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, may 1, 2015

niki loulouris
& kevin spenst

Niki Koulouris was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The Cortland Review, Space, Metro Magazine, Subtext Magazine and The Age. A beer enthusiast, she has been known to start spontaneous lists on napkins of her top India Pale Ales. Niki lives in Toronto. Shortlisted for the 2014 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the ReLit Award, The sea with no one in it is her first book.

Kevin Spenst is the author of Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press) and the chapbooks Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press), Retractable (the serif of nottingham), What the Frag Meant (100 tetes press) snap (Pooka Press), and Surrey Sonnets (JackPine press). In April and May of 2014, Spenst did a 100-venue tour of Canada in support of chapbooks and poetry presses. His work has recently appeared in BafterC, Poetry is Dead, and the anthology Best Canadian Poetry 2014.

Friday, may 8, 2015

bren simmers
& anne simpson

Bren Simmers is the author of two collections of poetry, Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood Editions, 2015) and Night Gears (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010). She is the winner of an Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Award, was a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and has been twice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013). She currently lives in Squamish, BC.

Anne Simpson has published four books of poetry, and her second book, Loop, won the Griffin Poetry Prize. She has also published two novels — Canterbury Beach and Falling — and a collection of essays about poetry, art, and the natural world called The Marram Grass: Poetry and Otherness. A writer-in-residence at universities and libraries across Canada, she was also a writer-in-residence at the OSU Children’s Libraries in Ghana in 2012. She is currently at work on a third novel.

Friday, may 15, 2015

best canadian poetry in english 2014

Launched in 2008 and shepherded by series editor Molly Peacock, the Best Canadian Poetry Series features fifty Canadian poets annually, drawn from Canadian literary journals and magazines. Each year a distinguished guest editor selects the poems based on their intellectual, artistic, or inventive merit, the editorial taste changing with each new volume. With this series, readers – often baffled by proliferating poems and poets – can tap into the remarkable and ever-changing Canadian poetry scene, getting a bird’s eye view of the work being done on the ground.

At this special Planet Earth Poetry event, three stellar local BCP 2014 contributors, Marilyn Bowering, John Barton, Kim Trainor and Garth Martens, will share their poems from the anthology along with some of their other work.

Best Canadian Poetry’s 2014 guest editor Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, both published by McClelland and Stewart. She was the StartsNow! Artist-in-Motion in 2013 and just completed her term as the 2015 Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University. L’Abbe’s handpicked selections include the best, and most current, representations of the vibrant Canadian poetry scene, covering a broad range of aesthetics and voices. Among these are a significant representation of accomplished poets who live in and near Vancouver Island, among them Sharon Thesen, whose tour de force in this year's anthology provides the intellectual framework for L’Abbé's illuminating introductory essay, which takes into hand our most enduring questions about the natures and sources and means of poetry.

Marilyn Bowering has published a number of award-winning novels and books of poetry. Many of the prizes she has received are named after women. Her opera, with Gavin Bryars, Marilyn Forever, was performed this spring in Adelaide, and in Long Beach, California. She is a recent migrant from Sooke.

John Barton has published eleven books and six chapbooks of poetry, including Hypothesis (Anansi, 2001), Hymn (Brick, 2009). For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2012), and Polari (Goose Lane, 2014). Originally from Calgary, he lives in Victoria, where he edits The Malahat Review.

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.

Kim Trainor’s poetry has won the Gustafson Prize and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and has appeared in the 2013 Global Poetry Anthology and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014. She lives in Vancouver. Karyotype, her first poetry collection, will appear in October 2015.

Friday, june 26, 2015

meira cook & cynthia woodman kerkham

Méira Cook has published four poetry collections, most recently A Walker in the City (Brick).  She won the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize in 2012. Her first novel, The House on Sugarbush Road (Enfield & Wizenty), won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award in 2013. Her new collection of poetry, Monologue Dogs, will be published in Spring 2015, and her new novel, Nightwatching, will be published shortly thereafter.

Cynthia Woodman Kerkham is an award-winning poet, most recently a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize (2014). She co-edited the anthology Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013) and is the author of Good Holding Ground (Palimpsest Press, 2011). She is currently working on two projects: a new poetry collection, which navigates the waters of the West Coast, and a Creative Nonfiction work about a Canadian family in the last British colony—Hong Kong. She lives and works as an editor in Victoria, BC, when not simply staring out the window at the purple rhododendron and the climbing moss rose.