This Friday May 27 I’ll be reading in Victoria at Planet Earth Poetry. Events kick off with an open mic at 7:30pm, and then Catherine St Denis will take the stage as the Poetic Opener. Catherine has read a number of times at the open mic, always impressed with her poems, and I am very much looking forward to hearing more from her. After Catherine, I’ll be reading from Larderand selling books thereafter.
The reading is live and in person! at Russell Books. For those who can’t make it in person, there’s a livestream of Catherine’s and my readings which starts around 8/8:15. For info on how to access that, it’s best to contact Planet Earth Poetry; (details in their weekly newsletter) or you can message me on Facebook.
PEP’s readings (featured readers and poetic openers) are usually recorded and posted on its Youtube channel a few days later, so you can catch us there too!
Some years ago, when I lived in central London, an Afghan restaurant on Baker Street called Caravan Serai was one of my favourite places. In one of those life coincidences, I’ve found myself on another caravan here in Canada.
For much of this year, the Planet Earth Poetry series in Victoria BC has been filming local poets reading their poetry in their chosen location. Poets Caravan is a project that maps the various locations using Google Earth; the texts of many of the poems are shown alongside the readings. The poems are also available on Youtube (without the texts).
Here’s mine from Youtube (click here for the Google Earth version – patience: it takes time to load). I chose to read at Haliburton Community Organic Farm where I’ve been volunteering since 2008. I selected poems suited to the environment I was reading from, which prompted the videographer to ask me if I was an entomologist! (Nope, I’ve just been spending time looking closely at what bugs me and my garden, heh heh.)
Most of the poems are from my new manuscript, Larder, which will be published by Caitlin Press in 2022. One (Vegetable Kingdom) is from my 2006 collection Cartography.
Well – long in the preparation and now over! Some 450 people from around the province registered for BC’s Virtual Seedy Saturday, and there were audiences of around 150 for each session.
I attended most of the events, with growing admiration for the Farm Folk City Folk team’s stamina. They were on hand at every session to keep on top of technical issues, monitor the chat and field the questions, so speakers were well supported.
The live sessions were not recorded. These zoom days we have become accustomed to having recordings at our disposal if we cannot attend an event. The organizers explained, when this came up on the last day, that a great deal of thought and discussion had gone into the decision not to record sessions. One reason was simple logistics: how to distribute recordings after the fact to participants. Another was permissions: the speakers would have had to consent to having their images and content shared, potentially to people other than those who had registered.
And my feeling is that the sense of constant availability really knocks participation down, since many people (guilty!) do sign up for things and then don’t attend, thinking they will watch later. But this means fewer people in a live audience – which affects the energy in the ‘room’ and means some questions don’t get asked or answered.
Among my favourite sessions, though, and there were many…
Vandana Shiva kicked things off on Friday night with a fiery talk on the importance of seed and food security, and the value of local action for both.
On Saturday The Master Gardeners Q&A was lively and well-attended, with MGs from around the province, able to discuss garden issues that differ hugely in the wide range of growing climates in this province. Kristen Miskelly of Saanich Native Plants (atHaliburton Farm) gave a great overview on the value – environmental, cultural and ornamental – of native plants for gardens and restoration. Saturday’s screening of Gather was a pleasure – I’d long wanted to see this film on indigenous foodways.
On Sunday, a panel on invasive species gave some helpful reminders on the perils of random seed and plant sharing, an update on problematic species of plants and insects, and recommendations on contacting local experts to report suspects when spotted. There was Bob Wildfong‘s (Seeds of Diversity) helpful talk on how to preserve seeds and build a usable local seed collection of any size. And Connie Kuramoto gave thorough coverage of seed germination and healthy soil.
Some months ago, when the idea for a virtual event was mooted, I was talking to Carla Hick, one of the organizers from Farm Folk City Folk. She said they were open to all kinds of ideas, and the word “poetry” crossed her lips. I jumped on that and offered to organize something.
I conferred with a couple of people – Yvonne Blomer, who’s well connected in the Island poetry community; and then Nancy Holmes, who teaches at UBC-Okanagan in Kelowna and knows many of the mainland and BC Interior poets.
It was Nancy who put her finger on the key issue: a regular poetry reading would not do, as our audience was not a literary one, but made up of farmers and gardeners whose focus is seeds, plants and the products of horti- and agriculture. She suggested something more multimedia. “Why not poetry videos?” she mused. Inwardly I cringed – learn another thing? Would there be enough BC poets writing around our subjects and comfortable with the technology?
