Recent Events
September 11, 2009 to March 10, 2010
March 07, 2010
Michael Turner
Details
February 27, 2010
Michael Barnholden
Details
February 25, 2010
Sina Queyras
Lydia Kwa
Emily Fedoruk
Details
February 22, 2010
Gregory Betts
Details
January 30, 2010
Larissa Lai
Jaqueline Turner
Aaron Peck
George Bowering
Details
January 17, 2010
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Details
January 16, 2010
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Details
January 08, 2010
Charles Bernstein
Details
November 28, 2009
David Marriott
Details
November 27, 2009
David Marriott
Details
November 26, 2009
Jordan Scott
Jason Christie
Details
November 19, 2009
Stephen Collis
Oana Avasilichioaei
Details
November 17, 2009
Paul Dutton
Jen Currin
Christine LeClerc
Roy Miki
Details
November 15, 2009
Oana Avasilichioaei
Erin Moure
Details
November 12, 2009
Stephen Collis
Oana Avasilichioaei
Details
November 10, 2009
Rita Wong
Larissa Lai
Kim Duff
Details
October 28, 2009
Larissa Lai
Rita Wong
Kim Duff
Details
October 20, 2009
Lisa Robertson
Ken Belford
Details
October 19, 2009
Ken Belford
Lisa Robertson
Details
October 14, 2009
Jordan Scott
Jason Christie
Details
October 10, 2009
Steve McCaffery
Steve McCaffery
Details
Michael Turner
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Sunday, March 07, 2010
to show, to give, to make it be there
Michael Turner is a
Vancouver-based writer of fiction, criticism and song. His books
include Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer's Poem and 8x10. As a
collaborator, he has written scripts with Stan Douglas, co-authored
public artworks with Geoffrey Farmer and composed with Andrea Young.
Over the years, Turner has instigated in a
numerous curatorial projects, including the Reading Railroad reading
series, the Malcolm Lowry Room, film programmes at the Pacific
Cinematheque, and most recently, the exhibition "to show, to give, to
make it be there": Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver, 1954-1969
at SFU Gallery (Burnaby), which he will discuss on March 7th. Turner is this year's Ellen and Warren Tallman SFU Writer-in-Residence.
Michael Turner will be giving a curatorial talk and slide presentation about the show "to show, to give, to
make it be there" of Vancouver art in the 1960s. If we can get the mimeograph machine working, the talk will conclude with a hands-on broadside editioning of a new poem by Maxine Gadd.
Michael Barnholden
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Michael Barnholden presents a talk and slideshow based on his new book Circumstances Alter Photographs: Captain James Peters' Reports from the War of 1885.
Circumstances publishes for the first time together the works of
James Peters, who took the world's first combat photographs during the
North-West Rebellion and took the first photograph of Louis Riel as a
prisoner of the Canadian Army on May 26, 1885. Circumstances Alter
Photographs presents 82 photographs documenting events from the Battle
of Fish Creek through the Battle of Batoche to the pursuit of Native
leaders ending at Loon Lake. A forgotten view on a key event in
Canadian history, the book also presents Peters' war correspondence and
an all-new essay by Michael Barnholden situating the photographs as art
and document.
Michael Barnholden lives and works in the Asthma Flats neighbourhood of Vancouver. Publishes LINEbooks, edits West Coast Line, teaches at Emily Carr U. Recent books include Circumstances Alter Photographs (Talonbooks 2009), Gabriel Dumont Speaks (new translation Talonbooks 2009), Street Stories: 100 Years of Homelessness (Anvil 2007), Reading the Riot Act: A Brief History of Riots in Vancouver (Anvil 2005), Works (Tsunami 1999) and Writing Class: The KSW Anthology (New Star 1995.)
Sina Queyras
Lydia Kwa
Emily Fedoruk
Read at
Rhizome Café
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Co-produced with the ON EDGE series
* the poetics of space: feminist writers in dialogueA poetry reading followed with a panel discussion moderated by Meredith Quartermain.
