HOT-SAUCED WORDS Thursday May 24th Featuring Edward Nixon and Phoebe Tsang (with a special performance by the Wu Tsang Nixons!)

Please NOTE that this is NOT the last Thursday of the month – this applies to May only!!

8:30 start at It’s Not a Deli – 986 Queen St. west (Near Ossington) Toronto.

Phoebe Tsang was born in Hong Kong, grew up in England, and has been resident in Toronto, Canada since 1998. A collection of eight of her poems will appear in the forthcoming edition of Atlas magazine (India), in a special focus feature on Canada. Her first chapbook, Solitaires (LyricalMyrical Press, 2006), is also reviewed in this issue. Her poetry currently appears in Canadian publications High Altitude Poetry, Words On Paper, Inscribed, and UK journal FourVolts. Her second chapbook will be published by PressOn in the fall of 2007.  

Phoebe began the journey of writing poetry in September 2004, and is grateful for the mentorship of Robert Priest and Allan Briesmaster. She received a BSc in Architecture from the Bartlett School in London (UK), and was a journalist for Building Design Newspaper. A professional violinist, she has performed worldwide and on MTV and CBC radio. http://www.phoebetsang.com. 

Edward Nixon, originally from Victoria, has spent time in Toronto since 1981 and lived here permanently since the summer of 1984. He has been reading regularly at venues across the city since early 2005. His work equally focussed on page-based poetry, short form texts and performance. Since October 2006 Edward has hosted and coordinated the Diamond Cherry Reading Series held on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at the Renaissance Café (1938 Danforth Ave just west of Woodbine).

His most recent chapbook is Nights in the City of Dead from Aeolus House and he has recently had poems accepted for publication in Jones Avenue, and was published in Aeolus House’s anthology: Renaissance Reloaded.

When not writing or performing his work, Edward volunteers in the co-op housing sector and is a volunteer director of the community WiFi initiative Wireless Toronto. Edward is also the principal consultant for EN Consulting a public outreach and marketing practice.  

HOT-SAUCED WORDS Poetry and Spoken Word Thursday April 26th

8:30 start at It’s Not a Deli  986 Queen St West (near Ossington)

featuring SHARON SINGER

and STEVEN MICHAEL BERZENSKY (MICK BURRS)

(SEE BIOS below the POSTER for full details on these fabulous poets!)

SHARON SINGER is a performance poet, a wordsinger who has worked as an arts journalist and film distributor. She programmed and hosted the Words in Concert poetry reading series at Free Times Café and served on the board of the Art Bar Reading Series at the Victory Café. Her poem suite, “The Names of Water” was set to classical music by Ottawa composer Colin Mack and sung by soprano Doreen Taylor-Claxton in her first CD of Canadian Art Song, HAIL. Sharon’s original lyrics are featured on the music CD, SUNRISE produced by Hamilton composer Marko Lukac. She is currently completing a third CD featuring her vibrant spoken word performances in collaboration with renowned jazz saxophonist Bob Mover (of New York City).
Among Sharon’s published works are FIRE RIDER (1996), a book of poetry, and her chapbooks, THE LAST YEARS OF THE NATURAL WORLD (2002), and her just released MOSES (2007).

STEVEN MICHAEL BERZENSKY (MICK BURRS) was born in Los Angeles and has lived in Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina, Yorkton, and now Toronto. He did not become a dedicated poet until he moved to Canada during the Vietnam War. So far, Mick has over 750 published poems, six books, and 28
chapbooks. His most recent collection is THE NAMES LEAVE THE STONES: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED (Coteau Books), and his latest chapbook is MEMORIES OF A BEE-HIVE BOY (Waking Image Press). He is a former editor of Grain literary magazine and founder of the Annual Short Grain Contest.
Mick is also renewing his folk singing experience, which, for him, always consisted of three dynamic elements: “Rough Guitar/ SereneVoice/ Imaginative Songs.” He is reissuing GOLD RAYS, on which he performs a dozen of his tunes accompanied by Rob Penner, concert violinist. This poet’s pencil paintings and miniature tiles or “luminosities” have served as covers for books, chapbooks, and CDs.

POETRY READING OSHAWA PUBLIC LIBRARY Wednesday April 18th 6:30

Hello poets and poetry aficionados:

If you’re out in the Durham area on Wednesday April 6th come out and hear some great poetry (some of it from me) on the theme of “Great lakes Inspired Poetry”.   

The Garden in the Machine

Poetry by James Dewar

published by Hidden Brook Press

 

 

The Garden in the Machine is the culmination of many years of developing the craft of poetry and represents the best work that I’ve done as a poet.

 

 

The oldest pieces were originally critiqued by Irving Layton in 1973.  Some of the poems were written during the many years when I was not a poet and was living and working outside any artistic community.  However, once I left the corporate world a few years ago, the many poems I had written over the decades called out to me like a siren on the rocks of the Aegean. 

