The League of Canadian Poets
43rd Annual Poetry Festival & Conference
SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver, BC
June 12 - 14, 2009
Panel Registration (non-members welcome) |
YOU’RE INVITED! LCP POETRY FESTIVAL AND CONFERENCE 2009
Plans for the LCP’s 43rd annual Poetry Festival and Conference are well under way. This exciting three-day poetry festival is scheduled for June 12 -14, 2009 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. The conference will take place at the SFU Harbour Centre, conveniently located in the heart of downtown Vancouver.
The League is very pleased to announce that Marilyn Bowering, long time League member and winner of both the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, will deliver the Anne Szumigalski lecture on Saturday, June 13th, as part of the weekend’s events.
Panels will include:
- Spoken Word: Deep Roots and Diverse Shoots
- Who's In, Who's Out? The Anthology
- Working Class Heroes – work poetry and why it matters
- Eco Poetry – Feminist Caucus Panel
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As always, there will be a new members reading, and the Anne Szumigalski lecture is followed by dinner and the Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards Gala.
Registration forms are available online and by mail. Registration is $175 and includes 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 2 health breaks, 4 panels and dinner at the Anne Szumigalski lecture and award gala. Additional tickets for the gala cost $75 each. There are a limited number of extra tickets, to be allocated on a first come, first serve basis and will be confirmed after the deadline. The registration deadline is May 1, 2009. Note that members should contact the office for discounted air travel with WestJet.
More on Marilyn Bowering: Marilyn Bowering has received many awards for poetry including the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and several National Magazine awards. Her work has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. She was a 2008 Fulbright Scholar at New York University. Her most recent books are “Green” (poetry) and “What It Takes To Be Human” (fiction). Marilyn has travelled extensively and has lived in Greece, Scotland, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Spain and the United States. Her work has been translated into Punjabi, Spanish, Italian, German, Finnish and Greek. She is a Professor in the Creative Writing and Journalism Department at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia. She first became a member of the League in 1977 where she met poets who are still among her closest friends today. For more info: www.marilynbowering.com
2009 Feminist Caucus “Eco Poetry Panel”
Friday, June 12, 1:45 - 3:15 PM – SFUHarbour Centre Segal Centre
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Anne Burke, “Scar Sands”, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Blake’s “Satanic Mills”: Alberta and the National Geographic. “This is a province with Awards for its UNESCO heritage sites, prime Eco Tourism, wildlife and the natural landscape. How my poetics have been shaped by the environment, based on an ongoing discovery of language articulated by (and embedded in) an aesthetics of the land.”
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Magie Dominic, “I wrote poems about the earth, the damaged sky, our little globe from all perspectives. The poems were set to music, sung and all recorded. The process was unique. The meeting of artistic minds, all strangers, all effected by the state of the earth and wanting to do something and the technology involved to make it happen.
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Cathy Ford, “A Memoir”, in progress. “My paper, it’s a kind of memoir and political statement about my love of the west coast and how one is, that is my self, helpless before the eco and the feminism.”
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Andrea Nicki, “Eco Feminist Poetry Empowering All Creatures Big and Small”. “When I first read the term ‘eco poetry’, I was delighted to experience a moment of self-discovery; I had thought of myself primarily as a feminist poet, when much of my poetry has been concerned with humanizing our technologically-driven world. I am, more accurately, an eco-feminist poet.”
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Catherine Owen, “Open Wounds: The Graphic Gothic and its Ecological Howl in the Visions of Di Brandt and Dionne Brand." “A romantic view of the earth, as with sanitized versions of the female body, has contributed to the ecological nightmare humanity finds itself approaching…Conversely, Di Brandt and Dionne Brand are unafraid to speak the brute truths of both the earth’s essential cycles and the reality of our environmental plunderings.”
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Working Class Heroes – work poetry and why it matters
Friday, June 12, 3:30 - 5:00 PM – SFU Harbour Centre Segal Centre
Is there anything about work that's poetic? Why write about work?
Considering that most poets have day jobs, and the majority of us, whether
poets, or lovers of poetry, spend the bulk of our lives at work, perhaps the
real question is why isn't more poetry written about work? Come experience
how a passion for the art of making a living creates evocative poetry. Panellists: Howard White and Hilary Peach. Moderator: Kate Braid -
Who's In, Who's Out? The Anthology
Saturday, June 13, 12.30-2:00 - SFU Harbour Centre McLean Management Studies Lab
Who hasn’t been included in or excluded from an anthology and lived to praise the saint or curse the devil for that decision? What drives anthologists, often dismissed as mere pack-rats, whose hoard is limited by their taste and personal poetics or even their poet friendships? Or is the impetus more intuitive, one of corralling the poets, pounding the drum, writing down the voice of the present? Here's your chance to get the answers, take a few pot-shots or grow in appreciation with panellists Mona Fertig, Harold Rhenisch, George McWhirter. Moderator: Gary Geddes. -
Spoken Word: Deep Roots and Diverse Shoots
Saturday, June 13, 2:30-4:00 – SFU Harbour Centre McLean Management Studies Lab
"Spoken Word" has entered the Canadian literary lexicon as a genre of variation. Simultaneously regarded as both an emerging form and a venerable tradition, it encompasses all things oral from the ancient art of storytelling, to the scions of the beat generation, to contemporary free-styling. Spoken Word includes jazz, lyrical and unlanguaged improvisation, sound poetry, audio poetry, video poetry, drag poetry, dub poetry, slam, hip-hop, rap, and riffing. It is urban and rural; academic and street-smart; improvised and scripted; multi- lingual and collaborative. It transcends class, embraces difference, and is practiced in some form in virtually every culture. Witness a little oral history with panellists Sheri-D Wilson and Randy Jacobs and explore what we can all learn about presentation. Moderator: Tanya Evanson
