Posted on behalf of Jillian Maguire
Well, we finally did it. We had a live reading. Well, a hybrid reading. After figuring out all of the technical logistics, we had a wonderful evening of poetry. The night began with the open mic featuring of “poetry without a license”. We went down the rabbit-hole of dogs learning to read poetry, buds in the sky, and anthropomarginalization. We fretted over our place in the sun, slid down the Fairview slippery slope, and heard a poem about everyone’s favourite topic – a skin condition.
Our feature poet was Gillian Jerome, reading walking poems from her new book Never the Less; she dedicated her reading to the women of Iran walking in protest against the “moral police.” Jerome’s carefully crafted images tickled the senses. The image of blueberries held in shirts contrasted with first blood on underwear. There were coyotes, crowns of peonies and a viaduct through the historical Hogan’s Alley. We heard the sound of things dying and splitting open. We experienced the loneliness of the skunk cabbage and we saw Rita Wong, singing through her arrest for protesting the Trans Mountain Pipeline. There was even a penis shaped like an ampersand – now there’s an image that might keep you up at night.
To cap off the night, we had a poem that was written during the reading and a poem about a father with a “smile as brilliant as the Sicilian sky”. For all the people who attended, thank you for making the evening a success. For the rest of you, see you the third Wednesday in October!