 

Immersing myself in the poetry communities of Toronto and Durham quickly revived my sleeping Muse. Before I knew it, I was writing poetry again and refining the techniques of editing and performance that I learned from the many poets and editors that I grew to know and admire. I found myself immensely happy and satisfied.

 

 

On the urgings of other poets and editors who had not only heard me read my poems during the many readings I attended and gave, but also read my poetry in chapbooks and anthologies, I was convinced to submit a manuscript to publishers.  I was very pleased when Hidden Brook Press advised me that they were interested in publishing my book.

 

So many artists and writers toil in obscurity too shy to present what they’ve discovered even though they know their eyes have seen a unique truth about what it means to be human. I wrote in seclusion for so long, but when I was welcomed into the artistic community, I remembered what Irving Layton had said to a young struggling artist many years ago: Listen to your Muse, translate what you see and hear into intelligible art and then speak up and deliver it to the world. I am proud of this book and I am proud of myself for taking the steps needed to feel this good about it, but I am especially thrilled to be a part of this vibrant community of artists and to have contributed to it in ways that I hope will inspire others to join us on this important journey in search of the human capacity for truth.

                                                                                                 James Dewar

Comments on The Garden in the Machine:

“This poet is a fearless explorer in his art:  uninhibitedly crossing boundaries and stretching horizons…. Dewar’s imagination won’t be bound to mundane matters or things the media tell us….. he carries the right equipment:  well aware how poems must be molded, and transmuted, if they are to bear the stresses of adventurous words and harness their energy.” 

from the foreword by Allan Briesmaster. 

 

 

“Two poems that really stood out for me and kept reverberating long after I’d read them – and re-read them – were “I never hug my Dad” and “Leaving the Edge”.  Very powerful poems, the kind you want to go back to many times.”

Glen Sorestad, Vice President of the League of Canadian Poets, noted in his invitation to Dewar to become a full member of  the League of Canadian Poets as a result of this publication.

 

 

To purchase a copy of the book please email me at james@creativejames.com with the caption ‘book purchase’ in the title line.

or via paypal through the publisher http://www.hiddenbrookpress.com/bookshbp.htm 

Ingrid Ruthig and Kevin Craig @ 66 on Brock March 27th

                                                               

Kevin Craig is a freelance writer and poet living in South Eastern Ontario. In addition to articles and fiction published internationally he has also recorded memoirs on CBC Radio Canada. His poetry has been widely published including Regina Weese, Holistics Today, The Future Looks Bright, Heritage Writer, Anything Goes, Jones Av. Journal, Word Weaver and Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine. He recently took 1st place in the Artella Words & Art Quarterly Poetic Idol Contest, having placed 2nd in their previous competition. Kevin has won and placed in several poetry contests over the past few years. Kevin is the editor of Words on Paper, a new online literary journal.After the success of his first chapbook, The Elephant Keeper & Other Pomes, he is hard at work on a second chapbook, I am a Tree, to be published in early 2007.  

Ingrid Ruthig earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Toronto in the 1980s. After a decade practising that profession in Toronto, she retired her licence to write full-time. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the UK, US, Australia, Bulgaria, and across Canada in such journals as The Malahat Review, Descant, and The Fiddlehead; in the chapbooks One Ticket Five Rides (Whirling Dervish Press, 2003) and Synesthete II (Littlefishcartpress, 2005); and in the anthology Letting Go (Black Moss Press, 2005). She also contributes reviews and interviews to Books in Canada, the Canadian review of books.In 2005, her poetry won a Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition award and the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival Literary Competition.She has read her work at literary events including the Petra Kenney awards ceremony at Canada House in London, England, been a feature reader at the Art Bar Poetry Reading Series in Toronto, and presented her short fiction at the Saturday session of the 2003 Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Ingrid currently resides east of Toronto, where she has co-edited the literary journal LICHEN Arts & Letters Preview since 2000. Her first collection of poetry, A History of Falling, is forthcoming, and a book examining the work of poet Richard Outram will be published this year by Guernica Editions.

Poetry Themed Challenge Winners

Here are the winners of the February 2007 show:

The Poetry Themed Challenge was to write a love poem to your favourite inanimate object:

PHOEBE TSANG (audience choice for favourite poem)
Apollo Dethroned

Sunlight gleams on the pillow
beside my head,
lustrous, blinding –
instinctively
I pull blankets back over eyes then stop
myself from reaching arm across
to the unwarmed half of the bed:
was that you, just there? –

don’t wake yet from last night’s
dreamed embraces, wild
and unplatonic, you Apollo
dethroned from your pedestal,
your placid perfection made stormy
with desire and expectation,
cold sweat soaking golden locks
made silver-blue by moonlight,
so far removed from those hazy days
when you lay stuporous, virtually
inanimate, waiting to be fed
from the vine of my body
as if your blond beauty earned you
some divine privilege –
you were the laziest lover
I’ve ever had.

