Dead Poets Reading Series — May

Join Massy Arts Society on Sunday, July 9th at 3pm for the next Dead Poets Society reading, 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. Register here!

This month:

• Julia Hartwig (1921–2017) read by Veronika Gorlova
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021) read by Heidi Greco
• Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) read by Tāriq Malik
• Eavan Boland (1944–2020) read by Barbara Pelman

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance. 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:

Veronika Gorlova is a queer, autistic, Jewish poet and writer living on the unceded territories of the Musqueum, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, also known as Vancouver, B.C. She immigrated to Canada from Ukraine when she was 5 years old and has lived across many parts of the country. She received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Susan Crean Award for Non-Fiction and her work can be found in Emerge 22.

reading Julia Hartwig

Julia Hartwig was born in Lublin, Poland in 1921 and was a writer, translator and poet. Considered one of Poland’s foremost poets, she received multiple accolades in her lifetime including the Wisława Szymborska Award for her 2014 poetry collection Zapisane. Although only a small selection of her work has been translated into English, she was highly regarded in the literary community and was even crowned the Grand Dame of Polish poetry by her contemporary Czesław Miłosz.

_______________

Heidi Greco lives and works on Territory of the Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey. Despite being published in a range of genres, she bemoans the fact that she’s such a pokey writer. Active in her community with a range of causes – from protecting waterways to promoting poetry – she enjoys what she calls ‘scratch-cooking’ especially when it means using something she’s foraged. Her most recent book, Glorious Birds (Anvil Press, 2021) is an extended commentary on one of her favourite films, Harold and Maude. More info, as well as links to her blog, can be found at her website, https://heidigreco.ca

reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was an extraordinarily creative human being. Although he probably remains best known as a poet, he was also a painter, a scholar, founder of a bookstore and a literary press – and more, a man with a strong commitment to peace. Although he was born in Yonkers, New York, his name will forever be affiliated with San Francisco, a city that celebrated his 100th birthday by declaring Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day. Nearly 102 at the time of his death, his legacy is huge, and one that likely won’t be repeated.

_________________________

Tāriq Malik

Pakistan born, Vancouver-based BIPOC author Tāriq Malik, has worked across poetry, fiction, and art for the past four decades to distill immersive and compelling and original narratives. He claims his working English is a borrowed tongue that is inflected with his inherited languages of Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and Arabic, and that he writes intensely in response to the world in flux around him and from his place in its shadows. He came reluctantly late to these shores, having to first survive three wars, two migrations, and two decades of slaving in the Kuwaiti desert.

He is the author of a collection of short stories (Rainsongs of Kotli), and a novel (Chanting Denied Shores), and Unmooring the Komagata Maru – Charting Colonial Trajectories (Poetry section). His debut poetry collection (Exit Wounds) was published by Caitlin Press in 2022.

His writing has appeared in The Puritan, TWUC’s Write Magazine, The Aleph Review, and Verbal Art July (2019), among others.

He is currently working on a trilogy of poetry chapbooks and a novel Blood Towers that presents an ant’s POV of the building of the world’s tallest tower.

reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 at Sialkot, and was educated at Lahore, where he studied English literature and philosophy. He began his career as a lecturer in English at Amritsar. After the second World War, he turned to journalism and distinguished himself as the editor of The Pakistan Times.

As a poet, Faiz began writing on the conventional themes of love and beauty, but soon these get submerged in the larger social and political issues of the day. The traditional griefs of love get fused with the travails of the afflicted humanity, and Faiz uses his poetry to champion the cause of socialistic humanism.

Charged in 1951 with complicity in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case he was condemned to four years’ imprisonment. The jail term gave him a first-hand experience of the harsh realities of life, and provided him with the much-needed leisure and solitude to think out his thoughts and transmute them into poetry. Two of his books, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan-Nama are the products of this period of this imprisonment.

Faiz was a “committed” poet who regarded poetry as a vehicle of serious thought, and not a mere pleasurable pastime. He did not accept the maxim of “art for art’s sake”. An admirer of Karl Marx and a poet of the people, Faiz was honoured by Soviet Russia with the prestigious Lenin Award for Peace. However, the Lenin Award may have kept him from the Nobel Prize for which he was also nominated.

His poetry collections include: Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1943), Dast-e-Saba (1952), Zindan-Nama (1956) and Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang (1965). Faiz passed away in 1984.

___________________________________

Barbara Pelman is a retired high school English teacher, born in Vancouver and now living in Victoria. She is a frequent participant and assistant at Planet Earth Poetry, the weekly poetry venue. She has three published books of poetry: “One Stone” (Ekstasis Editions 2005), “Borrowed Rooms” (Ronsdale Press 2008) and “Narrow Bridge” (Ronsdale Press 2017), a chapbook “Aubade Amalfi” (Rubicon Press 2016). Her new book, “A Brief and Endless Sea” will be published in the Fall, 2023 by Caitlin Press.

In 2018 her glosa, “Nevertheless” won the Malahat Open Season Poetry Contest. Previously, in 2004 and in 2014, she won the BC Federation of Writers’ poetry contest. Her poems can be found in literary journals and the anthologies “Refugium” and “Sweet Water” (Caitlin Press), and “In Fine Form” (Caitlin Press) as well as on the buses.

reading Eavan Boland

The celebrated Irish poet and essayist, Eavan Boland, was born in Dublin on Sept 24, 1944. Her father was a career diplomat and her mother was a post-expressionist painter. She spent her childhood in both Dublin and New York, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin. At eighteen she published her first book of poetry, and followed with over thirty books of poetry and literary criticism. Her work is preoccupied with issues of language, place, history, and identity. She writes about private and difficult subjects, such as domestic violence; her poetry confronts and subverts traditional, conservative concepts of womanhood. She writes about the difficulties of a woman poet in a male-dominated literary world and urges the reader to see through a woman’s perspective to the world around us. For Boland, the private and the personal is also political, as in poems like “Quarantine.” She taught at Stanford University and divided her time between Dublin and California. She died in 2020.