September 28

Clea Roberts and Tom Wayman

(with support of The Canada Council for the Arts)

 

 

Clea Roberts lives in Whitehorse, Yukon on the Takhini River. Her poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Lake: A Journal of Arts and the Environment, The Malahat Review, Prism International, and Room. Roberts has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Centre, the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, and is a three-time recipient of the Yukon Government Advanced Artist Award. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and her poem, “When We Begin to Grow Old,” won the After Al Purdy Poetry Contest. Clea co-organizes the Whitehorse Poetry Festival.

Tom Wayman was born in Ontario in 1945, but has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He has worked at a number of jobs, both blue and white-collar, across Canada and the U.S., and has helped bring into being a new movement of poetry in these countries - the incorporation of the actual conditions and effects of work. He received his MFA in English and writing at the University of California in Irvine has been awarded the Canadian Authors' Association medal for poetry, the A.J.M. Smith Prize for distinguished achievement in Canadian poetry and first prize in the USA Bicentennial Poetry Awards competition. His poetry has been published in literary magazines across the world, including The Paris Review, Saturday Night, The Hudson Review and Canadian Forum. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary and remains Squire of "Appledore," his estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern BC.

September 21

Poets for an Oil-Free Coast:

 

Red Tower Bookworks launches the chapbook, Poems for an Oil-Free Coast

A collection of poems and prose with themes that parallel the people and environment of B.C.'s central and north coast by Yvonne Blomer, Kim Goldberg, Jeanne Iribarne, Christine Lowther, Garry Thomas Morse, Patrick Pilarski, Steven Noyes, Eden Robinson and Alison Watt. (The same works are included in the art book Canada's Raincoast At Risk: Art for an Oil-Free Coast, published by Raincoast Conservation Foundation and available in November 2012.)

As many of the writers/poets as possible, plus others short-listed for inclusion in the book, will read from their work.

Poems for an Oil-Free Coast is letterpress printed at Vancouver's Black Stone Press, and hand bound by Frances Hunter in two limited editions: one softcover wrapped in cedar bark paper; the other bound in yellow cedar boards. Red Tower Bookworks is donating proceeds to Raincoast Conservation Foundation, www.raincoast.org.

 

 
 
September 14

Planet Earth Poetry begins its 2012-13 season with our annual MSF/Doctors Without Borders Fundraiser. We will have books for sale for $5 each and its Read a Poem by Your Favourite Poet (other than yourself) Night. 7:30/$3

All money raised goes to Doctors Without Borders. This year MSF is fundraising for relief in Sahel.  The Canadian government will match donations made to MSF for their work in the Sahel region before September 30,2012.

Planet Earth Poetry ~ August 24

In the anthology Stones, nine Vancouver Island writers present works of prose and poetry. Each a pebble flicked into the pool of life’s emotions, these works send ripples through readers’ minds. Here is what two of BC’s leading writers have to say about the prose and poetry respectively:

The prose pieces in Stones take us on adventures from the West Coast of British Columbia to Islamabad and Korea. Comic or poignant, always inspiring, they show how people learn and grow through encounters involving fire, foreign territory, families and fortune cookies. Blurring the line between fiction and memoir, there is an unmistakable and enduring truth to each story.

- Carol Matthews, author of Questions for Ariadne: The Labyrinth and the End of Times (Outlaw Editions) and Incidental Music (Oolichan Books).

The poems in Stones are “grace-notes fallen from fiddle airs” and “distant falling things.” Their ripples linger. These writers celebrate the places, people, and events they have known, in the world and in their imaginations, through language so charged that “the skin painted thin on bones” prickles at the experiences recalled.

- Yvonne Blomer, author of The Book of Places (Black Moss Press) and a broken mirror, fallen leaf (Gerald Lampert Award finalist).

Contributors are: John Beaton, Di Clarence, David Fraser, Harvey Jenkins, Judy Millar,
                            Mary Ann Moore, Cindy Shantz, Pat Smekal and Fran Thiessen.

