Kevin and Dave welcome everyone to the opening night of Versefest. It was a good turnout. People who came were jazzed about the chance to be there and looking forward to a good show.
The book table seemed to get some steady browsing before and in breaks.
Amanda was feeling under the weather but she jotted notes on events too.
Another dozen photos or so are with rest of the Slideshow of Versefest pics that I took so far.
Highlights for me are a bit towards…well, most everything.
Paul Tyler kicked it off with reading some poems from A Short History of Forgetting (vid link to previous reading from). And some new work. His are thinking poems. They work their way thru the natural world. I had a previous fondness for banana slugs but hearing his poem of them, love them more. He has such a great reading voice. I forget that when I read his poems on the page.
Suzanne Buffam read a little bit from her book, The Irrationalist but mostly from new poems, which she described as being the product of becoming a mom; they’re list poems. (But what she can do with a list.) She builds a setup and breaks it with comic timing to relieve tension and then one more tap for depth. She plays in the dexterity sandbox with David McGimpsy; a bit of clever, standup, a bit of profound. It was lovely to see shoulders around me shake with laughter.
Her lists included: Impossible things (which weren’t your lame usual list, although I forget now what she said), books I’d like to read (I remember the comic contrast punchline for that but without the setup, I’d be giving a spoiler), words with beautiful sounds that belong to ugly things, and terrible ideas that are probably commercially viable, like hamster farm babysitting. Somewhere in there she has a densely kapowing poem that said I want water to be thirsty for me.
Dennis Lee seemed to have some people delightedly chuckling at his verses and lining up for signatures after. He tried to get the audience to do a refrain of “on my air guitar” but only a couple people picked it up. (Perhaps he didn’t signal enough? Perhaps it was the crowd? During a later reading, finger-snap was agitating a woman who kept glaring back, not familiar with the tradition.)
The interview with him yesterday was chosen for podcasting so check All in a Day‘s sidebar for that. He released his Testament yesterday by a special rush from his publisher, Anansi. It arrived in house after the readings started with a call update from Kate from the back at the end of his reading confirming it arrived in the nick of time. (It doesn’t officially release for sale in Canada until March 1st.) Host Alan Neal quipped that there hasn’t been a announcement of the new testament being ready for some centuries.
As Alan Neal suggested it was like the whole night was choreographed from years ago just for us for tonight with the first poet having a poem of pigeons, the second poet having one of armageddon and the third with the phrase “pigeon armageddon”.
There was a half hour break to chat and get a drink, bite to eat, book or CD or few. Then at 9pm we were back with the second set.
Shauntay Grant at Versefest swept me away. I have rarely felt such presence. Without knowing who she was in a crowd, she owned every step she walked. Normally at a reading crowd the nervous spiking energy of people who will read will give off a static. Even if I don’t know the faces, I can usually tell who will read or present. She was at home.
And her poems. I thought to record phrases but I may as well draw in dust as write best phrases. There was a large sweep of how it all fit together. If I told you that father is ocean and mother is the sun sinking into him, it wouldn’t convey anything of how the cadences, music, rhymes, rhythms and power used that vehicle of concept. One poem ran parallel threads of repetition of problem and letting it go, (say, people who are activists not because they want a solution to the problem but because they like the cachet of the title: that’s life, people who say friend but don’t understand what trusts friendship entail: that’s life.) It tied together in an expected time and way to flip the same words into a celebration of life working and being glorious. It was uplifting not for claiming calm and talking only of happy safe subjects but affirming not just a surviving but a thriving outcome despite that is possible.
Afua Cooper closed the first night with stories of slave history, such as the woman who burnt down Montreal in 1734. She has it in a book form: The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (HarperCollins) which retells the oldest slave narrative in the Americas. She also talked of the private black graves that don’t stay unmarked and disappeared with boned shaking off their ashes from farmer’s corn fields.
She dislodged me as she talked of a field with thorn bushes at it edges. Dad told me in the old days when there were no needles, people used these to darn with. Dad took me when I was small. He took me only once down a farmer’s lane off into a field off a side road and we stood in the late fall long grasses without explanation.
He looked around, unsure of whether it was trespassing or unsure whether we would get caught. Or maybe he was afraid he couldn’t find the spot. Kicking around, there were badly eroding footmarkers. He told me there is where your ancestors are. It used to be common to have private burial plots on your own land. Wonder if I can find it.
Tonight, 7pm, we start again.