Winnipeg poet and critic Dennis Cooley will discuss “Regionalism and vernacular poetics” in a free public lecture Tuesday, March 20, on the University of Windsor campus.

In his essay, “The Vernacular Muse in Prairie Poetry,” Dr. Cooley actively attends to the dialogic and carnivalesque in vernacular speech, which he enlists in a class-based critique of standard Canadian English. Tuesday’s lecture, the last in the Language of Contemporary Poetry series, begins at 5:30 p.m. in the CAW Student Centre’s second-floor boardroom.

Cooley teaches at the University of Manitoba. His many books include Sunfall: New and Selected Poems, 1980-1996, and The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature. He is founding editor of Turnstone Press, and editor of Inscriptions: A Prairie Poetry Anthology.

On Wednesday, March 21, he will deliver his entry in the English department’s Distinguished Lecturer series, “A Lover’s Question: Staging Romance in Kroetsch’s The Sad Phoenician,” at noon in the Oak Room, Vanier Hall.