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). Between 7 and 7:15, put your name in the hat to read at open mic. Planet Earth Poetry acknowledges with respect that we read and write on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.
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.
october 2018
Friday, october 5, 2018
all open mic night
We want to know what you wrote last summer. Bring your best poem—about anything— that you wrote over the past few months. There will be some giveaways and good fun.
Jónína Kirton
FRIDAY, october 12, 2018
jónína kirton
& dvora levin
An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton confronts us with beauty and ugliness in the wholesome riot that is sex, love, and marriage. From the perspective of a mixed-race woman, Kirton engages with Simone de Beauvoir and Donald Trump to unravel the norms of femininity and sexuality that continue to adhere today.
Jónína Kirton is a Métis/Icelandic poet/author and facilitator. Born in Treaty One (Portage la Prairie, Manitoba) she currently lives in the unceded territory of the Musqueam, SKwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh. A Room Magazine Editorial Board member she is one of the co-founders of their new reading series, Indigenous Brilliance, an exciting new partnership between Room and Massy Books. She is also the curator of their new online poetry series, Turtle Island Responds. Kirton received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. She was sixty when she published her first collection of poetry with Talonbooks in 2015. Much to her delight, page as bone ~ ink as blood, has received some critical acclaim. Two years later she brought us her second collection, An Honest Woman, again with Talonbooks. The book was a finalist in the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Dvora Levin’s most recent collection.
Once a Director for Social Change Projects in Victoria and Israel, Dvora Levin now devotes herself to poetry. She has published six collections of her own work: To Bite The Blue Apple, Sharav, Ragged Light (all with Ekstasis Editions) and a unique hand-bound book, Zeroing In On Nothing. Her newest collections are Windblown & Waving (True Mint Blueprints) and Shared Motion: Science & Spirituality (Ekstasis Editions), both published in the spring, 2018.
Dvora also edited two poetry collections written by the homeless, sex workers and addicts in recovery: Voices From the Edge (Ekstasis Editions) and Victoria on the Banks of the Mainstream (funded by a City grant). She continues to lead weekly poetry writing sessions with federal parolees in a halfway house.
Windblown & Waving explores experience with cancer, including the crisis period (Windblown) and remission (Waving), poems which hopefully help to illuminate the journey of other patients, health professionals and volunteers.
Shared Motion is an exploration of the relationships between science and spirituality, a subject that will resonate with the growing number who identify as “spiritual but not religious”, as well as those immersed in the dynamic fields of quantum physics and cosmology.
Onjana Yawnghwe’s the small way
FRIDAY, october 19, 2018
onjana yawnghwe & micheline maylor
Onjana Yawnghwe is Shan-Canadian and was born in Thailand but grew up in BC. She is the author of the poetry books Fragments, Desire (Oolichan, 2017), and the forthcoming The Small Way (Caitlin Press, Fall 2018). She was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award in 2018. She has a MA in English and currently works as a nurse in Vancouver.
In The Small Way, a woman re-evaluates herself and her marriage as she comes to terms with a spouse’s transition. The book is an elegy to love and memory, a chronicle of holding on and letting go.
photo: Christina Riches
Dr. Micheline Maylor’s is the past Poet Laureate of Calgary 2016-18. She is a University of Calgary Senator, a Tedx talker, a Walrus talker, and she was the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Micheline attained a Ph.D. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Literature. She teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary where she won the 2015 Teaching Excellence Award and was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry. She serves as poetry acquisitions editor at Frontenac House Press. She is the co-founder of Freefall Literary Society and remains a consulting editor. Her most recent book Little Wildheart (U of A Press 2017) was long listed for both the Pat Lowther and the Raymond Souster Awards.
Patrick Friesen’s Songen
FRIDAY, october 26, 2018
patrick friesen
& joanna lilley
Songen is a book of swift-moving poems, each of them one sentence long, though the sentences are often not grammatically correct. They explore various subjects, but focus frequently on human pre-history and on the process of getting old. The book sometimes uses Low German, High German and Middle English words and constructions, looking at how the language began and evolved, at how diverse it is in its borrowings and unique usages in different parts of the English-speaking world.
Joanna Lilley’s If There Were Roads
Joanna Lilley’s poetry collections are If There Were Roads (Turnstone Press) and The Fleece Era (Brick Books). She’s also the author of the short story collection, The Birthday Books (Hagios Press) and her debut novel, Worry Stones, is out in October 2018 with Ronsdale Press. Joanna lives in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Guided by the geography of land and mind, the familiar and the unknown converge in If There Were Roads by Joanna Lilley. Pulled like the tide between the sea and the shore, If There Were Roads drives toward new vistas while reflecting on what has been lost in the process of moving forward. Lilley's poems explore the paths we take from here to there when there are no roads to guide us.