Poets Corner Reading Series

EVENTS

UPCOMING READINGS, FEATURED POETS, and THEMED READINGS.

Join us for our next Poetry Reading on September 16 –FINISHED!

Posted on behalf of Evelyn Schofield.

Wow, where did the time go?  Summer is drawing to a close and the cycle of the seasons propels us into fall.

The days are getting shorter and we instinctively know that it is time to get serious. In keeping with the traditional back to school / back to work feeling of this time of year, our next reading will feature two poets who are well known for their writing about the experience of work.

Join us on Wednesday September 16 at 7:30pm (West Coast time) to listen to M.C. Warrior and Tom Wayman bring their words to life in their own voice. You really don’t want to miss it, and you will find all the information you need to attend by scrolling down the page. But first, let’s tell you a bit more about these two fine poets.

Born in England and educated there and at UBC, M.C. Warrior worked for over thirty years at the sharp end of production in B.C., as a logger and commercial fisherman. He has also worked as a union organiser, an environmental campaigner, and a trade union researcher and historian. His new book Disappearing Minglewood Blues contains reflections on his experienceworking on the coast and the political meaning of work, as well as observations on topics ranging from Buddhism to Ovid in the afterlife. His poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies as well as in a chapbook, Quitting Time(McLeod Books, 1978).

 

In 2015 the Vancouver Public Library named Tom Wayman a Vancouver Literary Landmark with a plaque on Commercial Drive to commemorate his championing of people writing about their own employment. Since 1973, he has had published innumerable volumes of his poetry, fiction and cultural criticism. Recent titles include The Shadows We Mistake For Love (short stories; Douglas & McIntyre, 2015), If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change(essays; Guernica Editions, 2018) and Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems For a Dark Time (Harbour Publishing, 2020). Since 1989 he has been based in the Slocan Valley in southeastern British Columbia. www.tomwayman.com.

Please join us for our 5th Virtual Live Reading at Poets Corner!

If you want to hear these great poets, you need to register ahead of time. YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO JOIN UNLESS YOU REGISTER.

To attend this month’s virtual live reading, here’s what you need to know…

 

Venue:                 Zoom platform online (click the link below to register)
Date:                    Wednesday, 16 September 2020, from 7:30 to 9:30pm, PDT

Register in advance by clicking this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwocOqhrjIpHtNNIZOGxZ1iWoQdKtqUD_a_

 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the meeting. If you have any questions contact us in advance at:  socialmedia@poetscorner.ca.

Sign up for the open mic

A regular feature of our poetry readings is the Open Mic segment, which is an enduring favourite with both the readers and the audience. To sign up for the Open Mic for September (limit of 10 readers; 3 minutes per reader!) please REGISTER first for the event and then contact us at socialmedia@poetscorner.ca

Looking forward to seeing you online at our next reading on Wednesday Sept. 16 at 7:30 pm.

FINISHED! Poetry Reading on August 19

At our August reading, 45 poetry lovers were treated to provocative readings by no less than four featured poets. Yvonne Blomer joined forces with Jenna Butler and Tanis MacDonald to offer us poetry about water, women and walking. Their voices reached us from Alberta, BC and Ontario, sometimes calling out alone, other times alternating in antiphony, or even competing for our attention. They read selections from the just-released anthology Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, as well as other works with a particular focus on the paths that women seek to travel, often unsuccessfully. The final poet of the evening, Sarah deLeeuw, read poems from Outside America, reflecting on tragedies of both global and intimate scale, and continued the auditory delight of the evening with new work that features chanting repetitions, making us think about how language shapes our understanding of the world.

The evening was rounded out by short Q&A sessions with the featured poets, as well as readings by nine talented individuals who signed up for the Open Mic. If you missed this wonderful feast of poetry, or want to hear it all again, video clips of the readings are posted here from our YouTube channel Poets Corner Reading Series.

Our Next Poetry Reading August 19 — FINISHED!

Kim Trainor posting on behalf of Evelyn Schofield

We`re having so much fun, we’re not even going to go on vacation!

Next month’s virtual poetry reading will feature Yvonne Blomer and Sarah de Leeuw.  Also reading will be Jenna Butler and Tanis MacDonald whose poetry was included in the just-released anthology Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, edited by Yvonne.

Please join us on Wednesday August 19 at 7:30pm (West Coast time) to listen to these poets read their own works. Poets Corner will soon be listed on Eventbrite; for now, you will find all the information you need to attend by scrolling down the page.

 

Yvonne Blomer is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur. Her most recent book of poetry is As if a Raven. She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir. Yvonne served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015-2018. In 2017 she edited the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press) and this year Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds was released. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

 

Author of six literary books (creative non-fiction and poetry) and co-editor of five academic texts, Sarah de Leeuw is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses broadly on marginalized peoples and geographies. Nominated in 2017 for a Governor General’s Literary Prize in non-fiction, de Leeuw also holds a Western Magazine Gold Award, two CBC Literary Prizes for creative non-fiction, and a Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize for poetry. Currently the President of the League of Canadian Poets, de Leeuw has a PhD in historical-cultural geography and is a Professor and Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program in Prince George, a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. She grew up on Haida Gwaii and now divides her time between Prince George and Kelowna, British Columbia.

 

Please join us for our 4th Virtual Live Reading at Poets Corner!

If you want to hear these great poets, you need to register ahead of time. YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO JOIN UNLESS YOU REGISTER.

The reading will be delivered via the Zoom video conferencing platform, but in order to minimize interruptions from disruptive individuals, we have opted to make the live reading a registration-only event. To attend this month’s virtual live reading, here’s what you need to know…

Venue:                 Zoom platform online (click the link below to register)
Date:                    Wednesday, 19 August 2020, from 7:30 to 9:30pm, PDT

Register in advance by clicking this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtf-2vpj0rHNPoTn1Tpc5iabLtVQFzghWk

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the meeting. If you have any questions contact us in advance at:  socialmedia@poetscorner.ca

Sign up for the open mic

To sign up for the open mic for August (limit of 10 readers; 3 minutes per reader!) please REGISTER first and then contact us at socialmedia@poetscorner.ca

 

 

Looking forward to seeing you online at our next reading on Wednesday Aug. 19 at 7:30pm.

 

FINISHED! Poetry Reading on July 15

A screen shot of Francine Cunningham, one of our featured readers!

We are really getting into our stride with these virtual poetry readings and we just held another great one on July 15 with 41 people zooming in for some fine poetry.  Everything ran smoothly – even the audience is starting to get the hang of it! Video clips will be posted here from our YouTube channel Poets Corner Reading Series.

The July reading featured three inspired poets who covered a lot of ground in their diverse and intelligent writing. The first poet up was Francine Cunningham who read selections from her published work as well as some new pandemic poems and ended by taking us with her to relive a transformative experience from her childhood.  Next Joanna Lilley joined us from Whitehorse to read several poems from her newly published collection on the theme of extinction, paying homage to creatures who no longer grace the planet, and offering a sobering reminder of our own precarious existence.  Rounding the evening off was Kevin Spenst whose dramatic readings of his poems made all of us believers in the power of poetry to help us make sense of life and love and the many places that are called Surrey.

The evening began with a shorter-than-usual Open Mic, featuring 5 poets who are no strangers to the Poets Corner audience.

A screen shot of one of our Open Mic’ers, Herb Bryce!

We will post video clips of our FEATURED POETS as well as of our Open Mic’ers in the next few days. When posted, we will include links on this page to our YouTube channel, and circulate the links through our Social Media Platforms. Stay tuned!!!

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