Planet Earth Poetry Poets and Volunteers

friday, february 7
all bees OPEN MIC - an evening of poetry from the Planet Earth Poetry Poets (AKA PEP Bees)
Live and livestreamed!

An evening of poetry from the Planet Earth Poetry Poets (most of them)! Friday February 7th at 7:30pm (doors at 7:00pm)—live and livestreamed!Planet Earth Poetry runs on the phenomenal volunteer energy of over twenty poets and poetry-lovers. This reading will feature emerging and award-winning poets from our rich community (alphabetically listed):

Anna Cavouras, Lorne Daniel, Zoe Dickinson, Wendy Donawa, Nancy Issenman, Sharon Lee, Margaret Lonsdale, Sheila Martindale, Rhona McAdam, Nicole Moen, Susan Olding, Sandy O'Reilly, Catherine St. Denis, Christine Schrum, Andrea Scott, Daniel G. Scott, Clare Sharpe & Nancy Yakimoski. Hosted by Kyeren Regehr
(All of our poets and poetry-loving volunteers are pictured, but not all of them are able to attend.).  

Poet Violetta Leigh

friday, february 14
violetta leigh

Violetta Leigh holds a BA from the University of Victoria with a double major in Creative Writing/Environmental Studies, and is a certified Technical Writer. Her fiction has been published by SAND Journal, Litro Magazine, Minola Review, (and others), poetry by the Heartworm Reader (and others), and editorial by MONTECRISTO Magazine.

Lights Under Concrete and Glass is a collection of prose poetry that explores the twenties of a cultural historian, pragmatic insomniac, and capital-R Romantic through splintered Vancouver nights. The pieces, in their variety, connect into a cultural ecology: a stack of blurry photographs that remember places and people at a certain time in a certain place, with their connections and proclivities.

Poetic Appetizer
excerpt from “Memory Wood” in Lights Under Concrete and Glass

“Years caroused with Saturday nights supped by flung-open doors. The cottage chairs welcomed guests who bladed their backing with shoulders crescented in laughter and leaned too far on slanted legs to raise a toast with oxidized thrift shop goblets (god, the lead we must have consumed as young artists fatalistic to a look), wine shivering at the lip of the chalice, shared from jugs of tongue-numbing plonk pitched into with pocket change that charmed a tannin blush onto its drinkers.  The spindle legs held their stance but began to wobble, while splinters frayed ominous at the base of the divided backbone and mummified glue creaked. When a chair devolved into potential hazard, stretched to design limits by the linoleum bacchanal of kitchen parties, it was moved to the altar of embers at the fireplace framed in golden seventies brick. Someone would set down her drink and split the chair with swift cuts from a hand axe into an embrace of kindling, with the seat separated into two sheaves and each spindle twisted from its sheath. We kept our fingers higher than flame as our treasure burned, transposed from leisure to incandescence.”

Poet Eva Kolacz

FRIDAY, february 14
eva kolacz

Eva Kolacz is a Canadian poet and artist who has published four books of poetry, Whatever We Are, Fire and Water, and Solace. Her poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies. Her paintings are in national museums in Poland and in Archives of
the Government of Ontario. She lives in Victoria, BC.

Untamed was written when Eva Kolacz was in her twenties. The book produces
short poems with raw images that are hard to digest at times, full of personal experiences of the poet who doesn’t stop short of expressing what she felt. Kolacz follows in the footsteps of Adrienne Rich, who said, “instead of poems about experiences, I am getting poems that are experiences.”

Poetic Appetizer

“passing bird”

when you leave, I will take a jar of water
and pour it over the remains
of a smoldering bonfire
I will cut down trees around the house,
their fallen trunks will fall on the path
covering our tracks . . .
someone said that even passing birds
return to their nest,
but you won’t have a place to return to 

friday, februarY 21

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm, on Friday, February 21 for poet Barbara Tran.

Doors at 1:30pm, with sign-up for open mic.

New Horizons Centre is at 234 Menzies St. in James Bay (street parking only). Please note that unlike our evening readings, the afternoon readings will not be livestreamed or recorded.

