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 & December 2021
SPECIAL THEMED OPEN MIC on december 3
For the open-mic, the theme will be Celebrating Language Diversity. Share with us poems that move between languages, poems translated from one language to another, poems that lament the loss of certain words from the language, poems that contain ‘made-up’ words, etc. You get the picture—language diversity can be interpreted in many ways. Please use this link to sign up to read on December 3:
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
Poetic Opener: josephine lore
Poetic Opener: Marlene Grand Maître
Henry Doyle’s No Shelter
Francine Merasty
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.
friDAY, december 3, 2021
Francine Merasty
THIS IS A ZOOM READING Sign up for Zoom credentials HERE. Sign up for special themed open mic HERE.
Francine Merasty is a Nēhithaw Iskwew (Cree Woman) from Wapawikoschikanek (Pelican Narrows), a reserve in Northern Saskatchewan. She is a member of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, a fluent Nēhithaw speaker, and General Counsel and Executive Assistant to the Chief and Council of Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation. Francine is a winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Awards. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Iskotew Iskwew: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl is a poetry collection written during a period of trauma while the author was working as a statement taker and Counsel to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2017. This book portrays the author’s lived experience as an Indigenous woman raised on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in the 1980s, her memories of the wilderness, and her experiences as a residential school survivor. With this collection, the author seeks to teach and inform Canadians of her foundational truth, growing up as an Indigenous woman on the land in a remote area of Northern Saskatchewan.
Poetic Appetizer
from “Since Time Immomorial”
We’ve been here since time immemorial
It means a time
So long ago
People have no knowledge of it
friDAY, december 10, 2021
Dallas Hunt
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has been published in Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and was nominated for several awards. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of British Columbia.
Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing—or at least attempting to.
The poems in this collection aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try—and ultimately fail—to articulate them. This debut collection is vital in the context of a colonial aesthetic designed to perpetually foreclose on Indigenous futures and erase Indigenous existence.
Poetic Appetizer
the Cree word for constellation
is a saskatoon berry bush in summertime
the translation for policeman
in Cree is mîci nisôkan, kohkôs
the translation for genius
in Cree is my kôhkom muttering in her sleep
the Cree word for poetry is your four-year-old
niece’s cracked lips spilling out
broken syllables of nêhiyawêwin in between
the gaps in her teeth
POETIC OPENER: Leila Kulpas
The Birthday Guest: Wendy Morton
POETIC OPENER: Josephine LoRe
POETIC OPENER: Marlene Grand Maître
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.
a pearl in this diamond world …
Josephine LoRe’s words have been read live on stage and in zoom-rooms across the internet, published in literary journals and anthologies in ten countries and three languages, put to music, danced, and integrated into paintings and visual art. Her poem The Tea Set was shortlisted for the 2019 Room Poetry Prize.
She has two collections, Unity and the Calgary Herald Bestseller The Cowichan Series, both of which integrate her poetry and photography. She has taught workshops through the Alexandra Writers’ Center Society, When Words Collide, and the Wine Country Writers’ Festival and is participating in the Quebec project Femmes et Paroles. She contributes to the editorial staff of Parkland Poets and the international anthology PoetryXHunger.
Marlene Grand Maître's chapbook Cancer's Rogue Season was published by Frog Hollow Press in 2020. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, most recently in Prairie Fire.
In addition, her work has been published in eight anthologies. She has won first prize, been shortlisted and been first runner-up in various poetry competitions.
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. 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.