Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
From July 11th to August 1st, Massy Arts and Massy Books host, Chasing The Poem – Fourth Edition, an online poetry workshop marathon for emerging writers, in three courses created by queer poets to demystify poetry writing, to present useful writing prompts, to incite imagination, and to address political and poetic points of view through poetic literature.
The classes – conducted by published poets David Ly + Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch + Isabella Wang, will be held through Zoom in an exclusively online method, with 2-hours long experimental courses that will mix literary theory + artistic expression.
By the end of this writing marathon, attendees will have received feedback about their writing by authors in production, aware of the market’s demands – but also aware of poetry’s potential.
The event will be hosted at Massy Arts’ Zoom room.
Tickets are limited, and registration is mandatory + required for participation.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
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Chasing The Poem – A unique opportunity for emerging writers
Whether an emerging poet, unpublished author, poetry enthusiast, or someone searching for new ways of expressing their creativity – Chasing The Poem will connect our creative community in three courses:
July 11 – Tue – 6pm to 8pm PST
David Ly
Re-imagining Your Mythologies
July 18 – Tue – 6pm to 8pm PST
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Form as the container for the personal and the political
August 1 – Tue – 6pm to 8pm PST
Isabella Wang
Poetry Lab: Form’s Experimental Roots
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The Workshops
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“Re-imagining Your Mythologies: Writing to See Yourself in Imagistic Poetry” by David Ly
A workshop for emerging and established poets to practice flexing their imagination in composing poetry with vivid imagery that pushes a narrative of the self forward.
Whether you love to write with imagery, or would want to imbue more of it into your poems, this workshop will be guide you through discussions, close-readings, and a series of writing exercises an imagistic poem. While strongly imbuing your poem with images that speak to you, the other purpose of this workshop will be refining your poem so that it reflects your identity, and re-imagines ideas (“mythologies”) that you have about yourself.
As poets, we often explore our sense(s) of self in our work, and by the end of this workshop, you will leave inspired to explore what other images you can include in future poems, that resonate with you and speak to your identity.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Poetry Award, and Dream of Me as Water (2022), both published under the Anstruther Books imprint of Palimpsest Press. He is also co-editor (with Daniel Zomparelli) of Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). David’s poems have appeared in publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, PRISM International, and The Ex-Puritan, where he won the inaugural Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. David is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine.
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“Form as the container for the personal and the political: How to write non-didactic political poetry” by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
How can writing about the daily minutia, the sounds you like to hear, the images you can’t get out of your head, the construction in your city, the long bus ride to work, open up space to look at broader political, social, or interpersonal trials and difficulties?
Writing poetry with a political or social “message” is difficult when trying to make sure it doesn’t come off as didactic or overbearing. One way of pushing through this difficulty is to lean on craft, form, and hybrid genres/forms in order to help shape your poetry, the same way you would mold clay with your hands to create pottery.
This workshop will try to help workshop attendees to think about multiplicity as a strength in order to give their poems texture, layers, feeling, energy, elasticity, and to avoid flatness or didacticism. We are working here with the everything, the too much, the big feelings, the tiny little images stored in the back of ones head, the gross, the weird, the strange, and we’ll try to whittle it all down to a poem.
Other ideas we’ll be thinking about: the personal vs. the political, ways to create lenses through which we can write difficult subject matter, caring about the self through the writing practice and also the impact on the reader.
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer living in Tio’tia:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best
Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. Their book, knot body (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2021, was granted the honorary mention for poetry by the Arab American Book Awards and won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal. They are an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press. Their translation of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même from the French is forthcoming Spring 2023. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they are editing El Ghourabaa, an anthology of weird and experimental queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers, forthcoming Spring 2024.
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“Poetry Lab: Form’s Experimental Roots” by Isabella Wang
Focused on experimentation as a synaptic device in poetry. This workshop leads participants on an exploration of the experimental foundation of traditional poetic forms, as well as the synergy from which new, experimental forms arises from experimentation to shoulder the immediate, aesthetic, personal, environmental, and political visions of writers today.
We will journey with the term poiesis—a beloved term by poets—which translates loosely to mean ’the making of something out of nothing.’ Together, participants will be encouraged to consider not only language’s ability to bring into being new feelings, perspectives, and original metaphors, but equally how such perspectives are found in the unearthing of new experimental or hybrid forms.
What is the relationship to form and poetic language? How do pre-existing forms or free-verse stanzas assist or hinder a poet’s intended creative representation? Is experimental poetry empowering? Political? An act of refusal and resistance?
We will begin by engaging in a series of writing exercises ranging from experimental prose poetry to diptych and triptych forms. Exercises will followed by periods of collaborative sharing. Breaks will be interspersed with sample poems by contemporary poets, artists, and activists whose works engage with experimentation, new, and found forms.
We will end with a fun and artsy individual project to take home, commemorate our writing in our time together.
Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. She is completing a double-major in English and World Literature at SFU. She works in freelance editing, is a youth mentor with Vancouver Poetry House, and web coordinator for Poetry In Canada.