Sponsor a poet for planet earth poetry

You are invited to join with Planet Earth Poetry to bring the best possible poets to Victoria for a reading.  You can choose to sponsor one or more poets or simply contribute to our Poet Sponsors Fund to keep fine poetry happening on a weekly basis.

All the details and perks(!) here. We also have a gofundme campaign, which you can contribute to here.

Thank you for the SPONSORships coming in. see Our sponsor a poet HONOUR ROLL.

FRIDAY, november 16, 1:30PM: PLANET EARTH POETRY IN JAMES BAY

Join us for featured reader Yvonne Blomer as part of the afternoon reading series at New Horizons in James Bay. Hosted by Sheila Martindale.

november 2018

UPCOMING READINGS

Friday, november 2, 2018

lorna crozier

Lorna Crozier’s latest books are: God of Shadows and What the Soul Doesn’t Want. A resident of Vancouver Island, she’s an Officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of three awards for lifetime achievement, including BC’s Lieutenant Governor’s Award and the George Woodcock Award, which means her name is on a plaque in front of the Vancouver Public Library. Three-time winner of the Pat Lowther Award and four-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Award, which she received in 1992, she recently was honoured with China’s Chen Zi Ang Award for best international poet published in 2017 in  China’s biggest literary periodical.

From penguinrandomhouse.ca
How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen? 

The poet Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods we never knew existed and didn't know we needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting. What life-affirming questions have these deities come to ask? Perhaps it is simply this: How can poems be at once so profound, original and lively, and also so much fun?

FRIDAY, november 9, 2018

stevie howell
& eve joseph

Poems of stringent aesthetic demands and volcanic emotional release make up Stevie Howell's wondrous I left nothing inside on purpose. These poems—bewildering in their linguistic beauty—verge on prayer in their intense plea to be truly seen by another, a sort of devotional sequence addressing the psychological construct of attachment. Can we change? Has anyone ever changed? Does it matter? Lives marred by injury and violence, both physical and psychic, emerge in the book as meditations on trust, endurance, faith, destruction, and love. Howell's voice combines ferocious intimacy and moral rigour with precision and compassion.

The Hawaiian surf, the neuropsychologist's lab, the deliriums of social media, and the recovery room. From geology to theology, lyric pain to the contemplative mind of the quasi-saint, I left nothing inside on purpose is a deeply affecting, glittering analysis of who we are when we claim to be ourselves in the world.

Stevie Howell is a writer and editor. Stevie's poetry has appeared in BOAAT, Prairie Schooner, Gigantic Sequins, The Cossack Review, and Prelude. A second collection of poetry, I left nothing inside on purpose, was released this spring by Penguin Random House Canada. She is currently writing a thriller.

Quarrels by Eve Joseph: The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor’s hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists.

Eve Joseph’s two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. The book was named one of the top 100 picks of the year by The Globe and Mail.

FRIDAY, november 16, 2018

yvonne blomer & Patricia Young

Writer, critic, teacher and poet, Yvonne Blomer was born in Zimbabwe, and came to Canada when she was two years old. With her husband she has taught in Japan, cycled through Southeast Asia, and lived in the UK, where she completed a Masters in Creative Writing with Distinction at The University of East Anglia. Yvonne is proud to be serving as the Poet Laureate for the City of Victoria, BC, and is the Artistic Director emeritus of the Planet Earth Poetry reading series.

Yvonne has two new chapbooks out, and will be reading from a selection of works.

Love is a boxcar going off the rails. For anyone who has experienced the highs and lows of love and wants to know they are not alone.

Patricia Young's new collection Amateurs of Love confirms her status as one of Canada's great and most versatile contemporary poets. In Amateurs at Love, she explores the dynamic, liminal space between lovers, taking precise aim at the silent climacteric moments of the heart: the interrogating, persuading, confiding, reflecting moments that help us feel and understand that distance. Her response is unexpected, unsettling and emotionally pungent. 

Patricia Young has published twelve collections of poetry and one of short fiction. Her poems have been widely anthologized and she has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the B.C. Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, a CBC Literary Prize, several National Magazine Awards, the Bliss Carman Award, and the Confederation Poets Prize. She has twice been nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. She lives in Victoria

FRIDAY, november 23, 2018

philip kevin paul & amanda jernigan

Philip Kevin Paul is a member of the WSÁ,NEC Nation from the Saanich Peninsula on Vancouver Island. His first collection of poetry, Taking the Names Down from the Hill, won the 2004 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry, while his second book, Little Hunger, was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Award.

Amanda Jernigan is the author of two previous books of poems, Groundwork (Biblioasis, 2011) and All the Daylight Hours (Cormorant, 2013), as well as of the monograph Living in the Orchard: The Poetry of Peter Sanger (Frog Hollow, 2014). She is the editor of The Essential Richard Outram (Porcupine’s Quill, 2011) and, with Evan Jones, of Earth and Heaven: An Anthology of Myth Poetry (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Parnassus, PN Review, The Dark Horse, Atlanta Review, and The Nation, as well as in numerous Canadian literaries, and have been set to music, notably by Colin Labadie, whose piece Years, Months, and Days was premiered by Menno Singers in May 2017.  

FRIDAY, november 30, 2018

wendy morton & emily nilsen

Emily Nilsen was born and raised in Vancouver. She is the author of Otolith (Goose Lane, 2017) and the chapbook Place, No Manual (Lake, 2016). Otolith received the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her poems have also been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and longlisted for the UK National Poetry Prize. She now lives in Nelson, BC. 

Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection.

Wendy Morton has received a number of awards, the latest of which is the Order of BC. She has also received the Meritorious Service Medal from the Governor General of Canada, for her projects: Random Acts of Poetry and The Elder Project, which have brought honour to Canada. She will be celebrating her birthday, reading some of her favourite poems.

To read pdfs of the more than 15 Elder Projects so far, go to theelderproject.com