 Poetry in the Park is back again for another great season of spoken words. Come check us out every Wednesday in July and August at the Bandshell in beautiful Queen’s Park!
Summer 2016 Lineup:Dates Features July 6 Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott & Ray Hsu July 13 Candice James & Geoffrey Nilson July 20 Elizabeth Bachinsky & Erin Kirsh July 27 Cecily Nicholson, Manolis & Kevin Spenst August 3 Jónína Kirton & RC Weslowski August 10 Kyle McKillop & Timothy Shay August 17 Susan McCaslin & Rob Taylor August 24 Raoul Fernandes & Johnny MacRae August 31 Wayde Compton & Renee Saklikar im excited to be a part of this wonderful local event series in New Westminster.
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Excited to announce that my chapbook, We Have To Watch, has been selected for presentation as part of the 30th Annual Two Days of Canada Conference on "The Concept of Vancouver" that will take place on 13-14 October 2016 at The Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock University.
There will plenary presentations by Rita Wong, Richard Cavell, Michael Turner, Lisa Robertson, and Roy Miki — and a special keynote public address by George Bowering, Canada's first Poet Laureate and two-time Governor-General's Literary Award winner. The conference will involve a rich melange of artists, activists, and academics. There will be papers, discussion forums, music performances, poetry readings, visual art, and public lectures. The 30th annual "Two Days of Canada" conference at Brock University, the oldest Canadian Studies conference of its kind in Canada, invites scholars, artists, writers, and activists to broadly think through the conceptualizations of the histories, presents, and futures of the city. Papers and panels will consider the conceptualization of the arts, literatures, and politics of Vancouver, and the interconnections these concepts have with other scales of engagement, including the national and planetary issues in which Vancouver participates.  More Info and To Buy Issues Go to the Qwerty Website
 This weekend my videopoem, Headache Summer, will be shown as part of the 2015 Visible Verse Festival. Details below>>>
An evening of videopoems* curated and hosted by Ray Hsu. *videopoem = video art + poetry + creative ingenuity Presented by The Cinematheque since 2000, Visible Verse is one of the longest-running video poetry festivals in the world. Video poetry is a hybrid creative form bringing together verse and moving images. Visible Verse selects its annual program from hundreds of submissions received from local, national, and international artists. On the occasion of the 2015 festival, The Cinematheque says a fond farewell and expresses its great gratitude to Heather Haley, founder of Visible Verse and its curator and host from 2000 to 2014. We welcome Vancouver poet Ray Hsu into his new role as Visible Verse’s artistic director. Admission is $11; attendees must have a Cinematheque membership which can be purchased for $3. Advance tickets can be purchased online: http://thecinematheque.ca/visible-verse-2015-festival  I had a wonderful experience last weekend exhibiting my text based artwork for the 2015 New West Cultural Crawl. My piece was part of kuh-myoo-ni-tee, a small group show at Sixth Street Popup & Gallery in New Westminster, BC. Cut #2: On the Road (2015), is from a sequence of found-text poems sampled from canonical works of literature, formed through procedural constraints in the lineage of Oulipo poetics. Each poem is created from the text of one randomly selected book page. The text may be quoted, cut, mixed, or re-arranged in any way. Each poem explores the social and political legacies of literary canon, acting as a conversation in mutual language between the original writer and the poet. The juxtaposition of the cutout book page and the re-ordered text comments on the translation of language by a reader in the subjective creation of meaning and the destruction of the physical work is a literal dismantling of literary canon. Thank you to Sixth Street Popup & Gallery for putting on the show and for showcasing the great breadth of local New Westminster art.  Cut #2: On the Road (2015) by Geoffrey Nilson  It was the moment in your tiny, furniture-cramped bedroom in Surrey, I was staring at the John William Waterhouse poster on your wall and you said to me, I have to play you this song. And I remember it was the exact moment I fell in love with a band and fell in love with you, and I didn’t know where one ended and the other began. It was the moment when Chris Martin still had a shaggy afro of brown curls and the band was straight out of the college dorm room, sounding like The Bends-era Radiohead giving in to every sentimental turn. It was the moment you were studying to be a child care worker at Douglas and I used to visit you at the campus in New Westminster, feeling small in the atrium drinking coffee, the tall glass looking down the hill to the train yards, me: the poet, the musician, the selfish life, the artist as a young man. It was the moment I never dreamed of having children. It was the moment Jonny Buckland’s Telecaster was still the centre of the sound, still chimed more than it pronounced, bouncing in the space between vocal melody, note runs moving up and down the scale, his guitar at its best when used as both an accent of colour and emphatic punctuation. It was the moment just before Coldplay were everyone’s band, where they played the Commodore Ballroom on a weeknight and tickets were still available at the door. It was the moment every journalist in the world was certain they would be the next big one hit wonder. It was the moment unaware the thrill would end, or that it would be my doing. It was the moment with no irony in the lyric: “Did you want me to change? Well I changed for good. And I want you to know that you’ll always get your way.” It was the moment before you asked for more than I wanted to give. It was the moment I sat down on your bed, and said, where did this come from? And you said to me, you’re welcome.  A new book review of Niki Koulouris's poetry collection The sea with no one in it just went online at Pulp.
'While most of text brings an intellectual investigation of myth and art, it is not until the end that the reader sees the speaker’s gaze turn inward onto the poet. “It’s always midnight / in the river / between two poems” (58) it begins and the reader experiences the darkness that envelops the artist between work, the black void without ideas and without creation, like a ship at sea rolling on swells, with no land in sight. From this darkness The sea with no one in it radiates out, looking and looking again, knowing that midnight is simply a few short hours from the light.' Read the whole review on Pulp's website here.  Wonderful online journal the Glasgow Review of Books recently published one of my longer poems, "Emergency Room." This is my first international publication and I am very excited to have placed the poem with such a great journal. Their website is filled with fiction, poetry, book reviews, and lots of critical writing about literature. Check my poem and all their other great publications here.
 My poem "Burning Down the House" was recently selected by Lemon Hound as part of the New Vancouver Poets folio. I'm incredibly excited to have been included with such a wonderful & diverse group of poets. Thank you to editors Dina Del Bucchia & Daniel Zomparelli. Read all the poems from the folio HERE |
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