Thursday 8 December 2011

Happy Holidays and see you on January 13 2012

Planet Earth Poetry ended the 2011 Season on December 2 with Meira Cook and Jennifer Still and a fun time at Christies Pub.  We'll be back on January 13 with Eve Joseph and Patrick Friesen.

Have a relaxing Winter Solstice and all the best for the Holidays.

Planet Earth Poetry (aka Yvonne!)

Tuesday 1 November 2011

November Readings at Planet Earth Poetry

November 4: Maureen Hynes and Lisa Shatzky
Maureen Hynes has published three books of poetry, Rough Skin (Wolsak and Wynn) Harm’s Way (Brick Books), Marrow, Willow (Pedlar Press) and is working on a fourth. She has twice been selected for the Banff Writers’ Studio and in 2007, a selection of her poems were shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award.  She is Poetry Editor for Our Times, Canada’s national labour magazine
Planet Earth Poetry thanks The Canada Council for the Arts for funding Maureen Hynes reading.

Lisa Shatzky was born in Montreal, but has lived in Vancouver and Bowen Island for the past twenty-one years. Her poetry has appeared in Room, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, The Prairie Journal, The Antigonish Review, Canadian Women’s Studies and more, including several chapbooks and anthologies.

Lisa will be launching her first collection of poems: Do Not Call Me By My Name, from Black Moss Press, poems based on her experiences working with First Nations Children.

NO Planet Earth Poetry on November 11 Remembrance Day

November 18: Jan Zwicky reads from Forge (http://www.gaspereau.com/9781554470976.shtml)
Jan Zwicky is a musician, philosopher and award-winning poet. In 1999, she won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry for Songs for Relinquishing the Earth. Her most recent collection of poetry, Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (GP, 2005), was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Zwicky currently teaches philosophy at the University of Victoria.

November 25: Wendy Morton

Wendy Morton believes that poetry is the shortest distance between hearts. She has five books of poetry, and a memoir, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, in which her adventures as a corporate sponsored poet are revealed. Her latest book of poetry, What Were Their Dreams, is a book of photo-poems of Canada’s history.
She is the founder of Canada’s Random Acts of Poetry and is the recipient of the 2010 Spirit Bear Award and the Golden Beret Award. For her day job, she has been an insurance investigator for the last 28 years. She lives in Sooke, B.C. and is a raven watcher.

December 2: Jennifer Still and Meira Cook
Planet Earth Poetry thanks Brick Books for supporting their authors.
In her second book of poems, called Girlwood, Jennifer Still produces a rich and innovative collection that invokes the ghosts of girlhood past.  Jennifer Still’s first collection of poems, Saltations (Thistledown Press, 2005) was nominated for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. Poems from Girlwood were finalists in the 2008 CBC Literary Awards. After living her adult years until just recently in Saskatchewan, Jennifer now lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two children.


A Walker in the City is Méira Cook’s third book of poetry with Brick Books. The opening poem of this collection won first place in the 2006 CBC Literary Awards, and poems in this series were selected as part of the Poetry in Motion initiative. Her earlier books with Brick Books are Toward a Catalogue of Falling (1996) and Slovenly Love (2003).  Méira Cook lives, writes, and walks in Winnipeg.

Sunday 2 October 2011

October at Planet Earth Poetry

October 7    launch of Beside the Point's Fall Issue

The English Department of Camosun College is proud to launch its latest issue of Beside the Point, a high-quality literary publication, created by students and faculty, which presents literary and visual art from Camosun students and Canadian and International writers.  The latest issue showcases work from both the last web edition and the newest print edition.
Featured readers will include, drama writer,  Joe Thomas, and poetry writers, Caleb McIntosh and Alexandra Paul .  Copies of the magazine be available will be available for purchase.  The next submission deadline is November 15th.  To view the web edition or more information about submissions,  go to http://besidethepoint.net/.



October 14  Goran Simic and Ursula Vaira

Goran Simic
Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952 and has been living in Toronto since 1996. He has published eleven books of poetry, drama, and short fiction, including the acclaimed volume of poems in English translation, Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford University Press, 1997). In Canada, Simic has published Peace and War, a limited edition volume gathering poems by himself and by Fraser Sutherland; other books of his poetry and drama have been translated into nine languages. His poems are included in anthologies of world poetry, such as Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2002) and Banned Poetry (Index, 1997). He has received major literary awards from PEN USA and four times in former Yugoslavia.
http://www.biblioasis.com/goran-simic
Gordon Simic come to PEP with the support of The Canada Council for the Arts


Ursula Vaira   author of And See What Happens
Ursula Vaira's poems have been published in literary journals and in anthologies. The long poem "Frog River" was published as a chapbook and is forthcoming in the Portage Anthology. The title poem of this collection, "And See What Happens," was a finalist in the CBC Literary Competition and was published in slightly different form as a chapbook called A Thousand Miles. "Last One to Get There" was published in a chapbook titled Little Espinoza

Ursula grew up in northern BC and taught school in the Arctic and on the northwest coast. She worked at Oolichan Books for ten years, then founded her own publishing house, Leaf Press, in 2001.


October 21 Shane Rhodes

 



Shane Rhodes is the author of five collections of poetry: The Wireless Room (NeWest Press, 2000), which won the Alberta Book Award for poetry, Tengo Sed (Greenboathouse, 2004), Holding Pattern (NeWest, 2002), which won the Archibald Lampman Award, The Bindery (NeWest, 2007), which won the Lampman-Scott Award, and Err (2011). His poetry has also appeared in a number of Canadian poetry anthologies including Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets and Breathing Fire 2. Rhodes lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

PEP thanks the Canada Council of the Arts for Support in bringing Shane Rhodes to Victoria.

Mike Bond, born in the late  1950s lived the first 40 years of his life in the west of Ireland, save one year in London as a teen. Took early retirement from high-school on his 16th birthday and went on a twenty year walkabout through relationship and work life and what he describes as an extended adolescence that brought him to his mid thirties in a deep and darkening  forest. 
Finished high-school 20 years late and took a degree in social sciences before moving to Canada in 2000.
He single parents a 10 year old son, presently uses his hands to pay his rent and writes when he can or when he has to.



October 28 Sam and Sally Green


Sally Green—poet, printer, book designer, calligrapher—her work most recently appeared in The Poets Guide to the Birds, an anthology edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, and published by Anhinga Press, and a small, limited edition chapbook, Instead of Sleeping. She was a featured poet at the annual Lower Columbia College literary festival.

Sam Green was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and raised in the nearby fishing and mill town of Anacortes.  In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the State of Washington. In January of 2009, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and was a member of the NEA’s poetry panel for the 2011 fellowships.