writersreadconcordia reading, Uncategorized

An Evening with Claudia Rankine

 

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An Evening with Claudia Rankine:

March 10, 2017
7pm
J.A. de Sève Cinema, Webster Library, Concordia University, 1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montréal

Join us for a reading and discussion with Claudia Rankine. She is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

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Writers Read is one of a long tradition of diverse literary reading series at Concordia University and has recently hosted such authors as Trish Salah, Mary Ruefle, Ben Lerner, Dionne Brand, and Roxane Gay. Writers read is supported by the Faculty of Arts & Science at Concordia University and the English Department.

 

 

J. F. Clark poetry, reading, student driven, Suzanne Buffam, text

Damian Rogers is a Social Menace

Off the Page Festival welcomes Damian Rogers Thursday, November 3rd, in Concordia’s Grey Nuns Building (1175 Rue St Mathieu), room M100, starting at 7:30pm.

Damian Rogers is a social person. “I will talk to someone for hours, no problem. I’m good to talk, as they say,” Rogers recently told Trevor Corkum of 49thshelf.com. The same is true of her page. To read her books, Dear Leader (Coach House Books, 2015) and Paper Radio (ECW Press, 2009), is not at all like small talk. A testament to the absorptive power of her work is that hours of enjoyment will occur before one realizes the time. To finish her books poses the problem: what now? The solution is to re-read her work as if for the first time. As Rogers asks in “The Trouble with Wormholes” (Rogers, 23):

How many times must I learn the lesson of compression?
Let go of everything you know and start from scratch.

 

Damian Rogers’ work is menacing. Where her voice is accessible, her style, inviting, and her subjects, familiar, her themes challenge the reader’s sense of safety. Familiar objects – roller skates, pantsuits, soap dishes, and sweaters – lay alongside sensory descriptions of dreams, homes, and childhoods. Desires are addressed in association to these objects and sensations, such as the man and spider in “Poem for Love” who respectively “dreams of a red telephone that will only ring for him” or wishes for a “frame upon which to hitch his home” (Rogers, 48). Neither character will realize their desire. A common theme in Rogers’ work is, then, to remind us that life is a series of struggles wherein we often fail to reach our own desires. Life is gritty, we are imperfect, and we lack control to change course. To read Rogers’ work is to feel threatened by the reminder of what we don’t always see ourselves: That there is no escape from our imperfections but through catharsis. In this respect, Rogers’ work is as refreshing in its honesty and menacing in theme as it is creative in its composition. As she writes in “Storm” (Rogers, 18).

We live in
the arteries
of a large
ugly animal
and I saw
it move.

 

Damian Rogers is the editor of The Walrus and Anansi Press, creative director of “Poetry in Voice,” and the literary curator and co-host of The Basement Review performance series.

Damian Rogers is a hell of a poet.

From Dear Leader:

POEM FOR DEATH

‘Politicians, in my eyes, ruin our best chances
of making this work,’ said the man running for mayor.

Once they wondered, ‘Where do we go from here?’
And here is as far as they got.

‘If I start freaking out over this spill, I’ll never stop,’
said the oil can. ‘I want to get back to my wife.’

‘You’re a prisoner,’ said the snow leopard to the bank teller.
‘You’ll be the last of our kind to be free.’

‘Let the world turn,’ said the witch,
‘as if it would do so without you.’

‘That feels amazing,’ said the rock ‘n’ roll victim,
as he bled from his head. ‘Do it again.’

What can I say? I can’t wait to meet the future beasts that keep
on knocking from the other side of that big red door.

Don’t miss Damian Rogers with Suzanne Buffam and Sarah Burgoyne.
7:30, November 3rd, Grey Nuns Building M100, 1175 Rue St Mathieu

Rogers, Damian. Dear Leader. Toronto: Coach House, 2015. Print.

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark conversation, Literary Festivals, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

From the Archive: Francine Prose

Writers Read looks back at hosting prolific author, Francine Prose, in March, 2014, in Concordia’s Henry F. Hall building. Attendees crowded into the Hall conference room for a reading of Prose’s novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (HarperTorch, 2014), and later, a Q&A session with the Brooklyn native. Lovers is a multivocal series of epistolaries that spotlight Parisian lives during the rise of German fascism, and the impacts fascism had on various Parisian cultures. The innermost thoughts of Prose’s complex characters entwine to give a voice and face to a separate, abstract character – the motley cityscape of pre-war Paris.

Francine Prose released a new novel this month, entitled, Mister Monkey: A Novel.

