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George Bowering and other BookThug writers read at Real Vancouver Writers’ Series

Title: George Bowering and other BookThug writers read at Real Vancouver Writers’ Series

Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Description: The Real Vancouver Writers’ Series is proud to announce their first event of the 2012 fall season: Real Vancouver BookThug. In the first of a series of collaborations with independent publishers they’re happy to showcase 5 amazing local writers who have published with one of the finest publishing houses in Canada. The writers are George Bowering, Jake Kennedy, Andrew McEwan, John Francis Hughes and Meredith Quartermain.

Learn more here.

Date: September 27, 2012

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Victoria Writers Festival

Title: Victoria Writers Festival

Location: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Description: A literary bash featuring thoughtful, fun, important, inspiring, and invigorating voices on beauty, history, the wild, the true, and human “progress”. Some of the nervy poets, novelists and essayists who will challenge and sweeten our understanding of the worlds include Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst, Esi Edugyan and many more.

Learn more here.

Start Date: October 12, 2012
End Date: October 13, 2012

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Patti Smith talks with Paul Muldoon at the New Yorker Festival

Title: Patti Smith talks with Paul Muldoon at the New Yorker Festival

Location: New York, New York, US
Description: Described as the “Lollapalooza for the urban intelligentsia” (Gawker), the New Yorker Festival features a plethora of arts delights that includes poet Paul Muldoon interviewing legendary musician and songwriter Patti Smith.

Learn more here.

Date: October 6, 2012

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Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, and George Saunders talk Utopia/Dystopia at the New Yorker Festival

Title: Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, and George Saunders talk Utopia/Dystopia at the New Yorker Festival

Location: New York, New York, US
Description: Described as the “Lollapalooza for the urban intelligentsia” (Gawker), the New Yorker Festival features a plethora of arts delights that includes a discussion of Utopia/Dystopia with Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, and George Saunders.

Learn more here.

Date: October 5, 2012

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New Yorker Festival

Title: New Yorker Festival

Location: New York, New York, US
Description: Described as the “Lollapalooza for the urban intelligentsia” (Gawker), the New Yorker Festival overflows with readings, panels, performances and more by contemporary artists spanning all of the disciplines … and crossing disciplines to spark the most interesting conversations and reactions.

Learn more here.

Start Date: October 5, 2012
End Date: October 7, 2012

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Louder Than a Bomb – screening of film about youth poetry slam

Title: Louder Than a Bomb – screening of film about youth poetry slam

Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Description: Film synopsis: Every year, more than six hundred teenagers from over sixty Chicago area schools gather for the world’s largest youth poetry slam, a competition known as “Louder Than a Bomb”. Founded in 2001, Louder Than a Bomb is the only event of its kind in the country—a youth poetry sslam built from the beginning around teams.

The film will be screened at Selwyn House School, 95 Cote St. Antoine Road, Westmount. A question-and-answer session (with co-producer Greg Jacobs) will follow the screening.

Tickets ($10 each) are available at:
Livres Babar (46 St. Anne St., Pointe Claire – Phone: 514-694-0380)
Babar en ville (1235 Greene Avenue, Westmount – Phone: 514-931-0606)

For more details and additional ticket information, contact Carol-Ann Hoyte (email: kidlitfan1972@yahoo.ca, phone: 514-738-3413).

Learn more here.

Date: October 17, 2012

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Song for the Song of the White-Throated Sparrow

Don McKay

copyright ©2000 by Don McKay



Before it can stop itself, the mind
has leapt up inferences, crag to crag,
the obvious arpeggio. Where there is a doorbell
there must be a door – a door
meant to be opened from inside.
Door means house means – wait a second –
but already it is standing on a threshold previously
known to be thin air, gawking. The Black Spruce
point to it: clarity,
melting into ordinary morning, true
north. Where the sky is just a name,
a way to pitch a little tent in space and sleep
for five unnumbered seconds.

Notes on the Poem

The title of this poem just might send you off to discover what the song of the white-throated sparrow actually is, or to hear it again if you've encountered it before. You'll discover or be reminded that it's a surprisingly ornate song issuing from such a wee avian, just as this brief poem is a deceptively rich puzzle.

Right from the start, this poem makes you pause, consider, question and certainly not take initial impressions at face value. For example, it isn't about a sparrow or the sparrow's song, but it's a song for ... the song? Nothing that follows seems to be paying tribute to birdsong, mind you. Someone's mind is racing, though, with a fast-paced musicality ("the obvious arpeggio") that could be just like the sparrow's intricate call.

As we leap from doorbell to door, we stop to make sure that yes, a door "opened from the inside" is one where someone is home and is going to greet us. But - "wait a second" - is there indeed a house behind the door? Is anybody home?

As the mind races on, to

"clarity,
melting into ordinary morning"

does the pace here, threatening to become manic, suddenly calm down as "true north" and possibly some direction indeed becomes clear? Does that racing mind finally find

"a way to pitch a little tent in space and sleep
for five unnumbered seconds."

... and, in the time it takes for the sparrow to trill its complicated scales, has that mind found peace?
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Hampstead & Highgate Literary Festival

Title: Hampstead & Highgate Literary Festival

Location: London, England
Description: The fourth Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival is a celebration of writing for readers of all ages, which reflects the area’s strong literary heritage. The festival offers nearly 60 events to choose from over three full days, including a number of creative workshops.

Learn more here.

Start Date: September 9, 2012
End Date: September 11, 2012

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Paul Farley and Deryn Rees-Jones read at Manchester Literature Festival

Title: Paul Farley and Deryn Rees-Jones read at Manchester Literature Festival

Location: Manchester, England
Description: MLF and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester present two of the UK’s most acclaimed poets. Paul Farley has published four poetry collections with Picador, most recently The Dark Film which is shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot Prize. A regular contributor to the BBC, his work has won many awards, including the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, and is celebrated for marrying thought and form with humour and feeling. Deryn Rees-Jones has published four collections with Seren: The Memory Tray, Signs Round a Dead Body, Quiver and her new collection, Burying the Wren, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was named one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets and one of the Mslexia’s TopTen UK women poets in 2004.

Learn more here.

Date: October 15, 2012