Donato Mancini
Nikki Reimer
Heather McDonald
Jonathon Wilcke
Tony Power
Tomasz Michalak
Emily Fedoruk
Kim Duff
Cris Costa
Edward Byrne
Michael Barnholden
Sonnet L'Abbé

Friday, March 12, 2010 @ Doors at 8, readings start at 9 pm

W2 Perel Gallery
112 West Hastings

launch party for the new issue of W: W2010

W2010 features poetry and fiction by Jonathon Wilcke, Nikki Reimer, Tony Power, Tomasz Michalak, Donato Mancini, Heather McDonald, Tiziana La Melia, Reg Johanson, Scott Inniss, Ray Hsu, Emily Fedoruk, Kim Duff, Cris Costa, Stephen Collis, Edward Byrne, Michael Barnholden, Anne Ahmad and Sonnet L'Abbé. Edited by Anne Ahmad, Stephen Collis, Kim Duff, Emily Fedoruk, Donato Mancini, Tomasz Michalak, and Tony Power.

W2010 is published both in a limited edition print run, and as a free pdf downloadable from the KSW website. The pdf will be available online on March 12.

ABOUT THE NEW W:

"W2010 announces a new formation—both for the magazine and the Kootenay School of Writing. KSW, the more venerable of the two, is 25 years old this fall; W is ten. A new collective structure is in place for the School: a cluster of semi-autonomous yet intersecting “pods” (or “cells” if you prefer a more radical conception), each with its own projects or “areas of influence” (readings / pedagogy / publication, etc). W2010 begins a new conception of the magazine as an annual: this first issue gathers work from the present collective (or perhaps we should now say collectives) written this year; future annual issues will be announced with a themed call, for which work will be gathered and published on-line over the course of the year (see below for the call for the next issue). We hope work will be written dialogically as an issue accumulates: an initial selection of material will be posted, and then responses / extensions / contestations /emendations, etc, as they come; at the close of a year/issue, a print run of at least a “selection” of the year’s material will ideally then be issued.

The work in W2010 might surprise some familiar with the magazine and the School. For starters, there is some fiction here. We are doing our cultural work at a time of unprecedented pressures, as the “long neoliberal moment” (to borrow Jeff Derksen’s phrase) grinds on, responding to the current market crisis not by a return to some sort of neo-Keynsean economics, but rather, with bailouts for the rich and amped up privatizations. Meanwhile the public sphere—already just a pool of faint light beneath one last sputtering streetlamp—seems set to finally wink out altogether. In Vancouver, this has a lot to do with the Olympics, its hundreds of new security cameras, its 1 billion dollar security budget, and its “safe assembly areas” (outside of which we can imagine the majority of the city as an “unsafe assembly zone”). Beside this we have the provincial government’s concerted efforts to privatize, expropriate, expel, and otherwise suppress a still-vital cultural sector. In such an environment, we feel it is essential to broaden and strengthen affinities, working towards something of a cultural front to face “a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse” (The Coming Insurrection 7). From deep in the collapse, we reach out." - Stephen Collis

Rachel Zolf

Friday, March 19, 2010 @ 8:00 pm

3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts
112 West Hastings

NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics is a reading and seminar series organised around Lacan's Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The series will run for the equivalent of one academic year, with one writer a month presenting a reading one evening and running a workshop/seminar, which will address the controlling themes, the following day.

This series will continue periodically through Summer 2010.

The critical workshops will address the questions raised in the abstract below. Writers will talk about their own work and other works in relation to these questions. Participants are invited to read the texts listed at the end of the abstract and bring their own work or questions to add to the dialogue.

Series organized by Nancy Gillespie and Nikki Reimer, with Nancy acting as the point person. Nancy completed her PhD on Lacanian subjectivity and poetics at the University of Sussex UK in 2008. She has been a colleague of the London Society of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis for six years, and will soon be pursuing her Lacanian training analysis in Paris.

Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure (Coach House 2010) is a polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in its crosshairs. The collection samples a variety of source texts – Lone Soldier Foundation copy, ancient Hebrew texts, comments from internet trolls and (among others) an account of the first Israeli in space. It's an unsentimental look at one of the most complex ongoing conflicts of the past century. Zolf is the author of three previous poetry collections. Human Resources (2007) won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Masque (2004) was shortlisted for the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the title long poem from Her absence, this wanderer (1999) was a finalist in the CBC Literary Competition. She was the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine and has edited several books of poetry.

Rachel Zolf

Saturday, March 20, 2010 @ 12:00 pm

3rd Floor, W2 Community Media Arts
112 West Hastings

NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS

**Please note early start time**

Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: Thematic Abstract

The theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the subject. These discourses consist of the master’s discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is concerned with the limitation of the master's discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst's discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of discourse in the process of analysis—because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse—he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that appear to simply question the master and the university, and as a consequence only reproduce a new master, without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests that the Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing. However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social change. Can poetics operate like the analyst's discourse to create a different social bond through language? Do poets intervene in these other discourses or intersect with them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the four discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider how we engage with and disseminate them?

- Nancy Gillespie

A further description of Lacan’s four discourses will be available for workshop registrants.

Ray Hsu
Camille Martin

Friday, March 26, 2010 @ 8:00 pm

W2 Perel Gallery
112 West Hastings