As reviewed in the New York Times Book Review: “Expertly constructed, Mister Monkey is so fresh and new it’s almost giddy, almost impudent with originality. Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy. . . . It’s gorgeous and bright and fun and multi-faceted, carrying within it the geological force of the ages. It’s a book to be treasured. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.” (New York Times Book Review, front cover review)

Listen to a clip of Prose reading from Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932:

 

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark poetry, reading, student driven, text

Bewitched by Broadbent

Writers Read and Concordia University welcome Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent tonight at 7pm, in the York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Readers first shook hands with Laura Broadbent through the pages of her remarkable, and strikingly titled book, Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? (Snare Books, 2012). Most notable are the sections entitled “Between A And B,” and “Men in Various States.” The former is a suite of poems that tangentially weaves lines of grit, glass, bodies, sex, and sky. Each poem presents as inky layers of interior perspectives bookended between A. and B., two physical, chronological, and metaphorical touchstones. The latter, another suite of poems, reads as the unspoken confessionals of various male voices — work that brims with an honesty of crude desire and psychological strife. There is a magic in Broadbent’s words and ‘terrestriality’ in her approach, if such a word can be coined, as if locating a ley line meant digging through not just bodies, but the hell of what people mean within and between, what makes a self. Broadbent might contest this interpretation through her invention of Jean Rhys’ voice in Interviews (Metatron 2014): “If I was bound for hell, / let it be hell. / No more false heavens. / No more damned magic.” But reading Broadbent’s work is tantamount to incantation because it summons something palpable, dark, and lurking. The trick of her magic is this: Her work digs deep until it connects to a Hell that was bound for us.

Broadbent’s voice most recently resonates with the publication of In on the Great Joke (Coach House Books, 2016).

Arrive early on campus to hear volunteers read the entirety of Lisa Robertson’s, Debbie: An Epic, throughout Concordia University’s LB building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd W) from 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm.

 

Poem from “Between A And B” in Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining?:

A.

Even your family can betray you but when there is no you your
family can’t betray you. The place between A and B formally re-
quests you to drop the story. He is not better than you because there
is no you and you have not failed because there is no you. You
did not say the wrong thing because there is no you. There was no
humiliating sexual encounter because there is no you. You didn’t
detect bodily decay because there is no you. He cannot hurt you
because there is no you. You aren’t stuck in your first-world issues
because there is no you. Your task is to walk among the ten thou-
sand things – look at the sky and become it smell the morning
and become it feel the temperature and become it scatter with
the wind. Not a name reaches you in your bassinet of nothing-
ness strung between A and B.

B.

 – Johnathan F. Clark

writersreadconcordia student driven, Uncategorized

All Day & All Night with Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent

On Friday October 21st, Writers Read in collaboration with Off The Page presents a live performance of Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic (New Star 1997) in the afternoon before we gather for an evening with Lisa Robertson herself and Laura Broadbent.

debbie
Debbie: A Live Reading, Performance, Marathon

October 21st, 2pm, English Department, LB 671.05, 1400 de Maisonneuve

Call it a cover or a choral reading, call it a performance, a collaboration, or a marathon: it begins with a party scene in an English Department. We will gather to read Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic out loud from cover to cover. The readers will move around the English department and  through the book with the audience.

inonthegreatjoke 3summers

An Evening with Lisa Robertson & Laura Broadbent

October 21st, 7pm, York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Both with new releases from Coach House, Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent will join us at Concordia University on the evening of Friday October 21st. Two writers inhabiting many voices, 49th Shelf describes Robertson’s 3 Summers as “a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests.” Of Broadbent’s collection, In On The Great Joke, Rob McLennan notes “there is something reminiscent in In on the Great Joke of the work of Anne Carson, as Broadbent utilizes the frame of poetry to write her way around and through theory, prose-blocks and conceptual bursts.”

Writers Read is one of a long tradition of diverse literary reading series at Concordia University and has recently hosted such authors as Mary Ruefle, Ben Lerner, Dionne Brand, and Roxane Gay. Writers read is supported by the Faculty of Arts & Science at Concordia University and the English Department.

 

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writersreadconcordia poetry, reading, Uncategorized

Tonight: Phinder Dulai Reads

Phinder Dulai, Tuesday October 11, 7pm, LB 6.646, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.

