Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
Join Massy Arts Society on Sunday, November 19th 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.
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.
Featured readers and poets include:
Phinder Dulai reading T.S. Eliot
Phinder Dulai is the Surrey-based author of dream/arteries (Talon Books) and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). Phinder toured dream / arteries extensively across Canada and the USA. His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Cue Books Anthology. Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh Magazine, the Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. In 2017, he was the co-creater of Canada’s first writing residency for BIPOC writers called Centering Ourselves at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Currently he serves as the Poetry Editor for Canadian Literature Journal.
T.S. Eliot is highly distinguished as a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, an editor, and a publisher. In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published in Poetry magazine, and other poems that are landmarks in the history of modern literature. Eliot’s most notable works include The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and the play Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Eliot’s awards and honors include the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His play The Cocktail Party won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was famously adapted in 1981 into the musical Cats, which won seven Tony Awards.
Meredith Quartermain reading Douglas Barbour
Meredith Quartermain’s poetry books include Lullabies in the Real World, Vancouver Walking (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and Nightmarker (all from NeWest Press), and Matter and Recipes from the Red Planet (from Book*hug).
Douglas Barbour’s books of poetry include Visible Visions: Selected Poems, Story for a Saskatchewan Night, Fragmenting Body etc, Breath Takes, and Listen. If. He was a co-founder of NeWest Press in Edmonton, and was a professor of English at the University of Alberta. His critical work includes Worlds Out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany and monographs on John Newlove, Daphne Marlatt, bp Nichol and Michael Ondaatje. Barbour’s writing has been characterized as minimalist, aiming to create a landscape of sound equivalent to what his eye sees.
Peter Quartermain reading Maurice Scully
Peter Quartermain’s most recent book is Growing Dumb: My English Education. He is the author of two books of critical essays: Stubborn Poetries and Disjunctive Poetics. He edited the award-winning two-volume Collected Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan, and co-edited two other collections.
Maurice Scully was an Irish poet who lived in Dublin and was the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. His books include 5 Freedoms of Movement, Steps, Livelihood, Sonata, Doing the Same in English, Humming, Several Dances, and Things That Happen. Early in his writing life he edited Beau a literary magazine that featured an impressive range of writers from Ireland, Britain and the U.S. The magazine contributed to the emergence of experimental writers in Ireland. Things That Happen (2020) has been described critically as “the most ambitious and important long poem in modern Irish literature”.
Christopher Levenson reading Gerda Mayer
Christopher Levenson, born 1934 in London, England, has lived in Canada since 1968, first In Ottawa for 39 years where he taught English, Comparative Literature and poetry workshop courses at Carleton University, and co-founded and became first editor of Arc magazine.. In 2007 he moved to Vancouver where,. with Rob Taylor he helped re-start David Zieroth’s Dead Poets Reading Series. He has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Moorings (Caitlin Press, 2023) and has translated from German and Dutch.
Gerda Mayer, a German-speaking Jew, was born in 1927 in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia. She came to England at age eleven in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransport trains. After two boarding schools during the war she worked in an office, met and married her husband, and studied at Bedford College, London, for a degree in English, German and Art History, after which she worked for a while for the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Her first major poetic success was with Treble Poets 2 in1975 and was followed in 1991 by Bernini’s Cat, New and Selected Poems. She died in July 2021.
Fiona Lam reading Tin Lander
Tim Lander (26 February 1938 – 20 August 2023) Born in February of 1938 in Surrey, England, Tim Lander attended London University before moving to Canada in 1964. A penny whistle-playing itinerant ‘street poet’ and busker, he published over 50 handmade, hand-sewn chapbooks and 2 collections of poetry. Gentle, thoughtful and articulate, he remained an important presence on the West Coast poetry scene for decades, mostly based out of Nanaimo. In 2021, he moved to an assisted living facility and died on 20 August 2023, at the age of 85. (Reference: BC BookWorld Archives.)