13 The Meter’s Running: the New Wave of Poetry
This event will feature three contemporary poets who work in free verse
style and make extensive use of unconventional structural devices.
Elizabeth Bachinsky
Governor General’s Award-nominee Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of
three volumes of poetry, the most recent being god of missed
connections (Nightwood Editions), a collection that freely plays with
the basic architecture of poetry. Some pieces read like straight prose,
some leave large areas of negative space on the page, others consist of
one or two word lines written in list-like form. The author, whose
Ukrainian heritage is integral to the collection, refers often to the
history of Ukrainian-Canadians, as well as to the disaster at Chernobyl.
Joe Denham
The Denham family has been involved in dance, music and the arts in
general on the Sunshine Coast for decades. Joe Denham, a working commercial fisherman and a talented
writer, has produced two books of poetry. Flux, his impressive debut, was followed by Windstorm
(Nightwood Editions), a thematically-connected collection of five long pieces rich with the
language and imagery of the coast. Denham skilfully takes readers to that unpredictable, sometimes violent
edge where humankind and the natural world meet.
Gregory Scofield
Gregory Scofield is a Métis writer and one of the most powerful voices
of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. His five volumes of poetry have brought him a number of awards including
the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His most recent work, Kipocihkan:
Poems New and Selected (Nightwood Editions), is an anthology of urban
Aboriginal songs and a retrospective of his pivotal works. Scofield uses
unconventional page layouts, and relies upon rhythm, cadence and
musicality of language, rather than punctuation, to create syntax.
Brad Cran, an award-winning poet, essayist, photographer, and
Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, will host the event.
|
