2019-2020 Sessions

Mark Tredinnick is the author of eighteen books, including A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Red Writing Book. He is a celebrated Australian poet, essayist, and teacher of writing. “One of our great poets of place,” Judy Beveridge calls him. In 2020, Mark was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to literature and education. Other honours include the Cardiff Poetry Prize, the Blake and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, the ACU and Ron Pretty Poetry Prizes, two Premiers’ Literature Awards, and the Calibre Essay Prize. The Blue Plateau, his landscape memoir, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize.

Mark’s reading of his work will be an occasion to mark the migration of the Montreal International Poetry Prize to its new home in the Department of English at McGill University. www.montrealpoetryprize.com

Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and critic from New Brunswick. He is author of several books of poetry, including Complete Physical (2010), On Shaving Off His Face  (2015), Dysphoria (2017), and New Brunswick (2019). As a Vanier postdoctoral scholar at McMaster University, he researches the representations of pain in CanLit. Dysphoria, the final entry in his affect trilogy, was published in 2017 with the Porcupine’s Quill. He has just launched a collection of essays, Constructive Negativity, compiling commentary from different periods of his work. Recipient of the Walrus Poetry Prize and the Hamilton Literary Award for poetry, Neilson currently holds a SSHRC Talent Award.

Neilson focuses on the articulation of pain and disordered affect through poetic form. As poet and editor, he comments on the emergent area of “disability poetics”; as a physician, he considers the value of poetry in medical practice.

For this reading, Poetry Matters is delighted to partner with McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine (part of ROAAr, Rare & Special Collections, Osler, Art and Archives) https://www.mcgill.ca/library/branches/roaar. Materials from the Osler Collections will be featured at the event. Special thanks to Mary Hague-Yearl, Osler Head Librarian.

How can wellness be imagined for and by survivors of ongoing, intersectional trauma? Addressing trauma as experienced by individual, chronically ill bodies and on an ecological scale, these poems turn to secular ritual and magic as ethical structures that may permit healing to coexist and engage politically with complex harms.

Rebecca Salazar (she/they) is the author of the knife that justifies the wound (Rahila’s Ghost) and Guzzle (Anstruther Press), a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead and Plenitude magazines, and a PhD candidate living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq peoples.

You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and.”—Sufi parable

For far too long we have othered nature; the distinction between humans and the land has only bolstered illusions of authority and hierarchy. If, as Phyllis Webb suggested, poetry cannot change the world, it can change individual consciousness—starting with the poet’s—in efforts to understand the “and” between “one” and “one.” This reading explores ecological grief, the responsibility of connection, and gratitude.

christian favreau is a poet and activist living in Montréal (Tiohtiá:ke). His work has appeared in The McGill Daily Literary Supplement and Vallum. His forthcoming book of poetry with JackPine Press will be available in late 2020.

In “Talking to Grief,” poet Denise Levertov depicts grief as a stray dog desiring the companionship of the speaker—suggesting that taking ownership of grief transforms both the emotion and those experiencing it. In dialogue with Levertov, Jaeggle’s Night of the Crash, a sequence of poems on the death of the narrator’s son, proposes that wellness is only antithetical to grief when grief is denied its history.

M.W. Jaeggle’s poetry has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, The Dalhousie Review, Vallum, The Veg, and elsewhere. He is author of two chapbooks, Janus on the Pacific and The Night of the Crash. While pursuing an MA at McGill, Mike served as Poetry Editor at Scrivener Creative Review and was awarded the Mona Adilman Prize in poetry. Currently Poetry Editor at Montreal Writes, he lives in Vancouver.

Candour, Or: “Sometimes I Think The Branches In The Winter Night Are Shaken By Your Hands”

Candour, from the Latin candere, to shine; in English meaning openness, frankness, honesty. This reading proposes to investigate candour as a powerful, luminous source of poetic creativity and also as a potent force for change in individuals and the renovation of human relationships. It also seeks to explore candour’s errors, the various ways in which that same force can, along with its potential to heal, to brighten, to better, potentially damage, betray and degrade people, or degrade, betray and damage art. The poems to be presented, thus, are all artefacts of candour, or attempts at capturing it. They will take the hearer many places, from antique Carthage to XXth century Hungary, from suburban Quebec to the gates of Stalingrad. Drawing from memory and myth alike, they will seek to present a vision of candour as a revolutionary gesture in an era of constant deception, at once a salve for the bruises of the commonplace and a fiery destroyer of illusions.

