online readings fridays in july 2020

open mic as usual — click here between tuesday and Friday noon to sign up

UPCOMING READINGS

friDAY, july 10, 2020

featured readers are from yvonne blomer’s “undressing your master poet” class

Yvonne Blomer is an award-winning poet and nonfiction writer. She served as PEP’s Artistic Director from 2009-2015, and as the City of Victoria’s poet laureate from 2015-2018. Her recent books include the anthologies Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds and Refugium: Poems for the Pacific.  She has three books of poetry, most recently As if a Raven and has published a critically acclaimed travel memoir titled Sugar Ride: Cycling From Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur.

Students each chose a master poet to study and wrote free verse and form poems inspired by their master.

Zoom in to hear Anne Hopkinson, Pam Medland, Colleen Alstad and more.

friDAY, july 24, 2020

kyeren regehr

Poet, writer and editor, Kyeren Regehr spent her early working years on the fringes of dance and theatre, and in the healing arts. Born in Sydney, Australia, she has traveled to Eastern Europe, South America, and throughout the United States, finally settling on Vancouver Island (in 2002). She earned a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria (and was awarded the Victoria Medal in Fine Arts upon completion of her undergraduate degree). Kyeren's poetry has been published in anthologies and literary journals in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. She has twice received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and enjoyed several years as a poetry board editor with The Malahat Review. Her first book is Cult Life (Pedlar Press, 2020).

Kyeren Regehr’s bold, knife-edge poetry is always “looking right at you.” Cult Life offers a world richly peopled with characters, yet Regehr explodes this light-filled realm, showing us another side of the master, the devotees, and the ashram itself. In her poems, the extraordinary curls up inside the ordinary, a hidden dimension, revealing how “if you bend your ear / you might hear what it is to be whole.” What a wonderful book of poetry—prepare to be transformed. —Anne Simpson I read Kyeren Regehr's Cult Life in one "speed-firing" swoop and after had that woozy-spinning-exhilarating disorientation you feel when you stumble out of a roller coaster. These poems, a pushme-pullyou chronicle of life inside an ashram, of a poet seeking and ultimately leaving a "New Religious Movement" in order to find herself as poet, are ones I never could have imagined. Cult Life is astonishing and Regehr's poetry, distinctive and brilliantly bizarre, "basks in the felicity of sound.” — Sylvia Legris

Planet Earth Poetry is pleased to announce that, through a generous gift from Lorna Crozier, we have two sets of numbered limited edition prints of Patrick Lane’s original work from the early 1980s that we will be offering for sale as of March 15, 2020.

Prints are $250 each, payable to Planet Earth Poetry. Shipping costs will be the responsibility of the purchaser. The prints are unframed (protected by a plastic sleeve) and are 15 x 22 inches. Order and pay by e-transfer in an email to Planet Earth Poetry. Please indicate which print or prints you wish to purchase in the email body and use the subject line Lane Prints.  

All proceeds from this sale will go toward the on-going work of Planet Earth Poetry.
Thanks to DC Reid for the images of the prints that are posted.