Sina Queyras grew up on the road in western Canada and she has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia and Calgary where she was Markin Flanagan Writer in Residence. She is the author most recently of Unleashed (BookThug), a selection of posts from the rst four years of her blog. Her previous collection of poetry, Expressway (Coach House 2009) was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and a selection from that book won Gold in the National Magazine Awards. Lemon Hound (Coach House 2006) won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. In 2005 she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books. She is contributing editor at Drunken Boat where she has curated folios on Conceptual Writing and Visual Poetry. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she currently resides.
Lydia Kwa works as a writer and psychologist. She has published a collection of poems, The Colours of Heroines, and her 1st novel, This Place Called Absence, was nominated for two Canadian and two US literary awards. Her novel The Walking Boy was nominated for the 2006 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her new novel, Pulse, is out in Spring 2010. She is working on a book of poetry entitled sinuous.
Emily Fedoruk is a poet and dancer living in New Westminster, BC. An MA candidate at Simon Fraser University, she is currently conducting research into the social space of malls and their representation in contemporary art and literature. Her 1st book, All Still, was published in Fall 2008 by Linebooks.
Meredith Quartermain's Vancouver Walking won the BC Book Award for Poetry in 2006, and Nightmarker was a finalist for the 2009 Vancouver Book Award. Matter, which came out in 2008, has been described as "prescient, daring." In 2002, she and husband Peter Quartermain founded Nomados Literary Publishers, through which they've published more than 30 books of innovative writing.
Gregory Betts
Read at
The Candahar Bar
Monday, February 22, 2010
Co-Produced with The Candahar Bar.
131.
a new act
begins
in the rushed click
after math
132.
Fatal lies, tight and bright
this becoming of things
that refuse us
and of my mind
the metal
veers forward
133.
o from what powre
this art to kill
this is a
a war to kill
hating, hate
rinsed of life
134.
art transcends
of mind taught
metal minds
135.
Still Shatner
smiles
into the future
136.
What powre is
science art giving?
No beast.
No centre.
No blood.
[from The Others Raisd in Me, 150 re-writes of Shakespeare's sonnet #150]
Gregory Betts is a poet, editor, essayist and teacher originally from Vancouver and Toronto. He is the author of If Language (2005), Haikube (2006), and The Others Raisd in Me
(2009) as well as numerous chapbooks and various bits of ephemera. His
work has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, the United
States, and four other countries. He has edited editions of poetry by
W.W. E. Ross, Raymond Knister and Lawren Harris and, most recently, a
critical edition of selected stories, essays and manifestos by Bertram
Brooker, Canada's first avant-gardist. He is the co-editor of PRECIPICe
literary magazine, and curates the Grey Borders Reading Series. He
lives in St. Catharines where he teaches Canadian and Avant-Garde
literature at Brock University. For more, see
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/betts/
Larissa Lai
Jaqueline Turner
Aaron Peck
George Bowering
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Saturday, January 30, 2010
NOMADOS MOMENT
George Bowering was the founding Poet Laureate of Canada and the author many books such as the novel Burning Water and long poem Kerrisdale Elegies. He’s also the author of Fulgencio. *** "What a necessary poem this is, as USAmericans look for a new President and Cubans without Castro try to keep what they have so hard-won. The grotesque dead hand of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and the deadening grasp of the United Fruit Company, tyrannies of the past right here right now, wrong now, wrong always, implacably here always, the raw sugar of greed lurking beneath the poem’s flat matter-of-fact absurdity, grim comedy’s helpless outrage skittering over monstrous abuse of capital power. Compelling writing, the links between poetry and the political here inescapable. Bowering at his best." - Peter Quartermain
Larissa Lai is the author of Automaton Biographies, the acclaimed novels Salt Fish Girl and When Fox is A Thousand, and also Eggs in the Basement. *** "Procedure-in-a-round, Eggs in the Basement ticks the metronome of everyday diction through looped words and known notions. Text, repeated, collides and colludes meaning, lyric echoic, fierce. Disjunctive narrative swallows its own tail and births eggs into itself. Dim the light and consume immediately". - a.rawlings *** "Eggs in the Basement is a brilliant instance of the contrapuntal improvisation that can occur between writing and thinking. In this long poem Larissa Lai develops these linguistic clefts with such acute awareness and intelligence that each poetic shift triggers a new and surprising message, relentless in an absorption of the cascade of signals at the threshold of potential meaning". - Jeff Derksen
Aaron Peck is the author of the novel The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, and several chapbooks, and also Crepuscule on Mission Street. *** "With all the seductive charm of well-told gossip, this unfolding conversation draws us deep into the mysteries of the current day — money, art, fakery, friendship — even as it skates across the great separating distances of living, a jet plane making serial hops in the course of a long circuitous day. This is magical, compact writing that nevertheless exudes the marvelous, deluded spaciousness and ease of the North American west coast". - Matthew Stadler
