Title: Catriona Wright and Spencer Gordon at Tree Reading Series
Date: May 8, 2018
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Description: Running since May 9, 1980, the Tree Reading Series (Tree) is one of Canada’s longest-running literary events and an essential part of Ottawa’s vibrant literary community. Tree is a non-profit organization that supports established and emerging writers from Ottawa and across Canada by offering a supportive public venue for writers to present their own work and to benefit from exposure to the work of other writers. In providing this service, Tree hopes to inspire and sustain the development of the literary community in Ottawa and to promote Ottawa as an important community for Canadian literary arts.
The evening features a workshop on a topic to be announced with Jeff Blackman, readings by Catriona Wright and Spencer Gordon, and then an open mic.
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Description: Running since May 9, 1980, the Tree Reading Series (Tree) is one of Canada’s longest-running literary events and an essential part of Ottawa’s vibrant literary community. Tree is a non-profit organization that supports established and emerging writers from Ottawa and across Canada by offering a supportive public venue for writers to present their own work and to benefit from exposure to the work of other writers. In providing this service, Tree hopes to inspire and sustain the development of the literary community in Ottawa and to promote Ottawa as an important community for Canadian literary arts.
The evening features a workshop on a topic to be announced with Cyril Dabydeen, a reading by Ronna Bloom, and then an open mic.
Title: Tree Press Chapbook Contest submission deadline
Date: January 15, 2018
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Description: This contest is for those who come to keep the seats warm at The Tree Reading Series, those who come to the Seed workshops, or are regulars at the Tree open mic readings. The prize is now $250 and ten copies of your chapbook!
Location: Glasgow, Scotland Description: For those interested in developing their own poetry, Donny O’Rourke is offering a new class open to poets at every level of ability, experience and ambition. This exciting new class begins on Wednesday, 17th January, 2018, but enrolment is ongoing.
Donny’s many ‘graduates’ have gone on to gain praise, prizes and publication, with several students proceeding to Masters courses and Doctorates. Other writers simply enjoyed the camaraderie, stimulus and constructive candour of the task based, informal but never casual weekly meetings.
Although there is no paper yet, no ink
There is already the hand
That moves, needing to write
Words never shouted from balconies of rock
Into the concave hills
To one far away, whose hair
On a collarbone resembles
That break in the dunes, that tufted ridge
He must have passed, faring away.
If the railway does not exist yet, there is, even
Now, a nostril to recognize
The smells of fatigue and arrival,
An ear cocked for the slow beginning,
Deliberated, of movement, wheels rolling.
If the telephone has not been invented
By anyone, still the woman in the scratchy shirt,
Strapped to her bed, on a dark evening,
With rain beginning outside, is sending
Impulses that sound and stop and ask
Again and again for help, from the one
Who is far away, slowly
Beginning her day’s work,
Or, perhaps, from one already in his grave.
Notes on the Poem
How does Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's poem "Come Back", from her 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection The Sun-fish, manage to hold us in such a surprisingly intense grip? Ní Chuilleanáin uses a potent poetic method to imbue her words with a power to connect reader and poem, even as, ironically, the poem depicts breakdowns in connections.
We've scrutinized once before the poetic device in question - synecdoche - in Michael Symmons Roberts' poem "The Hands." Essentially, with synecdoche a part of something represents the whole, or a whole represents a part. While Symmons Roberts used the method to shocking and macabre effect, Ní Chuilleanáin deploys it here with more poignant results.
"the hand
That moves, needing to write"
is the first gently disembodied indication that someone is frustated in and unable to communicate.
The sense of that someone is departing or has departed is captured in this both striking and intimate juxtaposition:
"To one far away, whose hair
On a collarbone resembles
That break in the dunes, that tufted ridge
He must have passed, faring away."
The phrases "far away" and "faring away" frame this beautifully, too.
All senses are attuned accordingly, including those of smell and hearing, delicately referenced by "nostril" and "an ear cocked." The cumulative synecdochical effect is of someone on high alert. At the same time, there is a sense of someone yearning - perhaps hopelessly - for the departed to return.
"With rain beginning outside, is sending
Impulses tht sound and stop and ask
Again and again for help"
... and oh, that phrase "far away" is repeated wistfully.
The theme of disconnection recurs in subsequent work by Ní Chuilleanáin. Listen to the haunting echoes in this poem from her 2015 collection The Boys of Bluehill. A plaintive and almost chilling link between the two poems is the thwarted desire - "needing to write" - to communicate.
Start Date: February 1, 2018 End Date: February 28, 2018
Description: Write one haiku a day for the month of February! Why February? Because it’s the shortest month – for the world’s shortest genre of poetry. Join poets around the world who pledge to write at least one haiku a day for National Haiku Writing Month during the year’s shortest month. Or write haiku every day of every month, all year round, on the NaHaiWriMo site on Facebook, with daily writing prompts to inspire you.
Location: Canada Description: This award is a program created by the League of Canadian Poets’ National Council to promote the art of Haiku, and to celebrate Haiku Month in February! The winner of the Haiku contest will receive 10 t-shirts printed with the winning poem, and will have their work featured on the League’s website and social media. The winning poem will also be included in the 2018 Poem in Your Pocket Day booklet, published internationally each April.
Title: the shadows are only beginning to reveal themselves – photography and text by Leslie Greentree
Start Date: January 5, 2018 End Date: February 10, 2018
Location: Red Deer, Alberta, Canada Description: Writer Leslie Greentree debuts her first art show, triptychs of photos and text poking around themes of death and loss from oblique angles.
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Description: The most diverse poetry reading and open mic in Toronto, Shab-e She’r has been bridging the gap between diverse poetry communities, bringing together people from different ethnicities, nationalities, ages, disabilities, religions (or lack thereof), poetic styles, voices and visions. At Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) we don’t just wait for diversity to happen: we actively invite it. Please spread the word through social media and other means. Let our event become as diverse as we are.
Host of the evening is Bänoo Zan and the featured poets are Canisia Lubrin and David C. Brydges.
January long light
Janus I see you
God of locks and doorways
two-faced looking in Capricorn
Capricious like the snowy owl
irruption
We fear heavy body collisions
January time of doors
time looking back on itself
God of gates
spelt and salt
They say when you
walk through a door
you can forget what
you came for
Notes on the Poem
Over the holiday season, we're revisiting some Poem of the Week favourites. This one comes from Hoa Nguyen's collection Violet Energy Ingots, shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Among her work's many fascinating attributes, how Nguyen refashions language, often swiftly over the course of a brief poem like "January", is simultaneously an exhilarating pleasure and an inviting challenge to the reader.
"January" offers subtle word shifts in its succinct 15 lines, including January / Janus, Capricorn / capricious and spelt / salt. "The slippages in language" is the rather lovely way the 2017 judges characterize this method Nguyen uses with captivating regularity throughout this collection. How that method gently connects words within the poem captures both how language evolves and how we react to what that language denotes and connotes.
The name for the first month of the calendar year comes from the Latin "Ianuarius" named after the Latin word for door (ianua). From that same root comes Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, as symbolized by gates, doors, doorways and openings. In essence, the month of January is both the start of the new year and as it is celebrated in many traditions, is the opening to new beginnings.
In the closing lines of her poem ...
"They say when you
walk through a door
you can forget what
you came for"
Nguyen tweaks the idea of being hopeful as one goes through a door with just the shadow of a doubt, that voluntary or involuntary memory loss might attend what is supposed to be a positive moving forward. Just as she deftly shifts words, she as elegantly shifts the tone of what the poem suggests by concluding with a hint of a cautionary note.
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