James Dunnigan is a poet, scholar and fishmonger from Montreal. His first book of poetry, The Stained Glass Sequence, won the Frog Hollow Press chapbook competition in 2018. Shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry prize in the same year, his work has also appeared in such places as Maisonneuve Magazine, CV2 and Montreal Writes. A second chapbook, Wine and Fire, is forthcoming with Cactus Press.

Vice Viscera: The Body Gives up What it Cannot Hold

The act of communication is inherently vulnerable for with it comes the risk of misinterpretation. In a worst-case scenario, words are weaponized against the speaker in a process of emotional evisceration. When trust is broken, the body responds. Trauma. Abuse. Heartbreak. Illness. “Trust your gut,” can serve as a compass to navigate healing or be the source of further symptoms of distress but ultimately, the problem of vulnerability is one that lies at the heart of connecting with others—through poetry and
elsewhere. The poems that comprise this reading investigate the psychosomatic and imagine “body language” as a process of catharsis: the corporeal as a vessel and a portal, bearing the potential to reveal and conceal the self’s secrets. They attempt to dissect, to explore physical intimacy as means for knowing others and anatomy, as a lexicon for turning things inside out.

Willow Loveday Little is a writer, poet and freelance editor whose work has appeared in places like The Dalhousie Review and On Spec. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University, teaches ESL, and runs workshops at Sur Place Media. In 2018, she was a finalist for the QWF poetry mentorship. She curates “Pieces of Process,” an art series that aims to demystify creative process by providing a space for emerging artists to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about art. Willow is currently agonizing over her first chapbook manuscript, Viscera.

Asa Boxer is a poet and critic based in Montréal. Recent books include Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Friar Biard's Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013) and Skullduggery (Signal, 2011). His debut book, The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), received the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry, and his cycle "The Workshop" won the 2004 CBC/enRoute Literary Award. His work has appeared in collections such as The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, the Oxford-Poetry Broadside Series, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2009 and 2012. His latest chapbook is Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018). Boxer is founder of the globally recognized Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Marc di Saverio’s poems and translations have appeared in such publications as CNQ, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, and Partisan. Poet and critic Shane Neilson acknowledged di Saverio's first book, Sanatorium Songs (Palimpsest, 2013) as "the greatest poetry debut from the past 25 years." Di Saverio was recognized among the top ten of the world's finest English language haiku poets in 2011 by Simply Haiku Magazine, and in 2016, di Saverio was recipient of the City of Hamilton Arts Award For Best Emerging Writer. In 2017, his poetry was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, his debut became a best seller in both the USA and Canada, and he published Ship of Gold: the Essential Poems of Émile Nelligan, which appeared in 2017 through Montréal’s Véhicule Press. His Crito di Volta: an Epic, will be appearing in the spring of 2020.

Please join Poetry Matters for a reading with Montreal poets Stephanie Bolster and Susan Elmslie, featuring recent work.

Susan Elmslie’s second collection is Museum of Kindness (2017), shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her first trade collection, I, Nadja, and Other Poems (2006) won the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the McAuslan First Book Prize, the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award and a ReLit Award.  Her poems have also appeared in several Canadian journals, anthologies, and in a prize-winning chapbook, When Your Body Takes to Trembling (Cranberry Tree, 1996). Elmslie teaches at Dawson College in Montreal.

Stephanie Bolster’s White Stone: The Alice Poems won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 1998, and Two Bowls of Milk (1999) received the Archibald Lampman Award. A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (2012), was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Work from Long Exposure, her manuscript-in-progress, was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. Bolster teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal.

On some of Elmslie’s and Bolster’s work:

[Bolster’s] A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature—constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past—through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries… Informed by the author’s grand tour of … zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is … a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet’s combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where “arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades,” and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air.

Museum of Kindness, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie's searching second collection of poetry, is a book that bravely examines "genres" familiar and hard to fathom: the school shooting, PTSD, raising a child who has a disability. It is a collection about thresholds big and small. In poems grounded in the domestic and in workaday life, poems burnished by silence and the weight of the unspoken, poems by turns ironic and sincere, Elmslie asks "What, exactly, is / unthinkable?" Confronted by "the mismatch / between our need for meaning / and our inability to find it," the poet reflects on the possibility of the miraculous in hard-won insights, in "a comparatively / uncomplicated joy."