February 28, 2008 to August 27, 2008

 
August 24, 2008
Every one
Details

 
August 23, 2008
Tyrone Williams
Steve Collis
Laura Elrick
Judy Radul
Mark Wallace
Stacy Doris
Sianne Ngai
Lisa Robertson
Catriona Strang
Details

 
August 22, 2008
Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
Rod Smith
Kaia Sand
Jules Boykoff
Jeff Derksen
Rodrigo Toscano
Details

 
August 21, 2008
Pat O'Riley
Michael Davidson
Juliana Spahr
Rita Wong
Jules Boykoff
Louis Cabri
Roger Farr
Aaron Vidaver
Peter Cole
Reg Johanson
Details

 
August 20, 2008
Clint Burnham
Dodie Bellamy
Kevin Killian
Sianne Ngai
Brian Kim Stefans
Darren Wershler-Henry
Colin Smith
Andrew Klobucar
Details

 
August 19, 2008
Maxine Gadd
Michael Barhnolden
Sachiko Murakami
Ted Byrne
K. Lorraine Graham
Andrea Actis
Donato Mancini
Peter Culley
Colin Browne
Details

 
June 06, 2008
Jaspreet Singh
Details

 
April 26, 2008
Julia Williams
Natalie Simpson
Details

 
April 17, 2008
Mark Salerno
Details

 
April 11, 2008
Jeanne Heuving
Meredith Quartermain
Details

 
February 29, 2008
Maxine Gadd
Details

 
February 28, 2008
Colin Browne
Details

Read at Sunday, August 24, 2008
POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM CLOSING DAY

AFTERNOON - EVENING SESSION ONLY

Closing day social - Every One is Wel Come

1:00 pm
Baseball game
at
Nat Bailey Stadium
4601 Ontario St
purchase tickets (10$) at the stadium

5:00 pm
Closing party
at
the studios of Urban Subjects and Fillip Magazine
#03 - 305 Cambie Street
free admission, byob

Read at VIVO Media Arts Centre
Saturday, August 23, 2008
POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM DAY 4

MORNING - AFTERNOON SESSION
11:00 am
Seminar
Seminar leader: Sianne Ngai
Title / theme: "The Zany Science: Post-Fordist Performance and the Problem of Fun"
Respondents: Tyrone Williams, Mark Wallace, Andrew Klobucar, Rob Fitterman, Stacy Doris, Jeff Derksen, Michael Davidson, Louis Cabri

-- download a reading copy of this essay from the left hand sidebar of this page, under "W"

1:00 pm
Audio feature
Lisa Robertson and Stacy Doris
"The Perfume Recordist"

DINNER BREAK
3:30 pm (circa)

EVENING SESSION
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Tyrone Williams, Mark Wallace, Catriona Strang, Judy Radul, Laura Elrick, Steve Collis

Read at VIVO Media Arts Centre
Friday, August 22, 2008
POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM DAY 3

MORNING - AFTERNOON SESSION
11:00 am
Seminar
Seminar leaders: Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff
Title / theme: "Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry & Public Space"
Respondents: Catriona Strang, Colin Smith, Juliana Spahr, Nicholas Perrin, Laura Elrick, Clint Burnham

1:00 pm
Roundtable presentation
Moderator and Curator: Jeff Derksen
Title / theme: "Neoliberalism and the Politics of Poetics"
Respondents: Rod Smith, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Roger Farr, Laura Elrick, Louis Cabri

DINNER BREAK
3:30 pm (circa)

EVENING SESSION
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Rodrigo Toscano, Rod Smith, Kaia Sand, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen

Read at VIVO Media Arts Centre
Thursday, August 21, 2008
POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM DAY 2

MORNING - AFTERNOON SESSION
11:00 am
Panel presentation
Moderator and Curator: Rita Wong
Title / theme: "Alpha Bets: Language Gambles on Land"
Panellists: Juliana Spahr, Pat O'Riley, Reg Johanson, Peter Cole

1:00 pm
Talk
Michael Davidson
"On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA.

DINNER BREAK
3:30 pm (circa)

EVENING SESSION
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Rita Wong, Juliana Spahr, PILLS (A. Vidaver, R. Johanson, R. Farr), Pat O'Riley, Peter Cole, Louis Cabri, Jules Boykoff

Read at VIVO Media Arts Centre
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM DAY 1

MORNING - AFTERNOON SESSION
11:00 am
Panel presentation
Title / theme: "On Line: Poetics and the Distribution of Meaning"
Moderator and Curator: Andrew Klobucar
Panellists: Darren Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans, Judy Radul, Sianne Ngai

1:00 pm
Theatrical presentation
Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy w/guests
"The Clifford Irving Show"

DINNER BREAK
3:30 pm (circa)

EVENING SESSION
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Darren Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans, Colin Smith, Robert Fitterman, Clint Burnham

Read at 536 Tuesday, August 19, 2008
POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM OPENING NIGHT

Opening day social - all are welcome!

a party + bbq
free food and drink
but please bring some food and drink to share

w/ readings by poets who have been members of the KSW board or collective, with one exception.

food and drink will start to flow around 5:00 pm
poetry readings will start after 7:00 pm

Read at Radha Eatery Friday, June 06, 2008
launching his new book CHEF

Jaspreet Singh is the author of Chef, a novel, and Seventeen Tomatoes, a collection of linked stories which was awarded the 2004 McAuslan Best First Book Prize. His work has appeared in Walrus, Alphabet City, ArtsEtc Cricket Anthology, and Francis Ford Coppolas Zoetrope. He recently finished writing Speak Oppenheimer, a play for Montreals Infinite Theatre. He was the 2006-07 Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.

