John Lent is a Canadian poet and novelist, as well as a college teacher of creative writing and literature. He has published ten books from 1978 to 2012. His book, So It Won't Go Away, was shortlisted for the 2006 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Lent's fiction and poetry have appeared for years in magazines across Canada, including: The Malahat Review, Event, Dandelion, Grain, The Wascana Review, NeWest Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, New Quarterly, Waves, Matrix, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review. Lent has read from his work in many cities in Canada, and internationally. Lent has also published critical articles on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Thomas DeQuincey, Wyndham Lewis, Tom Wayman, Kristjana Gunnars, Mavis Gallant, Dennis Brutus and Wilfred Watson.
"My continuing interest," Lent says, "is the relationship between consciousness and notions of 'narrative' in both fiction and poetry. So I'm fascinated by what happens when you take a person in a very ordinary, textured world and the story that surfaces actually mimics the process of awareness that is right at the heart of that world...so it's this wonderful, crazy mix of subjectivity and things that keeps drawing me to more open, more flexible forms of story. I find that whole process nervy and exciting."
Lent is also a singer-songwriter and plays in a roots/jazz trio, The Lent/Fraser/Wall Trio, which performs in British Columbia, and has opened for groups as various as Leahey, Chilliwack, Campbell Ryga, Long John Baldry, UHF and others. John Lent lives with his wife, Jude Clarke (painter and writer) in Vernon, British Columbia. Lent is a member of the Writers Union of Canada, SOCAN, the Canadian Songwriters Association, and the Associated Writing Programs (USA).
Biography John Lent was born on July 8, 1948, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.The Writers Union of Canada, member page for John Lent He is the son of Harry and Adrienne (Brown) Lent and is one of seven siblings (Susan, Michael, Harry, Francis, Timothy, Mary-Lou). Lent married the painter Jude Clarke in 1981. Educated at the University of Alberta, B.A. (with honors), 1969, M.A., 1971, where he was a student of Sheila Watson, Lent pursued doctoral studies at York University, 1971–1975, including field work in British Columbia, on Malcolm Lowry and Spatial Form.
Prior to joining Okanagan College, Lent taught at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, and Notre Dame University College in Nelson, British Columbia. Starting in 1979, he taught creative writing and literature courses at Okanagan College in Vernon, British Columbia. He retired from the position of Dean, North Okanagan Region, Okanagan College, in April 2011. He was influential in the creation of the Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Canadian Literature, Ryga a Journal of Provocations, the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series, the Kalamalka Press, KIdsWWwrite (a creative writing ezine) and the KIWW Digital Archives, as well as several radio programs and newsprint collaborations such as The Kalamalka Chronicles. John Lent's participation in and authoring of the opening chapter of the, initially, serialised Kalamalka Chronicles, a community writing project initiated by The Sun Review newspaper and the Kalamalka Institute for Working Writers, emphasises the degree to which he experiments with narrative form and authorship. In this instance, the characters and their opening maneuvers were controlled by Lent, then re-authored and re-plotted by eight other writers. That the 'contest' was quite lively and that the newspaper folded after the publication of chapter nine is, perhaps, indicative of a community of writers rather than readers. In addition to these services to the literary arts and promotion of quality writing, Lent has engendered careers in writing through his work as a teacher and as an editor. He was a writer in residence at Sage Hill, Saskatchewan from 2009 to 2011.Hartig, Jean. "Sage Hill Writing Experience." Poets & Writers Magazine 38.2 (2010): 145 Lent reads his work in many cities in Canada, the United States, France, and England. He is a founding member of the Kalamalka Press, the Kalamalka Institute for working writers, and the annual Mackie Lecture and Reading series at Okanagan College. Lent is also a singer-songwriter and played in the roots/jazz trio Lent Fraser Wall.
Lent lives in Vernon, British Columbia, where he has finished revising a novel, The Path to Ardroe, a multi-voiced narrative set in Vernon, Strasbourg and the Scottish highlands, scheduled for publication in Spring 2012. He is also at work on a sequence of essays on consciousness and form, covering, among others, the writings of DeQuincey, Gunnars and Lowry.
Other biographical information is available in Jude Clarke's The Language of Water.The Language of Water: A Woman's Struggle With Systemic Lupus Erythemotosus. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2002.
Critical response John Lent is an academic, essayist, poet, short story writer and musician. His work is marked by a mixing of genres that aims to produce a literary equivalent of jazz music. Lent also draws on art (especially the Impressionists) and has been influenced by the pioneering work of Joseph Frank in spatial form.
A Rock Solid plays off the various senses of the term rock: geological, musical, and etymological, with emphasis on its derivation from the Old High German rucken: "to cause to move". The term solid relates to the Cubist-influenced geometric structure, an insight prompted by the epigraph from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's Du Cubisme (1912). Combined, the "rock solid" signposts an emphasis on fluidity and stasis. The title's indefinite article foregrounds this rock solid as one petite narrative among many; that is, the structure and sense are not a univocal, universalising "truth". The relationship between words and painting, tied to the acoustic suggestion in the volume's title, stress the poet's inter-related concerns with a totality of experience. A Rock Solid "has captured a sense of experimentation with form [...] It is rare in literature for a reader to have a glimpse of the poet chipping through the rock solid of experience in order to see the poem" (Meyer, 88–90).Meyer, Bruce. "Six Chapbooks." Canadian Literature 92 (Spring 1982). 88–90. Meyer's sole review of the book also comments on its packaging and how the reader is "sorting through a pile of debris". This comment underlines the reader's engagement, where sorting through the cards enforces reflection upon the experience and the reading process.