Poet Barbara Tran

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21
BARBARA TRAN

Barbara Tran writes poetry, writes poetry, short fiction, and screenplays. She authored the narration of Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a short VR film nominated for Best VR Story at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Barbara’s debut poetry book, Precedented Parroting, is a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award. 

Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”

Poetic Appetizer

“Buttercups in Foil on the Windowsill”

She never set foot in that house, 
was on the other side of the world, living 
her life as if every day were Sunday, though 
given her location this was no 
blessing, just another day of 
shortages, of thuds in the distance that made 
one’s mind leap even when one’s 
body was in bed. One day bled 
into another, the ash of intention blowing 
into oblivion. To accomplish 
anything, one had to leap through 
the doorway of existence, existence being 
an opening that allowed all you love to leave 
as easily as it arrived.

Poet Rob Taylor

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21
rob taylor

Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News, which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Living with his wife and young children in a small apartment during the pandemic lockdown, Rob Taylor developed a habit of retreating to the wooded fringes of a nearby walking trail with a camping chair to do his work. “I needed that space in order to edit the writing of others,” writes Taylor, “but when time allowed I waited in that quiet, that wind and birdsong, for haiku.” A companion to his poetry collection The News, Taylor’s Weather was written over the first three years of his daughter’s life, chronicling the accumulative effect of intimacy and contemplation and revelling in the “small moments out of which we assemble our lives.”

Poetic Appetizer

“Sunlight”

I no longer remember
the blessed black object
my daughter dropped
in deep snow

only the mile out
and the mile back
in the deep pines
alone.

Poet William Ngenda

FRIDAY, february 28
J. William NGenda

J. William Ngenda is a Canadian Liberian poet who has spent the last eight years adjusting to the colder side of his heritage. Much of his work looks at contrasts within the intrinsic paradoxes of living. His first book is Battledancer, and he is currently at work on his next project, Pantheon.

Battledancer, from concept to creation, is a story of motion—it explores the body’s gains and losses, examining how our bodies don’t ever stop. It’s a beautiful and violent examination of indoctrination, obsession, and the limits of a singular ideology playing out in our world. Battledancer is J. William Ngenda’s first publication.

Poetic Appetizer

An excerpt from Battledancer:

Holy child slaughters soulless ones
Never falters in their choices
Only path to absolution
Absolute certainty in revolutions
Chaplain said
"Love is often lonely
Violence never dies, it's carried on”

Poet Wayde Compton

FRIDAY, february 28 -
WAYDE COMPTON

Wayde Compton was born and raised in Vancouver and studied English at Simon Fraser University, where he worked with George Bowering and Roy Miki. He was associated with the Tads group of writers and the Runcible Mountain College study group. Compton was also a co-founder of the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project, a grassroots organization that researched and advocated for the public recognition of Vancouver's historical Black community. He later co-founded its successor group, the Hogan's Alley Society. In 2006 Compton co-founded Commodore Books, Western Canada’s first Black Canadian literary press.

Compton has published six books and has edited two literary anthologies. His collection of short stories, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011. His work has been a finalist for three other City of Vancouver Book Awards as well as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Compton has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. He has taught either English Literature or Creative Writing at the following institutions: SFU, ECUAD, Capilano University, Kwantlen University, Douglas College, and Coquitlam College. From 2012-18, he administrated the Creative Writing Program in Continuing Studies at SFU, including the award-winning Writer’s Studio. 

FEBRUARY 28th: HOSTED BY TRACY WAI DE BOER

Tracy Wai de Boer is an award-winning writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist. Her debut book, Nostos, a collection of poetry and experimental photography, will be out Spring 2025 with Palimpsest Press. Tracy’s chapbook, maybe, basically, was published with Anstruther Press in 2020 and was nominated for the bpNichol Award. She has co-authored multiple books including Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, which won the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC’s Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021. Tracy was a resident at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2017, 2023) and her work has been featured internationally in outlets such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Catapult, Plenitude Magazine, Ricepaper Magazine, G U E S T, canthius, Prude Magazine, Petal Projections, and Unearthed Online Literary Journal.