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poetry readings

Full steam ahead: a week of talks!

Lots going on this week. If you’re in town I hope you can make it to one or more of these different events!

On Tuesday evening, March 19, look for me in Fernwood, where I’m talking urban agriculture at Fernwood U. Cornerstone Cafe, 1301 Gladstone Avenue, Victoria, at 7pm. (Free!)

Friday night, March 22, I’ll be reading at Planet Earth Poetry alongside Rosemary Griebel. Moka House Cafe, #103-1633 Hillside Avenue, Victoria, at 7:30pm. (Nearly free – just $3)

Saturday afternoon, March 23, I’m on the Food Writing panel at the WordsThaw Spring Writing Symposium, hosted by the Malahat Review, an all day affair that runs 10am until 10pm at the University of Victoria, Human & Social Development Building, Room A240. ($40-50, but you get a whole day of literary fun for your money)

Skagit River Poetry Festival

It’s been a brilliant couple of days in La Conner WA, and the weather likewise. Cool blue skies over a flock of talent at this biennial event. Tonight’s readings by Nikki Giovanni, Bob Hicok and Marie Howe were dazzling.

After admonishing one and all to be sure to record and archive readings such as these,  Giovanni explained to us mostly white folks what the agonies of hair care were for black women of her age, raised on flat ironed hair and a chronic fear of the moisture or heat that could bring the nappiness back. She had to explain to us what a “kitchen” was, so we could hear her poem The Wrong Kitchen.

Hicok ranged from proprietary leanings on his birth-decade, the Sixties, to the tender agonies of a mother with Alzheimer’s, a topic he’s worked before. His Speaking American was a delightful opener. We’d heard his name already in an afternoon discussion on humour in poetry, invoked by Tony Hoagland when he’d been asked whose poetry and sense of humour resonated (our own Lorna Crozier – brilliant in all the sessions I caught – cited Alden Nowlan and Susan Musgrave).

Howe finished the evening off with a painfully funny reading, including poems about her mother and her daughter, a new sequence about Mary Magdalene’s seven devils, and a poem she said she’d like to retitle After the Divorce.

The best session of this friendly little festival had to be the marathon reading this afternoon at which every invited poet (and there were 31 of them) read a single poem. The earth-shakers for me included Elizabeth Austen’s Untitled; Ellen Bass’s Gate C22, Jericho Brown’s Heart Condition, Karen Finneyfrock’s What Lot’s Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t a Pillar of Salt) (possibly my favourite poem of the weekend); and Tony Hoagland’s The Social Life of Water.

Those of you who’ve heard me rant about festivals that cram poets into cattle-car readings rather than letting them roam the stage in twos and threes like prose writers may find my delight in this reading surprising. But here it was a sampler, an opportunity for a fully-packed autditorium to hear all the poets – not just those who the tight scheduling of a two-day festival would allow. And to hear poets of such calibre reading one fine poem after another was a pure pleasure.

So, one more day in La Conner, with its smart shops and casual oceanfront air. And its amazing oyster tacos from the Swinomish seafood kiosk, Legends Salmon Bar, which were so delicious in their frybread wrappers I had to have them for lunch two days in a row.

Permaculture & poetry

The last couple of weeks have swung past in a mainly permacultural haze.

The first screening at a new permaculture film night series was Anima Mundi, a bit of a collective disappointment for the 20-odd souls who crowded into the Community Microlending Society office, but a cheery networking session, lively discussion and helpful information share ensued.

I went for my second round of Permaculture Design classes last weekend, in which we built a hot compost bed in a classically low-maintenance permacultural manner (meaning: let nature do its thing). We prepared the ground by sheet-mulching with layers of cardboard; built a hollowed shell from horse manure; filled it with weeds and seriously rotten kitchen waste; and then covered it with more horse manure. Rats apparently don’t care to dig through manure to get to rotten food. You can then plant squash on top, which keeps the weeds down and thrives on the nitrogenous waste beneath. And harvest fresh soil in a year’s time, when the hill will have sunk to about ground level. Or leave it in place and plant something else there.

 

 

 

 

 

Later we went for a forest walk with Brandon Bauer in order to test our powers of observation and  taste a few ants. Very tasty indeed. A sharp organoleptic explosion that Brandon likened to tamarind or vinegar; I’d say a very acerbic sorrel.

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a nice-sounding workshop I won’t make it to this weekend, An Introduction to Home-Scale Permaculture with Elaine Codling; and the Duncan Seedy Saturday takes place that day as well.

And finally, back to poetry. I read with Ruth Pierson and Ted Blodgett at Vancouver Public Library last night and a good time was had by all, I’d say. I read food poems to one of the most responsive and delightful audiences ever, and sold lots of books, including the last few copies of Sunday Dinners. If you have one, you can now officially treasure it as a rare book.

