Poets Corner Reading Series

EVENTS

UPCOMING READINGS, FEATURED POETS, and THEMED READINGS.

Trucks and Bird Pillow Talk…..January 2023 at Poets Corner: Sarah de Leeuw and Rhona McAdam

2023-01-30 EVENTS, NEWS ,

Posted on behalf of Jillian Maguire.

Sarah de Leeuw sharing her beautiful book jacket with Zoom folks.

Our January reading, I dare say, was the biggest party yet at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  We knew it was going to be a night of intense learning when Sarah de Leeuw taught us that crocodiles eat only twice a year and make excellent pets, as long as the owner knows when their feedings are due. Our first round of open mic poets featured some moronic verses, a moderate-man revenge poem, two ridiculously funny poems featuring a large truck and birds discussing sex.  Yvonne, a Poets Corner first-timer, had us in stitches with her Rumba in the Raw.

Our first feature reader was Rhona McAdam and she was a delight, teaching us about the click beetle, micro armadillos, jello, cheese, though “a cheese may disappoint” and gluten.  She definitely filled some poetry gaps and left us with a question that I am sure our Poets Corner viewers thought about all night -who would want to live in a world without gravy?

Our second round of open mic readers, complete with our second Peter of the night, examined the “forcefuls and the connectors”, the food chain of fools and a man who ate his boots. The crowd giggled at the line “objects in the rumour appear realer than they are.”

Second feature reader Sarah de Leeuw continued the truck metaphor. She may have dated several. Her alliterative wordplay delighted the ears: spoon drift, clam beds, taking down tenacious targets, soft targets, targets likely to fold quickly. She explored the evolution of a monster and left us with a reminder that poetry works best under constraint.

At the end of the reading, during question period, we found out that Rhona is motivated by a fear of Tammy and she gave us a bonus poem about Meat.  She and Sarah riffed a bit together like an old-school comedy team and we all left feeling satiated.

Where poets dare to go: December Reading at Poets Corner

2022-12-19 EVENTS ,

Posted on behalf of Evelyn Schofield

December is always a bit hectic, so it was a treat to pause for the final Poets Corner reading of 2022, featuring Ryan Fitzpatrick and Renée Saklikar.  What a fine evening of poetry it was, and a worthy end to an eventful year. We started with our customary open mic segment and heard poems from three of our regular contributors: Angus Pratt, who took us on one wild car ride, Peter Marcus, whose juxtaposed words exposed the absurdity of war, and Herb Bryce, who asked us “Where does the mind of the poet go?”

Both of our featured poets then proceeded to demonstrate that there is, indeed, no limit to where the poet’s mind can go. First up, Ryan Fitzpatrick, joined us from Calgary to read from his upcoming book “Sunny Ways” – a commentary about environmental denialism and the petro state. He read “Hibernia Mon Amour” which presents us with a series of bold arguments that lead off with a confident “no” yet end with a telltale “but” that highlights the precariousness of the future we are building.

No it will be inspiriting when the sun rises over the tankers at Kitimaat but

no it will be sublime when the sun sets over Hibernia but

no it will not be a problem after you shotgun those tailings but

He then read the first part of his long poem “Field Guide”, which he explained was an attempt to grapple with the topic of extinction within the Anthropocene by ‘writing around it’. Lines like “Didn’t crisis pay your rent?” and “No one will need to live without disease” show that this poet’s mind goes wherever it must to force us to face our contradictions and own up to our complicity in the destruction we see around us.

Our second featured poet, Renée Saklikar, read selections from her book-length epic poem “Bramah and the Beggar Boy” which Fred Wah has described as ‘a novel in verse’. It is, in fact, just the first instalment in a dystopic saga telling the story of humans left on a ravaged planet Earth. (The second instalment “Bramah’s Quest” is due to be published in the spring of 2023.) The narrative is complex and multi-layered, presented through the medium of objects and fragments of text discovered in an oak box, revealing a tale of disaster, pandemic, civil war – and human resilience. Underlying the story is a philosophical treatise on good and evil, but the language is never dull and, as the poet herself reveals, ‘the sound is what keeps it going’. She masterfully propels us to the heart of the matter with verses like the following:

Wash your hands

Use your sleeve

Trust us now

You’ll never grieve

and

IED, baby, IED!

Who’s right, who’s wrong?

We just want to eat

     – been so long.

The evening concluded with a lively Q&A session, in which Ryan confessed that he is obsessed with social media, and Renée commented that being invited to read for 25 minutes, was ‘a gift’. It was a memorable evening of poetry and those who attended were thankful for the opportunity to follow the creative minds of these two poets into places strange and yet familiar, to see the world more clearly, and to imagine a different future for us all.

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