Joe Rosenblatt
| Joseph Rosenblatt | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 26, 1933 Toronto, Ontario |
| Occupation | writer / artist |
| Language | English |
| Citizenship |
 Canadian |
| Education | high school dropout |
| Alma mater | Central Technical School |
| Genre | poetry, fiction, drawing |
| Notable works | Bumblebee Dithyramb, Top Soil, Poetry Hotel |
| Notable awards | Governor General's Award, B.C. Book Prize |
Joseph Rosenblatt (born December 26, 1933) is a Canadian poet who lives in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia. He has won Canada's Governor-General's Award and British Columbia's B.C. Book Prize for poetry. He is also a talented artist, whose "line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets’ books of poetry."
Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Rosenblatt grew up in the city's Kensington Market area and attended Lansdowne Public School. Later he went to Central Technical School, but dropped out and worked in a variety of blue-collar jobs. In 1956 he became a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
A Joe Rosenblatt ran in the Toronto municipal election, 1958, 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." He "got his start with the help of other poets: Milton Acorn, Al Purdy and Earle Birney."
His first book, The L.S.D. Leacock, was published in 1966. In the same year he received a Canada Council grant that allowed him to quit his railway job and write full-time.
Since then, in his 40-year career, "Rosenblatt has written more than 20 books of poetry, several autobiographical works and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry.... He has traveled widely giving readings of his poems in Europe, Canada and the United States."
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Wikipedia