Dane Swan
Guernica Editions
“Genre doesn’t exist,” claims Dane Swan in a 2013 interview on the website Black Coffee Poet. “There are different ways you have to manipulate your work so that it fits a medium. Medium exists. For me writing is writing.” The disavowal of proscribed categories is appropriate for an artist like Swan, a Toronto resident of mixed Bermudan and Jamaican heritage who defiantly straddles the line between the improvisatory attitude of slam and spoken-word poetry and the more formalized world of print poetry. It is also appropriate given the guiding spirit that animates Swan’s second collection.