Joe Rosenblatt

Joseph Rosenblatt (December 26, 1933 – March 11, 2019) was a Canadian poet who lived in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia. He won Canada's Governor-General's Award and British Columbia's B.C. Book Prize for poetry. He was also an artist, whose "line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets' books of poetry."

Life and writing

The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rosenblatt was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, where he grew up in the city's Kensington Market area and attended Lansdowne Public School. In 1956 he became a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

A socialist, he became a Trotskyist, joining the Socialist Education League in Toronto. He ran in the 1958 municipal election, for city council in Ward 1 (Riverdale), receiving 521 votes.

He began seriously writing poetry in the early 1960s. "He became interested in writing through his association with the worker poet Milton Acorn in the early sixties and the metaphysical poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen."

Rosenblatt died on March 11, 2019, shortly after advance reviews of his newest poetry collection Bite Me! Musings on Monsters and Mayhem began to appear in media.

Recognition

A 1976 book of selected poems, Top Soil, won Rosenblatt the Governor General's Award in 1976.