Poets Corner Reading Series

EVENTS

UPCOMING READINGS, FEATURED POETS, and THEMED READINGS.

Like a Shadow Crossing the Moon: May Reading at Poets Corner

Posted on behalf of Jillian Maguire

 

May was another festival of words at Poets Corner. We had a relatively full house at Fairleigh Dickenson University and a healthy virtual audience.  Our first open mic featured forensic examinations, knitted fishing nets, poetry in the nude and even a shout out to Allen Ginsberg’s lonely old grubber. There were asymptotes, a renaissance angel, a pre-EU cycling trip, a bear tryptich, ta errified buffet and we even found ourselves stuck between a drunk and a hard place.

Free picture (Children’s drawing wildflowers) from https://torange.biz/childrens-drawing-wildflowers-42859

Our first feature poet was Jordan Scott, appearing on the big screen. Jordan’s verse is incredibly well crafted and imagistic.  He moved from colouring wildflowers with a purple crayon to the colour of sickness and bushfires, following sleepwalker’s crumbs and watching a loved one learn to hate their face.  The journey he took us on through his verses was slow and purposeful like a shadow crossing the moon, kicking up cinnamon plumes in the liver berries until we learned how to outlove our pastoralness in the headwaters of our fucked-upedness.  We were left in a state of sonic portage, with nothing trifled.

We got into the second round of open mic poems and saw a woman burying her husband headfirst and upside down, a dialysis ward featuring Lewd Judy and a sloo of colonial jokes.  There was a Chilean lawyer who last week was an accountant from Mexico putting us really really really in the mood to care. The audience was definitely amused by the white knuckle action of these poets.  We got a plea to stop Cop City, and if you don’t know what Cop City is, you have some googling to do!

Alice Major was up next, and were transported back to Anglo-Saxon times with a reference to Beowulf.  The image of a knife on snow invading the poet’s landscape was as disturbing and the 3000-mile strand of asphalt that residents of Fort MacMurrey used to escape the hellscape of the 2018 fires. As I write this, May wildfires are ravaging almost every corner of the country and I am wondering why we didn’t learn any of the lessons Mother Nature was trying to teach us five years ago with her downpour of flames. Alice reminded us that we are all historians and she went back to the knife in her yard, remembering a time before iron was a weapon. She ended with two sonnets, leaving us with a sense of liquid time, pouring on unending. Let’s hope humans keep going on with it.

We look forward to our grand finale on June 21, with Gary Geddes and Derek Beaulieu. It is going to be a heck of a night of verse.  We do pay our poets well at Poets Corner, and though we are grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support, we are finding our bank account is running low, so if you enjoy our readings, please consider donating.  We really do want to keep putting money into our poets’ pockets, so click here to go to our donations page. We can’t keep this series running if we don’t put a little back into kitty.

Poetry for the New Moon: April’s Reading at Poets Corner

Posted on behalf of Evelyn Schofield

On April 19, under a new moon, poetic souls gathered at FDU in downtown Vancouver and around computer screens in distant places to enjoy an evening of fine poetry. Our two featured readers for the evening were Jane Munro and Jan Zwicky, two beloved “grandes dames” of the west coast poetry scene, who both read beautifully and generously from their recent works. But, right from the start, you could tell it was going to be a special evening when our Open Mic introduced us to poems that spoke of all manner of things: blowing up a building that reminds us of a past that we are no longer comfortable with, recognizing the entitlement inherent in beach umbrellas or the incongruity of a nuclear sub patrolling scenic waters, appreciating the sublime serenity of a Bach cello concerto, or protesting the injustice of reacting to people based on the colour of their skin, or their sex.

In the poems that Jane Munro read, she voiced grief for what is lost, whether in ancient Pompei or present-day Vancouver, whether a lifetime of memories lost to dementia or plant and animal species lost to extinction, whether the passing of one dear friend or scores of indigenous children lost to the cruelty of residential schools. She read several poems from her newly published False Creek, which draws on her studies in decolonial esthetics and biodiversity to chronicle the transformation of False Creek from an abundant wetland, so teeming with life that it was a virtual marketplace for the indigenous peoples, to “an abused body of water, inlet to the heart of Vancouver”.  She likens False Creek to a “keel of grief” but tempers the bleakness of that assertion by offering that “grief is something to steer with and keep us upright”. In ‘Walking home from Vanier Park’ she thinks of the longhouses that were once home to thousands in the exact same spot where she had just watched a performance of King Lear. In ‘Nursing the Moon’ she offers humour and the possibility of hope by speaking of cycles that ultimately bring renewal.

Jan Zwicky began her reading with the poem ‘Courage’ which exhorts “Come, step close to the edge, then. // You must look, heart. You must look.”  The poems that she read challenged her audience to summon the courage to truly observe what is before them.  For example, in ‘My Mother’s Dream’ she describes a scene of a table and two chairs in shack, chairs which are “radiant with emptiness, replete with it, so empty that they’re full.” Her poetry reflects her intellectual interest in philosophy and in particular the study of ontology which examines the nature of being. Her most recent publication is Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies which consists of a suite of 49 Poems accompanied by 18 photographs by Robert Moody. She described how the two of them worked independently and then matched up images with poems when they sensed connections between them.  She read a number of poems from this book, and stepped aside for some that were paired with one of Moody’s photographs projected onto a screen. ‘Effervescence’ was accompanied by an image of Japanese cherry trees in full bloom; ‘String Quartet’ was followed by an image of trees and an old stone wall.  In ‘Waking’ she asked “Sleep, what pulls us from you?”

It was difficult to break the spell and pull ourselves away from the poetry, but there were buses to catch and dogs to let out, so at 9:40 we dispersed into the night, under a new moon, inspired to see the world more acutely and make new beginnings.

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