PEP for July 20

Nora Gould and Emily McGiffin come to Victoria to read at Planet Earth Poetry

Nora Gould writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family and volunteers in wildlife rehabilitation with the Medicine River Wildlife Centre. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 1984 with a degree in veterinary medicine.


http://www.brickbooks.ca/?p=3325

Emily McGiffin's poetry was awarded the 2008 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada and was a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 2004 and 2005. She lives in northwest BC.

The Summer at Planet Earth Poetry

June 29  Heather Spears and Yvonne Blomer

Canadian writer and artist Heather Spears was educated at the University of British Columbia, The Vancouver School of Art and the University of Copenhagen. She is divorced and has 4 children. She has lived in Denmark since 1962. She has held over 75 solo exhibitions and published 11collections of poetry and 3 novels of speculative fiction (1991-96), the Moonfall Trilogy. The Flourish, (04) a novel of crime fiction and the family, came out in Canada and was republished in Europe as A Muted Voice (09). The Creative Eye (07), is the first of a series on visual perception. She has 3 books of drawings: Drawn from the Fire (89) Massacre (90); and Line by Line (02). Drawings from the Newborn (86), The Panum Poems (96) and Required Reading (00) contain both poems and full-page drawings. Her latest collection of poetry, I can still draw (08), was shortlisted for the Lowther Memorial Award. She has illustrated numerous books and articles; and also draws courtroom, dance, theatre and childbirth. Specialising in drawing children, in particular premature and other threatened infants, she travels widely and has drawn in hospitals in the Middle East, Europe and America.

Yvonne Blomer is Planet Earth Poetry's Artistic Director.  She will be launching her second full collection of poems The Book of Places published this spring by Black Moss Press.

 Yvonne Blomer lives in Victoria, BC where she works as a poet, memoirist, writing teacher, event organizer and mom.  She was born in Zimbabwe and came to Canada when she was two years old. With her husband she has taught in Japan, cycled in Southeast Asia and lived in the UK where she completed an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry.  Her poems have twice been shortlisted for the CBC Literary awards and have appeared in literary journals in Canada, the US, Japan and the UK.  Her first collection of poetry, a broken mirror, fallen leaf (Ekstasis Editions), was shortlisted for The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2007. She is the host/organizer of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series in Victoria, B.C.  In 2012 Yvonne’s illustrated series of poems “Bicycle Brand Journey” will launch with Jack Pine Press.

Serious, playful, and governed by the eye’s apprehension of the familiar as well as the shockingly new, Yvonne Blomer’s Book of Places takes us cycling through Asian landscapes, Britain’s stone cathedrals, and the intimate landmarks of home, where these poems accumulate earthly wonders: rivers and rain, animals, leaves, bamboo’s hollow knock against stone. She drops the pebble of a word into a mirror pool, and its ripples expand into the still pond of the reader’s mind.  

                                Pamela Porter, author of "I'll be Watching", "Cathedral" and 

                                Governor General's Award winner "The Crazy Man"

Planet Earth Poetry extends thanks to The Canada Council for the Arts and The League of Canadian Poets for funding this reading.  

Planet Earth Poetry May Calendar

May 4 - David Taylor and Dvora Levin read

Dvora Levin has published Sharav, her first full-length book of poems, and the chapbook This Time In the Land, as well as poems in five chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane (Leaf Press). A regular reader at Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria, BC, she has read poems on CBC Radio and participated in the Poet Tree Project. She leads poetry writing workshops in the workplace and for people of the street. She edited the anthology "Voices from the Edge", poems from the streets of  Victoria.

David Taylor will read from  Ark/ The Ascent, a long poem written in David's metaphoric language

May 11 - Arleen Paré launches Leaving Now

Arleen Paré’s first book, Paper Trail, won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize in Poetry. Paré completed an MFA in poetry at the University of Victoria and her poetry and prose have appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals. Before beginning a career in writing, she worked as a social worker for two decades in mental health housing in Vancouver. She now lives in Victoria with her partner, and has two sons and two grandsons. 

 

...an unsettling, tender lyric, beautifully written in a mixture of poems, prose fragments and fairytales, a story like no other.  Read it if you are a mother.  Read it if you are not.  It’s a splendid, unique contribution to our country’s literature.   – Lorna Crozier

May 18 - All Open Mic.

This is the night to come and sign up to read - maybe twice!

