Title: A Celebration of 10 Years of The Best Canadian Poetry
Date: October 29, 2017
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Description: Chosen from the first nine volumes of this innovative series, the anniversary volume takes the pulse of the last decade of Canadian poetry with ninety superb poems that have excelled—twice—at the test of Best. Join series editors Molly Peacock and Anita Lahey, previous guest editors, and a constellation of Canada’s twice-tested poet-contributors for a special tribute to ten stellar years of this landmark series.
Participants include Peter Chiykowski, George Elliott Clarke, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Cara-Lyn Morgan, A.F. Moritz, Elizabeth Ross, David Seymour, Bardia Sinaee, Karen Solie, Carmine Starnino and Priscila Uppal.
Description: In fact, every day is #todayspoem day. With the #todayspoem hashtag, you can share an excerpt from any poem that happens to have made your day. Everyone shares their #todayspoem experience a little differently, with an image, a link, an excerpt, whatever fits in a tweet. Each tweet is enough to spur a moment of delight or recognition or, handily favorited in Twitter, is a lovely bookmark for future poetry explorations.
Description: In fact, every day is #todayspoem day. With the #todayspoem hashtag, you can share an excerpt from any poem that happens to have made your day. Everyone shares their #todayspoem experience a little differently, with an image, a link, an excerpt, whatever fits in a tweet. Each tweet is enough to spur a moment of delight or recognition or, handily favorited in Twitter, is a lovely bookmark for future poetry explorations.
Description: In fact, every day is #todayspoem day. With the #todayspoem hashtag, you can share an excerpt from any poem that happens to have made your day. Everyone shares their #todayspoem experience a little differently, with an image, a link, an excerpt, whatever fits in a tweet. Each tweet is enough to spur a moment of delight or recognition or, handily favorited in Twitter, is a lovely bookmark for future poetry explorations.
Location: Brampton, Ontario, Canada Description: The Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) celebrates diversity in literature by promoting diverse authors and stories in Brampton, Ontario – one of Canada’s most culturally diverse cities.
Title: The Young Buck Poetry Prize submission deadline
Date: November 1, 2017
Description: Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2) magazine offers a poetry contest exclusively for writers under the age of 35. The YOUNG BUCK poetry prize will be awarded to the author of the single best submitted poem, along with $1000 and publication in CV2. Two honourable mentions will also be awarded, each with a cash prize.
Title: 2017 Southern California Poetry Festival (SoCalPoFest)
Start Date: October 28, 2017 End Date: October 29, 2017
Location: Walnut, California, US Description: The SoCalPoFest is an annual poetry festival that relocates each year to a different Southern California community. For 2017, the second annual, the event will feature themed readings and workshops. The SoCalPoFest is dedicated to preserving the diversity of voices within the community, and this diversity extends across cultural lines and lines related to schools of poetic thought. SoCalPoFest wants to hear poetry from all who make a practice of it, regardless of poetic affiliation or cultural group. This is how we come to understand and appreciate varying experiences and modes of thought.
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Description: The warlock of words himself – Jeramy Dodds – is hitting the west coast. His newest collection of poetry, Drakkar Noir, is a haunting, yet hilarious depiction of a journey to and fro the furthest limits of the human experiment. He will be reading at The Paper Hound Bookstore.
Title: Celebrating Feminist Experimentation with Daphne Marlatt and Erin Moure
Date: October 27, 2017
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada Description: Join Concordia University’s Writers Read program for an evening “Celebrating Feminist Experimentation” with Daphne Marlatt and Erin Moure.
Green, how much I want you green. Great stars of white frost come with the fish of darkness that opens the road of dawn.
– Somnambular Ballad (Stephen Spender and G.L. Gili, trs.)
Landscape of crystals
rock salt and icebergs
white trees, white grasses,
hills forged from pale metals
padlock and freeze me
in the Pleistocene.
See my skin wither
heart become brittle
cast as the Snow Queen. Green, how much I want you green.
Green oak, green ilex
green weeping willow
green grass and green clover
all my lost youth.
Come before springtime
before the brown locust
come like the rain
that blows in the night
and melts to fine dust great stars of white frost.
Water, sweet water
chortling, running
the chinooks of my childhood
warm wind, the ripple
of icicles dripping
from my frozen palace.
How sweet the water
moonstones and vodka
poured from a chalice with the fish of darkness.
Come water, come springtime
come my green lover
with a whistle of grass
to call me to clover.
A key for my lock
small flowers for my crown.
The Ice Age is over,
green moss and green lichen
will paint a green lawn that opens the road of dawn.
Notes on the Poem
In other Poem of the Week selections from P.K. Page's 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted Coal and Roses ("The Blue Guitar" and "The Age of Gold"), we observed Page's skillful and innovative uses of the glosa form. Page drew from a diverse range of artists for the opening sequences of each glosa in the collection, which use a four-line sequence or quatrain from the work of another poet. With "Green, How Much I Want You Green", the poet providing the starting point was Federico García Lorca.
From Lorca's 1924 poem "Somnambule Ballad" (translated by Stephen Spender and G.L. Gili), Page selected a section capturing strikingly the surrealistic elements that informed significant parts of his work. From there, Page follows the glosa constraints to compose four ten-line stanzas where the tenth line of each stanza is a line from the other poet's passage, used in consecutive order. Glosa rules also dictate that the poet must make the sixth and ninth lines of each stanza rhyme with the borrowed tenth from the other poet. Page is particularly resourceful with "palace", "chalice" and Lorca's "darkness" in the penultimate stanza.
Just as Page transmutes one poem and form to another through her gorgeously wielded glosa mastery, so did Page's work inspire further poetic alchemy. In a 2011 tribute to Page in The Malahat Review, poet Kirsteen MacLeod adopts the same Lorca quatrain and gently but tellingly riffs on Page's work in her poem, simply titled "Green". Take some time to enjoy MacLeod's variation and her subtle reinterpretation of the glosa form. It's intriguing and moving to see Page's work as the centerpiece of a beautiful poetic relay, with the baton passed from Lorca to her to MacLeod paying lovely respect.
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
