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February 2012

Wednesday February 22, 2012
Confessions of the Other Woman - Shadbolt Centre for the Arts

Thursday February 23, 2012
Talking Stick Festival presents In a World Created by a Drunken God

Friday February 24, 2012
Galiano Literary Festival - 2012

Saturday February 25, 2012
red diva projects - Marie Clements, Michelle St. John, Women from DTES Centre

Tuesday February 28, 2012
The Leisure Society - Trafalgar Studios - UK

March 2012

Thursday March 1, 2012
Fred Wah - Versefest in Ottawa

Thursday March 1, 2012
The Kranky Reading Series - Raoul Fernandez, Jordan Abel, and Gurjinder Basran

Thursday March 1, 2012
Gordon - Morris Panych - Revue Stage

Thursday March 1, 2012
Where the Blood Mixes - Kevin Loring - Remai Arts Centre

Sunday March 4, 2012
In Absentia - Morris Panych - B Street Theatre

Tuesday March 6, 2012
The Leisure Society - François Archambault - Infinithéâtre

Friday March 9, 2012
Ms Thing - Vancouver Women in Film Festival - Embracing the Darkness

Saturday March 10, 2012
How To Write A Poem For The Queen: a workshop with the Parliamentary Poet Laureate

Wednesday March 21, 2012
BellaLuna's Fresco - Lucia Frangione - Shadbolt Centre and Cultch

Friday March 23, 2012
Words on the Water - Campbell River Writer's Festival 2012

Saturday March 31, 2012
Visual Poetry Presentation with derek beaulieu - A B Series

April 2012

Friday April 13, 2012
Bordertown Cafe - Kelly Rebar - Toledo Repertoire Theatre

Thursday April 19, 2012
Down Dangerous Passes Road - Michel Marc Bouchard - Encore Theatre

Tuesday April 24, 2012
The Real World? - Michel Tremblay -Tarragon Theatre

Monday April 30, 2012
M.A.C. Farrant at Banff Centre in 2012

May 2012

Tuesday May 1, 2012
Carmen Aguirre's Blue Box at The Cultch

Tuesday May 8, 2012
King Lear - NAC English Theatre Production

Wednesday May 23, 2012
The eh List Author Series: Michel Tremblay and Sheila Fischman

July 2012

Thursday July 19, 2012
Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival - 2012

September 2012

Tuesday September 18, 2012
Chickens - Lucia Frangione - Chemainus Theatre

The Long Poem Workshop - Jay MillAr

The Long Poem Workshop
(February 9 – April 12, 2012)
Posted in Courses, Jay MillAr

(Note: The Wednesday evening originally listed is full — second section added!)
Duration: 10 Weeks (30 hours), FEB 9 – APR 12, 6:30-9:30 pm, (Thursday Evenings)

Location: The League of Canadian Poets Offices, 192 Spadina Avenue
Toronto, Ontario

Capacity: 6 students

Instructor: Jay MillAr

And you have to go into the serial poem not knowing what the hell you’re doing. That’s the first thing. You have to be tricked into it. It has to be some path that you’ve never seen on a map before. I think all of my books as far as they’re successful have just followed the bloody path to see where it goes, and sometimes it doesn’t go anywhere.

— Jack Spicer, 1965

Led by poet and publisher Jay MillAr, this 10-week workshop will allow students to investigate the trends of the “genre” of the North American Long (or “Serial”) Poem, with particular emphasis on reading and discussing Canadian Long Poems. Provided with a safe haven from undesirable influences such as the marketplace and the academy (except, as Philip Whalen suggested, in the strictest sense of the word: academy: a walking grove of trees), students can explore the possibilities a Long Poem form has.

Required Text: The Long Poem Anthology, Sharon Thesen, ed (Talonbooks)

Course Work: Students are required to come to the first class prepared to share and discuss with the group an idea they have for a long or serial poem. All subsequent classes will then be run beginning with reading and discussion of work in The Long Poem Anthology, followed by sharing and discussing original writing. Successes and problems that arise in relation to the student’s ongoing work and the original idea presented in Class One will be of particular interest. The notion of “failure” will be addressed throughout the course, especially in the context of the Spicer quote provided at the beginning of this course description. Students will be continually asked to evaluate whether or not they are following the path their original idea projected for them.

Floating Up To Zero: Wheels Turning

Claudia Lapp gives a glowing review of Ken Norris’ Floating Up To Zero:

Inseparable from the writing life is the personal library: “These books that aren’t mine fill up the house…Sometimes I welcome them into the work itself. You must understand that I consider books as sacred. So much human life has gone into them.” (These Books). Diverse feminine portraits abound – a list of ex lovers and wives, their names “street signs of the road I had not taken”…

> Go to story...

End of Days: A Local Glimpse of Götterdämmerung

A look at Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina production of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Live HD broadcast from the Met):

Strangely, in this century of globalized sweatshops and rampant economic crises, the themes in this opera are even more timely, as the musical drama revolves around the renunciation of emotion in favour of mineral extraction, which is the inception of the curse that enslaves others. The luxurious wealth of the powers-that-be come at the price of many labourers, and this leads to a kind of Freudian psychosis among the gods. Even the security of their dream home Valhalla has been established upon the mythical equivalent of subprime lending.

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Suffragette City: The Fighting Days

(Marina Stephenson Kerr plays Nellie McClung, on one side of an ethical split within the suffrage movement in Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days)

In the play, Francis Beynon, who is passionately antiwar, clashes with Nellie McClung over military conscription, and over McClung’s position that the vote should be withheld from “non-Empire” immigrant women during the war.

> Go to story...

How to Bank Your Life on Speculative "Futures"

Jonathan Ball interviews Garry Thomas Morse about various speculative “futures”:

In two volumes of The Chaos! Quincunx, I use what William S. Burroughs called the “fold-in” method, which feels rather like battering some batter in a bowl. This process is exciting, because of its sense of immediacy. I’m never quite sure what the characters are going to do next!

> Go to story...