The story goes that in April 1996 the Academy of American Poets started National Poetry Month by standing on the steps of a post office in New York City handing out copies of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” It begins, “April is the cruellest month …” and likely resonated with individuals waiting in line to mail their tax returns. The League of Canadian Poets (LCP) picked up on the idea in 1998 and the month of celebration brings together schools, publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries and poets from across the country.
On the Sunshine Coast Poetry Month will showcase a trio of poets reading at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery and a full calendar of lyrical events at the Sechelt Public Library.
Susan Telfer of Gibsons published her first book of poetry, House Beneath, (Hagios Press) in 2009. She currently works as an English teacher at Elphinstone Secondary. When she began, she didn’t think of herself as a writer until she signed up for a workshop with Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke and was inspired.
“I saw how people responded positively to my poetry,” she told Coast Reporter, and she continued to write.
In 2016 Oolichan Books published her second collection, Ghost Town. It harbours an intensity born of struggle for identity, fuelled by her dysfunctional parents. Many references to the Sunshine Coast (“Mapping the Aquifer” or “Grey Whale at Roberts Creek”) give the book local appeal. In her dreams she visits strange towns: “No one will tell me whose land this house is built on,” she writes in “Northwestern Town”. There is a sense of wandering, searching, while nurturing a baby and damning a drunk father.
A line from one of her favourite poems enlightens the reader. In “The Lord Sits with Me in the Kitchen,” she writes: “He says the key is to let go of the past, put down those heavy parents on each hip.” With the publication of Ghost Town, Telfer acknowledges that she might be done with the past. She has had something new to contend with – her son’s critical illness and, thankfully, his subsequent recovery.
Telfer and Coast poet Joe Denham will join visiting Halifax poet Michelle Elrick, who is launching her new collection with Gibsons-based Nightwood Editions, a publisher that offers innovative and complex poetry, on Wednesday, April 5 at Gibsons Public Art Gallery (431 Marine Drive) at 7 p.m.
Elrick is the author of To Speak (The Muses’ Company, 2010). Her poetry has appeared in literary journals and on CBC TV and she was a finalist in the CBC Poetry Prize in 2015. Elrick’s second collection of poetry is titled then/again, a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places – an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother’s birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast – as well as the memory-warped terrain of the poet’s past houses.
Joe Denham’s most recent poetry collection, Regeneration Machine (Nightwood Editions, 2015), was the winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. It’s a heartfelt lament/epiphany for a friend’s tragic end. His next book, Landfall, is forthcoming with Nightwood this fall. He lives with his wife and two children in Halfmoon Bay.
This event is made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. For more information, visit www.nightwoodeditions.com. The event is free and books will be sold.
Lyrical Library
Friends of the Sechelt Library are sponsoring National Poetry Month, and the kick-off event is on Tuesday, April 4 at 11 a.m. Michael Oswald and Richard Austin will recite T.S. Eliot’s “Macavity: the Mystery Cat” along with some of their own original compositions. If you’ve never heard Austin’s mellow vocals or enjoyed Oswald’s sense of fun, then this is the event for you.
Tuesday, April 4 is the launch of the Book Spine Poetry Contest on Facebook (for 18+ years) and Wednesday, April 12 is the deadline for entries in the Canada 150 Poetry Contest. The theme is “What Living in Canada Means to You” and the contest is open to all ages (registration forms are online at sechelt.bc.libraries.coop). Winners will be announced on April 21 and you can watch for poetic offerings during the week of April 24 when the poems will hang on the Poetry Line, a textual clothes line in the trees beside the library.
Find the Poet in You Poetry Workshop with Jeanne Sommerfield, a therapeutic recreation practitioner, is on Thursday, April 20 at 1:30 p.m. Stay tuned for a grand finale on April 27, the Eclectic Electric Eye, a spoken word event with John Pass and Philip Jagger.
