planet earth poetry is online on friday nights.
We are excited to bring our poetry community together online. Each week, the Planet Earth Poetry newsletter will include a link to the Zoom reading scheduled for Friday nights at 7:15, with open mic and the featured reader starting at 7:30. If you aren’t already signed up to get our weekly news, click here to ask to be added to the email list. Check here or on our Facebook page for what’s coming up.
to sign up for open mic, visit this link between tuesday and Friday noon.
Planet Earth Poetry gratefully acknowledges all of its supporters.
online readings fridays in september 2020
open mic as usual — click here between tuesday and Friday noon to sign up
Happy anniversary to Planet Earth Poetry
(the longest running reading series in Canada)
Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds
friDAY, september 11, 2020
and a happy new year!
As some of you know, we consider this time of year Real New Year – so Happy Real New Year. It is September when everything starts, even through the COVID mists, and Planet Earth Poetry is no exception; our first Friday session is this week – September 11.
It is an open mic night with a twist. All readers are required to read a poem by a poet other than themselves. That’s been our tradition for years. But this year you have the option of reading a poem you have written in response to the poem you read. Maximum time for the two poems is 5 minutes and that includes any intro and comments you make. Three minutes if you only read someone else’s poem. You have to sign up in advance for the open mic and we want to know the poem and author you have selected. Let us know if you will be also reading a response poem. The sign up for the reading will open on at noon, Tuesday, September 8. Here is the link to our special Kick-Off open mic sign-up:
tuesDAY, september 15, 2020
JOin us for a virtual launch of Sweet Water: poems for the watersheds
Edited by Yvonne Blomer
Bookseller for this event: Munro’s Books
Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds gathers the voices of poets from across Canada, the US and the UK who write of water. Bottled, clouded, held in rain, in river, estuary and lake, sweet water is the planet’s life force and the poets here examine it from every angle—the pitcher plant, the beaver and the American Bull Frog, rain, clouds, smog, the many ducks and the salmon and the last lake sturgeon. Poets take us to the rivers they live along—and grieve daily—the Peace River Canyon, Chilcotin, Taylor River, the Humber River, Millstone River, the Fraser River, and more.
In Canada, the watershed runs into the Pacific, Arctic, Hudson Bay and the Atlantic. This water houses the aquatic ecosystems that feed and nurture not only the people, industries and animals on land but also drains into the world’s oceans. It is part of the hydrologic cycle that begins with water evaporation to become groundwater that seeps into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans. It is the water we bathe in, drink, and with which we grow our food. As it becomes more and more poisoned from industrial corporations, mining and the many, too many humans on our planet, it also becomes more and more endangered. We are paying attention. We are aware of the watershed moment that we inhabit in the twenty-first century. We know that change must come.
READERS: Alisa Gordaneer, Richard Harrison, Jeremy Pataky, Marion Quednau, Rhonda Ganz, Susan Stenson, Bruce Hunter, Zach Wells, Ulrike Narwani, Harold Rhenisch, Tom Nesbitt, Anita Lahey, Kirsten Pendreigh, Barbara Black, Maureen Hynes, John Barton, Terry Ann Carter, Marlene Grand Maitre
Marlene Grand Maitre
friDAY, september 18, 2020
marlene grand maitre & daniel g scott
Marlene Grand Maitre’s chapbook, Cancer’s Rogue Season was published by Frog Hollow Press in April 2020. Her poetry has also appeared in many literary journals, most recently in Prairie Fire, CV2 and Event. Work has also been published in seven anthologies, including I Found It at the Movies (Guernica, 2014), Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), Sweet Water: Poems tor the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2020). Two poems are forthcoming in Voicing Suicide (Ekstasis Editions, 2020).
![Daniel G Scott’s [Klee-Shays]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/524a2cfce4b0cd3b084a32c7/1598482113459-5B3PB1F3XZ0GMBNWW45M/klee-shays.jpg)
Daniel G Scott’s [Klee-Shays]
Daniel G Scott is a poet with five volumes of poetry and [Klee-Shays] Undone Volume 1 (Nose in Book Publishers) is his fourth chapbook. This year will also see the release of Voicing Suicide (Ekstasis Editions), an anthology of suicide poems he has edited. He has been the artistic director of Planet Earth Poetry since 2016, is a retired academic and is now becoming a gardener.
[Klee-Shays] takes clichés and rereads them, undoes their implications, sometimes with humour, sometimes uncovering dark overtones. What began as a writing exercise became a small obsession.
Bruce Rice’s The Vivian Poems
friDAY, september 25, 2020
bruce rice & ted landrum
Bruce Rice is the Saskatchewan Poet Laureate, an essayist and editor with six collections of poetry. Bruce has been called “a master of light.” He writes about individual lives, community and how we are transformed by landscape even as we leave our footprints on it. Bruce lives in Regina.
When Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier’s life’s work of 140,000 prints, negatives and Super 8 films was discovered in a storage locker auction, the media called her the “mystery nanny.” Maier had no voice in any of this and died in poverty. In this reading of the photographs, Bruce Rice shows us a documentarian who can be compassionate, funny, abrasive, and always deeply aware of her times. Barry Dempster calls these poems “beautiful…deep and full of consolation.”
Ted Landrum’s Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems
Ted Landrum is the maker of Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems (2017). Poems appear in CV2, Partial Zine, Warehouse, Heartwood: Poems for...Trees (2018), and two collaborative chapbooks, Room-to-Room: Poetry & Architecture in Conversation (2018) and Table for Four / Eccentric Crops (JackPine Press, 2020). Ted teaches at the University of Manitoba. See www.ubuloca.com
Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems (Signature Editions, 2017) is a provocative leap into experimental poetry. Limned by peers as “edgy,” “surprising” and “strangely affecting,” this “delightful impertinence” is a work of serious play, culminating decades of hybrid search: for the poetry of architecture and the architecture of poetry. By turns demanding, playful, jubilant and mad, the work is made as much as written. “Archi-poetry” responds to formative sources, rules and principles (archē) with a polylogue-collage of sound, sense and emotion.
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.
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 currently a digital reading series. 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.
Planet Earth Poetry gratefully acknowledges all of its supporters.
