Artist's statement:

B. J. was just so enthusiastic over this poem we were studying in class rhymes, an established rhythmic pattern. That formality, B. J. was certain, must take a genius to achieve.

I wasn't impressed. “It’s just a trick,” I declared. “Nothing special.
Anybody could do it.” Was I just being contrary?

”I bet you couldn’t,” B. J. smiled.

”How much?”

I wrote a little ballad on the Rapunzel story over the weekend, end rhymes, an almost consistent rhythmic pattern, winning the wager, proving that at least that part of poetry really didn't take a genius.

In the process, though, I discovered an intriguing something else going on in poetry, a something else that I was impressed by. Part of me headed off along the path through that part of the forest of language and art. There
are these springs there. I won't claim they’re fountains of youth but -

I never did admit to B. J. that, in the final analysis, his instincts about poetry were probably right, but he knows that anyway, wherever he is.

“There was something mysterious about poetry…It’s an expressionstic way of using language that allows writers to think in different ways.”

Daniel David Moses

Moses’ poetry has been published since 1974 and selected poems have been translated for readers in Chinese, Czech, French, German and Spanish.

You can find his poems published in prestigious international and national literary magazines such as Prism International, ARC, Atlanta Review, The Fiddlehead, Poetry Canada Review, Impulse Magazine, Prairie Fire, QUARRY, event and Exile, the Literary Quarterly.

They have appeared in collections such as:
Native Poetry in Canada, A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Jeanette C. Armstrong and Lally Grauer (Broadview Press 2001) ISBN 1-55111-200-0
Native Writers and Canadian Writing, edited by W.H. New (1990)
The Last Blewointment Anthology, Volume II, edited by bill bissett (1986)
First People, First Voices, edited by Penny Petrone (1983)

‘Moses’ voice is firm and assured, but oddly hard to define, combining a loose colloquial sprawl and a pared-down tenseness, an on-and-off leaning towards traditional fixed forms and rhyme patterns, a mythic imagination and an everyday chattiness. He writes in a world in which everything is not only possessed of consciousness, but seems engaged in thoughtful consideration of itself.’ - review of The White Line: Poems written by Maggie Helwig for Books In Canada.