Born in Steinbach, Manitoba on July 5, 1946, Friesen has Mennonite roots in Northern Europe. He graduated from University of Manitoba in 1969 with B.A. (Hons.) in English Literature. He has had various jobs, including driving cab, working on a highway crew, working in a window-making factory, and teaching various levels of school. Aside from his books of poetry, he has written songs with Cate Friesen (unrelated), Big Dave McLean and Jim Donahue, written text for modern dance, written documentary film scripts and radio plays and has worked with improv pianist Marilyn Lerner, with whom he has released a CD entitled Small Rooms, as well as improv artists Peggy Lee and Niko Friesen. He has also worked on translations of Danish poets, including the selected poems of Ulrikka S. Gernes, entitled A Sudden Sky (2001), co-translated with Per Brask. His book Blasphemer's Wheel received the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in Manitoba in 1996. He has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award In Poetry in 1997, for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in BC in 1998 and 2003, for the Griffin Poetry Prize (a co-translation with Per Brask ofFrayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instrumentsby Danish poet Ulrikka Gernes) in 2016, and for the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry in 2016. In 2018, his play A Short History of Crazy Bone was staged by Theatre Projects Manitoba.

Once in a rare while a jacket blurb competes for resonance with the book it endorses. Sharon Thesen describes Patrick Friesen's creation of a soul-searching, eccentric, wild woman and trickster for his 16th book, a short history of crazy bone: long poem (Mother Tongue 2015), as "at once a performance of the archetypal feminine forever at odds with patriarchal order and a libretto for the wayward, solitary, and vulnerable spirit of art, passion and expression."; In March of 2018, a stage version of this book was presented by Theatre Projects Manitoba as A Short History of Crazy Bone.

Occasionally using words and phrases from Middle English and Low German, the 86 poems or meditations in Patrick Friesen's Songen (Mother Tongue 2018) touch on musical influences, the changes in language over the centuries and on the dissolutions, dilemmas and inevitabilities of old age. His 18th release, and the first to be designed by his daughter Marijke Friesen, has been praised by George Fetherling as a haunting suite about "the complexity of life inside the words we use to describe ourselves."

Patrick Friesen has two adult children, Nikolaus and Marijke. He moved to Vancouver in 1996 and has since taught Creative Writing at Kwantlen University College.

BOOKS:

The Lands I Am (Turnstone, 1976)

Bluebottle (Turnstone, 1978) 9780888010070. Illustrated by Eva Fritsch.

The Shunning (Turnstone, 1980) 9780888010384

Unearthly Horses (Turnstone, 1984) 9780888010889

Flicker and Hawk (Turnstone, 1987) 9780888011138

You Don't Get to Be a Saint (Turnstone, 1992) 9780888011633

Blasphemer's Wheel: Selected & New Poems (Turnstone, 1994) 9780888011794

A Broken Bowl (Brick Books, 1997) $12.95 9780919626935

St. Mary at Main (The Muses' Company, 1998) 9781896239323

Carrying the Shadow (Beach Holme, 1999) 9780888784018

Jumping in the Asylum (Quattro Books, 2001) 9781926802572

The Breath You Take From the Lord (Harbour, 2002) 9781550172840

Interim: Essays and Mediations (Hagios Press, 2005) 9780973972702

A Ragged Pen: Essays on Poetry & Memory (Gaspereau, 2006) $22.95 9781554470303. Co-authored with Robert Finley, Aislinn Hunter and Jan Zwicky.

Earth's Crude Gravities (Harbour, 2007). 9781550173994

A Dark Boat (Anvil Press, 2012) $16 9781897535912

A Short History of Crazy Bone (Mother Tongue, 2015) $19.95 9781896949499

Songen (Mother Tongue, 2018) $19.95 9781896949642

Outlasting the Weather (Anvil, 2020) $20 9781772141535

Reckoning (Anvil, 2023) $18 9781772142167

ALSO:

Small Rooms (CD of spoken text and improv piano with Marilyn Lerner, 2003)

AWARDS:

Nominated, Griffin Poetry Prize, 2016
Shortlisted, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 1998
Shortlisted, Governor General's Award for Poetry, 1997.
Winner, McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, 1994.
Shortlisted, Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, 1996.

[BCBW 2020] "Poetry"