Read at Spartacus Books
Saturday, April 26, 2008

JULIA WILLIAMS is a poet and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Literary Review of Canada, Matrix Magazine and CV2, and was selected for the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Her first book of poetry, The Sink House, was published by Coach House Books in 2004. She lives in Calgary.

NATALIE SIMPSON's first collection of poetry, accrete or crumble, was published by LINEbooks in 2006. above/ground press recently reissued her chapbook Dirty Work as part of its Alberta Series. More of her poetry can be found in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press) and Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry (Talonbooks). She is a former managing editor of filling Station magazine, and she recently started publishing limited edition chapbooks through her press, edits all over.

Read at Kootenay School of Writing Thursday, April 17, 2008

Mark Salerno was born in New York City in 1956. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. From 1993 to 1999, he edited Arshile: A Magazine of the Arts, published in Los Angeles. Arshile quickly gained recognition as one of the most influential and innovative small press magazines of its time by publishing a wide array of poetry, fiction, drama, essay, review, and interview. Arshile also featured world-class cover art by such artists as Jasper Johns, Willem De Kooning and Wayne Thiebaud, and inside art by Yoko Ono, Roy Dowell and Emerson Woelffer. In 1995, Mark Salerno published _Hate_ (96 Tears Press), a book of poems. Although _Hate_ grained critical recognition as a serious collection of verse by a new voice, some bookstores refused to stock it, citing its title and cover art as incorrect. The poet went on to publish _For Revery_ (a+bend press, 2000), _Method_ (The Figures, 2002), which was a Finalist in the National Poetry Series, _Matters_ (The Dozens Press, 2002), _So One Could Have_ (Red Hen Press, 2004), and _Odalisque_ (Salt Publishing, 2007). John Ashbery has called Mark Salerno brilliant & an original. He is the recipient of a Fund for Poetry award.

On _Odalisque_:

In this superb new book, Mark Salerno questions the place of value in a world of sequels and simulacra. _Odalisque_ submits repetition to novel, unpredictable forms of renewal a pantoum of the quotidian. Salerno's tightly wrought poems probe the interstices between seeming and being, between Hollywood and the stars, between desire and attendant clamor. If Ingres had placed his Odalisque on the Sunset Strip, she might be looking at us through these poems. This is a completely original work by a serious, important poet.

- Michael Davidson

Read at Spartacus Books
Friday, April 11, 2008

JEANNE HEUVING's cross genre Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a Book of the Year Award in 2005 from Small Press Traffic, and her book of poems Transducer (Chax Press) is just out. She has published critical pieces on avant garde and innovative writers, including the book Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. She is concluding work on a new book The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry, focusing on the poetics of Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan as well as several contemporary poets.

from FURROW

How all is a fertile field ever threatening
Plowed too close like an ominous sky
Earth ever opened the possibility of
Into the plowed furrowed lined earth
A fertile plow into the staid forestation
Into the silvered peat moss lined with
A jewelry box felted with diamonds

...

the possibility of light falling onto his face
the possibility of walking into a sunlit alcove
the sunlit alcove fitting rippling like a glove
the glove moving from finger tip to forearm
silky on flesh receptive to being touched
harvested when a light brown will turn black
deadening hollow black seeds refusing

__________

What does not go away this
Mascared eyes, Cleopatra
Charcoaled Marlene Dietrich
Wanting at the grave as it
Leaks light

***

MEREDITH QUARTERMAINs most recent book is Vancouver Walking; it won the BC Book Awards 2006 Poetry Prize. Two new books by Quartermain are coming out this year: Matter from Bookthug (spring 2008), and Nightmarker from NeWest (fall 2008). She and husband Peter Quartermain run Nomados Literary Publishers in Vancouver.

from THE RAWS

If city is figure what is ground?

20,000 tons of brown sugar, four stories high, land gifted from city to sugar factory  with tax breaks and free water. Every few minutes, a man with an earth mover scoops three tons of raws into a hopper.

1890s: men hauled 700-pound baskets from ships. Picked and sawed like miners at brown boulders in cavernous warehouses. Factory paid managing director $5000 a year, plus $20,000 bonus in 1892, same year it paid $18,000 in dividends.

Cutting up, distributing pieces, classifying, parting, disuniting, subjecting to division.

Can you divide figure from ground? What's individual and not divisible?

1916 $400,000 in dividends. 1917 280% dividend. Same year factory workers struck three months for a 10% raise.

Bonusing: (1) rewards to directors or managers; (2) the use of public money to set up private companies. 1890-city raising $30,000 with 5% debentures, buying sugar-land from mayor's land company, hiring contractors to clear it. On plantations, thirty slaves with hoes trenched two acres a day, planting cane  1.4 million Cormantins, Papaws, Ibos, Bantus shipped to sugar islands  300,000 dying at sea.

Read at Spartacus Books
Friday, February 29, 2008

Join the Kootenay School of Writing and New Star Books in celebrating the launch of Maxine Gadd's new book SUBWAY UNDER BYZANTIUM.

*

Read at Spartacus Books
Thursday, February 28, 2008

Come celebrate the launch of Colin Browne's latest book The Shovel, with an extensive reading from the new work.

Co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing, COLIN BROWNE is an educator, documentary filmmaker and the author of numerous books of poetry including Ground Water, nominated for a Governor General's award in 2002.

"The skill and intense ardor of the mind at work is delightful." - Fred Wah