George Fetherling — Canadian Poet
George Fetherling is a Canadian poet, novelist, and cultural commentator. One of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including a dozen volumes of poetry, four book-length fictions, and a two-volume memoir. He lives in Toronto and Vancouver... (wikipedia)
Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.
A human heart that matched what we think of as heart-shaped - a perfectly formed bright red thing with two halves of equal size - would be one that was horribly diseased. The origin of this stylized representation is somewhat obscure, but it probably appeared at the same time as St. Valentine's Day, about whose history there is much dispute.
The heart was always seen as the noblest of the internal organs as well as the most vital. The hearts of martyrs or future candidates for sainthood would be preserved, but never their livers, say, or the entrails - at least not on their own; it was either the heart by itself or the whole lot together.
