Poets Corner Reading Series

Tag Archive: virtual poetry reading

May’s Featured Poets! Please join us via Zoom this Wednesday 19th May, @730pm for an evening of ecopoetry

We hope that you can join us this upcoming Wednesday 19th May @ 7:30pm for our fifth virtual poetry reading of 2021.

This month’s reading will feature poet Adam Dickinson, whose most recent book, Anatomic (Coach House Books, 2018) won the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada and Kim Trainor, a member of our Poets Corner collective. You can register for this live Zoom event at

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0qcu-oqTwiHN3Y2F1CmZYgIChv8Gmz7Mto

 

We will also have our usual  open mic — all are welcome. Please contact us at socialmedia@poetscorner.ca if you would like to be included on the open mic list. Read more about our featured poets:

 

Adam Dickinson is the author of four books of poetry. His latest book, Anatomic (Coach House Books, 2018) concerns the results of chemical and microbial testing on his body and won the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the Raymond Souster Award. He has also been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature. He teaches Creative Writing at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. 

 

 

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930’s. Her book-length poem, Ledi (Book*hug, 2018), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Bluegrass will appear with Icehouse in 2022. Her poetry films, created with musician Hazel Fairbairn, screened at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2020 and will appear at the 9th International Film Festival in Athens in 2021. Ledi will also be performed live as part of the “Assemble” exhibit at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster in the fall of 2021. Recent poems have appeared in Otoliths, Fire Season, Ecocene, Anthropocenes, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Kim teaches in the English Department at Douglas College, where she chairs the faculty association’s Climate Emergency Action Committee. She lives in Vancouver, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

 

 

Hazel Fairbairn grew up in and around London, UK, and studied music at The City University and viola at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Whilst in London, she played with the London Musicians Collective, various avant-garde ensembles, an African jazz band, and in a lot of Irish pubs. Following this, studying Ethnomusicology at University College Cork and the University of Cambridge provided the opportunity to pursue a growing fascination with traditional Irish music and her PhD ‘Anarchy and Heterophony in the Traditional Music Session’ was the first in its field. In 1993, Hazel co-formed ‘Horace X’ with producer/drummer Mark Russell. Currently teaching music, art  and audio in Vancouver, Hazel is also exploring the manipulation of violin-generated sounds, recently collaborating with UK based Moff Skellington to produce the radio people by the sleeping ducks, and working with Mark Russell on a new studio-based electronic-acoustic project.

 

FINISHED! Poetry Reading on November 18

Posted on behalf of Evelyn Schofield. 

Full Moon photograph taken 10-22-2010 from Madison, Alabama, USA. Photo credit: Gregory H. Revera. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

First of all, a big thank you to our ten open mike readers who shared some fine poetry which took us far, far away from our computer screens. We witnessed the joyful colours of fall in the treetops, and the seductive orange glow of an oil flare at night. Some poems philosophically pondered our life stories and our connections to each other; another dealt matter-of-factly with the harsh reality of domestic violence. We were taken on journeys to the unseeable side of the moon, to a chance meeting at a cricket match, and to the beach, which we discovered is not only a place to dance joyously, but also a place to stare at the moon and cry out for food and shelter with the seagulls.

Our first featured poet, Kate Marshall Flaherty, read several selections from her book Radiant, a collection of poetry she wrote while undergoing treatment for breast cancer. The poems she read emphasized her need to believe in the healing power of her treatments and dealt sensitively and honestly with the intimate indignities of cancer. They included “Triptych” a deeply personal expression of gratitude to each of her three children for the different ways they sustained her, and “Radium Girls” a testament of solidarity with women who died of cancer after working in factories where they painted clock faces with radium. Kate finished her reading with a video performance of her poem “Far Away”, in which she describes her mother’s dementia with exquisitely crafted and subtly humorous phrases that reveal how “the life story [is] forgotten, but not the words.” You can watch the video of the poem, set to wistful music performed on the nyckelharpa, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=img8SYSZD5w

The second featured poet of the evening was Michael Prior, who joined us from Minnesota where he is currently teaching. He read five poems from his latest book Burning Province which explores the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and deals with intergenerational trauma and the experiences of his grandparents who were interned as children in a camp near Hope, BC. The first selection was an ekphrastic poem entitled “150 Pounds” which was inspired by The Suitcase Project, a photographic exhibit by Kayla Isomura in which Japanese Canadians and Americans are photographed with the items that they would pack if uprooted from their homes with only 24 hours’ notice. This was followed by a further four masterful poems exploring the intricacies of his relationships with his father and grandmother and delving further into themes of family, memory and love, and how these have shaped the person that he is today. After this wonderful reading we can only echo Michael’s grandmother and say “Thank you.”

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