Todd Swift
Todd Swift is one of the leading Canadian poet-editors under the age of 45. He was born in Montreal on Good Friday, 1966, and grew up in St-Lambert, Quebec. In 1987 he visited Belfast to research his first anthology, Map-Maker’s Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (1988), co-edited with Martin Mooney. As a screenwriter (WGC member) he has written over one hundred hours of TV for HBO, Fox, CBC and Paramount, among others.
In 1997, Swift moved to Budapest. In Hungary he was Visiting Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), 1998-2001. In 2001 he moved to Paris. In 2003, after marrying an Irish barrister in Ireland, he moved to London, England. Swift was poetry editor of award-winning online magazine Nthposition from 2003 to 2008. He has edited many global anthologies, including 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, UK, 2003). He has also edited special sections on new Canadian poetry for New American Writing, and The London Magazine, and on Young British and Scottish poets, for The Manhattan Review.
Swift’s own poetry has been collected in six collections, Budavox (1999), Café Alibi (2002), Rue du Regard (2004), Winter Tennis (2007), Seaway: New and Selected Poems (2008) and Mainstream Love Hotel (2009). His poems have been published widely in journals and magazines including Agenda, Books In Canada, Chapman, The Cimarron Review, The Daily Telegraph, Geist, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, London Magazine, Jacket, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Prism International, The SHOp, and Stand. The Chronicle of Higher Education has compared his work to “that of Ezra Pound’s in the 10s and 20s of the last century, in Paris and London”.
Swift’s poetry has appeared in many anthologies, including Radio Waves (Enitharmon, UK, 2004), Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, New York, 2005) and The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Véhicule, Montreal, 2005), as well as The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope, Toronto, 2008). He has been Oxfam Great Britain’s Poet-in-residence since 2004, and edited several poetry CDs and a DVD for them. He is a Core Tutor with the Poetry School. He has an MA in Creative Writing, from the University of East Anglia. Forthcoming publications include Modern Poets of Canada (co-edited with Evan Jones), from Carcanet. He lives in London, England, where he is a lecturer at Kingston University. His popular blog, Eyewear, has been running for five years, and is archived by The British Library.
Appeared April 26, 2010: what time carries