Jacqueline Turner is the author of Into the fold, Careful, and Seven Into Even, and also Nomados’s most recent and 33rd publication, The Ends of the Earth. *** "Jacqueline Turner’s work has long impressed with its fine wit and crisp sound textures. She has now gone to the ends of the earth. There, on the furthest extremity, midst the debris of a shipwrecked contemporary world, she writes mash notes to the social heart of language where you/we will either sink or swim—together and alone. “Tantalizing by degrees of omission,” these tiny apertures in the possible lead us towards the minimal light. You/we will fall in love with what is found there, or else lose our way home again". - Steve Collis *** "Turner’s The Ends of the Earth imagines natural erosions and erasures as acceptable and probable at the same time as it refutes a culture of catastrophism and a poetics of evacuation, wherein the subject atomizes away from the densities of daily experience. In this both poignant and wry meditation on the social, addresses are made to requisite shifts of grammar, both in terms of relational enunciations that must be honed and the subject’s fervent readiness for lived and imagined translocations." - Margaret Christakos.
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Sunday, January 17, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS
Jules Boykoff is the author of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). His political writing includes Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (co-authored with Kaia Sand) (Palm Press, 2008), Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007), and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge, 2006). His writing has appeared recently in The Nation, The Guardian, and Wheelhouse Magazine. He teaches politics and writing at Pacific University and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Kaia Sand's book, Remember to Wave, was just released by Tinfish Press. This collection investigates political geography in Portland, Oregon, which takes the form of a poetry walk. She is also the author of a poetry collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). Sand has created several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv, which also published her wee book, lotto. Her poems comprise the text of two books in Jim Dine's Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008). She is currently working on The Happy Valley Project, multi-media collaborations investigating housing foreclosures and finance.
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Saturday, January 16, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS
Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: A series that returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics.
Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: Thematic Abstract
The theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject. These discourses consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is concerned with the limitation of the master's discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst's discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that appear to simply question the master and the university, and as a consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests that the Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social change. Can poetics operate like the analyst's discourse to create a different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these other discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider how we engage with and disseminate them?
- Nancy Gillespie
Charles Bernstein
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Friday, January 08, 2010
Charles Bernstein is the author of 40 books, including All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PENNsound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsund); editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu); co-editor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998 - ); and host and co-producer of LINEbreak and Close Listening, two radio poetry series. He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
One More for the Road
Like comedy never strikes the same place
More than a couple of times unless you
Change costumes and dance with me, dance
Till the furniture turns to props and
All the mops are a chorus of never
Before heard improbabilities, honeyed alibis
For working too hard, mowing the Astroturf,
Cranking the permafrost, watering the microprocessors
On the kids’ conveyor belts. The bird never
Flies as high as an old-fashioned kick
In the carbonization. --They gave me till
Friday to let them know if the job would
Ever be complete. We’re getting there, just
Fall a little further behind by day
And after dark it’s a mule’s paradise.
David Marriott
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Saturday, November 28, 2009
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS
Negotiating the
Social Bond of Poetics is a reading and critical workshop series organised around Lacan's
Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine
Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The series will run for the
equivalent of one academic year, with one writer a month presenting a reading
one evening and running a workshop, which will address the controlling themes,
the following day.
