writing is evocative and full of powerful images. Sometimes, as Garebian describes, the whole landscape answered in pain: “Between the staked olive trees, the partridge/caught their spurs in wires/wrenching the skies with cries.’”
(Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg)
>>>>>> SAMPLES

“This is a momentous collection rendered by a poet in his prime. Children of Ararat takes the reader on a harrowing journey beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and continuing on to the denial that lingers to this day. While the horror is made clear, there is something oddly joyful in the mourning, in the poet’s ability to give voice to the long-dead. Without hyperbole, the poet evokes the gruesome events and articulates how, as the inheritor of his father's experiences, he finds himself  ‘trapped in an abyss’ created nearly a century ago. As with his previous collection, Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Garebian once again creates a living elegy that at times reaches almost beyond words.”
(Jeff Round, www.jeffreyround.com)

“Keith Garebian writes with solicitousness, rage, and pure confidence in his resources...Garebian places poetry at the service of his identity--personal, political, and human--and draws vitally from the store of imaginative vigour. The poems in Children of Ararat are creations of a man with an ‘optic heart’ --a man who belongs to the people, to his father’s people, as well as to a wider span of citizenry intent on the pursuit of transparency, justice, and human renewal.” (Elana Wolff, Open Book Toronto, August 3, 2010)

“His father was a young survivor of the atrocity, and Garebian packs his story with the pure, corporeal horror that only a child can experience. ..Garebian communicates his rage better through physical objects (tendons, blood, bodies, mould) than abstractions (hope, will, shame, regret), but there's so much precise detail that the tangible always wins out. ...His greatest political weapon, then, is his steadfast sense of accounting....Children of Ararat locates both its history and its poetry, within the cruel specificities of those events.” (Jacob McArthur Mooney, Globe and Mail)

“Garebian's collection is a moving reflection, in burning poetics, on the fragments of memory and body--'backbones, femurs, joints,' an 'eye socket'--left by the Armenian genocide...Some, like Garebian, whose father survived, go on to speak eloquently, even poetically, for those who were silence. As he writes, 'This tongue tries a reparation of speech/beyond the reliquary ashes of books./It licks the caves where the dead/lie in their long hibernation.'” (Robin Durnford, vueweekly.com)

 

*The Making of 'Cabaret' (2nd edition) (2011)

“Garebian tells the story of an important musical in a manner that is both compelling and page-turning. Yes, Garebian must weave together his story from varied accounts and sources stretching over 45 years; but he does so in a manner that gives us the big, overall picture instead of a fragmented one. ” (Steven Suskin, Playbill.Com, July 2011)

“A marvelous job.”  (Harold Prince)