If the idea of a four-day poetry conference conjures images of men who sport berets pontificating alongside grim women, you might be surprised to learn the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, Oct. 19 to 22, includes one writer who has posted poetic structures that others can "renovate" online and another who aims to embed prose in bacteria.
"Quite frankly, I often don't even admit I'm a poet because it just sounds so pretentious," said Brad Cran, the city's outgoing poet laureate who dreamt up the convention. "But in reality, poetry's this really dynamic thing. More than anything, that's what I wanted to show with the curation of this event is that poetry, it can't really be defined easily and it's as open and as infinite as any art."
Cran declined to participate in the city's 2010 Winter Olympics celebrations because he felt local literary artists were neglected in the cultural programming and he objected to the clause that prohibited artists from making negative remarks about the Olympics and its sponsors. But he pitched a poetry conference when the city wanted him to celebrate its 125th anniversary. It was one of three proposed events in the city's application to be a 2011 Cultural Capital of Canada. "They went from rock concert to a four-day rock concert to a poetry conference," Cran quipped.
Cran has worked to draw a diverse array of local, Canadian and North American writers to the conference, while concentrating on those he considers to be part of the younger generation of writers, or those who published their first book after 1990.
Since he started writing in the early to mid 1990s, Cran has seen the literary community transformed. "The whole dynamic of what it means to be a poet has changed," he said. "The biggest effect on Canadian poetry has been the Internet, because communities are now building across the country and back when I first started writing, pre-Internet .there were conversations through literary journals."
Writers are now communicating and collaborating online.
Author Sachiko Murakami is inviting writers to remodel others' poems with her online Project Rebuild. She'll read and speak at an event that focuses on future directions in contemporary poetry alongside Calgary's Christian Bök, whose Xenotext Experiment aims to create a poem in the form of a genetic sequence that would serve as a set of instructions to build a protein that would include another embedded message or a second original poem.
"At the same time, we're going to have people coming to the conference who are writing sonnets and really want to get back to some of the more traditional forms," Cran said.
The conference kicks off with a spotlight on Vancouver writers including Elizabeth Bachinsky, Stephen Collis and Catriona Strang. It incorporates cabaret nights at the Vancouver International Writers Festival that include Wayde Compton, Matthea Harvey and Srikanth Reddy. A keynote reading by Don McKay, Fanny Howe and Martin Espada happens Oct. 21. Poets from the Downtown Eastside will read at two events.
Cran is most excited about the event Oct. 22 where he passes the distinction of poet laureate on to Evelyn Lau. After co-writing the Hope in the Shadows book and serving as poet laureate, he's keen to focus solely on his writing.
His advice to award-winning writer Lau is to dream big while she wields her newfound power. "People treat you well," he said. "If I'm on a business call, I'm like, 'I'm the poet laureate, I'm calling for this,' and people are like, 'Wow, you're the poet laureate? That's so cool.' And then they'll say, 'What's a poet laureate?'"
For more information, see v125pc.com.
crossi@vancourier.com
