Robert Bringhurst is a poet, typographer, translator, and cultural historian. His early training was in the sciences, though his reputation now is in the arts. “It seems to me,” he says, “that all the arts and sciences are one pursuit - and that all the world’s cultural traditions are really ecological phenomena, linking human beings to the rest of the natural world more than separating them from it.” As a translator and literary critic, he has shown that the indigenous oral literatures of North America include some of the world’s greatest literary traditions. As an art historian, he has worked for years to show that the history of letterforms is an integral part of the history of art, and that art history in turn is part and parcel of the history of nature. His poems speak with equal fluency and tenderness the languages of science and the languages of the heart.

Over the past thirty-five years, Bringhurst has written more than thirty books. Half of these are books of poetry, including Bergschrund (1975), The Beauty of the Weapons (1982), The Old in Their Knowing (2005) and the recent Selected Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2009). (Jonathan Cape in London will publish a different selection of his poems under the same title in 2010).

With Doris Shadbolt, Geoffrey James and Russell Keziere, he coedited Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada (1983). With Haida sculptor Bill Reid, he is the coauthor of The Raven Steals the Light, first published in 1984 and reissued in 1996 with a preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss. His book The Black Canoe (2nd ed., 1993), a study of Reid’s sculpture, is a classic of Native American art history. Design schools, trade and academic publishers throughout the English-speaking world rely on his book The Elements of Typographic Style (1992; 3rd ed., 2004). His groundbreaking study

of a Native American oral literature, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999) unleashed a storm of controversy and a tidal wave of praise.

Two volumes of translation from classical Haida complete the trilogy that began with A Story as Sharp as a Knife. Volume 2 is Bringhurst’s translation of Nine Visits to the Mythworld: nine narrative poems by the Haida poet Ghandl. Volume 3 is his translation of Being in Being: the complete extant works of the Haida poet Skaay. Reviewing this trilogy for the London Times, Margaret Atwood writes that “Bringhurst’s achievement is gigantic, as well as heroic. It’s one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head - a profound meditation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on the habits of thought and feeling that inform them.” In 2004, this trilogy was awarded the Edward Sapir Prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and chosen by the Times of London as Literary Editor’s Choice Book of the Year.

Bringhurst’s other recent books of poetry include New World Suite No. 3 (2005) - a work for three simultaneous voices - and Ursa Major (2003; 2nd ed. 2009) - a multilingual work in which the characters tell simultaneous stories in English, Latin, Greek and Cree. This work was premiered by New Dance Horizons in Regina, with choreography by Robin Poitras and a cast including Cree actor Floyd Favel Starr. His recent translations include The Fragments of Parmenides (2003): the remains of an intensely intellectual yet vividly narrative classical Greek poem composed in southern Italy 2,500 years ago, “Parmenides,” Bringhurst says, “is the link between Homer and Plato.” Recent prose works include The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada (2008), The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning (2004), and two collections of lectures and essays:The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks (2006) and Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking (2007).

Bringhurst was poet-in-residence at the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1983, writer-in-residence at the University of Winnipeg in 1986, Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 1988-89, writer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh in 1989-90, Spenceley writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario in 1998-99, Philips Fund Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society in the year 2000, held the Atwood-Roy chair in Canadian Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2008, and will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Wyoming in 2010.

In 1993 he delivered the American Printing History Association’s annual Lieberman Lecture at UCLA; in 1994, Trent University’s Ashley Lectures on Native American oral literature; in 1997, the University of Iowa’s annual Brownell Lecture on the History of the Book; in 1998, the University of British Columbia’s Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture and the annual Georg Svensson Lecture at the Royal Library, Stockholm; in 2001, Wilfrid Laurier University’s Laurier Lecture and the culminating lecture of the San Francisco Public Library’s Zapfest; in 2002, the University of Manitoba’s annual Belcourt Lecture in Linguistics, the University of Victoria’s Orion Lecture, the Great Plain’s Research Centre Lecture at the University of Nebraska, and the keynote leture at the 16th triennial congress of the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs; in 2003, the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association Typographique Internationale and the Ralph Gustafson Memorial Lecture in Poetry at Malaspina College; in 2004, the 30th Anniversary Lecture at the Center for Book Arts, New York; the annual Pratt Lecture at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2005, and in 2008 the University of Maryland’s Humanities Forum Lecture “What Is Language For?”

“A sense of shared responsibility and shared fate burns through this book,” wrote Jorie Graham, reviewing The Beauty of Weapons in the New York Times. Robin Skelton, writing in Poetry (Chicago), says simply that Bringhurst “may be the poet we have all been waiting for: one who can reclaim for poetry the dignity, wit, brilliance, and wisdom it has recently appeared to have mislaid. He is without doubt a major poet, not only in the context of Canadian letters, but in that of all writing of our time.”

Events featuring Robert Bringhurst:

1. 1.Main Stage Event (Raincoast Culture: Plants, Trees, Myths & Languages, with host Bill Richardson, also featuring Nancy Turner, Richard Mackie and Philip Kevin Paul) 7:30 - 9:30 p.m. Friday, July 16 at the Community Hall.
   

2. 2.Themed Reading (Polyphony: a two-voiced poetry reading and talk with Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky) 1:30 - 3:00 p.m. Friday, July 16 at the Back Hall.