Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) LXXXIV: Toronto’s most diverse & brave poetry reading + open mic series

Featured poets: Leslie Roach & Sam Cheuk

Host: Bänoo Zan

Leslie Roach is a Montreal-born poet, writer and lawyer. She is currently based in Ottawa, where she works for the Supreme Court of Canada. She previously worked for the United Nations, and has lived in Italy, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya and Senegal. Finish this Sentence, her debut collection of poetry, is about healing from the effects of racism, finding one’s voice and power, and claiming one’s human right to be happy. She has been featured on major media platforms, including CBC and CBC Books, and has partnered with national brands like DeSerres. She is an advocate for finding one’s power through practicing mindfulness.

Sam Cheuk is a Hong Kong-born Canadian author of Love Figures, Deus et Machina, and Postscripts from a City Burning. He is currently working on Marginalia, which examines the function, execution, and generative potential behind censorship. Cheuk lives in Vancouver.

About Shab-e She’r:

Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) is Toronto’s most diverse and brave monthly poetry reading and open mic series. It was founded by Bänoo Zan in November 2012, two years after she immigrated to Canada. Since then, we have been bridging the gap among diverse Toronto poetry communities and have so far featured more than a hundred poets and musicians. And close to 2000 people have shared their poetry, music, songs and stories on our open mic. We have featured poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religions (or lack thereof), and poetic voices, styles and visions. Shab-e She’r core values are diversity and freedom of expression.

Attendance & Open Mic:

Dear poet, writer, lover of words,

If you join us to listen and enjoy, you are most welcome. You are the reason we create and run events. We are deeply grateful for your support.

During the event, the participants will be muted. You are encouraged to turn your camera off except during your performance. This is to allocate as much of the bandwidth as possible to performers.

The private chat function will be disabled to keep the online event safe. Participants can use the public chat function. They can also message the hosts and moderators.

Please do not record anyone without their permission.

Open Mic:

There is no pressure to perform or to join the open mic. Though it is a good idea to consider sharing a poem esp. if you are a woman, a refugee or an immigrant, a member of a visible minority, IBPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, or if you have a unique perspective that is good to share with others. Shab-e She’r values are diversity and freedom of expression. We value peace, broad-mindedness, truth, and inclusion. We aim to build a community, not an exclusive club.

Open mic slots are 3 minutes or one poem (whichever is shorter), depending on the number of people who sign up. Open mic time includes all the introductory explanations, background information, and anything else you say.

If you wish to join the open mic, select your poem, rehearse and time yourself beforehand. On the day, join the online event no later than 6:45 PM. Turn your camera and audio on and message Bänoo Zan.

Then, turn your camera and mic off and wait to be put on deck or invited to share. The order of performances will not be the same as the order of sign-ups.

Kathleen Jamie: Poetry at the Heart of our Culture

Kathleen Jamie, poet and essayist, was born in Renfrewshire in 1962. Her work concerns nature, travel and culture. Her poetry collections to date include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward Prize. Her non-fiction includes the highly regarded books Findings and Sightlines, both regarded as important contributions to the ‘new nature writing’. Her most recent poetry collection, The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015, and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

She is presently serving as the Scottish Makar, or National Poet.

Winter Words welcomes you to a week-long celebration of all things literary. Our interactive festival brings together well-known and much-loved authors, playwrights, poets, adventurers, broadcasters and TV personalities to participate in interviews, Q&A’s and discussions – all Zoomed straight into your home from our virtual auditorium stage!

CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Bertrand Bickersteth & Karina Vernon

We are excited to announce that on Friday, February 18, the CLC will host poet, playwright, and essayist Bertrand Bickersteth in conversation with literary scholar Karina Vernon. Vernon’s The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology features poetry by Bickersteth, for whom Alberta is at once a “central source of inspiration” and an “unwilling muse.” Introduced by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, they will join us from 2 to 3 p.m. MST via Zoom.
Karina Vernon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2020 and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) she is working on a book project on the politics and aesthetics of relation of Black Canadian cultural achievement, including writing, music, film, and visual art.
Bertrand Bickersteth is a poet, playwright, essayist and educator who was born in Sierra Leone, raised in Alberta, partly educated in the U.K., and completely resident in the U.S. for several years. In 2021, CBC named him a Black writer to watch. His collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was a finalist for multiple awards and won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and the 2021 High Plains Book Award in the category of First Book. He has been a contributor/columnist for CBC’s The Next Chapter as well as the CBC project Black on the Prairies. His most recent work was published in The Walrus (poetry) and The Sprawl (essay). His TEDx talk is called The Weight of Words. He is currently working on a new collection of poems highlighting the history of Black cowboys in western Canada. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and writes about Black identity on the Prairies.
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from mantra of no return

