The Planet Earth Poetry reading series is a launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not. It is a place where words are most important. A venue in which all manner of poets and writers are welcome; a place for excellence, innovation, collaboration, diverse projects and experiments. The evening begins at 7:30 with an open mic, followed by a featured reader(s). Planet Earth Poetry is located at Hillside Coffee and Tea, 1633 Hillside Ave (across from Bolen Books). Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7pm.

Friday, november 7, 2014

No event at hillside coffee and tea tonight—
join us over at the victoria writers festival

As part of the Victoria Writers Festival, Planet Earth Poetry featured poet Tracy Hamon will read at the gala event, The World Before Us, on Saturday, November 8, at 7pm, along with Aislinn Hunter, Nancy Lee, Jordan Abel and Darrell Dennis.

Tickets: $15/$12

Tracy Hamon was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. She holds an MA in English from the University of Regina. Her first book of poetry, This Is Not Eden (Thistledown Press, 2005) was a finalist for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Portions of her latest collection Interruptions in Glass won the 2005 City of Regina Writing Award and were also shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards in 2010. Most recently she was long-listed for the 2012 CBC Poetry Award.

In a series of poems that move between narrative and lyric, the personas of Austrian artist Egon Schiele and his mistress/model Valerie “Wally” Neuzil are revealed in exquisite detail. Dividing the work into three sections, equal energy is given to the artist, his model, and the alluring energy of Viennese eroticism. Throughout, three voices appear as dramatic monologues that allow Schiele, Neuzil, and a voice from the present to speak. Central to the voices is the emotion of desire and how this desire to paint, love, or write inspires us to greatness. Creating intimacy through the use of first person and exposing drama through the use of the third, Hamon’s poems resonate with Egon’s and Valerie’s story: how they met, their intense desires, and the union and bond that would keep them together for years. Red Curls chronicles life, and in doing so captures the enterprise and intensity of Schiele as he pushed the culture of desire to new heights. With meticulous care, Hamon explores the truth of her subjects as presented in Schiele’s portraits. The paintings themselves became the revolutionary and liberating edge of a generation of artists.

Friday, november 14, 2014

garth martens & erina harris

Garth Martens won the 2011 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, PRISM international, Fiddlehead, Grain, and The Times Colonist. His first book Prologue for the Age of Consequence (Anansi) is a Finalist for the 2014 Governor General's Award in Poetry. He has worked in large-scale commercial construction for nine years. In 2014, he wrote and performed the libretto for Pasajes, an international flamenco production.

Canadian poet Erina Harris has published internationally.  Her work has been awarded multiple international writers’ residencies, awards, and nominations. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she resides in Calgary, at work on a doctoral dissertation in poetics. 

Erina Harris’s debut poetry collection, The Stag Head Spoke comprises two musical, self-contained “Books.” Book One, “Bestiary” reinvents lyric forms derived from song, fairy tales, and traditional poetries. It explores animality and human identity through the destabilizing functions of nonsense verse. Book Two, “For The Suicide of Vespertine” is an experimental elegy written as a poem-play for the loss of a beloved female friend. Both “Books” are subtle, feminist-inflected meditations emphasizing human community in language, and animated by renewed usages of rhyme.

Friday, november 21, 2014

rhona mcadam &
wendy morton

Rhona McAdam is a poet and food writer who has lived in BC, Alberta, England and Italy. Ex-ville (Oolichan) is her sixth full-length poetry collection. Her publications include food poetry chapbooks: Sunday Dinners (JackPine, 2010) and The Earth’s Kitchen (Leaf Press, 2011); anthologies: Poems From Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013), Untying the Apron (Guernica, 2013), Force Field: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mother Tongue, 2013), Rocksalt (Mother Tongue, 2008); and previous collections Old Habits (Thistledown/Slow Dancer, 1994) and Cartography (Oolichan, 2006). Her first book of nonfiction, Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto (RMB) was published in 2012. Rhona’s blog is here.

Wendy Morton celebrates her birthday with a celebration in words and photographs of her second summer at Torngat Mountains National Park. She will be reading her new poems written there and showing the photographs that illustrate them.  

Of her presentation last year, Wendy Donawa wrote:
“Wendy Morton adds another layer to her eloquent photographs with poems. She has often commented that poetry is “the shortest distance between two hearts,” and her poems convey a warm engagement with land, culture and people. Heartfelt without sentimentality, sometimes lyrical and evocative, at other times narrative and down to earth, her poems and their accompanying images celebrate the land, the Inuit.”
 
Terry Ann Carter wrote: “From the Inuktituk word “torngait” meaning “place of spirits,” the Torngat Mountains have been home to the Inuit and their predecessors for thousands of years. With great respect for the land and its peoples, Wendy Morton shared with us in poetry and photographs, her love affair with the spectacular wilderness of Torngat Mountains National Park. We travel with her to the northern extremity of the Labrador coast, share in her stories and the story telling of others, and know that we have been touched by the profound.
 
Wendy Morton has six books of poetry and a memoir. She is the recipient of the Spirit Bear Award, the Golden Beret Award, the Colleen Thibaudeau Outstanding Contribution Award from the League of Canadian Poets and is an Honorary Citizen of Victoria for her contribution to the arts.

Friday, november 28, 2014

Fionncara MacEoin & Michael Kenyon

Fionncara MacEoin is a Saskatchewan poet. Recent publications include the chapbook Even the Sky Parts (JackPine Press, 2011) and Not The First Thing I’ve Missed (Thistledown Press, 2014).

Michael Kenyon was born in Sale, England, and has lived on the West Coast since 1967. He’s the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. The Beautiful Children won the 2010 ReLit Award for best novel. Other work has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Baxter Hathaway Prize (Cornell) in fiction, The Malahat Review Novella Prize, Prism international’s fiction contest (won twice), the Journey Prize, and the National and Western Magazine Awards. He has been employed as a seaman, a diver and a taxi driver. Presently he works as a freelance editor and a therapist and lives on Pender Island. Two books were published this fall: Astatine (poems, Brick Books) and Parallel Rivers (stories, Thistledown Press).

An award-winning writer conjures the Muse and the “noble gases” in this new collection.

Astatine is an Italian girl, who like Dante’s Beatrice, haunts the narrator of Michael Kenyon’s incandescent fourth book of poetry. Named after a radioactive element whose isotopes endure half-lives of mere seconds, she is simultaneously a disappearing and abiding presence who cajoles and comforts, who questions and points, who often leaves the poet puzzled, electrified, heart-broken, and wanting more. Astatine is Kenyon’s meditation on the evanescent and persevering tragedy of our lives on Earth. He takes us on an inspirational journey through time that embraces all we are born to and must too soon let go of, even as we make peace with the ever-changing fortunes of existence, even as we come upon unexpected joy.

Husband of a broken arm, take your time.
Joy is waiting. Joy is almost here.

Look twice at the black dog with three legs.
You just saw a black dog with four legs.