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poetry readings

Telltale & Other Poetry

Judging panel chair Helen Dunsmore announcing TS Eliot prize-winner
Judging panel chair Helen Dunsmore announcing TS Eliot prize-winner

Wednesday’s reading with the Telltale Poets was great fun, and has been well reported by champion blogger and poet Robin Houghton (whose book  for blogging writers is essential reading – practical and well illustrated – for those wanting to take the plunge).

Went to a lunchtime talk at the Wellcome Institute on Friday, by epidemiologist Liam Smeeth from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He spoke very well on the state of epidemiological research in the UK, explained his role in untangling the confusion over the MMR vaccine in the 90s, and talked about some large scale research going on to track different cancers in very large populations. I heard distinctly Goldacrean echoes in his discussion of the value of using electronic medical records to improve medical research, and the all-important and extremely time-consuming work of checking data meticulously before reaching conclusions.

This week’s poetic entertainment started on Sunday with the TS Eliot Prize finalists Ian Macmillan - TS Eliot readingsreadings. These readings now take place in the Royal Festival Hall (capacity 2500) – a near sell-out from all reports. It was certainly a busy and overwarm venue, the proceedings beautifully presided over by Ian McMillan.

He introduced us, and more importantly the short-listed poets, to the notion of the poetry year. This he explained was like a dog year, but much shorter, lasting precisely 8 minutes. So each poet had one poetry year, and no more, to read… which included time for the poets to reach the podium, adjust their glasses and introduce the poems, though this part of the definition had not been entirely apprehended by all, including one or two of the most experienced readers.

Made me think nostalgically of the reading I attended at Toronto’s Harbourfront, watching the gratifyingly pugnacious (in this instance anyway) Greg Gatenby walk onto stage to tell the equally pugnacious Irving Layton that he had exceeded his reading time. Many an audience member has sent out prayers for this kind of intervention which occurs too seldom on our over-polite stages. I’ve seen the other end of the spectrum too, at the Vancouver literary festival, where poets were sent to the podium which was rigged with a timer, set to go off at the end of their reading time. Surely there must be a happy medium.

David HarsentAll that having been said, I name my favourite reader as Michael Longley, whose elegies to his twin were simple and strong. The eventual winner, however, was David Harsent, often nominated so a fair choice, though his reading style put me off, as a bit self-satisfied, and found his poetry too distant for my tastes, other than his poem Icefield, a good clean observation on climate change. Fiona Benson‘s poem Portrait with a Bandaged Ear remains a favourite – a powerful portrait of an abusive relationship that lost something for me, curiously, when I re-read the title and realized it was a Van Gogh poem. (You can read a sampling of poems from all the shortlisted poets, plus discussion notes here)

More excitement to come in my world anyway with another reading on tonight’s horizon. I’ll be reading at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden (22 Betterton Street, London WC2) tonight at 8pm, at the Loose Muse women writers’ night. Open mic and a fellow reader I look forward to meeting and hearing: Tania Hershman. If you’re around, come on down!

Poets in Paris

ParisPoemsDes4SaisonsSo finally the Iambic Cafe dusts itself off and drags itself to its weary feet, slightly jetlagged but coming round. Sunday’s arrival in London was enlivened by the rather leisurely delivery of my baggage, but after that it was clear sailing and I was greeted by faltering sunshine on the cobblestones.
ParisGargoyleOff to Paris on Tuesday, arriving by Eurostar in good time, and then an evening of bilingual readings at the Delaville Cafe, courtesy Ivy Writers Paris, comfortably accommodated and efficiently organized by expat poet Jennifer Stills. It featured Belgian poet Constance Chlore and Parisian Dominique Maurizi, as well as Saskatoon’s own Mari-Lou Rowley, shown here with Christmas tree..
ParisMariLouReading2 We passed a relaxing Wednesday afternoon wandering around the 18th arrondissement, mostly towards Montmartre, admiring the food in the windows, prowling its shops and pausing for a leisurely coffee. Hills and steps there are many, but the sun came out from time to time and warmed the way.
ParisBreadParisMimoletteParisWindowSouffle
Entertainingly, we passed a couple of goats gnawing on a grass fence we’d passed several times – and found we’d discovered a little pocket of urban agriculture, apparently lush in the summer but a bit bare now, with chickens pecking trackside near Porte de Clignancourt. ParisClignancourtGoats+Chickens

Our wanderings ended with a delightful dinner at the Bistrot Poulbot. Pour moi, saumon tartare, dorade , and (how could I not) a lovely confection involving lashings of my namesake Valrhona chocolate.

