Open mic as part KaDo at versefest.ca, was 1:30pm Sun Mar 29, Black Box Theatre, Arts Court, Ottawa. I read a few haiku atMinute 52:43. Photos at PearlEssence.
If you missed it, theVF channel is still there to see events you missed. or want to have another go at listening to. Like Isabella Wang at Arc’s showcase or the Factory Series poetics lecture.
Isabella just started the Phoenix Poetry Prize. You can offer your books or cash as support.
Over at Blasted Tree, there’s Die Workshop which is a chance operations poetry chapbook by Neil Surkin. A couple years old but I missed it at the time.
Do you know about booksellers.ca? The Quebec Cooperative of Independent Bookstores brings together, under the name Les libraires, more than 125 independent bookstores in Quebec, the Maritimes, Ontario and Manitoba. Its members are committed to both books and book readers and to the vitality of the literary scene. In 2026, LIQ’s digital expertise was shared Canada-wide when it deployed booksellers.ca, an extension of its leslibraires.ca site. Great for when your indie is far away and when you want digital book now but not from you-know-who.
Over at Wikipedia, “Better to praise and share than blame and ban”, John Updike‘s rules for art criticism.
Oh, and this isn’t technically links but here are my fav reads and re-read this year:
Becoming Altar: New and Selected Poems by Kyla Houbolt (Suppress, 2025)
Cinema of the Present by Lisa Robertson (Coach House, 2014)
Weather by Rob Taylor (Gaspereau Press, 2024)
Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the Twenty-first Century by Derek Beaulieu (Assembly Press, 2026)
Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses by Kristen O’Neal (Quirk Books, 2022)
and
Turtle Dreams: The Red Moon Anthology of English Language Poetry 2025, ed. by Jim Kacian (Red Moon Press, 2026).
Worth looking into.
