From the moment we learn to speak we are always using other people’s words. the real made up improvises on this simple idea of imitation; mimicry becomes a kind of cadence for an interweaving of transcribed speech, ironic song, jarring randomization, post-colonial irony, and blatant theft. An incessant imitative dialogue shapes our neural and cultural networks; imitation is a source of power for any subculture, and the primary means of a colonizing process that should be seen as violent. But imitation is not a simple act of copying; at its best, imitation is accompanied by play, performance, and re-enactment. Imitation is a crucial human faculty — a talent at the heart of social being. The primal emotions of love, hate, desire, and anger find their expression in speech and action that are by nature imitative. the real made up is itself made up of real and imaginary interviews with people off the street, of poems by others and poems from others (including much imitated members of the Can Lit canon like Al Purdy, Irving Layton and Erin Mouré). Every poem in the real made up is an attempt to revel in or escape from — an impossible task — the imitative traces of everyone else.

Stephen Brockwell cut his writing teeth in the '80s in Montreal, appearing on French and English CBC Radio and in the anthologies Cross/cut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry and The Insecurity of Art (both Véhicule Press, 1982). George Woodcock described Brockwell's first book, The Wire in Fences, as having an "extraordinary range of empathies and perceptions." Harold Bloom wrote that Brockwell's second book, Cometology, "held rare and authentic promise." Fruitfly Geographic won the Archibald Lampman award for best book of poetry in Ottawa in 2005. His most recent book is Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books published by Mansfield Press. Brockwell currently operates a small IT consulting company from the 7th floor of the Chateau Laurier and lives in a house perpetually under construction.

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