Tour de blogosphere: Pearl Pirie, Ottawa’s blogger extraordinaire

Apartment 613 does an article on Chaudiere Books author Pearl Pirie's many, many blogs.

Garth Martens on John Newlove, The 49th Shelf

It might have taken a while, but Pearl Pirie was good enough to point out this post on The 49th Shelf by Garth Martens, the 2010 Bronwen Wallace Award Winner, where he includes our John Newlove title on a Recommended Reading List [see the full list here]. He writes:

A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove: Newlove's voice is uncommon, his use of the conversational phrase anything but slovenly: “You may allow me moments, / not monuments, I being / content. It is little, / but it is little enough.” These poems are marbled with failure, revelry, weariness, love, the usual catch-all descriptors, sure. Newlove's intelligence, his agility of voice, command the best from these subjects. I particularly admire “Public Library” and “Company,” poems where we observe men at their lowest, rank with self loathing, alcoholic blurriness, and depressive wandering: “It loves company and company is disgusted by it; / company enjoys being disgusted by it; / it enjoys disgusting company.”

Pearl Pirie has a new essay online in the 6th issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics,

Pearl Pirie's essay, "Safety, Risk and the Brain in Poetry and Publishing," originally presented at a fundraiser for VERSeFest in November 2012 (alongside Cameron Anstee (his piece is in the same issue) and Stephen Brockwell), is now online in the sixth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics.

View the Premiere Screening of Robert McTavish's "The Line Has Shattered" on March 21 at SFU Woodward's, Vancouver

The Line Has Shattered, a documentary film by Robert McTavish on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, is being premiered on Thursday, March 21st at 7:30pm at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU Woodward's, 149 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver. Admission is by donation: $3.00 for students, and $5.00 for others.

The event is being introduced by Canadian Poet Laureate (and '63 conference participant) Fred Wah.

Narrated by poet Phyllis Webb, who chronicled the event at the time, The Line Has Shattered is a sixty-minute documentary film that revisits the '63 Conference and hears from a number of its participants half a century later.

The Vancouver Poetry Conference, hosted by the University of British Columbia in the summer of 1963, is seen by many as a landmark event in the history and development of West Coast Canadian and North American innovative poetry - and indeed a major early manifestation of the Sixties West Coast zeitgeist.

Organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and American poet Robert Creeley, the conference was an intense, freewheeling three-week program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings at which a rising generation of Canadian and American poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge, was exposed to and, in many cases, profoundly influenced by the personalities and 'New American' open-form poetics of the visiting poet-instructors Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Margaret Avison.  For many of the student participants the conference played a key role in providing them faith that the pursuit and practice of poetry could constitute a meaningful calling and life's work.

Robert McTavish is a Canadian documentary film-maker whose works include Ghosts on the Land (2001), Fiddler's Map (2003) and What To Make of It All?: The Life and Poetry of John Newlove (2006).  He also edited A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books, 2007, afterword by Jeff Derksen) which was hailed by the Globe and Mail as "a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration."

This event is being co-sponsored by SFU Library and English Department, with thanks to the Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

View or print the poster. Contact the library to reserve a seat. For more information, contact Tony Power in Special Collections, 778.782.6676.