Kaie Kellough

copyright ©2019



people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from
india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people
predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated.
whips patterned rays into people. people arose. people rayed outward to
toronto, london, boo york. people raided people. people penned the past.
people roved over on planes. people talked over people. people rented places.
people planted people in people. people raided plantations. people prayed.
people re-fried. people died and didn’t get second glances. people won
scholarships and vanished. people lived atop people. people represented
people. people drain-brained. people studied for the common entrance.
people paraded. people stumbled and tranced. people took two steps
backward. people simmered and boiled over. people plantain. people orphan.
people sugarcane. people undocumented. people underground. people never
lauded, landed. people arrived but. people             . people departed and
arrived again. people retreaded. people stole knowing. people plantation.
people horizon. people done run from people. people arrived not knowing
their patterns. people arrived riven, alone in the world. people made their
war from time. people hailed from climes. people fanned their spreading.
people cleaved unto people. people writhed over / under people. people
arrived over / under people

Notes on the Poem

Our Poem of the Week is excerpted from the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Magnetic Equator (McClelland & Stewart) by poet Kaie Kellough. 

Of the collection the judges said: ““Speaking to Caribbean and hemispheric migrations, the poems in Magnetic Equator recall trouble, hybridity, steep falls, continuance, and elaboration. Taking on influence, place, and racialized diasporic experience as it draws language into geographic drifts and historic collisions, these are voicings that cascade and collect ‘an accent adrift in its second language / over a b-side version of empire’. Singing of exile and scattering, the text negotiates survival and revolt as it moves with the surety and complexity of improvisation and collaboration.” 

Watch Kaie Kellough from his collecting in this hypnotizing and visually captivating Griffin Poetry Prize video!

bpNichol Chapbook Award – 2022 Call for Submissions opens

The bpNichol Chapbook Award recognizes excellence in Canadian poetry in English published in chapbook form within Canada. The prize is awarded to a poetry chapbook judged to be the best submitted. The author receives $4,000 and the publisher receives $500. Awarded continuously since 1986, the bpNichol Chapbook Award is currently administered by the Meet the Presses collective.

Chapbooks should be not less than 10 pages and not more than 48 pages. The chapbooks must have been published between January 1st and December 31st of the previous year (2021), and the poet(s) must be Canadian.

Interested authors or publishers should submit three copies of eligible chapbooks. Translations into English from other languages are eligible, as long as the translator is Canadian or a permanent resident of Canada. Chapbooks by two or more poets who are Canadian or permanent residents of Canada are also eligible.

Please include the Submission Form with your entry.

Submissions must be sent by Canada Post or courier (and not hand-delivered to a Meet The Presses collective member) and include a completed submission form or accurate facsimile, a brief CV of the author, including address, telephone number, and email address. Publisher contact information (contact person, mailing address, email address, and telephone number) must also be included. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

The opening date for receipt of submissions is February 17, 2022, and they will be accepted until May 31, 2022. If submission confirmation has not been received by email by June 30, 2022, please send a query to Gary Barwin at himself@garybarwin.com.

Please send submissions to:
Meet the Presses / bpNichol Chapbook Award
c/o 180 Dufferin St. Hamilton ON L8S 3N7

The cash prize to the author has been generously donated by an anonymous donor. The prize to the publisher has been generously donated by writers Karl Jirgens and Michael Dean. All chapbooks submitted are archived at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Chapbooks written by members of the Meet the Presses collective are ineligible for the award. Authors of chapbooks published by members of the collective remain eligible for the award, but member-publishers forgo the prize money.

AfriCanLit: Contours & Conflicts

The February Giller Master panel will celebrate Black History Month and will focus on writer’s craft, the relationship between art, community and politics, and some of the interesting debates/discussions happening within contemporary Black life.

Populating the panel are authors Donna Bailey Nurse, Francesca Ekwuyasi, Antonio Michael Downing and H. Nigel Thomas.

Scott Fraser, publisher and president of Dundurn Press, will moderate the panel.

Humber Lit Review Deadline

The Humber Literary Review, a literary and arts magazine, is excited to announce that it is now accepting submissions for its biennial emerging* Canadian writers fiction contest. All winning entries, including three honourable mentions, will be published in print in the Spring 2022 issue.

*An Emerging Writer = A Canadian writer who has not yet published a book.

Contest judge Zoe Whittall is the author of four novels and three volumes of poetry. Her third novel, The Best Kind of People, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is currently being adapted for a limited series by director Sarah Polley. It was Indigo’s #1 Book of 2016 and a Heather’s Pick, and was chosen as Best Book of the Year by the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life and the National Post. Her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, won a Lambda Literary Award for trans fiction and was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her debut novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and is being adapted for screen. Whittall sold her first sitcom, Breaking, to CTV in 2014 and recently optioned the half-hour comedy Wellville to CBC. She has worked as a writer on the Emmy Award–winning comedy Schitt’s Creek and the Baroness Von Sketch Show, for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. Zoe Whittall has an MFA from the University of Guelph. Born on a sheep farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, she has called Toronto home since 1997. Her latest novel, The Spectacular, was recently published.

Prizes
In addition to publication in the Humber Literary Review, we offer the following prizes:
First Place: $500
Second Place: $300
Third Place: $200

Three stories earning honourable mention will also be published; these writers will receive $100 each.

