Elsie K. Neufeld author of Grief Blading Up has a birthday today

and to help her celebrate, Lipstick Press is awarding her the 2013 Literary Facebook Status Update prize ... which is ... well, um, this post here.

Wishing you happiness and success, and of course, many fans.

Naomi Beth Wakan and David Bateman at The Old Crow Cafe July 18th

is happy to present

NAOMI BETH WAKAN AND DAVID BATEMAN

reading from ‘pause’— response tanka

PLACE:     THE OLD CROW CAFÉ, FOLKLIFE VILLAGE, GABRIOLA

TIME:        JULY 18^TH, 2013, 7:00 pm - ALL WELCOME

ADMISSION: BY DONATION

Contact for information and reservations:altogetherlisa@yahoo.ca

Naomi Beth Wakan, Gabriola’s resident and profuse poet, and Toronto performance poet, David Bateman, (who will be familiar to Gabriolans from the performances he has offered at Poetry Gabriola Festivals) will be presenting a reading of their dual-written poem “pause” at the Old Crow Café, Folklife Village, Gabriola, at 7 pm, on July 18^th.

Soon after the 2010 event “Canada Speaks,” held at Dragon’s Lodge on Gabriola Island, where David offered a presentation, Naomi and David began to correspond by email and created, over the course of eight months, a full length manuscript in tanka form that chronicles their responses to a diverse array of life circumstances. From forms of drag and masquerade found in both culture and nature, to the daily chores of keeping homes in the city (David), and within the rural setting of Gabriola (Naomi), both poets strove to navigate the essence of an ancient form of Japanese poetry in order to reveal that that essence itself lies within so many opposing, contradictory, fleeting, and at times beautiful instances of reflection, meditation and celebration.

As a kind of call and response across generations, genders, and geographic sites, from two very different poets, pause explores the ways in which tanka can elegantly defamiliarize the familiar and bring two disparate voices together in conversation.

no matter 

how many words we say

to each other

the essence lies in the spaces between

the essence lies in the pauses                                                   (from ‘pause’)

The generous support of The League of Canadian Poets and Poetry Gabriola is gratefully acknowledged

Happy Birthday Al Rempel

Author of The Picket Fence Diaries has a birthday today.  Hope it is happy Al.

Since publication of the chapbook, Al has published Understories and This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For and been published in many anthologies.

Haiku in Other Forms & Rengay Roundup July 21 on Gabriola

July 21, 2013

Haiku

In Other Forms

The Gabriola Commons

675 North Road (opposite the elementary school)

10 am – 12 noon

Suggested donation $5

Rengay Roundup

The Poetry Yurt

At The Gabriola Commons

1:30 – 4:30 pm

Registration $10

At The Gabriola Commons Main House (Suggested donation $5)

9:55 am Welcome

Naomi Beth Wakan – Poetry  Gabriola

Vicki McCullough – Pacifi-kana

10 am – 12 noon

Haiku Moments on the Camino

Harvey Jenkins

Harvey introduces his memoir of pilgrimage on the popular Compostela de Santiago. He will talk about his personal choices in the use of prose and haiku to capture special moments and document his France-into-Spain journey.

Haibun Origins

Sonja Arntzen

With a few choice examples, Sonja will trace the origins of haibun in Japan from the poem-diaries of the 10th and 11th centuries through to the development of haibun as an independent genre in the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus will be on how entwining poetry into prose narratives of journeys and personal life opened up possibilities for expression that were not available to poetry or prose narrative on their own.

Haibun in the 21st Century

Susan Constable

Susan will read some current examples of the haibun form by authors from several different countries around the world. Touching on a variety of subject matter and styles, these examples will exemplify what is considered praiseworthy in modern day haibun.

Break: 10:50 – 11:00 am

Photo-Haiga Approaches and Visions

Carole MacRury, Jim Swift, and Michael Dylan Welch

Traditional Japanese haiga combined brush art (sumi-e) with a haiku poem done in brush calligraphy. Three photo-haiga artists present their unique perspectives on the evolution of haiga in the digital age.

Lunch break: 12 noon – 1:15 pm

Gabriola Photography Club

Exhibit

Local photographers will once again show photos produced in response to haiku by

poets with a connection to the Gabriola Haiku Gathering.

In the Poetry Yurt

at The Gabriola Commons

$10 registration fee

1:30 – 4:30 pm

Rengay Roundup

Michael Dylan Welch

Join Michael in exploring the collaborative linked verse form of rengay—consisting of six haiku or haiku-like verses by two, three, or six writers on a thematic focus. Combine the shared social benefits of renga and renku with a shorter, more accessible, and more readily publishable linked form of poetry. Come prepared to write collaboratively and have fun. For more info on rengay, visit http://sites.google.com/site/graceguts/rengay.

