BACK TO IN-PERSON READINGS!
All in-person PEP events will be taking place at Russell Books, 747 Fort Street in downtown Victoria. Doors open at 7:00pm, event starts at 7:30 and sign up for the open mic is between 7:00–7:20. Masks are encouraged but no longer required; proof of vaccination will still be required until April 8. In person events will be livestreamed HERE (Meeting ID: 494 660 4447 /Passcode: 2129) **please note, livestream begins at approx. 8:00–8:15pm with featured readings**
Planet Earth Poetry gratefully acknowledges all of its supporters.
April 2022
in person
Heather Haley’s Skookum Raven
Friday, April 1, 2022
Poetic Opener: Julie Paul
Heather Haley
Heather Haley’s writing has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, she was Poetry Editor for the LA Weekly and publisher of The Edgewise Café, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. She is the author of debut novel, The Town Slut's Daughter, with a stage adaptation in the works, plus poetry collections Sideways, Three Blocks West of Wonderland and Skookum Raven.
Poetic appetizer
Let us linger, ponder,
Graph. So much garbage. Deaf
German Shepherd hears malice.
Medicine arrives post-dumpster,
Mercy too late and garbled.
—from Immune
“Tart, taut and terse, Haley’s honed poems of lust and loss, wrath and remorse are imbued with hard-won insight and subversive wit. Her wry x-ray eye cuts to the quick in an array of deftly drawn portraits that will make you grin with recognition.” —Fiona Tinwei Lam
March 4 Poetic Opener
Julie Paul
Julie Paul is the author of one poetry collection, The Rules of the Kingdom, and three books of short fiction. She is currently working on more poetry and a book of personal essays.
in person
Tolu Oloruntoba
IN PERSON
Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth
zoom only
Zoom link HERE
Four poets from Electronic Garret
IN PERSON:
NO ZOOM LIVESTREAM
Chantal Gibson
NOTE: at the reader’s request there will be no livestream of this event.
friDAY, April 8, 2022
Poetic Opener: Rhonda Ganz
Tolu Oloruntoba
Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and practiced medicine before his before his current work managing projects for provincial health organizations. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Pleiades, Columbia Journal Online, Obsidian, The Maynard, and the Humber Literary Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His debut collection of poems, The Junta of Happenstance, was published in Spring 2021 by Palimpsest Press and is a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in Surrey, BC, in the territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen First Nations.
Each One a Furnace explores (im)migration, diasporas, transience, and instability by following the behaviour, and the abundant variety, of finches. The often-migratory birds in these poems typify the unrest, and inability to rest, that animate the lives of billions in the modern world. Out of the register of ornithology, themes of difficulty, adversity, and migrancy, urban ennui, and the psychic struggles of diasporic peoples take shape. Those unable to be at rest in the world take to improbable flight.
Poetic Appetizer
Cutthroat Finch
I’m a cutthroat
(as in, the one throatcut,
neck a red sash)
(they clutch their bags
and flinch).
April 8 Poetic Opener
Rhonda Ganz
Rhonda Ganz’s first collection, Frequent, small loads of laundry (Mother Tongue Publishing) won the Relit Award for Poetry. The book was also a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Victoria Butler Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, Rattle, Room, Harvard Design Magazine, on city buses as part of Poetry in Transit and many anthologies, the latest being Voicing Suicide.
FriDAY, april 22, 2022
Yvonne Blomer & Arleen Paré
Yvonne Blomer (she/her) is an award-winning travel writer and poet. Yvonne’s other poetry books include As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015), and the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2017 and 2021). Her travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017) explores body, time, and travel. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, BC, and the past Artistic Director of the weekly reading series Planet Earth Poetry. She lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Yvonne mentors and teaches in poetry and prose and will be offering a five day class at www.missa.ca this summer.
Arleen Paré
Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer with eight collections of poetry, including a recent chapbook. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC Award for Poetry and has won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
Poetic appetizer
In the last century the twentieth the late nineteen-nineties everyone wanted
to be a lesbian this may be exaggeration maybe not everyone maybe not
Pope Saint Paul II or John Ashbery or Sarah Palin but many enough . . . .
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Electronic Garret
Join four poets from the Electronic Garret to celebrate Poetry Month! The Electronic Garret is a group of Canadian women and non-binary poets who have created an online community to support each other in writing thirty poems in thirty days for National Poetry Writing Month. They have done this every April since 2014.
Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. Her latest collection, TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020), is the first book out of a public poetry project where Ariel hangs poems in trees and asks passersby to add their thoughts, ideas, and secrets. She is also the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Gordon is currently the Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.
Tanja Bartel is a writer and high school teacher living in Maple Ridge, BC. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in various journals, including Geist, Grain, the Antigonish Review, the Puritan, the American Journal of Medical Genetics, and the anthology We Are One: Poems of the Pandemic. Her first poetry collection, Everyone at This Party, was published by Goose Lane in 2020.
When Conni Cartlidge was little, her mom took her to the library weekly and her dad read to her every night. Now, she curls up on the couch with her grandchildren to share their favourite stories. A retired college instructor and emerging writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, Conni's work has been published at CBC Online, the Winnipeg Free Press, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Pure Slush Books, and Voices, the journal of the Lake Winnipeg Writers' Group.
Dr. Micheline Maylor was Calgary’s Poet Laureate 2016–18. Her latest poetry collection is The Bad Wife (2021), and Little Wildheart (U of Alberta Press) was long listed for both the Pat Lowther and Raymond Souster awards. She recently won the Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence in Alberta. She teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University and has been recently translated into Farsi.
Friday, April 29, 2022
Poetic Opener: Daniel Scott
Chantal Gibson
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning artist and educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her collection How She Read won the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and was nominated for that year’s Griffin Poetry Award.
with/holding is a collection of genre-blurring poems that examines the representation and reproduction of Blackness across communication media and popular culture. Together, text and image call up a nightmarish and seemingly insatiable buzzing-clicking-scrolling-sharing appetite for a daily diet of Black suffering.
Poetic appetizer
Terms n Conditions
I come to you withholding. Let’s
not loiter in the truth. The evil is
already written, our files forever
corrupted. No free antivirus. No
algorithmic way out. The content
is sponsored, baked with our DNA,
the machines busy with the mind-
less work of reproduction. There’s
no Science in remembering, no Art
in the daily curation of our suffering,
no wonder in their wretchedness,
no limit to the limits of their artificial
intelligence.
Daniel Scott
Daniel G Scott is past Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry. His recent publications, both Ekstasis Editions, include Aftertime, and Voicing Suicide, an anthology of suicide poems he edited as well as [klee-shays] undone, volume one (Nose in Book Publishing, 2020) He has individual poems in journals, anthologies and chapbooks as well as numerous academic publications and, with Shannon McFerran, The Girls Diary Project (University of Victoria, 2013). In 1984, he won a one-act playwriting competition in New Brunswick with Four Steps Closer.
POETS CARAVAN
We are excited to launch our latest project to share poetry!
The Planet Earth Poetry Poets Caravan highlights the rich cultural landscape of Southern Vancouver Island. Each poet is represented by a pin on Google Earth of a spot meaningful to them – somewhere they like to do their writing or find particularly inspiring. We began with readings from poets from each of the nine regions in the CRD. We have now added more poets who live in Victoria, thanks to a grant from the City of Victoria, and also moving outside the city limits thanks to funding from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. This project is ongoing, so check back for new pins.
CLICK HERE to go to google earth & watch our poets.
(Be patient, the program needs a bit of time to load in your browser.)
The Poets Caravan is accessible to audiences both in BC and worldwide. This interactive experience will be available over time and provides a way for poets and poetry to reach a wide audience in this time when in-person reading events aren’t possible. Digital projects come with accessibility challenges for those who may not have access to a computer or have disabilities which stop them from using the selected platform. We have made the videos and text available for download separately on request. Please email Planet Earth Poetry if you’d like this option.
Thank you to the CRD Arts and Culture Support Fund, the BC Arts Council,the Canada Council for the Arts, and the City of Victoria for their support and funding of the Poets Caravan. Thanks to videographer Lorraine Scollan, Leigh Hilbert, Rachel Lenkowski, and Kurt Knock for capturing each poet's unique voice with care and enthusiasm!
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. Planet Earth Poetry takes place at Russell Books, 747 Fort St. in downtown Victoria. Doors open at 7:00; sign up for the open mic between 7:00-7:15. The evening begins at 7:30 with an open mic, followed by a featured reader(s). 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.