Entry fee: $20 per submission of one story not longer than 2500 words.
(All contest entrants receive a one-year subscription to the HLR!)

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from Hawk

Kamau Brathwaite

copyright ©2005



And so this foreday morning w/out light or choice
i cannot swim
the stone, i can’t hold on to water, so i drown

i swallow left, i turn & fall-
ow into fear & blight, a night so deep it make you turn
& weep the line of spiders of yr future you see spinn-

ing here, their silver
voice of tears, their lid. less jewel eyes .
all thru this buffeting eternity i toss i burn

and when i rise leviathan from the deep . black shining from my skin
of seals, blask tooth, less pebbles mine the shore
haunted by dust & bromes . wrist, watches w/out tone or tides, communion

w/out broken
hands, x-
plosions of frustration, the trans-

substantiation of the sweat
of hate, the absent ruby lips
upon the wrinkle rim

of wine . i wake to tick
to tell you that in these loud waters of my land
there is no root no hope no cloud no dream no sail canoe or dang, le miracle .

good day cannot repay bad night. our teeth snarl snapp-
ing even at halp-
less angels’ evenings’ meetings’ melting steel

in this new farmer garden of the earth’s delights
this staggering stranger of injustices
come rumbelling down the wheel and grave-

yard of the wind, down the scythe narrow streets, clear
air for a moment. clear
innocence whe we are running. so so so so so many. the crowd flow-

to tell you that in these loud waters of my land there is no root no hope no cloud no dream no sail canoe or dang, le miracle . good day cannot repay bad night. our teeth snarl snapp- ing even at halp- less angels’ evenings’ meetings’ melting steel in this new farmer garden of the earth’s delights this staggering stranger of injustices come rumbelling down the wheel and grave- yard of the wind, down the scythe narrow streets, clear air for a moment. clear innocence whe we are running. so so so so so many. the crowd flow-

ing over Brooklyn Bridge. so so so many . i had not thought death
had undone so many melting away into what is now sighing . light
calp from the clear avenue forever

our souls sometimes far out ahead already of our surfaces
and our life looking back
salt. as in Bhuj. in Grenada. Guernica. Amritsar. Tajikistan

the sulphur-stricken cities of the plains of Aetna. Pelée, ab Napoli & Krakatoa
the young window-widow baby-mothers of the prostitutes .
looking back looking back as in Bosnia, the Sudan. Chernobyl

Oaxaca terremoto incomprehende. al’fata el Jenin. the Bhopal
babies sucking toxic milk, our growing heavy furry tongues
accustom to the what-is-the-word-that-is-not-here-in-English beyond ashadenfreude
not at all like fado or duende

Notes on the Poem

Our Poem of the Week is by Kamau Brathwaite, from the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Born to Slow Horses.

Of the collection the judges said: “To read Kamau Brathwaite is to enter into an entire world of human histories and natural histories, beautiful landscapes and their destruction, children’s street songs, high lyricism, court documents, personal letters, literary criticism, sacred rites, eroticism and violence, the dead and the undead, confession and reportage. An epic of one man (containing multitudes) in the African diaspora, Brathwaite’s world even has its own orthography and typography, demanding total attention to the poem, forbidding casual glances. Born to Slow Horses is a major book from a major poet. Here political realities turn into musical complexities, voices overlap, history becomes mythology, spirits appear in photographs. And, in it what may well be the first enduring poem on the disaster of 9/11, Manhattan becomes another island in the poet’s personal archipelago, as the sounds of Coleman Hawkins transform into the words and witnesses and survivors. Throughout Born to Slow Horses, as in his earlier books, Brathwaite has invented a new linguistic music for subject matter that is all his own.”

Watch Kamau Brathwaite read from this collection at Koerner Hall here.

Translation, Poetry, Resistance: Don Mee Choi in conversation with Uljana Wolf & Sung Un Gang

Save the date!
Don Mee Choi and Uljana Wolf will be in conversation with Sung Un Gang at Literaturhaus Berlin (livestreamed).
Don Mee Choi was the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize International winner for Autobiography Of Death, translated from the Korean written by Kim Hyesoon. Uljana Wolf, who is currently working on a translation of Choi’s collection DMZ Colony, has also translated our 2021 Griffin winner Valzhyna Mort‘s work into German.

Banff Centre – Computational Writing Deadline

The Computational Writing residency will allow writers to explore working at the intersection of computing and literary art, not only by using pre-developed tools but also by directly undertaking programming. The residency will consider how computation can be means for reflecting on one’s own writing process as well as for processing anything from small, curated collections of words to large text corpora.

This self-directed residency offers the opportunity to work away from the constraints of everyday life. Delve deep into your creative project and take advantage of the artistic community of your peers around you. The program provides opportunities for consultations with mentors, and optional group sessions led by guest mentors that allow writers to explore literary techniques, aspects, and devices that you may find useful in your practice.

This flexible program allows you to choose the amount of support you are looking for. All program elements are optional.