The critical workshops will address the questions raised in the abstract below. Writers will
talk about their own work and other works in relation to these questions.
Participants are invited to read the texts listed at the end of the abstract
and bring their own work or questions to add to the dialogue.
Series organized by Nancy Gillespie and Nikki Reimer, with Nancy acting as the point person. Nancy completed her
PhD on Lacanian subjectivity and poetics at the University of Sussex UK in
2008. She has been a colleague of the London Society of the New Lacanian School
of Psychoanalysis for six years, and will soon be pursuing her Lacanian
training analysis in Paris. Nikki, a Vancouver-based poet, has been a member of
KSW from 2005-2006 and 2009-present. Her first book is forthcoming from Frontenac
House.
David Marriott
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Friday, November 27, 2009
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS
David Marriott's
most recent books are Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman Books, 2008), a volume of
poems, and Haunted Life (Rutgers, 2007), a critical study. A selection of
his work will appear in Roddy Lumsden (ed), Identity Parade: New British and
Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). He is currently a fellow at the
Stanford Humanities Center where he is completing a new book of poetry and
critical study.
Jordan Scott
Jason Christie
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Thursday, November 26, 2009
RespondencyWest
Stephen Collis
Oana Avasilichioaei
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Thursday, November 19, 2009
RespondencyWest
Oana Avasilichioaei is
a poet and translator (French and Romanian). She has published two
collections of poems, feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008) and
Abandon (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), as well as a translation of Romanian
poet Nichita Stănescu, Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006). A
collaborative, book-length work with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a
Chimæra, involving translational and authorial impossibilities is just
out this fall (BookThug). She has given readings and talks on poetry
and translation in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe, and she was the
founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in
Montreal from 2004 to 2009. She is currently the writer-in-residence at
Green College, UBC.
Stephen Collis
is the author of four books of poetry, Mine (New Star 2001), Anarchive
(New Star 2005), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry
Prize, The Commons (Talonbooks 2008)—the latter two form parts of the
on-going “Barricades Project”—and On the Material (Talonbooks 2010). He
is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the
Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe
and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006). He is currently editing
a collection of essays, Reading Duncan Reading, organizing the Charles
Olson Centenary Conference (June 4-6 2010), and continuing to work on
“The Barricades Project.” A member of the Kootenay School of Writing,
he teaches American literature, poetry, and poetics at Simon Fraser
University.
Paul Dutton
Jen Currin
Christine LeClerc
Roy Miki
Read at
The Railway Club
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
co-presented with Memewar / Short Line
Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist, musician, and oral sound artist. He has read and performed, solo and ensemble (the Four Horsemen, CCMC), throughout Europe and the Americas. Most recent works are Several Women Dancing (novel) and Oralizations (CD).
Oana Avasilichioaei
Erin Moure
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Sunday, November 15, 2009
launching Expeditions of a Chimæra (Moure + Avasilichioaei) and My Beloved Wager (Moure)
dear o, will you confess?
Excised from the body, what was coupled
is now words winged with air.
The bridegroom’s face alone against the priest’s stole
with the murmur of a confession.
If I had a tongue yet or still,
I would not stop this tale.
When I lifted my face from the scent of myrrh
and cloth, I would turn
my mouth to you, to hear.
dear e, will you?
In these questions my complete biography. My face
issued from a country that does not exist.
Medieval artifacts of authority: the ports
we pass through. Where all is boundaries
except these words in which we cross with ease.
In such questions I am an artifact.
Do you like this tale of the tongue?
Do you brave?
from “Airways” in Expeditions of a Chimæra
Oana Avasilichioaei has published feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), Abandon (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005) and a translation of Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu, Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006). She was the founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in Montreal from 2004 to 2009 and this fall she is the writer in residence at Green College, UBC. Her latest writing project is a debauched poetic tale about a child, a tyrant and a wolfbat.
