Naked Poems, by Phyllis Webb (1965), is one of the most influential works of its time, for it suggested a new vision of the book-length poem which profoundly affected a number of poets in the following literary generations. Full of lyric intensity yet transcending mere lyric posturing, Naked Poems is Canada's first masterpiece of process poetics, a series of precisely crafted minimal texts which remain open to the possibilities of what the third section calls the "Non Linear."
In this gestational long poem, sexual and writerly desire are interrogated and integrated in a manner new to Canadian poetry.