Photos: Poetry Bash

Andris Taskans, Prairie Fire editor, looks on while an audience member scopes out Victorian Trisha Cull's Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Prize ring, which was presented just before Cull's reading. And what a hunk of turquoise it is (covet covet)!

Apparently, 2006 was a good year for Cull. She was also shortlisted for the 3-Day Novel Contest won by fellow THIN AIR author Brendan McLeod.



THIN AIR Director and poet Charlene Diehl assumes her trademark "I'm a bat" pose at intermission. From the podium, Charlene lamented the end of the festival insofar as she would have to put away all her dramatic clothing until next year.



THIN AIR festival staff assemble to view General Manager Perry Grosshans' shoes.

You can't quite see it in this pic, but there's an overhanging chrome lamp in the 'living room' the authors (and in this case, festival staff) inhabit while on stage.

Poet Paul Savoie, who was originally from St. Boniface but who has called Ontario home since the 70s, gonged his head on the lamp while rising for his reading. Eek!



Poet and U of M Prof Alison Calder (in a sparkly sparkly ensemble) chats with Poet and U of M Ph D Candidate Melanie Branagan.

Calder had a busy week, dividing her time between THIN AIR campus program events at the U of M and The Prairies in 3-D: Disorientations, Diversities, Dispersals conference hosted by St. John's College.

Calder even split her Saturday, presenting her paper, Fear of Flooding: Mapping Competing Spatial Definitions in Winnipeg, earlier in the day.

Photos: Writing Through Race

There are two things I know about THIN AIR. I may not enjoy every event I attend or even get in some good chat but Saturday's Poetry Bash and the panel discussion on the Friday afternoon at the U of Wpg are always always...well, memorable.

I'm not sure if it's the performing mojo of the Eckhardt-Grammate Hall at the U of Wpg, with its excellent accoustics (no competing with cash registers or espresso machines or even the scrape of chairs) or the careful curating of the event itself, but I always leave with a species of of heady inspiration.



This year's panel was entitled Writing Through Race and featured David Chariandy, Lawrence Hill, and Paul Yee as well as the facilitating powers of Winnipeg poet/mystery writer/prof Catherine Hunter.

David Chariandy and Lawrence Hill both spoke to the themes that underpin their most recent books and then gave brief readings from the texts. Both were eloquent on the subject of race and research and how forgetting/remembering work for immigrants but when it was Paul Yee's turn, he learned forward, flashed a smile, then started telling his story.



No text, no notes, just him and the story and us. The lot of us together, being told a story. It evoked childhood and so was familiar and intimate but it was also an adult experience. When he finished, both Hill and Chariandy joined the audience in applause, having somehow been made audience members too.

I've a video of Hill reading from his Book of Negroes and a special bookless version of Reading Copy that I did with Yee (almost making him late for his flight home, incidentally) but in the meantime, here's a photo or two from the event...

Out-take: festival staff

Here's an admittedly contrived picture from Monday night's Mainstage performance, featuring Charlene Diehl (the choker), THIN AIR Director and emcee for the evening, and Perry Grosshans (the chokee), THIN AIR General Manager.

Lecture Review: Brian Henderson

There was no Power-Point presentation or laser pointer. There was no popcorn or confectionery candy. Rather Ballsy, in our over-scripted-lecture-era, that Henderson didn’t have even a pine podium from which to read his latest collection of poems, Nerve Language.

Not often will a lecturer rouse me (for probably a decade I’ve listened to mundane-talkers while quietly lusting more hyperized stimuli like video games, reality programming, and gonzo-blogging) so when the packed lecture hall at the University of Winnipeg finally settled, and Henderson was set to begin, I questioned whether I’d stay engaged.

Henderson was pique and handsome, dressed in a fantastic black sweater with matching black slacks, and he possessed an angular intensity from the very outset of his talk that couldn’t help but keep the most pixelated of attentions engaged.

Henderson explained that the subject of Nerve Language was Daniel Paul Schreber, a late 19th century German judge, who was institutionalized for lunacy at time predating any conceptions of the unconscious.

“I was reading Shreber’s memoirs,” Said Henderson, “and I was taken by the poetry of the language, the German phraseology.”

Henderson explained it was first time he had got into a relationship with a dead writer, and he wanted to make a body of poems less forensic than the memoirs left to history and its multitude of psychoanalysts.

Henderson talked in that brilliant circuitous manner that is impossible to summarize; he is no stodgy tweedsmuir variety of Prof. When it came time for the audience to ask questions, Henderson considered each answer thoughtfully and answered with never too much authority, with just the perfect modulation of mirth to let the audience enjoy his answers for what are all answers, in Art, but speculation?


* * *

J.S. is a propagandist and pamphleteer for over sixty-six Crown and Association publications. He has been both staff and contributing writer for weekly newspapers such as the Selkirk Journal, the Gimli Spectator, and the Midnight Sun, in Dawson City, Yukon. His poems and prose have appeared in the Golden Buzz (now the Force Gazette), Tart Magazine, and as low, low, low-run chapbooks. He is also founding member of the now defunct rap-futurist collective, Xenophane Six.

Out-take: Alison Calder

Here's an out-take from Alison Calder's 'photo shoot' in her book-filled office at the University of Manitoba.



Not wanting to distract Alison while she patiently recorded the audio component to her soundslide three times, I scanned the titles of her three or four shelves of poetry titles.

Also the Edward Gorey poster on the back of her door.