Erín Moure’s most recent book of poems is inspired by the medieval Iberian lyric repertoire: O Cadoiro (2007). Her translations of Chus Pato from Galician and (with Robert Majzels) Nicole Brossard from French are widely known – Chus Pato’s m-Talá just appeared in Moure’s English version in spring of 2009. A new book of poetry, O Resplandor, will appear from Anansi in 2010. Moure will be writer in residence at the University of Ottawa from January-April 2010.
Stephen Collis
Oana Avasilichioaei
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Thursday, November 12, 2009
RespondencyWest
Oana Avasilichioaei is
a poet and translator (French and Romanian). She has published two
collections of poems, feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008) and
Abandon (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), as well as a translation of Romanian
poet Nichita Stănescu, Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006). A
collaborative, book-length work with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a
Chimæra, involving translational and authorial impossibilities is just
out this fall (BookThug). She has given readings and talks on poetry
and translation in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe, and she was the
founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in
Montreal from 2004 to 2009. She is currently the writer-in-residence at
Green College, UBC.
Stephen Collis
is the author of four books of poetry, Mine (New Star 2001), Anarchive
(New Star 2005), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry
Prize, The Commons (Talonbooks 2008)—the latter two form parts of the
on-going “Barricades Project”—and On the Material (Talonbooks 2010). He
is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the
Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe
and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006). He is currently editing
a collection of essays, Reading Duncan Reading, organizing the Charles
Olson Centenary Conference (June 4-6 2010), and continuing to work on
“The Barricades Project.” A member of the Kootenay School of Writing,
he teaches American literature, poetry, and poetics at Simon Fraser
University.
Rita Wong
Larissa Lai
Kim Duff
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
RespondencyWest*
Kim Duff
is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,
BC. Her previous research has included avant-garde poetry and global
spatial logic. Her dissertation will focus on contemporary British
literature with a particular focus on literature that engages with
Thatcherism, privitization and urban spatial theory. She has also
recently published a book of poetry, Tube Sock Army, through LINEbooks.
Larissa Lai
is currently an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at the
University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD in English from the
University of Calgary and an MA in Creative Writing from the University
of East Anglia. She is also the author of two novels When Fox Is a
Thousand (Press Gang 1995 and Arsenal Pulp 2004) Salt Fish Girl
(Thomas Allen Publishers 2002) and two poetry books, Sybil Unrest (with
Rita Wong) (Line Books 2009) and Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp
2009). Her chapbook Eggs in the Basement was recently published by
Nomados.
Rita Wong
has written three books: sybil unrest (with Larissa Lai, 2008), forage
(2007), and monkeypuzzle (1998). Wong has received the Dorothy Livesay
Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer
Award. An Assistant Professor at Emily Carr, she is currently
researching the poetics of water.
Larissa Lai
Rita Wong
Kim Duff
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
RespondencyWest
Lisa Robertson
Ken Belford
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
RespondencyWest
(formerly Influency West)
Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and lived for many years in Vancouver, before moving to France, and then California. Her most recent book is Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House 2009). R’s Boat will be out with University of California Press in 2010. She has been the recipient of the Relit Award and the bp Nichol Chapbook Award, and has taught and held residencies at the Kootenay School of Writing, California College of the Arts, University of Cambridge, Capilano College, University of California Berkeley, University of California San Diego, American University of Paris and the Naropa Institute. She is currently working collaboratively on sound and video-based projects.
Ken Belford has published four books of poetry: Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, and ecologue, as well as 15 chapbooks. Belford’s poetics blend borders. He is a self-educated “Lan(d)guage” poet who mixes an earned back country experience with the questions, failures, and linguistic particulars of these times.
Ken Belford
Lisa Robertson
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Monday, October 19, 2009
INFLUENCY WEST
Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and lived for many years in Vancouver, before moving to France, and then California. Her most recent book is Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House 2009). R’s Boat will be out with University of California Press in 2010. She has been the recipient of the Relit Award and the bp Nichol Chapbook Award, and has taught and held residencies at the Kootenay School of Writing, California College of the Arts, University of Cambridge, Capilano College, University of California Berkeley, University of California San Diego, American University of Paris and the Naropa Institute. She is currently working collaboratively on sound and video-based projects.
