| POETRY CURRENTS | |
TORONTO: HARBOURFRONT
One of the local newspaper reporters phoned me up a few weeks ago to ask about the poetry scene this fall. The more we talked the more I realized that this will be a full, varied season in Canada.
As Toronto has been under-represented in my past Museletter columns, and with the example of the Rolling Stones’ free concert to guide me, here are just a few of the things that’ll be happening in Toronto this fall:
The Harbourfront series got a new director this year, and with it came a full schedule of readings through September, and an authors festival to follow in October. The September highlight, to my mind, was on the 24th, when George Elliott Clarke, one of the finest poets in the country, read at Harbourfront. Coming next month is the Harbourfront Authors Festival, which features a lineup that includes Margaret Atwood, William Gibson (a fine science fiction writer who almost singlehandedly invented the cyberpunk genre), A.S. Byatt (an excellent writer from England), and a host of others. For more information on both of these events, you can catch up at the Harbourfront readings calendar.
JILL BATTSON BACK IN ONTARIO
Meanwhile, in the neighboring city of Kingston, it was nice to see poet and spoken word promoter Jill Battson back making the scene in Ontario after an absence that took her to Taos, New Mexico, among other places. (Battson has also been poetry editor for Toronto’s Insomniac Press, the same people who put out the Word calendar listing all literary events in the Toronto area.
Kingston is a university town (and a penitentiary town), and we hear that Battson has settled on a wild farm on the outskirts. To announce her presence she created and hosted the Red School House Poetry Primer, a 3-day spoken word festival in mid-August that featured excellent word performers including Regie Cabico, Ken Cormier, Clifton Joseph, Adeena Karasick and Robert Priest.
Battson’s own work is available in books and on CD, and she made a major contribution to the spoken word scene in Canada in the mid-90s when she, Virgin Records and Bravo Television collaborated on Word Up, a project that featured a spoken word CD and a series of videos by the performers on the CD. Don’t look for this on the Web, as I tried, and it seems that the current Word Up project is either a British magazine or a new CD by one of the Spice Girls. Too bad the CD is so hard to find, as it still represents one of the seminal spoken word collections to come out of this country.
POETRY A FORCE FOR CHANGE IN MONTREAL
Meanwhile in Montreal, the Quebec Writers’ Federation has launched a new program to place spoken word writers and performers in non-traditional settings like youth drop-in centres. One of the most interesting parts of organizing these events is that I’ve discovered just how much hip-hop music and dub poetry are forces for change in our inner city communities. In this context poetry becomes a tool for giving kids power over their experience, and performers also focus community attention on important local and national issues. And the poets are becoming the leaders and examples these communities need.
One example of this trend is Myron Weekes, the coordinator of the Leave Out Violence centre on Atwater Avenue in Montreal. We approached Mr. Weekes about doing a workshop for kids at his centre, and discovered that he is a poet and performer himself. The same was true of Giorgio Chatelaine, the coordinator of the Jeunesse 2000 drop-in centre in NDG, who already does a hip-hop workshop for kids at his centre.
Reading the local newspaper in Montreal last month I noticed that Manchilde, a writer/performer who will be giving some of the workshops in the program, had just been cited by the Black community as one of fourteen Quebecers to receive awards for service to the community. Besides his work as a performer, Manchilde is currently creating multimedia presentations to teach kids about the history and the heritage of the Black community in Canada.
The events and workshops kicked off September 8th with an an outdoor show highlighting World Literacy Day at Dawson College. The show featured Paula Belina, the creator of Streeteaters Magazine, as well as a young poet named Padraic Scanlon, who just won the League of Canadian Poets’ best young poet award.
EXPOZINE
Our last big event is October 25th, a new version of the fabulously successful zine fair known as Expozine. For the contributors and the public, Expozine represents a chance to see publications and meet writers and artists from a diverse array of vibrant communities which rarely come together in the same place anywhere else in Montreal. The capacity crowd last year was evidence of how long overdue the fair was.
This year Expozine is expanding and welcoming out-of-towners. Register soon for a table, because they’ll go fast. There is a suggested donation of $10/table. To book a table to sell your zine, books, or comics, call Monastiraki at 514.278.4879 or email archivemontreal@canada.com or send us a letter: P.O. Box 55003, CSP Fairmount, Montreal, Quebec, H2T 3E2, Canada. Updates will be at the Expozine Web site.
That’s all for now. My best to all in the Museletter community,