Wood Lake Music continues the emphasis on landscape, but a greater sense of mood is evoked. In tune with the sense of foreboding, the narrator's consciousness penetrates day-to-day rituals of renewal. The narrative employs a simple plot—the protagonist's drive (from Vernon) past Kalamalka Lake, then Wood Lake, and finally Duck Lake and into Kelowna. Temporal structure runs from "Monday, September 8, 3:30 pm" through "Monday, October 13, 7:00 am; 1:00 pm" Time represents the specific chronological frame of the trips, while their incremental repetition offers an accretion of being in place.
In subsequent writing (Frieze and The Face in the Garden), Lent loosens his aesthetic through the application of lessons taken from Joseph Frank's concept, spatial form, as well as its deconstructive developments—in particular the emphasis on space/place. Reviews of Frieze have been positive. Andrew Vasius, for example, applauds Lent's use of "end-line, internal, vowel and consonant rhyme for his own designs. The effect is not, as one might think, poetic conservatism, since he creates new forms through rhythmic change-ups, diction, caesura and sustained imagery" (110).Vasius, Andrew. "A Gambol, A Walk, and a Stroll," Waves 12(?).4. 108–110. Yet Vasius is critical of what he perceives to be "some poems [that] are so self-centred they leave a fleeting impression that Lent is translating experience into poetry" (110) rather than vice versa. Further to this claim, Vasius contends that the "'how' is exciting [...] whereas the 'what' is often only as new and unusual as the coffee, cigarettes and booze" (110) that punctuate these poems. Christopher Wiseman differs from Vasius in Wiseman's recognition of the regional place and the vernacular that is attendant to it: "The poems are rooted in real places, but these are turned into places of the mind, way-stations of the migrant heart, touchstones in the poet's search for meaning. The search is intensified by the tonal range of the poetry, from the high serious to the most colloquial, blended smoothly and always at the poet's service" (190).Wiseman, Christopher. "Limits of Feeling." Canadian Literature 105 (Summer 1985). 188-90. Michael Estok presses further, highlighting a motif in Lent's aesthetic: "Primarily, however, Lent is an artist of the 'negative space' of unadorned day-to-day existence. The stress of his rhythms is clearly on the banal, rather than on the sensational [...] The poet's careful structure of imagery and his muscular tone—his powerful expression of the hypnotic rhythm of the ordinary—elicit our confidence in his ability to redeem the commonplace" (9).Estok, Michael. "Recent Poetry from Thistledown." NeWest Review (November 1985). 9. Cheryl Sutherland, in a fine, close reading of several poems, evokes the volume's core: "he finds precision satisfying [and so] the task he has taken upon himself is to release the petrified voices of those who have lacked the vocabulary; he fashions a frieze from their silence" (Sutherland, np).Sutherland, Cheryl. "Poet Draws on Family Memories," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, September 6, 1984.
The Face in the Garden explores subjectivity by using prose and poetry to refer to external and internal states of consciousness. The author's linguistic dexterity underscores the sense of mobility as a theme in life and in literature. The volume is, however, a transitional moment in the writer's career. On the one hand it presents his first published stories; while, on the other, it consolidates his accomplishments as a poet. Reviews of this experimental book range from the journalistic boorishness of John MooreMoore, John. "Strange and Surreal Ways to Wave Farewell to the Summer." The Vancouver Sun, Saturday, October 19, 1991. D19. to academic criticism. Elizabeth St. Jacques, in Freelance, sees the work as the story of Peter Bendy, wherein "Boredom [...] has become his companion enemy that follows him on the long search to find his own 'face in the garden' of life" (38).St. Jacques, Elizabeth. "Review: The Face in the Garden." Freelance (December–January 1991–92). 38 St. Jacques faults the weakness of Bendy's character, the prose stories, that "come across as mini-lectures" and applauds the poetry, where "Lent allows his sensitivity and calm spirit to surface" (38). Professor R. G. Moyles concentrates on the title, offering an explication of "face" as many and "garden" as metaphor for life. He views "Towards the Gardens" as about "family upbringing and its emotional energy", while "In the Gardens" and "Facing the Gardens" present "physical and psychical" (n.p.) terrain.Moyles, R. G. "Review: The Face in the Garden." SOURCE INFORMATION NEEDED (1991). 196. John Le Blanc's review is the most considered, though readers are likely to find room for argument with his conclusion: "[T]he shift to poetry in the last third of the work [exchanges] an analyzing consciousness [with] a verse that, in its imagistic terseness, is more coldly remote than engagingly elemental" (180).LeBlanc, John. "Male Expression." Canadian Literature 133 (Summer 1992). 179-81. While there is much to agree with in Le Blanc's piece, the shift to poetry, far from being remote, is an imagistic expression that complements the analyzing consciousness. The point is not body versus mind, but rather body and mind—a fusion and a 'return' to that originary garden, Eden, where humans could be.