Ken Belford has published four books of poetry: Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, and ecologue, as well as 15 chapbooks. Belford’s poetics blend borders. He is a self-educated “Lan(d)guage” poet who mixes an earned back country experience with the questions, failures, and linguistic particulars of these times.
Jordan Scott
Jason Christie
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
INFLUENCY WEST INTRODUCTORY SESSION
To register, please send an email to InfluencyWest@gmail.com. In your email please confirm that you would like to register and provide us with a little background about yourself, your interests, and writers that you enjoy reading. Cost: $20-$30 per registrant (sliding scale). We are open to all registrants and will not turn anyone away. If the cost is prohibitive please let us know. Also, please register even if you can’t make all the readings / lectures.
InfluencyWest is a unique lecture and reading salon modeled on the highly successful Influency series organised by Margaret Christakos. We share her enthusiasm for critical engagement with poetry and her desire to foster a connection between writers and readers. With this in mind, we are offering lectures and public readings once a week during the months of October and November. Each night will feature an intro by facilitators Jason Christie and Jordan Scott, an original 30-minute lecture by one of the participating poets on the work of one of their colleague poets, and a half-hour live reading by the poet under discussion. To round out each night, a dedicated period for discussion will follow to give everyone a chance to offer insights and share thoughts.
Participants in InfluencyWest read a book of poetry each week to prepare for the evening`s guest poet. In the week after a lecture / reading, participants are encouraged to compose written responses to the poetics and the ideas encountered during class and email, post to the InfluencyWest blog, or orally present their responses in order to increase the complexity and dynamism of the dialogue. This, of course, is optional.
SCHEDULE
Wednesday, October 14th: Introductory Session
Monday, October 19th: Ken Belford on Lisa Robertson
Tuesday, October 20th: Lisa Robertson on Ken Belford
Wednesday, October 28th: Kim Duff on Larissa Lai and Rita Wong
Wednesday, November 10th: Larissa Lai and Rita Wong on Kim Duff
Thursday, November 12th: Steve Collis on Oana Avasilichioaei
Thursday, November 19th: Oana Avasilichioaei on Steve Collis
Thursday, November 26th: Final Session
THE BOOKS BEING DISCUSSED
Lan(d)guage: a sequence of poetics by Ken Belford. Caitlin (2008)
Lisa Robertson’s Magneta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson. Coach House Books (2009)
Tube Sock Army by Kim Duff. LINE BOOKS (2008)
sybil unrest. By Larisa Lai and Rita Wong. LINEbooks (2008)
feria: a poempark by Oana Avasilchioaei. Wolsak & Wynn (2008)
The Commons. Stephen Collis. Talon Books (2008)
All these books can be purchased at the People’s Co-op Bookstore at 1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC.
Facilitated by: Jason Christie and Jordan Scott
Presented by: The Kootenay School of Writing, Down Stream Project and the Canada Council
Steve McCaffery
Steve McCaffery
Read at
W2 Perel Gallery
Saturday, October 10, 2009
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS
This is the second workshop in the readings and critical workshops series "Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics". The series will continue once per month through August 2010.
Workshop is limited to 18 registrants. To register please contact info@kswnet.org
Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics - Theme
The
theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory
of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics.
Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side
of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of
Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television.
He proposes that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures
of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject.
These discourses consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s
discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While
Lacan is concerned with the limitation of the master's discourse and
the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in
the analyst's discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to
make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—because
this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he
asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s
discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in
1969, follows the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical
moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that
appear to simply question the master and the university, and as a
consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds,
as he cynically suggests that the Parisian students of 68 were in
danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in
which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an
analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other
discourses to enact some social change. Therefore, I am using this
frame to ask questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social
change. Can poetics operate like the analyst's discourse to create a
different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these
other discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift
discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the
four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into
financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit interventions in
hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and
discourse are and reconsider how we engage with and disseminate them?
- Nancy Gillespie
(A further description of Lacan’s four discourses will be available to workshop registrants. )
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