Poet Colin smith gestures at intermission.
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No human is illegal.
Cyril Dabydeen brought this sentence to the surface within the first five minutes of his time in front of the quiet audience sitting in the cave that is the Carol Shields auditorium during The Nooner today.
The combination of his light and jovial nature didn't hide the intensity of his poems or his politics.
No human is illegal.
Followed by his poem Lady Icarus-about a woman, considered 'illegal',
her story of deportation
x 5.
I have been told that it is difficult to write well and to write politically and/or socially consciously.
I have been told it is best to avoid it.
The idea that there is a divide between good writing and political writing creates a divide in me. Even when writing doesn't deal directly or obviously with political issues-be it race or gender or class,
the politics are always there.
Cyril Dabydeen quoted someone (whose name I forgot to write down, and who I now cannot recall), but the quote was
The aim of the writer is to mythologize the ground that you walk
And the ground that we walk is our history, never separate from our oppressions and our privilege. So it only makes sense to me that, as writers,we stay aware of our location. And the idea that someone can even consider eliminating the political and social context from their art,
is an act of privilege.
No human is illegal.
No art is without politics.
*please note the word politics in this post is being used in the lower case 'p' for politics kind of way. You know, the kind of stuff one might study if they did a degree in say, Gender studies, just for example....
Courtney Slobogian was born in Winnipeg and likes it that way.
She is a writer/understated activist/ irreverent feminist.
Some of her work can be tracked down in quiet corners of the internet.
She co-hosts a radio show on CKUW called Tiger Lilies are Poisonous, and dislikes cotton socks. She wrote a thesis once.
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Cyril Dabydeen brought this sentence to the surface within the first five minutes of his time in front of the quiet audience sitting in the cave that is the Carol Shields auditorium during The Nooner today.
The combination of his light and jovial nature didn't hide the intensity of his poems or his politics.
No human is illegal.
Followed by his poem Lady Icarus-about a woman, considered 'illegal',
her story of deportation
x 5.
I have been told that it is difficult to write well and to write politically and/or socially consciously.
I have been told it is best to avoid it.
The idea that there is a divide between good writing and political writing creates a divide in me. Even when writing doesn't deal directly or obviously with political issues-be it race or gender or class,
the politics are always there.
Cyril Dabydeen quoted someone (whose name I forgot to write down, and who I now cannot recall), but the quote was
The aim of the writer is to mythologize the ground that you walk
And the ground that we walk is our history, never separate from our oppressions and our privilege. So it only makes sense to me that, as writers,we stay aware of our location. And the idea that someone can even consider eliminating the political and social context from their art,
is an act of privilege.
No human is illegal.
No art is without politics.
*please note the word politics in this post is being used in the lower case 'p' for politics kind of way. You know, the kind of stuff one might study if they did a degree in say, Gender studies, just for example....
Courtney Slobogian was born in Winnipeg and likes it that way.She is a writer/understated activist/ irreverent feminist.
Some of her work can be tracked down in quiet corners of the internet.
She co-hosts a radio show on CKUW called Tiger Lilies are Poisonous, and dislikes cotton socks. She wrote a thesis once.
The seedy underbelly...er...I mean undernose of the afternoon book chat. Someone in the audience even spoke of killing puppies. I'm starting to wonder about this festival again.
J
The Tuesday afternoon book chat...very frenetic, very fun!
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone
Last night following the first half of the Mainstage I decided to buy featured writer Jon Paul Fiorentino's recent novel Stripmalling.
And I figured, since he was standing there with a pen anyway, I'd ask him to sign it.
He thanked me for the support and while I told him I enjoyed the reading and the cover of his book, and how the parents described in the novel are very similar to my own he was writing something rather lengthy on the inside of the book.
We thanked each other again and shook hands and I made my way to the bar and the cheese table and then back to my seat.
I opened the book and immediately burst into laughter at what he had written:
And while I'm honoured by the proposition, the answer, Jon, is no. Sorry.
***
Jon Paul Fiorentino's most recent novel is Stripmalling. ECW Press: Toronto, 2009.
****
Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.
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And I figured, since he was standing there with a pen anyway, I'd ask him to sign it.
He thanked me for the support and while I told him I enjoyed the reading and the cover of his book, and how the parents described in the novel are very similar to my own he was writing something rather lengthy on the inside of the book.
We thanked each other again and shook hands and I made my way to the bar and the cheese table and then back to my seat.