We will celebrate our open mic and celebrate Planet Earth Poetry with drinks afterward at a local pub.

May 25 - Wendy Donawa and Catherine Owen

 After spending most of her adult life in the Caribbean, as teacher, artist, and museum curator, Wendy Donawa settled in Victoria, where she is a regular participant at Planet Earth Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Caribbean and Canadian journals, in five chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane, and in the anthologies Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press, 2010), Open Hearts 5 (Ontario Poetry Society, 2011), and The Wild Weathers: A Gathering of Love Poems (Leaf Press, 2012). Her first chapbook, Sliding Towards Equinox, appeared in 2009 (Rubicon Press). Her most recent publication, Those Astonishments of Sorrow, of Joy, is her second chapbook, recently published by Leaf Press.

 She has co-authored, with Leah Fowler, Reading Canada, a survey of Canlit for young adults, which is forthcoming early in 2013 with Oxford University Press. Please see also www.wendydonawa.ca

Catherine Owen is a Vancouver writer. She’s published seven previous collections of poetry. Her poetry collection Frenzy won the Alberta Literary Award for 2009 while The Wrecks of Eden was shortlisted for the BC Book Prize in 2002. Her first compilation of essays and memoirs, Catalysts, is forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn in 2012. She also plays bass in the metal band Medea and works as a freelance editor and tutor. Check out her website for more information http://www.catherineowen.org/.

 

 With her characteristic fearlessness Catherine Owen examines what drives her to write and the influences that shape her writing. From her childhood memories in suburban Vancouver to her willingness to risk all for a glimpse of her muse, the essays in Catalysts allow readers unparalleled insight into Owen’s creative life. A brilliantly honest collection, these essays should be read by every aspiring author.

Planet Earth Poetry Acknowledges the support of 

April is Poetry Month

April 6
Good Friday - No Planet Earth Poetry

April 13: Cornelia Hoogland and Sheila Martindale


Since coming to Victoria in 2009, Sheila Martindale has become a fixture on the literary scene. She is the Poetry Editor for Island Writer magazine, the editor of the James Bay New Horizons newsletter, and she proofreads for the Diocesan Post newspaper.  She was one of the Times Colonist’s Solstice Poets in 2010, and her drama Inauspicious Events was produced at Christ Church Cathedral in December 2011.  Her ninth book of poetry, Here, There and Somewhere Beyond, was published in November 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHV-r8a8hbs

Cornelia Hoogland takes the story of Little Red Riding Hood and turns it inside out in this sensuous Canadian retelling.

Cornelia Hoogland has published five poetry collections, most recently, Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011). Her poetry has been published internationally and has been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards on multiple occasions. Hoogland is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario , and is the founder and the co-artistic director of Poetry London, an organization that brings prominent writers into lively discussion with local writers and readers. Hoogland divides her time between London, Ontario, and Hornby Island, BC. 

April 20: Naomi Beth Wakan




Naomi Beth Wakan was born in London, England, and has travelled extensively, including living in Japan for two years. Naomi has authored education books, children books, and poetry collections, as well as non-fiction titles, including the ALA selection, Haiku - one breath poetry. She continues to write prolifically and also conducts workshops on writing later in life. She is a member of Haiku Canada, Tanka Canada and The League of Canadian Poets. She lives on Gabriola Island with her husband, the sculptor, Elias Wakan. More information about Naomi Beth Wakan

April 27: Stephanie Bolster and E. Alex Pierce 



Stephanie Bolster reads from A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth,  a book with a coherent vision of nature—constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past—through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author’s grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet’s combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where “arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades,” and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster’s best work.
“Bolster’s work demonstrates a surety of vision supported by an insider’s eye for the telling aberrant detail everywhere matched by her impeccable ear . . . ” – Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail
“What a startling voice she has . . . ” – Patrick Lane, The Vancouver Sun

Stephanie Bolster is a Governor General’s Literary Award-winning poet. She has published three other collections prior to A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth and has been awarded the Archibald Lampman and Gerald Lampert Awards.





E. Alex Pierce lives in East Sable River, Nova Scotia where she is developing a centre for writers and artists. E. Alex Pierce’s voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth.  It’s not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.