Toronto Readings by Jim Nason/Kate Cayley/Maureen Hynes/Steve McOrmond

Monday, August 23 / 8:00pm at Clinton’s, 693 Bloor Street

Poetry & Contemplation at Hollyhock – October 24 – 29, 2010 – Presented by: Jan Zwicky

Delve into poetry as a way of knowing the world. Poetic or contemplative attention — what Simone Weil called “the natural prayer of the soul” — opens the ear, eye, heart and mind to the being and beings around us. In doing so, it reveals to us, as poets, that our best work is not about ourselves. Discover how the power of contemplation can inspire your creativity. Learn to listen to and edit your poems. As a crucial component of engagement with poetic attention, participants maintain silence for the duration of the workshop, apart from scheduled group and individual meetings. Group meetings include discussion of participants’ work in progress as well as exercises designed to foster contemplative awareness and literary technique. Each participant meets one-on-one with the presenter.

Jan Zwicky has led poetry workshops and taught in writing and philosophy programs across Canada. She has published six volumes of poetry, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won Canada’s Governor General’s Award, Robinson’s Crossing, and, most recently, Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences.

Hollyhock, Canada’s Leading Center for Lifetime Learning, exists to inspire, nourish and support people who are making the world better. Powerful experiential learning happens in a magnificent setting on British Columbia’s wilderness coast. Enjoy cozy accommodations in hand-crafted wooden buildings and gourmet organic vegetarian cuisine. www.hollyhock.ca

Click here to read more about Jan and Canada’s poetry renaissance in The Walrus.

TUITION: $535 CDN (meals & accommodation extra) / 5 nights

For more info see http://www.hollyhock.ca/cms/index.cfm?Group_ID=4489

Barry Dempster’s book with Pedlar Press Ivan’s Birches is also on this list.

here’s the full article – http://therelitawards.blogspot.com/

My interview with globetrotting Canadian poet Antony di Nardo is now up at The Torontoist Books Page. It’s been a few weeks since the last in the Critical Interview Series posted, so it’s good to get back on that horse. Di Nardo’s book, Alien, Correspondent (one of two he published this past Spring, strangely enough) has been one of the great surprises of my reading year. It’s a sort of long-lead travelogue derived from the poet’s many years spent living in Beirut. I don’t usually use this space to explicitly tell people what to read but, just this once: You should read this book. I really can’t think of a reader of Canadian poetry who wouldn’t find something to love here. It’s politically and culturally complex, but quite personal. The lines are beautifully assembled, despite the appearance of a certain rambling anecdotal casualness.

For the full article, go to http://voxpopulism.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/antony-di-nardo-interview-the-torontoist/

from “Correspondent (Notes for a Mideast Solstice)”
Scroll down for the rest of the poem

Antony di Nardo is the author of two new collections, Soul on Standby (Exile Editions) and Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books). The latter is a collection of outsider pieces taken from the poet’s years spent living in Beirut, Lebanon. It’s a surprising book; as successful an act of reportage as a collection of personal lyrics. Di Nardo’s tone is mature, concerned, and almost radically apolitical at times, a thorough and meticulous attempt at documenting and translating an experience too massive for simple accounting, but too specific for the blunt force of the proclamation. It’s also a surprisingly beautiful work, filled with a sneaky craftsmanship that belies its formal casualness and twists the rhythmic presentation of the lyrics in unexpected ways.

Di Nardo exchanged emails with Torontoist’s poetry columnist, Jacob McArthur Mooney, while journeying home from Beirut, through Paris, and finally back to Ontario soil. Their correspondence follows, edited somewhat for space.

To read the full interview, go to http://books.torontoist.com/2010/07/the-poem-then-becomes-the-correspondence-an-interview-with-antony-di-nardo/

For the full review, see  http://saltyink.com/2010/07/22/salty-ink-on-poet-laureate-lorri-neilsen-glenns-new-collection-lost-gospels/

Lorri will be part of the Shelburne Writers Festival in Shelburne, Nova Scotia on August 13-14, 2010 with authors George Elliott Clarke, Beth Powning and Stephanie Domet.  Here’s the website for that http://www.ospreyartscentre.com/writers_fest10.htm – Lorri will conduct a writing workshop “Poetry and the Art of Letting Go” and will read with George Elliott Clarke.

Sunday morning Carolyn Smart decided to climb the great big tree and read to the crowd below.

Carolyn Smart, Hugh Macdonald, John Smith, Brent MacLaine

Antony will be launching his book in Toronto at Ben McNally Books at 366 Bay Street on Thursday, September 16; he will read at the Art Bar poetry series at Clinton’s on Tuesday, November 16; and the Pivot reading series on Wednesday, December 1st – all in Toronto.

Antony will travel to Calgary to read at the Flywheel reading series on Thursday, October 7 at Pages Books on Kensington; to Victoria for the Planet Earth reading series on Friday, October 8; and to Vancouver on Tuesday, October 13 for the Cross Border Pollination reading series at the Vancouver Public Library where he will read with Carolyn Smart.

Carolyn was at the inaugural Victoria Literary Festival at Victoria-by-the-Sea in Prince Edward Island.  www.victorialiteraryfestival.com

Lorri was at the Festival of Words in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.  http://www.festivalofwords.com/

And Antony was at the inaugural Knowlton Wordfest in Knowlton, Quebec.  http://knowltonwordfest.blogspot.com/2010/06/summer-schedule-for-wordfest.html

Here’s a picture of Carolyn Smart reading “Rickety Rackety” from her book Hooked. The caption from the Victoria Literary Festival reads, “Oh yes, and she was seated most comfortably in Victoria’s great big tree!”

The Coast’s Sean Flinn writes about Agnes Walsh, “Her writing tends to flutter down, feather-light, but often land with an unexpected weight, a thud that wakes the listener up. (If one even got a sense of this from Thursday night, it’s worth checking out Walsh’s books, especially 2007’s Going Around with Bachelors.)”

For the full article, see http://www.thecoast.ca/SceneAndHeard/archives/2010/07/16/jazz-fest-poetry-gets-sweaty

To learn more about Going Around with Bachelors by Agnes Walsh, see http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=3&bookid=47