“Combined rhythmic discipline and a wide descriptive palette, wielded by a talented composer of word images; this would be the definition of anyone’s preferred reading. These essential elements are richly present in dream / arteries … While a pointed, heartfelt and lyrical precis of a sore spot in Canada’s expansive immigration history, dream /arteries is no less a work of agile poetics and vivid juxtaposition … a full range of common life experience and observation, shifting its focus from the specific immigrant experience on into a wider observance of the world and its offerings. The volume is elegantly produced and includes strategically placed archival photos, some faintly impressed as sepia ghostings upon translucent panels. The effect is one of contemporaneous immediacy within an irresistible sense of the importance of the past. It is a testament to Phinder Dulai’s consummate skill, aside from his personal connection to the material, that we come away fromdream /arteries with a heightened awareness of all travel phenomenon, the harshness and revelatory thrill of new lands, the coldness of alienation and the vivacity of new connection.” – Vancouver Sun

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Phinder Dulai is the Vancouver-based author of dream/arteries and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). His most recent work has been published in Canadian Literature and Cue Books Anthology. Earlier work appeared in Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh, the Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. Dulai is a co-founder of the Surrey-based interdisciplinary contemporary arts group The South of Fraser Inter Arts Collective (SOFIA/c).

coopbookstore
*~*~* The Co-op Bookstore will be selling books ~*~*~
The Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore is pleased to offer a viable alternative to the corporate structure, putting students’ best interests above and beyond our own bottom line. As a not-for-profit alternative to corporate bookstores, we are conveniently located right on Concordia’s downtown campus at 2150 Bishop Street in Montreal. Offering both new and used books, in addition to a wide variety of artisan consignments, we also boast the largest selection of sex and gender studies titles anywhere in Montreal. (Cash + Credit only)

writersreadconcordia poetry

Angular & Crabwise: a Reading with McKay and Dodds

Join Writers Read on Friday October 7th at 2pm (MB 2.130, 1450 Rue Guy) for our first event of the season, as we host Don McKay and Jeramy Dodds, two equally original poets, for a reading and discussion about writing poetry, winning poetry prizes, and speaking in the voices of Old Icelandic, bird songs, and stones.

“Over a span of more than forty years, Don McKay has been writing and publishing poetry and essays, his reputation and influence increasing with each passing year. McKay’s books have been recognized with many awards, including five nominations for the Governor General’s Award, winning twice, and three nominations for the Griffin Poetry Prize, winning once. His is the voice of a careful observer, a confiding and companionate voice that whispers “Look!” to the reader, pointing out the barely noticeable and rarely considered phenomena that underpin our short existence.” (Gooselane Editions)

Jeramy Dodds’ first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds, won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His poems have won the CBC Literary Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award. He holds an MA in Medieval Icelandic Studies and his latest release is translations of the 13th Century Poetic Edda. “Dodds’ wasabi-infused free verse is sprinkled with its own odd Cat in the Hat magic, twisting familiar idioms into unexpected meditations while exploring the sublime potential of myth, metaphor, and the English language. Reading Dodds’ poetry, one is first struck by a sense of familiar smells, distilled universal moments; yet, his language stretches to the very edge of consciousness.” (Mark Vincenz)

writersreadconcordia reading, Uncategorized

Lunch with Jane Munro & Surprise Guest

jane-munro-2013

Jane Munro, Sept. 23 NOON in LB649 Concordia University, English Department,

A reading from Jane Munro’s award winning book Blue Sonoma

From Judges’ Citation:

Somewhere between the directness and clarity of haiku and Yeats’s ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ moves Jane Munro’s hauntingly candid explorations of the hard truths of growing old.

http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/awards-and-poets/shortlists/2015-shortlist/jane-munro/

THERE WILL ALSO BE A SURPRISE MYSTERY READER!

writersreadconcordia reading, Uncategorized

Dionne Brand in Montreal

It’s true. We have been waiting years, maybe a decade, maybe a lifetime, and the date has finally be confirmed. Dionne Brand will join us for a reading and discussion in Montreal at Concordia University.

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Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice, including particularly issues of gender and race. Dionne Brand has published eighteen books, contributed to seventeen anthologies, written dozens of essays and articles, and made four documentary films for the National Film Board. Her latest novel is “Love Enough.”

*~*~*~*
The Co-op Boostore will be joining us with copies of Dionne Brand’s books

coopbookstore

The Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore is pleased to offer a viable alternative to the corporate structure, putting students’ best interests above and beyond our own bottom line. As a not-for-profit alternative to corporate bookstores, we are conveniently located right on Concordia’s downtown campus at 2150 Bishop Street in Montreal. Offering both new and used books, in addition to a wide variety of artisan consignments, we also boast the largest selection of sex and gender studies titles anywhere in Montreal.