Ruth Roach Pierson
E.D. Blodgett

Oxford weekend

I had a grand reunion with my London poetry workshop group last weekend, when we all travelled to Oxford for a couple of days of reading poetry and eating nice food. One night we ate at Folly’s Bridge Brasserie near the Folly, (a For Sale sign on the front of it when we passed).

Although we had a very fruitful workshop, discussing consistently interesting, challenging and inspiring poems, another highlight was in store for us, in the form of a group reading, organized by Jenny Lewis, at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, Oxford. An enthusiastic, attentive and book-buying audience of 55 or so squeezed into every available corner to sup on mulled wine, mince tarts and the ambrosial words of Jenny (who read poems from Fathom), Claire Crowther (reading from Mollicle and Incense), Anne Berkeley (reading from The Men From Praga), Tamar Yoseloff (reading from The City with Horns)

 

 

 

 

 

and I (reading from Sunday Dinners, The Earth’s Kitchen and Cartography) before we were treated to a slightly longer reading from Sue Rose in celebration of her new collection, From The Dark Room. We were inclined to agree with the bookshop owner who said he’d never had a better poetry evening.

The next morning we opted for an amble through Oxford, a browse of Objects of Use, and a nice coffee and sandwich at The Missing Bean before scattering to the four corners.

www.jennylewis.org.ukAlb

Poetry, quince & marmalade

As was foretold, I attended Poetry in the Crypt on Saturday, which expedition yielded these three treasures: a bilingual book of poetry by Stephen Watts & Cristina Viti, fresh off the press; a giant quince, fresh off the greengrocer’s stand; and a jar of lime and lemon marmalade, fresh from Liz Salmon’s jam kettle. The readings were good, the company full of fond familiars, and the tea and cakes most welcome. I had made a sticky ginger cake which I brought along to help with the offerings.

On Sunday we went to see the Group of Seven exhibition in Dulwich. And my goodness what a lot of people came likewise, and what a LOT of paintings were on show. “Can there be any left in Canada?” wondered Meli. Ironies not lost on me that I should travel half a world to come and see paintings by my countrymen that once inspired in me only gloomy associations with gloomy reproductions on the classroom walls of my youth. I liked many of them better in their current settings, but I find it can be harder to love what one has rubbed up against all one’s life than what might be new and exciting and from away. And I haven’t the distance to view it with new eyes. But I’m glad to have gone, and seen more of these paintings than I had, and learned a bit about them, and walked the still-leafy streets of Dulwich where once walked the schoolboy Ondaatje.

It was nigh on teatime by the time we finished, and so we stood around on the platform at South Dulwich admiring the view until the train arrived  and then once back in Central London ambled across the footbridge from the Embankment to the Southbank Centre which is hosting a Christmas market, which was thronged. It had a lot of stalls selling everything from churros and sausages and ostrich burgers to Peruvian knitting, wooden knick-knacks and jewellery that, luckily for my finances, I found of little interest. Though luckily for the traders, not a view that everyone shared as many were very busy – notably the ones selling a fairly foul-smelling Glühwein.

We stopped for a bite at an Italian chain outlet, where I twice sent back my pasta with melanzane which was, twice, badly undercooked (this is why eggplant/aubergine has had such a bad rap, imho: I’ve found only Indian restaurants seem to reliably understand how to prepare to the correct texture this most delicious vegetable)(–tho botanically a fruit, of course). The manager was most understanding and said he agreed with me and would have a word with the chef and offered us a drink and dessert in compensation. But right at the next table I watched someone chew his way through a bowl of the stuff without a whimper. If he’d had a shred of awareness about what he’d been eating and didn’t realize how foully abused it had been he should have gone home grumbling about how he doesn’t really like aubergine and vowing not to order it again.

After a soothing inspection of the offerings at Foyle‘s we wended our way back across the footbridge and into the underground and home to our beds.

 

More quince, more poetry

 

 

 

 

There’s a very nice greengrocer on Turnham Green Terrace, whither my yellow friends have followed me. These quince are enormous and flawless, the size of grapefruits, a world away from the lumpy lemon to orange-sized treasures I was working with in Victoria.

I’ve been in London a bit less than a week and have so far had one lunch at Carluccio‘s, taken in one reading (Tamar Yoseloff and Katy Evans-Bush, at CB-1 in Cambridge) and made one visit to the British Library. Tonight I’ll be in Islington attending a great big reading at Poetry in the Crypt (Stephen Watts, Cristina Viti, Ales Machack, Jane Kirwan and Jane Duran).

When in Cambridge, I supped with the poets at The Punter, where we passed on the Movember blackboard special: lamb fries. Instead, I had gnocchi with roasted pumpkin and “frazzled sage,” which came in a creamy pumpkin sauce and was rather good. My second such dish in a few weeks, as I’d had a similar one (without the creamy sauce – instead pan-fried in clarified butter I’d guess) at La Piola before I left Victoria.