Contact Janet Vickers at janetvickers@shaw.ca to register.

Our facilitators:

Vicki McCullough, regional coordinator for Haiku Canada and a long time haiku volunteer with the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, has organized the program for this gathering.

Harvey Jenkins is a long time member of Haiku Canada and received a Sakura Award from the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival in both 2011 and 2012.
His haiku has appeared in many magazines and anthologies.

Sonja Arntzen is a leading translator of Japanese classical texts, including Ikkyū and the Crazy Cloud Anthology and The Kagerō Diary.

Carole MacRury  has received many awards for her widely published haiku, tanka and photographic haiga.

Jim Swift is a leading exponent of photographic haiga and photographic tanka.

Michael Dylan Welch is founder of National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWrMo) and the Tanka Society of America, and cofounder of the Haiku North America conference, and the American Haiku Archives. www.graceguts.com.

www.nahaiwrimo.com.

Susan Constable’s award winning haiku and tanka have appeared in numerous journals. She is currently the tanka editor for the on-line journal, A Hundred Gourds.

Special thanks to our sponsors and supporters

www.poetrygabriola.com

Pages Resort and Marina

www.pagesresort.com

Gabriola Optical

#2–580 North Rd. 247-7223

The Gabriola Commons

www.gabriolacommons.ca

Naomi Beth Wakan

www.naomiwakan.com

Chap Book Launch - Woodwinds by P. C. Vandall

Hear P. C. Vandall read from her new chapbook

Woodwinds

Wednesday May 22

7 - 9 pm

at The Commons

675 North Road

Gabriola

Pamela is a Gabriola poet and writer who resides here with her husband and two children.

Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and websites. She is currently working on her first full length poetry collection.

Refreshments and books available to purchase.

For further information: lipstickpress@shaw.ca

Susan J. Falk's Art Show - May 11, 2013 - McLellan Forest East

"Artist Susan J. Falk was inspired by the McLellan Forest East in Glen Valley, Langley and created many stunning paintings of the forest. Over 200 poets contributed poems to help save this forest, and Susan incorporated 12 of the poems directly into her paintings. On May 11, 2013, the poets joined Susan in celebrating her installation, by reading their poems next the paintings. The art is being sold by silent auction and partial proceeds will benefit the Watchers of Langley Forests (WOLF). The installation may be viewed until May 26 at The Fort Gallery in Fort Langley, 9048 Glover Road."

BACK ROW (L to R) Heidi Greco, E.D. Blodgett, Jamie Reid, Susan J. Falk, Susan McCaslin, Christopher Levenson, Ray McGinnis, Celeste Snowber, Catherine Owen; FRONT ROW: Daniela Elza, Roni Haggarty, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Pam Galloway, Elsie K. Neufeld.

Two Lipstick authors - Heidi Greco and Elsie K. Neufeld wrote poems included in that 12.

Happy birthday Kim Clark

Kim's poem "Whether you like it" appears in the Beautiful Women anthology and her chapbook of poems Disease and Desire also is still available.

Beautiful Women Unleashed

"Being essential, authentic, unfazed, theurgical, incandescent, flawed" and "utterly lovable" - is beautiful to Honey Novick, one of the poets in this anthology.

For Katherine L. Gordon beauty begins with love. "Love me as I am / For I am the softness of the world".

Whether you like it or not, says Kim Clark a "Beautiful Woman / is the one / who reflects your worth / [and] magnifies / your joy".

Darryl Knowles lists the strong women we see in history, on the screen, and includes "all the women in this world / who ever gave a f ... k / and never gave up."

Kate Marshall Flaherty remembers learning cursive writing in Grade 4 "under Miss Reed's giraffe lashes, / blinking" for she was the one who inspired her to write.

As a child L. Muirhead "never did want to be a girl / had always fit in with the boys" until her mother insisted it was time to wear a bra. When her brother's friend teased her about it she bloodied his nose.

Angeline Schellenberg's Oma lets down her long hair and suddenly she becomes a young girl again running through the grass.

"Like a soldier marching forward / you fought for independence" writes Debbie Okun Hill in her memorial to the journalist Malvena Hope Morritt.

Shelley Haggard recalls Jackie Ciano whose "vision / that the men who go fishing / create new lines and new knots / that the whales might escape" lived long enough to see the results of her crusade.

Waldemar Ens pays tribute to Feist - "unafraid / taking chances on the edge of disaster / fiery feet dancing on the rooftop ledge".

A mother's wisdom: "there’s no curfew / come home when it’s over / don’t drive fast" is the muse for Franci Louann's haiku.

Can a woman be beautiful when she is laid out in a casket? Louise Carson thinks so -"You model it for us
in sky blue with white hair, / your fastidious fashion sense / intact / before the flame".

