Summerhall » Literature

Canadian Poetry: Northern Lights Reading

Box Office — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 19:03:06 +0000

Five established Canadian poets take to the stage to read their work. Though they come from different perspectives and poetic stances, each performer delivers a high standard of poetic achievement, and together, these voices represent a cross-section of current Canadian artistic concerns. Tickle and assuage your curiosity in this session with these five distinguished poets from Canada!

Poets: Ruth Roach Pierson, Jim Nason, Maureen Hynes, Myna Wallin, Moira MacDougall

Jim Nason

Myna Wallin

Ruth Roach Pierson

Maureen Hynes

Moira MacDougall

Canadian Poetry: Canada, the Frigid North? Eros and Desire in Poetry

Box Office — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:41:09 +0000

Canadian poet Myna Wallin’s collection, A Thousand Profane Pieces, is full of eroticism and free expressions of sexuality. But do there seem to be fewer poets interested in writing about sex these days? Is it considered passé? Declassé? Why are more poets writing about loons than sexual politics?

The lush, sensual tradition of Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton seems to have vanished. Or has it? Do more female than male poets write from and of the body now? These questions and others are worth considering in an increasingly cerebral and diversified poetic landscape.

Panelists: Myna Wallin, Moira MacDougall, Jim Nason, Halli Villegas

Canadian Poetry: Where We Stand: Urban and Wilderness Poetics

Box Office — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:31:46 +0000

How does place compel our creativity and shape our poetic imagination? Whether at home or abroad, whether on a pastoral retreat or in an off-hour at a busy city job, how does the writer’s location seep into the written work? Why does travel, a new environment, stimulate and inspire new work for some writers? This panel considers poems where place is a key motif.

Panelists: Ruth Roach Pierson, Maureen Hynes, Myna Wallin, Moira MacDougall

Best Canadian Poetry: Group Event

Box Office — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:16:54 +0000

Under the stewardship of esteemed series editor, Molly Peacock, The Best Canadian Poetry in English takes the pulse of Canada’s poetry on an annual basis.

Governor General’s Award winner Lorna Crozier guest edited the recent edition, selecting the fifty best Canadian poems published in Canadian literary magazines in the previous year. The Best Canadian Poetry series is now the measure of excellence on the Canadian literary scene. Series editor Molly Peacock says Best Canadian Poetry is “for all who are curious about Canadian poetry but need a place for such curiosity to begin.”

Featuring readings from the 2010 anthology plus an introduction by series publisher, Halli Villegas, and including poets: Maureen Hynes, Jim Nason, Moira MacDougall, Ruth Roach Pierson, Myna Wallin.

Canadian Poetry: Beyond the Self, Within the Self: Ekphrastic Poetry

Box Office — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:52:44 +0000

To walk into a gallery, to look poetically at a painting, photograph or sculpture can take a poet both
deeper within the self and beyond the self. But in doing so, despite the long tradition of ekphrastic
poetry and its current resurgence, compelling questions arise: Is the poem then in some way an art
heist? Is it a reproduction or a conversation with the work of art? What gap lies between the poem and
the art?

Panelists: Ruth Roach Pierson, Jim Nason, Maureen Hynes

Kenneth Goldsmith: Sucking on Words

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:41:16 +0000

Presenting a mode of literature more in dialogue with the visual arts than with conventional poetry or fiction, and arguing for a new kind of ‘thinker-ship’ to replace the conventional idea of a ‘readership’, the lively, incisive and accessible conversations in Simon Morris’ film Sucking on Words are an ideal introduction to Goldsmith’s witty and provocative work.

‘Goldsmith is our James Joyce for the 21st century’ – Christian Bök

These Silences – Storm The Reality Studios: Ed Robinson, Stewart Home, Tom McCarthy

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:46:49 +0000

Edward S. Robinson riffs on his book Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives From William S. Burroughs to the Present. In this book Robinson offers a biography of Burroughs cut-up method. He locates its prehistory in modernist and avant-garde practices; he charts its origins with Gysin and Burroughs through to its early practitioners Claude Pélieu, John Giorno and Carl Weissner; remarks on developments made by Kathy Acker and Stewart Home; and finally identifies some contemporary manifestations. Shift Linguals contains the first critical attention – in English at least – to some of these authors, and charts the various permutations and applications of the cut-up method since Burroughs.

These Silences – To ignore the avant garde is akin to ignoring Darwin: Tom McCarthy

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:44:16 +0000

Tom McCarthy was short listed for last year’s Booker Prize. His books are crammed with coincidence, with doubles and fakes, moments of deja vu, repetitions of repetitions. McCarthy draws on the history of the avant-garde and modernist experimentation to produce left-field literary fiction that is both acclaimed and contemporary. Time Out called him: “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment”. As well as the novels Men In Space, Remainder and C, McCarthy is also the author of a book of criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature.

These Silences – Where The Novel Has A Nervous Breakdown

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:41:57 +0000

Writers from the Book Works Seminar series whose work demonstrates a total disregard for the conventions that structure received ideas about fiction. Bridget Penney was born and grew up in Edinburgh; her first book Honeymoon with Death was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Richard Marshall says of Katrina Palmer’s The Dark Object: “the reader is placed in a Russian Doll sort of text, a story in a story in a story, where the ideal of narrative closure, of interpretive closure, is provocatively questioned.” The same source calls Stewart Home: “Britain’s greatest living underground legend”. Home is the author of 13 published novels and several books of cultural commentary

These Silences – Putting The Psycho Back Into Psychogeography: Iain Sinclair

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:38:19 +0000

Iain Sinclair has been called East London’s recording angel. Hackney’s Pepys. A literary mud-larker and tip-picker. A Travelodge tramp. A toxicologist of the 21st-century landscape. A historian of countercultures and occulted pasts. A psychogeographer. He’s all of these things, and more, but above all he’s the only contemporary British writer whose work is grounded in experimental literary practices who has been wholeheartedly embraced by the literary establishment. Acceptance was a long time coming, but after twenty years in the underground, Sinclair has now spent two decades more blinking in the sunlight of commercial success.