Podcast: Interview with Writer B. W. Powe (1987)

Marshall McLuhan in 1973.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian writer and scholar B. W. Powe.

At the time of our conversation Powe's landmark book, The Solitary Outlaw (Lester & Orpen Dennys), had just been published. He was a student of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto, and the book explores the role of the intellectual in a post-literate age by profiling Pierre Trudeau, Wyndham Lewis, Glenn Gould, Elias Canetti, and McLuhan. Since 1987, Powe has published books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and philosophy. His latest publication, in 2016, is The Tigers of Perception, a multi-media lyric essay. Powe is currently a professor of English at Toronto's York University, where he has taught since 1984.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with B. W. Powe as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

– Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Talking Out of Turn: A Collection of Reviews, Interviews and Remembrances currently being assembled on Blogger. 

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.