Dead Poets Reading Series

Join Massy Arts Society on Sunday, March 10th at 3pm for the next Dead Poets Reading Series, as deep threads of connection and solidarity are drawn between local, contemporary poets and a diverse array of poets from the past.

We welcome you to an afternoon reflection and celebration, as poetic conversation and recitation travel through time.

Registration is free/by donation, open to all and required for entrance.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the readers and poets:

Rahat Kurd’s publications include THE CITY THAT IS LEAVING FOREVER: KASHMIRI LETTERS (co-authored with Sumayya Syed, Talonbooks 2021) and COSMOPHILIA (Talonbooks 2015).

reading:

PARVEEN SHAKIR (1952-1994), born in Karachi, Pakistan, began to write poetry in Urdu at a young age. Her first book, KHUSHBU [Fragrance] was published in 1976, and was widely acclaimed for her contemporary approach to classical ghazal poetics, grounding lived experience in a feminine voice. Shakir was tragically killed in a car accident in Islamabad at the age of 42. She left behind a young son and several published poetry volumes; one final work, KAF-E-AINA [The Mirror’s Edge] was published posthumously.

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Devon Rae (she/her) is a queer writer from Montreal who now lives in Vancouver. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM International, Canthius, SAD Magazine, Touch the Donkey, Periodicities, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Thirteen Conversations with My Body, will be published by Anstruther Press in 2024.

reading:

Ikkyū Sōjun (1394 – 1481) was an eccentric and iconoclastic Zen master and a prolific poet. He also had a profound influence on Japanese tea ceremony, calligraphy, and shakuhachi (bamboo flute). When he was appointed abbot of Daitokuji Temple, he left after just nine days to protest the rampant hypocrisy, and told the monks to go looking for him in fish stalls, bars, and brothels. Ikkyu (or Crazy Cloud, as he was also known) loved Zen, sake, and women, and famously burned his enlightenment certificate to ashes.

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RC Weslowski is an award-winning poet, broadcaster, podcaster, clown and MC. He’s performed at and led workshops at festival across Turtle Island and parts of Europe. His first collection of poetry “My Soft Response to the Wars” is available now from Write Bloody North Publishing www.writebloodynorth.ca

reading:

Ian Ferrier (1954-2023) was a poet, performer and musician; author of four books of poetry and prose: Quel est ce lieu (Éditions du Noroît 2017); Bear Dreams (Popolo Press, 2016); Coming & Going (Popolo Press 2015); Exploding Head Man (Planète rebelle 2000). 3 releases on compact disc: Pharmakon MTL (BongoBeat 2011); What is This Place (BongoBeat 2007); Exploding Head Man (Wired on Words 2000) ; founder of The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance (LITLIVE.CA); founder and Executive Producer of Wired on Words, a label that releases spoken word and poetry and music projects; founder and curator of annual Mile End Poets’ Festival (Montreal, Canada) and of the monthly Words & Music Show (Montreal), now in its 17th year. His essays have appeared in the Review of the Americas, Canadian Theatre Review and The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance. A former president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, he resided in Montreal. He toured poetry and music shows in North America and Europe as a solo artist and with the spoken word/dance company For Body and Light. ( http://forbodyandlight.org )

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Estlin McPhee is a writer and librarian who lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Estlin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is the author of the poetry chapbook Shapeshifters (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018). For many years they co-organized REVERB, a queer reading series in Vancouver, with the wonderful Leah Horlick. Estlin’s debut poetry collection is forthcoming in spring 2025 with Brick Books.

reading:

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was born in Kent, England. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Dispatched as “shell-shocked” to hospital, he organised public protest against the war. Sassoon was gay, and after the war he had a series of relationships with other men, including most famously with socialite Stephen Tennant. Sassoon’s poetry initially met with little response, but his reputation grew steadily in the following decades, though it is as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better known.