Things could be VERSe(Fest)
Poetry Season!
High season
It's 6 days of 60+ poets at VERSeFest. Lots of familiar names. The community is both small and sprawling. Last night Amal El-Mohtar, who I quoted in the Kitchissippi Times at Prose in the Park, read honeyed words and declared "a poem is grudge clutched against the liver." She read with with Saskachewan's Poet Laureate, Gerald Hill who announced miracles that came with the advent of his arrival to office, such as city council all conferring at his house for how to run the city, arriving in their electric cars. Gerður Kristný had the whole audience laughing as well with her sharp wit, crossing Icelandic legend with pop culture. Pictured is Monty Reid giving introductions.
Upcoming on St. Paddy's day is Doyali Islam who was on the last Literary Landscape. Also this week, fellow Rubies workshoppers, Frances Boyle and Sneha Madhavan-Reese. George Elliott Clarke who is Canada's new poet laureate of Parliament. Also incoming, KaDo member, and In/Words editor, Sanita Fejzić, 'Natalie Hanna who was in the chocolate chapbook (copies still available) and Phil Hall who edited the pet radish, shrunken. He's up with all the BookThug readings on the 18th. On Sunday afternoon at Knox is the KaDo event with Terry Ann Carter and André Duhaime. So much. I have started to put photos up at Flickr.
Pictured is the mock up cover for the April-release chapbook An Ongoing Lack of Spontaneous Combustion, poems from the last 7 years of a surreal bent. It is coming out with words(on)pages (Follow them at twitter.) It has been a dream relationship with fast open communication and quick and astute and large edits. And a gorgeous design. Launching in Toronto April 20. (And Ottawa time, place tbd.) But it will be at the small press fair June 18th at Jack Purcell at least.
One of the Studio Nouveau Workshops has wrapped. I'm awed by the intelligence and reach of poets, willingness to strive and consume and question. It's always exciting to see poems grow in power and clarity before our very eyes. We talked poetics, devices, book structures. The second workshop, an online one, will hiatus over VERSeFest and do its last 2 weeks in April. Each group has its own character and this one is brave and enthusiastic about creating new poems, stretching themselves in new shapes and forms and nurturing one another. It too is a beautiful thing to see.
I'll be starting a new round in May/June with a face-to-face set and an online-set, registration permitting. A few new people have expressed interest. Contact me if you're interested as well.
As ever, I have Chalkpaths for assisting with editing and design of chapbooks, or editing longer manuscripts.
Bookwise, if you're looking for new good reads, what wowed me lately were: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pitt Poetry Series) by Ross Gay, Bodymap: Poems by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Batanezak.
Blogwise, I dug up more archives of Looking on the Bri Side where I post portraits of the hubby but realize I've got a 5 year gap of missing photo albums.
What else? Readings. March 31, 2016, 7-9pm at the Atwater Poetry Series, I'm reading with Gary Geddes and Talya Rubin at 1200 Atwater Ave., Westmount, Québec. There's FB event page for that. If you can get over to Toronto, April 20, 2016, 6:30pm door the spring Words(on)Pages Chapbook launches include: Pearl Pirie's An Ongoing Lack of Spontaneous Combustion, Brady Tighe's debut chapbook, Bottling the Lead Singer of the Mountain Goats, and Adam Zachary's Bodies Vs. That's all upstairs at The Central, 603 Markham Street.
Until next time, keep reading and keep writing,
Pearl