JOE DEWAR (audience choice for favourite performance)
Faithful Lover

I love you for your obedience
even when the result
is not what I intended

Your head is equipped
so that it’s easily adjusted
Your long smooth neck
makes you sing as I caress it

The luscious curves of your body
are a sight to behold
and are mine all mine
to have and to hold

When at the height of my performance
you disappoint
I forgive you this little thing
and reach deep inside
the soft recess of your home
and pull out
a replacement
high-E
string.

LARA BOZABALIAN (Also a feature at the show)
Nimble Fingers

Audacious cheeky sexpot
How I love thee so!
Nimble fingers couning off
The failed characteristics
Of men long gone and so (haha) forgotten
Alas, Alas, sucks to be them
I’d rather be here
with you.

SUE REYNOLDS
ode to my computer

u’re hardly inanimate
although u hunker down at my desk, unmoved

u tremble with a kind of video Parkinson’s
narcoleptic,
u drop off to sleep at inconvenient moments
like my first husband
who, come to think of it,
was less animate than u

disassociative
or maybe just bipolar
u run several programs at once
still u’re not too limber,
stuttering if i make too many simultaneous demands

but i love u
mostly because u give me back myself
my words, my images, my thoughts,
trans Parent conduit, u connect me to me

isn’t that what Love is all about?’

SHAWN MCLEOD
Haiku

intimately touch
your strings of electric fire
mind bomb ignition

Thanks to all of these fine POETS for allowing me to share their themed poems with you.

HOT-SAUCED WORDS “TORONTO” – Thursday March 29th

FEATURING JOAN LATCHFORD and JAMES DEWAR:

JOAN LATCHFORD launching her new book “REVELATION”

Joan has enjoyed a checkered background. Her education comprised 6 schools, 13 governesses, 43 moves and 8 Atlantic crossings by the time she was 20. She has taught convent school girls and emotionally disturbed boys in England. In addition to being a staff Trainer she has also been the Executive Director of a pre-trial residence for men, funded by the Ontario Ministry of Correctional Services.

She has been married to Frank for 47 years and raised 8 children while freelancing as a documentary photographer for the National Film Board Still Photos Division. In 1967, she was the first woman photographer to receive a Short Term Canada Council Grant to Photograph “Miles for Millions” marches across Canada.

Joan’s favorite English teacher Edna Walker, always told her she should be a writer and has written a number of articles to accompany her published photo stories. After losing her darkroom about 10 years ago Joan began writing, often inspired by people or situations she would have previously photographed. With the advent of acceptable digital technologies, she is once more taking and exhibiting photographs. Her photo of late afternoon reflections in City Hall Pool graces the cover of her new poetry collection, “REVELATION”.

JAMES DEWAR (that would be me) launching my new book “THE GARDEN IN THE MACHINE”.

Click on the Bio tab to learn more about me.

Both books published by HIDDEN BROOK PRESS.

HOT-SAUCED WORDS – Thursday 22 February 2007: Featuring LARA BOZABALIAN and CRAIG GRANT

Join us for the “VALENTINE POST-COITAL COMEDOWN” Show….

LARA BOZABALIAN has been writing poetry and prose for the last six years. Her work has been published in newspapers, journals and magazines, as well as in two literary anthologies. She is the author of three collections of poetry, and Young Lion, her fourth, will be available in the spring of 2007.

CRAIG GRANT was born on a pool table in Val Marie, Saskatchewan in mid-June of 1955, making him a Gemini, the sign of prevaricators, thieves and late night talk show hosts. As well as, of course, writers. It wasn’t until he went to Nepal in 1978 and studied the Akashik Records in a remote ashram belonging to the Black Hat Society, an enclave of time-travelers, that he realized, in the twenty-third hour of a past-life regression experience inside a salt-water flotation tank, that his mother, a one-time prostitute, had been a guinea pig in some nefarious drug experiments dreamed up by the CIA, at the University of Regina, when she was pregnant with him, in the first trimester. This epiphany, plus being hit by lightning at age 12, plus eleven other near-death experiences, had a profound impact upon his psyche. He began having psychic dreams. He began travelling around the country on the psychic fair circuit, with a laptop loaded with astrological software, a Salvador Dali tarot deck, three astral dice and a sign that said, simply, “the psychic detective”.

He also wrote a novel about his trip to Nepal and India, since it involved travelling through the Iranian revolution.

THE LAST INDIA OVERLAND is now out of print. But sometimes a copy can be found at www.abebooks.com, for $200 Am, if it’s signed and in mint conditiion. Or from the author, himself, for half the price.

Craig Grant can be contacted through Coteau Books.

Praise for Craig Grant’s THE LAST INDIA OVERLAND…..

“a rocky, raunch, unforgettable ride!” – Derek Shell

“….. is a wonderfully bizarre travel tale that I really sank my teeth into. Gut-wrenching and gritty.” – Tim Brandt

“….is weird and funny and erotic and knowing. The must-read book of the year.” – Cliff Burns