London Books

Reading at the RA

Still a few more bits and pieces to share from my time in London, back in March, before this month, like the past couple, get away from me.

I went to a number of events while in town. One, a reading at the Royal Academy, was themed to reflect the architectural exhibit, Sensing Spaces. Poets were commissioned to write poems inspired by the pieces and then come along and read them one evening, in and around the exhibition. The affair was a mixed success, from my point of view out there in the audience. The show carried on around the readings, with bemused art-lovers pausing to puzzle over who these people were and what they were doing. The reading spaces were not always ideal, as in the one shown above, which was a large, cavernous room with a bar – attracting a fair amount of traffic and chat and requiring the poets to bellow above the din. Which not everyone can manage, and it doesn’t always serve the poem’s quiet purpose. Another, shown here, was more intimate and atmospheric, but not always in the best way, as it featured a pebble floor which made, well, pebble sounds when anyone moved or walked over it. Still, a tip of the hat to organizers for trying to include poetry – which is incompatible with many features of our rushed, noisy lives.

A quieter event was Carrie Etter’s launch of Imagined Sons. Most pubs in England have function rooms, mostly above the main tavern. The Yorkshire Grey in Clerkenwell had one that was perfectly sized and situated, and offered what looked like pretty good food too. A goodly throng assembled to wish Carrie well with her most recent poetry collection. We were treated to Carrie’s reading of a number of these moving and imaginative reflections on the unanswerable question of what becomes of a child given up for adoption, and how the act haunts a teenaged birth mother throughout the rest of her life.

Other events included a visit to Poetry in the Crypt, which was, as always, a packed-out event in which poets waive their reading fee and all monies raised are given over to charity. The readers du jour were Clare Best, Robert Chandler and Jean Sprackland, who gave generously of their words, alongside many fine readers from the floor. On my way to the venue, in the crypt of St Mary’s Church in Islington, I noticed other audiences spilling out of pub doorways, as the Six Nations Rugby match was on.

And finally, right at the end of my visit, I was able to attend a book launch by an old friend from way back, Stephen Watts, who was launching his beautifully titled collection, Ancient Sunlight. He read in his characteristically powerful style, from a collection that travels around London and Europe but remains rooted in his personal web of humanitarian and political concerns. A good literary finale, although it meant I had missed Jenny Lewis reading from Taking Mesopotamia in Oxford. And illness kept me from the launch of Heart Archives by Sue Rose. But I managed to get to quite a lot over a relatively short visit. Always so many reasons to return!

 

London – food & drugs

Mystery revellers at Westminster

Gorgeous springtime weather here in the UK, which has earned it after a sodden couple of months. Last weekend it hit 17c on Sunday which brought all the picnickers out in force. Primrose Hill was littered with everyone and his dog, and the market at Camden Lock was seething. It’s not the market that was during my day, but I was pleased to see a few things have endured, like Marine Ices and Belgo Noord. But the market itself – once a jumble of knick-knacks, housewares, jewelery, and oddities with a bit of food – has become one big street food extravaganza with little else on offer. If you’re hungry and willing to eat and run, it’s the place to be on a weekend. But otherwise, other markets.

Camden Regents Canal

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve managed to arrive in time to attend some of the free lectures on offer at Kings College London in its Feed Your Mind series. I went to the well-attended first session, Obese London, to learn about obesity rates and their consequences for Londoners. These are highest among immigrant populations, whose diet plummets away from traditional foods into heavy consumption of the worst foods (chips, sugary drinks, chocolate, sweets and processed foods) the longer they’ve been in the country. And of course these deliver obesity and its associated chronic illnesses including diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and higher mortality.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I headed to KCL’s Guy’s Campus, in the shadow of the Shard, and arrived as the Tuesday farmers market was underway. The afternoon’s entertainment was called Hot & Spicy Drugs, which focused somewhat disappointingly and pretty much exclusively on capsaicin (the heat in chilli peppers) and its possible uses in pharmacology. I’d been hoping for a bit more talk about more of the hot & spicy foods and their uses both traditional and pharmacological, but I learned some interesting things. Birds lack the receptor protein that gives chillies their heat; drugs that block this receptor in humans have been developed but are not used since they also block our ability to feel external heat, which seems a pretty undesirable side effect. Applied topically, capsaicin (after an introductory period of discomfort) has a desensitizing effect which can help a lot of kinds of neuralgia and neuropathy. Capsaicin creams and patches have been found to be helpful in relieving pain associated with arthritis, shingles, psoriasis and a number of other conditions. And we got to do a taste test with randomly assigned chocolates with different amounts of chilli in them; as might have been expected, the perception of heat varied wildly among tasters.