Vikash Kumar attributes beauty to the dream "Of another world / A new realm, a divine vista".

Joy Donnell invests beauty in the imagined daughter as the centre of herself  "& find you to be not a woman but a world / walking so high gravity evades".

Beauty has long represented ideals and for Kim Goldberg one ideal is strength, courage: "caked in cow dung and dust, nothing / to slake her burning thirst, her sun-baked / lips, but her own thin spit".

For Vuong Pham, resignation. "rainy night— / somewhere else / the stars shine".

Weighing skin deep beauty with beauty on the inside, Naomi Beth Wakan, asks what "may prevent me being seduced / by a pair of wild brown eyes"?

Can beauty exist within the womb? Pd Lietz writes "moist muscle pulsating / I laboured to be smaller / she implored me to be mightier".

"For in the end it is / to one another that we turn, hands / groping in the dark" writes Ronnie R. Brown.

Heather Brager paints a full circle from the edge of woman-as-object to "the synonym of / protector, the /
reckless bard / a strumpet, girl".

Amen.


Published by Lipstick Press
767 Chelwood Road, RR #1
Gabriola BC V0R 1X1
lipstickpress@shaw.ca
www.lipstickpress.com

ISBN: 978-0-9880043-3-7

$10.00 plus shipping.

Woodwinds by P. C. Vandall now available

Lipstick Press is pleased to announce the publication of P. C. Vandall's first chapbook titled "Woodwinds".

Pamela is a Gabriola poet and writer who resides there with her husband and two children.

Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and websites. She is currently working on her first full length poetry collection. When she's not writing, she's sleeping.

Here is what writer Naomi Beth Wakan ("And after 80...") has to say:

Woodwinds is an apt title introducing a very welcome fresh new voice, Pamela Vandall, for the bittersweet sound of woodwinds is echoed so well in her poetry.

Her imaginatively metaphored pieces dig deep into archetypal images, however her characteristic striking rabbit's-foot-kick in her final lines not only adjust the poems into small miracles of tenderness, but also bring the reader back to the sharpness of reality. A fine first book.

Here is a sample of Pamela's poetry ~

Woodwinds

He's the sound of pine and cedar crackling
in a forest, chain oil greased in his palms,
the low lying rustle of salal, sword
ferns, and chanterelles underfoot.  He's snow
crunching under heels of boots, the trumpet

of geese overhead, the drizzle of rain
off black silk boughs. He's the thwack of logs,
the flop of a jean jacket, the swoop
of waxwings to air as the axe catches
glints of light.  He's the shake of leathery

drenched leaves, the brush stroke of branches, 
the sprinkle of saw dust in his damp brown hair.
He's the sound of the wheel barrow creaking
towards the house, one tire deflating soft
as a stiff breeze in snow.  He's the sound of fire

wood being split and stacked, winters breath
haloed in hemp smoke. It's the flutter
of his rumpled blue shirt tied round his waist,
the thump of logs piled beneath the window
sill in tidy rows.  It's the lumbering 

footsteps on stairs, the squeak of the screen door,
the spark of a Red Bird match.  This man who
scarcely says a word can divine a chore
into music.  He witches sound like water
from a woodpile, resonating a pitch

that flows a perfect cord between us.


Published by Lipstick Press

767 Chelwood Road

Gabriola BC V0R 1X1

ISBN:  978-0-9880043-2-0

$10.00 plus shipping and handling

To order email: lipstickpress@shaw.ca

Art can change your mind and change the world

Dear Han Shan Poets:

A local artist in Langley named Susan Falk has been inspired by McLellan Forest and by some of the poems of the Han Shan poets to create a series of forest paintings in which she has embedded phrases from selected forest poems. Unfortunately, Susan was able to work with only 13 of the many excellent poems contributed to the initiative.

On Saturday May 11 from 12-3 pm at The Fort Gallery in Fort Langley, Susan is having an art show opening during which thirteen of the Han Shan poets will be reading their forest poems.

You are most cordially invited to attend this wine and cheese gala if you happen to live within a reasonable range of the area. If not, I’m sure you will be with us in spirit.

Susan is conducting a silent auction of her work whereby proceeds from the sale of the paintings will go to the continuing work of WOLF (Watchers of Langley Forests) to ensure that the forest is officially and permanently protected.

It would be a pleasure to see some of you there to support our endeavour and your fellow poets. Perhaps there will be future occasions where I am free to invite more of you to perform your work.

Please circulate the attached e-vite widely to your friends and associates. It contains all the pertinent information.

All the best,

Susan McCaslin

Oops I missed Robert Martens birthday

which was yesterday.  

(This is the danger of keeping tabs on birthdays - some get missed.)

Robert Martens is the author of Poltergeist which was published in 2011 and shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook award in 2012.

Hope it was happy Bob.