I opened the book and immediately burst into laughter at what he had written:
Brandon!
Let's make sweet love behind the 7-11 on day street--3 am ok?
xo Jon
And while I'm honoured by the proposition, the answer, Jon, is no. Sorry.
***
Jon Paul Fiorentino's most recent novel is Stripmalling. ECW Press: Toronto, 2009.
****
Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.
* * *
Scofield muttered about his homemade heart tattoo, saying he got it when he was fourteen on a camping trip, but agreed to have one hand photographed after checking with Lauren Kirshner that she'd also had "her hands done."
* * *
In 2009, Scofield will be releasing the following books:
kipocihkân: Poems New and Selected. Gibson's: Nightwood Editions, 2009.
Love Medicine and one Song. Wiarton: Kegedonce Press, 2009.
I Knew Two Metis Women. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2009.
* * *
Ariel Gordon is the Winnipeg-based author of two recent small press chapbooks and has had poetry published in fine lit mags such as Carousel, PRISM International and Prairie Fire. Her first collection of poetry, Hump, is forthcoming from Ontario's Palimpsest Press in spring 2010.
When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
Poetry and what?
What is this ever so enigmatic phrase “The Common Good?”
And what, even, is poetry?
Okay, that one’s easy...right?
Poetry is the harnessing of ideas, putting ideas to work by way of carefully chosen words, punctuation, line breaks, etc. It is images and metaphors. Poetry can be stories, conversations, abstractions. Poetry can be confessional, can be didactic.
According to Gwendolyn MacEwan,
I’ll leave those questions to you to think about, as I myself am still pondering their plethora of possible answers.
At any rate, when I made my way out to CMU this morning to see Rhea Tregebov and Gregory Scofield read their poetry I was hoping they’d shed some light on this subject, seeing as the title of the event was Poetry and the Common Good. Instead I was treated simply to a traditional reading that saw Gregory pouring out passionate poems that bounce between English and Cree with a most amazing sense of rythm and cadence, and Rhea reading old and new poems and one, entitled “The Gardens of the Antarctic,” a poetic sci-fi dystopia about what it might be like if we consume ourselves to extinction (a speculation that doesn’t seem all that far-fetched anymore).
Maybe poetry is by its very nature acting towards a common good.
****
Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.
|
What is this ever so enigmatic phrase “The Common Good?”
And what, even, is poetry?
Okay, that one’s easy...right?
Poetry is the harnessing of ideas, putting ideas to work by way of carefully chosen words, punctuation, line breaks, etc. It is images and metaphors. Poetry can be stories, conversations, abstractions. Poetry can be confessional, can be didactic.
According to Gwendolyn MacEwan,
Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry.Now, I’m aware of the impossibility of pinning down words with ostensive definitions, poetry especially, so I cite our dear friend Mirriam Webster as just another example of how we define poetry:
Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder,
is the sound you make when you come, and
why you live and how you bleed, and
The sound you make or don’t make when you die.
Main Entry: po·et·ryWith poetry being all these things and more, the questions still remain, what is the common good and what does Poetry have to do with it?
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a: metrical writing : verse b: the productions of a poet : poems
2: writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm
3 a: something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression b: poetic quality or aspect.
I’ll leave those questions to you to think about, as I myself am still pondering their plethora of possible answers.
At any rate, when I made my way out to CMU this morning to see Rhea Tregebov and Gregory Scofield read their poetry I was hoping they’d shed some light on this subject, seeing as the title of the event was Poetry and the Common Good. Instead I was treated simply to a traditional reading that saw Gregory pouring out passionate poems that bounce between English and Cree with a most amazing sense of rythm and cadence, and Rhea reading old and new poems and one, entitled “The Gardens of the Antarctic,” a poetic sci-fi dystopia about what it might be like if we consume ourselves to extinction (a speculation that doesn’t seem all that far-fetched anymore).
Maybe poetry is by its very nature acting towards a common good.
...poetry...is always political and subversive: it uses our foremost technological tool, the ur-tool that is language, against itself, against its tendency to be the supreme analytic and organizing instrument. In poetry, language is always a singer as well as a thinker; a lover as well as an engineer. It discovers and delights in its own physical being, as though it were an otter or a raven rather than simply the vice president in charge of making sense.Maybe poetry is by its very nature pushing us toward a common good, causing us to rethink normal and see that there might actually be a different way of going about things. Imagine that.
-Don McKay
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Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.