Tomorrow I’m off to hear the creator of meat from stem cells, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, extoll the virtues of stemburgers. Yum.

ASLE 2013 – plenaries, poetry & medicinal plants

 

 

 

I managed to get a long overdue poetry reading into my ASLE week, attending the plenary reading by Maine poet Jeffrey Thomson and Colombian writer Juan Carlos Galeano, who teaches in Florida. I had first encountered Galeano at my first ASLE at UVic in 2009, where he read some of his translated poems from Amazonia, a charming collection that draws its inspiration from Amazonian folk tales. This time he read from that, accompanied by projected translations, as well as from a new work just published (in Spanish) in Peru, Special Report on the Wind. Thomson read from several works, notably his 2009 collection Birdwatching in Wartime; his anecdote about hanging back while the sounds of a group of students he was with faded and observing the way the forest animated after the humans had left stayed with me as a good metaphor for what a lot of presentations touched on.

The Friday afternoon field trip I chose was a trip to the Native Medicinal Plant Research garden, which also houses the university’s community gardens. We were led down the garden path by the excellent Kelly Kindscher, a highly knowledgeable prairie ethnobotanist and wetlands advocate, who explained a bit about the program and let us pick, crush, sniff and ponder over many of the garden’s plants. The program’s main aim is to examine native plants for cancer-healing and antioxidant properties, and Kindscher made some interesting observations about the narrowness of that kind of research: what else might we be missing by focusing on molecules? As if to prove the point I caught myself asking which part of the immune-boosting Topeka Purple Coneflower (echinacea atrorubens) was used for tea. How locked we all are in our modes of thinking: had I not just heard Karin Kilpatrick say that one Western medicine’s many mistakes is failing to use the entire plant as native cultures do? Below, we look at Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccifolium), Kelly demonstrates the invasive power of Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca. a good food – if cooked) ironically invading a patch of mint; and the star plant of the moment, the Long-Leafed Ground Cherry (Physalis longifolia) which is showing some powerful antioxidant properties, offering 14 new compounds that reduce tumour size in breast and pancreatic cancer.

 

 

 

 

Finally, my day came first thing on Saturday morning when I read my personal essay in the company of two quite different academic papers. I had not expected more than a couple of people to attend, since it was 8:30 in the morning and the room was murderously difficult to find, but we had a healthy gathering of 15 or so which was gratifying, and the discussion was interesting and friendly. The sessions I went to in the Species & Food subject stream were all pretty well attended; I understand it was the first time ASLE had had a food theme, so I expect it will continue. Since I have the floor, here is the panel in its entirety: Shamim Us-Saher Ansari, St. Louis Community College-Meramec: ‘You are What You Eat and How You Eat’: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eating in French Canadian Culture as Dramatized in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock; Bethany Ober, Penn State University: Expanding the Limits of Gender and Domesticity in Contemporary Ecofeminist Memoir; and Rhona McAdam, In your own backyard: Food sovereignty & the urban garden.

After that there was only time for one more session before I had to leave for the airport, and fortunately for me it was Daniel Wildcat. The title of his topic, After progress: Enacting systems of life-enhancement frankly put me off but I went anyway and was very glad I did, as he was an entertaining and persuasive speaker. Describing himself as a recovering academic, he spoke about how to respond to a damaged world, using “indigenous realism.” This is not, he stressed, naive romanticism: that label is better represented by the idea that humans are in charge of the balance of life on the planet. What we need, he said, is a cultural climate change, one that bridges the gap from knowing to doing and does not include a division between nature and culture. Storytelling is lost: the stories our children hear now are not the wisdom transmitted by their elders, but 30 second soundbites developed by corporations in order to teach kids to be consumers. We need to get from a sense of inalienable rights to one of inalienable responsibility, in a world of relationships not resources. The least each of us can do, if we can’t fix the planet, is to become a better relative and make the world a better place for nonhuman relatives.