Turns out there were! Farm Folk City Folk reckoned we’d have room for 10 videos, scattered through the weekend’s program rather than posted as one long piece. In the end we’ve got 11 poets represented, and here they are, with the names of their pieces and the date/timing in the program:
Sarah de Leeuw – October Chanterelling – Sat Feb 20, 8:45am Matt Rader – Garlic – Sat Feb 20, 10am Nancy Holmes – The Way We Are Made Of – Sat Feb 20, 12:15pm Michelle Doege – Fields of Wheat – Sat Feb 20, 2:15pm Fiona Tinwei Lam – August Raspberries – Sat Feb 20, 3:30pm Yvonne Blomer – Rhubarb, Death in a Garden – Sun Feb 21, 8:45am Renée Sarojini Saklikar – Grandmother’s Instruction, Sun Feb 21, 10:05am Shelley Leedahl – Sometimes – Sun Feb 21, 11:15am John BartonMalus Pumila – Sun Feb 21, 12:30pm Rhona McAdam! – Wild Bees – Sun Feb 21, 1:45pm Cornelia Hoogland – Seaweed, Sun Feb 21, 3:45pm
All the poets used their own poems and created new videos for this program, so check ’em out! Registration for the weekend is only $5 (or more if you want to donate towards a share that goes to the organizing nonprofits). See you there!
I’m back online after a long absence! It seems right to pick up the thread here with news of this year’s Seedy Saturday.
Autumn is the time gardeners and farmers are starting to pore over seed catalogs, and community organizers are normally well into booking venues and speakers and seed vendors for that fine Canadian tradition known as Seedy Saturday.
But back in the fall of 2020, infection numbers were starting their winter ascent, and we were beginning to hunker down for more isolation after a carefully sociable summer. So the folks from Vancouver’s Farm Folk City Folk took the bit between their teeth and invited regional Seedy Saturday organizers into a series of brainstorming meetings to see if we wanted to put all our seeds in one provincial basket.
The consensus was a resounding YES. And FFCF has done a remarkable job of engaging seedy folk from around British Columbia to prepare a rich and fertile schedule for BC’s Virtual Seedy Saturdayfrom Feb 19-21.
The nonprofit groups who organize local Seedy Saturday events in ‘normal’ times have lost this valuable source of income, and FFCF is sharing whatever profit may ensue with those groups. One of them, with which I’ve long been associated, is Haliburton Community Organic Farm.
Hali’s contribution is a talk by Kristen Miskelly of Saanich Native Plants, one of the longtime farm lessees on Hali’s land. She’ll be speaking on ‘Native Seed For Gardening and Restoration’.
I’ve also been working with Kelowna poet Nancy Holmes to coax poetry videos from BC poets. We approached those we thought would have a passion for seeds, gardens or similar, and our harvest will be scattered through the program. More on all this in upcoming posts!
Just sitting around adding a layer of cookbooks to the layer of poetry books on my desk. A gift from the gods — well, from Susan in Calgary really — arrived in my mailbox yesterday: the gastro-biography Toast, by that most laid back of the British celebrity chefs Nigel Slater. Pretentious is certainly not a word you could use about someone who describes his mother’s chronically burnt toast thus:
“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten.”
Meanwhile I peruse recipes of a non-toasty nature as I have been smitten myself by an insane plan to cater my own book launch. Will I never learn? I think it was finding a caterer who charged $69 for a smoked salmon cheesecake that unhinged me. So I and my crispy assistant Miss Vicky will take care of things.
I’ve picked up another half-read book. This time it’s the always unpredictable and hugely successful anthology Staying Alive, edited by Bloodaxe’s own Neil Astley (check out his controversial lecture, Guile, Bile and Dangerous to Poetry). I was surprised – favourably – to discover Gwendolyn MacEwan among the contributors; and Anne Michaels, P.K. Page, and lots (7 poems!) of Alden Nowlan. One or two of the section introductions are more confusing than the poems — I have long been baffled by Astley’s assertion that Elizabeth Bishop’s Chemin de Fer could “be read as a ‘coded’ account of female masturbation.” Huh?!? Still, the poems themselves are ones to be grateful for and it is a wonderfully broad selection.
This Friday May 27 I’ll be reading in Victoria at Planet Earth Poetry. Events kick off with an open mic at 7:30pm, and then Catherine St Denis will take the stage as the Poetic Opener. Catherine has read a number of times at the open mic, always impressed with her poems, and I am very much looking forward to hearing more from her. After Catherine, I’ll be reading from Larder and selling books thereafter.
