planet earth poetry is back — Live and in person at russell books!
Welcome back to in-person PEP readings! We will be meeting on Friday nights at our new venue, Russell Books (747 Fort St). Doors open at 7:00pm, event begins at 7:30pm. Sign up for the open mic between 7:00 and 7:15. Please note that as per the latest provincial health orders, we will be requiring all attendees to wear masks and to bring proof of vaccination. While we hope to offer refreshments in the longer term, to keep things simple and avoid having too many occasions to remove our masks, for now we will simply be encouraging attendees to bring a drink or a snack along with them if they wish.
If you wish to tune in via Zoom for the featured reader portion of the evening (approximately 8:15-9:00pm Pacific time), please use the following credentials. Join Zoom Meeting: CLICK HERE. Meeting ID: 494 660 4447 Passcode: 2129
As always remember that you can tune in audio-only via landline by dialing +1 778 907 2071. While this won't allow interaction from the Zoom portion of our audience, we are happy to be able to share the featured reading with all who wish to tune in. Please note that we have disabled audio, video, and chat input from Zoom attendees to avoid any Zoom-bombing issues.
Planet Earth Poetry gratefully acknowledges all of its supporters.
november 2021
poetic opener: medwyn mcconachy
Pamela Medland’s collection Echo of Ash
friDAY, november 5, 2021
pamela medland
Medland’s poems have appeared widely online and in print in Canadian literary journals and anthologies. Originally from the west coast, Medland currently lives in Calgary (Treaty 7 territory, Metis Nation Region 3) where she serves as Director of the Airdrie Public Library. Echo of Ash is Medland's debut collection.
In Echo of Ash Medland shares the pain and trauma of the sudden loss of her best friend and partner of thirty-eight years. While Medland’s sorrow is personal, her poems portray facets of a grief journey that is universal. The collection builds towards an acceptance of the impermanence of life and the transitory nature of all human relationships. The final poem ends with “the splendour of a slow night fall” that “moves us to silence.”
Poetic Appetizer
I hold your box of ashes to my ear
and hear the sound clouds make
when they are making snow,
a quiet, endless becoming.
I have never been less dead than when, at ten, I jumped
feet first into a salmon run. Felt on soles the slap, the rush
the thousand scarlet bodies thrashing.
POETIC OPENER: Medwyn McConachy
Medwyn McConachy writes poetry about place, ancestry and old ways of knowing. Her work can be found in PEP’s pandemic collection The Sky is Falling, and in the SFU 2021 Emerge, launching October 24 at the Vancouver Writer’s Festival. She lives with gratitude on Hul’q’umi’num and SENĆOŦEN lands, Salt Spring Island.
Poetic Opener: susan braley
Bramah and the Beggar Boy by Renée Sarojini Saklikar
friDAY, november 12, 2021
Renée sarojini saklikar
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the author of four award winning books, including children of air india, and Listening to the Bees. Her newest book is Bramah and The Beggar Boy, an epic fantasy in verse, (Nightwood Editions, 2021). She was the first poet laureate for the City of Surrey (2015–2018).
Bramah and The Beggar Boy introduces the poetry epic, THOT J BAP, The Heart of this Journey Bears All Patterns, a fantasy series in verse, featuring a world ravaged by accelerated climate change, pandemics, and global inequality. Bramah, a locksmith demi-goddess, time travels to save orphans and seed savers from the evil Consortium. Using traditional verse and new poetic forms, this book alchemizes language and climate activism: each page is a portal, at once ancient and futuristic.
Poetic Appetizer
At the year’s midnight, we sighed, heads bent to—
Perimeter where oracles foretold
colony collapse, our aunties saving
mason bees, small finds in handmade glass jars.
Poetic Opener: leila kulpas
Wendy Donawa’s Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions
friDAY, november 19, 2021
wendy donawa
Victoria poet Wendy Donawa lives on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples. Her poems appear in journals, anthologies, and her three chapbooks. Her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, (Brick Books, 2017), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions is her second book.
Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions is peopled with casualties of colonizing desires. It revises mythical, historical and personal narratives, scrutinizes time’s unstoppable flow, and charts the body’s mortality, its capricious heart. The struggle to find grace-notes of love and beauty in our present historical moment animates these poems: tough and lyrical, they resonate with authentic feeling, cultural urgency, and a quirky sense of humour.
Poetic Appetizer
Our bodies’ unanswered questions carry us forward.
Or should I say the spikey peachpit of the stalled heart?
Time gnaws any sense of the possible.
Every sorrow winnowed by beauty….
SPECIAL ZOOM EVENT
tuesDAY, november 23, 2021
Frontenac house quartet
Planet Earth Poetry hosts this special Zoom launch of Frontenac’s 2021 Quartet! Sign up here to get the Zoom credentials.
Andrea Thompson is a poet, novelist, educator and editor at Brick Books . Her poetry album One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award, her album Soulorations earned her the 2019 LCP Golden Beret Award, and she is the recipient of the 2021 Pavlick Poetry Prize.
D.A. Lockhart is the author of nine books, including Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House, 2020) and Breaking Right: Stories (Porcupine’s Quill, 2021). He is a Turtle Clan member of Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Lenape), and a registered treatied member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. His work has been generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Tyler Engström is from Calgary. In 2017 he was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poems have previously been collected in Drifting Like a Metaphor: Calgary Poets of Promise. Think of How Old We Could Get is his first book, an existentialist tour guide led by a clean-eyed nihilist or an unreliable narrator.
See Wendy Donawa’s bio on November 19.
wendy morton’s birthday reading
Henry Doyle’s No Shelter
friDAY, november 26, 2021
henry doyle
Henry Doyle lives and works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A long-time member of the DTES Writing Collective, Henry has published work in multiple literary magazines and the anthologies V6A and From the Heart of it All. He has won Geist’s DTES Jamboree Writing Contest and Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize.
Infused with the spirit of Charles Bukowski, these down-to-earth poems take readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle’s years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ontario, to his arrival in Vancouver to work in construction before landing work as a custodian and maintenance man.
Poetic Appetizer
I get on the bus after a ten-hour shift,
pay my $3 to just go a few blocks,
too tired to walk home.
I sit down in the first seat I see,
open the window and put on my mask.
A maskless man who wears a smile of hate
jumps up to close the window, then says loudly,
“Keep the window closed, you fuck’n junkie crackhead.”
Just because we live here,
they think we’re all the same.
POETIC OPENER: Susan Braley
Susan Braley lives and writes in Victoria. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as The Antigonish Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, Literary Review of Canada, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Room. Her poem “Traces” was shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year, and was selected as Readers’ Choice.
POETIC OPENER: Leila Kulpas
The Birthday Guest: Wendy Morton
Leila Kulpas has a medical degree, a fellowship in Psychiatry, and an honours degree in English. Her poetry has appeared in an Ascent Aspirations Magazine anthology, and has been accepted for publication in four upcoming anthologies; it has also been published on the Internet by Pandora’s Collective, in Autumn House Review and in Island Writer.
PEP is honoured to help Artistic Director Emerita and longtime friend and mentor of Planet Earth Poetry, Wendy Morton, celebrate her birthday!
Wendy Morton has six books of poetry, and a memoir, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, in which her adventures as a corporate sponsored poet are revealed. She has been WestJet’s Poet of the Skies, Chrysler’s Poet of the Road. In 2019, she became the Poet Laureate for Juan de Fuca. She has lived in Otter Point, west of Sooke for 46 years, grows a large organic garden and is a raven watcher.
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 eight CRD poets up; one 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!
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.