planet earth poetry is online on friday nights. Scroll down for details.
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. You can also receive the Zoom link by registering (FREE) through this link at Eventbrite.
to sign up for open mic, visit this link between tuesday and Friday noon.
Planet Earth Poetry gratefully acknowledges all of its supporters.
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 the CRD, with readings from poets in all of its nine regions. Each poet is represented by a pin on Google Earth of a spot meaningful to them in the CRD – somewhere they like to do their writing or find particularly inspiring.
CLICK HERE to go to google earth & watch our poets.
(Be patient, the program needs a bit of time to load in your browser.) We have six CRD poets up; three more to come. After that, we’ll be adding more poets who live in Victoria, thanks to a grant from the City of Victoria.)
The Poets Caravan is accessible to audiences both in the CRD 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 and the City of Victoria for their support and funding of the Poets Caravan. Thanks to videographer Lorraine Scollan for capturing each poet's unique voice with care and enthusiasm!
online readings in january 2021
open mic as usual — click here between tuesday and Friday noon to sign up
Evelyn Lau’s Pineapple Express
friDAY, january 8, 2021
evelyn lau
Evelyn Lau’s poetry has received the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and a National Magazine Award, as well as nominations for a BC Book Prize and a Governor-General’s Award. From 2011–2014, Evelyn served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.
Pineapple Express is rooted in the mind and its disorders. This collection explores moods, medications and side effects, capturing the flatness of depression while still making the language sing. It also probes the landscape of mid-life in all its manifestations: physical changes, psychological upheaval, the notion of becoming “invisible,” aging and loss, mortality, and the haunting of family and cultural history.
Pineapple Express is Evelyn Lau’s eighth collection of poetry and marks an important contribution to the literature on depression.
Susan Alexander’s Nothing You Can Carry
friDAY, january 15, 2021
susan alexander
Susan Alexander is the author of two books. In 2019, her “Vigil” sequence received the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. Susan’s work has garnered awards and appeared in anthologies and magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, B.C., unceded territory of the Squamish people.
Nothing You Can Carry pushes us to the limit of hope. Alongside their imagistic flourishes, sleight-of-hand enjambments, witty turns of phrase, and delectably melodic stanzas, Alexander’s deft lyrics stick out because of their throat-throbbing honesty…. The speakers excoriate, bemoan, grieve, and intimate; they engage our shared contemporary terror at the deterioration of the natural world; they reckon with personal loss; they refuse superficial solace; they pray. Mourning becomes a political act. Rather than start afresh, these poems persist amidst devastation. – Neil Surkan in Prism Magazine
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!
Patrick Friesen’s Outlasting the Weather
Tyler Pennock’s Bones
tuesDAY, january 19, 2021
pandemic poems anthology launch
Free. Registration is required. Click here to go to Eventbrite for link.
The Sky is Falling, The Sky is Falling will launch on Tuesday January 19th at 7 pm on Zoom. TSiF, TSiF is an anthology of pandemic poems written at the beginning of the COVID invasion edited by Sheila Martindale, assisted by Barbara Pelman. The poems, arriving from far and wide, came in response to a pandemic poetry contest. The styles and moods vary widely as poets try to understand and respond to the pandemic reshaping our lives.
Anthology contributors
friDAY, january 22, 2021
patrick friesen
Patrick Friesen is a poet from Victoria who has published poetry, essays, co-translations with Per Brask, and stage and radio plays. In 2020 he and Niko Friesen put out Buson’s Bell, a CD of text and music, and Anvil published Outlasting the Weather: Selected & New Poems 1994–2020.
Spanning a quarter century of Friesen’s work, the poems in Outlasting the Weather speak to what is meant by “a life lived in poetry.” The poems in this Selected are inseparable from the poet. To read them is to enter his thinking and ride his breath: to experience the art of making in as immediate a way as is humanly possible. These poems are archaeological digs through layers of a life lived without the certainty of belief.
friDAY, january 29, 2021
tyler pennock
Tyler Pennock is an adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Slave Lake area of Alberta. They write poetry, theatre, and creative non-fiction, which have appeared in collections in Canada, the US and France. Their first book, Bones was released in Spring of 2020, by Brick Books Publishing. Their second book, Blood, will be released in Autumn 2022.
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.
