October 26, 2024 (Zoom): Fall Poetry Intensive
The League is excited to present an inaugural online poetry intensive, a series of four workshops presented by four diverse poets on unique subjects. Although this is an all-day event, participants are welcome to attend only some of the workshops. Regular breaks are built into the day's schedule to accommodate bio breaks and snack/lunch breaks.
Saturday, October 26, 2024 | 11:30am - 6pm ET
Free for members | $25 for non-members
Discounts are available for Black, Indigenous, racialized, LGBTQI2S+, and disabled poets using the coupon code IDEA2024.
Sessions will be recorded and available to members and registrants following the event; however, live participants will uniquely benefit from the opportunity to engage in discussion with workshop facilitators and other organizers.
Icebreaker & Breakout Rooms
11:30am - 12pm ET
Visual Poetry for Fun and Exploration
with Amanda Earl
12 - 1pm ET
Introduction to Videopoems
with Brenda Clews
1:30 - 2:30pm ET
Writing from the Body: a Pain Poetry Workshop
with Cassandra Myers
3 - 4pm ET
Close reading workshop
with Cornelia Hoogland
4:30 - 5:30pm ET
The League does not tolerate discrimination or hate speech, including microaggressions, and any attendees engaging in bad-faith discussion around issues such as diversity, participant safety, accessibility, and equitability will be removed from the workshop. We encourage attendees to ask tough questions, but to remain respectful of the diversity of lived experience among participants.
Session descriptions
Visual Poetry for Fun and Exploration, with Amanda Earl
Visual poetry (Vispo) can be an excellent and enriching literary and art hybrid form that is an addition to poets’ investigations of poetry, of language, and the world. In this session, Amanda Earl will provide a survey of contemporary visual poetry with discussion and examples of work by contemporary visual poets. Discussion the connection between visual poetry and literature, the workshop will explore how both forms work to disrubt and question the status quo and to investigate the role of language in society.
Each participant will have the opportunity to create a visual poem by hand and discuss creations during the workshop. Various tools and ways of making visual poetry—from the typewriter to Letraset to photoshop to handwriting—will be reviewed.
Introduction to Videopoems, with Brenda Clews
This workshop is for all poets either curious about or already working in the area of videopoems. In particular, this session will focus on how to create a videopoem that does not rely on hiring a team to record, edit, and produce it. The session will provide an introduction to the filed, showcasing a few examples, and offer a variety of ways for poets to produce their own videopoems.
Writing from the Body: a Pain Poetry Workshop with Cassandra Myers
“Writing from the Body - A Pain Poetry Workshop” is a writing workshop using Ayurvedic healing and traditional Chinese medicine as well as somatic strategies of generative writing to write from the body and re-story chronic pain. It is proven by pain research that by naming and reframing chronic pain it actually reduces symptoms. The goal of this Workshop is to be able to reclaim your own personal story on chronic pain, while remapping your symptomology through a decolonial lens of traditional East Asian and South Asian medicine. As a South Asian person I'll be using these practices in line with my therapeutic techniques as someone with a Masters of Social Work and a clinical counselor. The workshop will use tools of pain reprocessing therapy, and mindfulness from a decolonial narrative approach.
A close reading workshop with Cornelia Hoogland
In the workshop participants will analyze poems by different writers, discussing such things as the writer’s chosen topic or theme, and their formal and linguistic choices. A guided reading of each poem will reveal to us the template or blueprint of its creation. This template can, in turn, offer a way to approach, and write, individualized experiences. Experience is various and includes one’s own hardships, delights, preferences, and struggles, as well as tried-and-true ways of exploring our topics through poetry. The template can help avoid the formal or linguistic habits writers fall into, and offer alternatives, thereby refreshing a writing practice and surprising the poet. There will be time for modelling this approach, creating templates for the studied poems, writing poems from those templates, sharing the poems (voluntary) and summarizing learnings so that participants can create templates from poems for their own use.
About the facilitators
Brenda Clews is a multi-media poet, artist and video poet who interweaves poetry, painting, theory, dance and video in in her work. She hosts a Poetry & Music Salon in Toronto and has published the luminist poems (LyricalMyrical Press) and Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions) with solo art shows at York University, Q Space and Urban Gallery.
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a queer writer, reviewer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin Anishinaabeg traditional territory, colonially known as Ottawa, Ontario. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca, and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of long poems about her near-death health crisis. Her latest chapbook is Seasons, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia. Earl offers an editing and mentoring service for creators of visual poetry, prose, poetry and hyrid forms. Visit TinyUrl.com/AmandaEarlEdits for more information.
Cornelia Hoogland is 2023 winner of the Colleen Thibaudeau Outstanding Achievement Award given by the League of Canadian Poets. The award-winning author of eight books is being recognized for her outstanding contribution in the literary community across Canada. Hoogland founded and was the first director of Antler River Poetry in London, Ontario and Poetry Hornby Island on Hornby Island, B.C. where she lives on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks Nation, Gilakas’la/čɛčɛ haθɛč. Hoogland’s poetry collection, Trailer Park Elegy, (Harbour, 2017), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster award. Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011) was a finalist for the ReLit Award for Poetry. Sea Level was a finalist for the CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize, and Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway was a finalist for the 2017 CBC Poetry Awards. Her long poem, “Sea Level,” short-listed for the CBC Nonfiction Awards, was published as a chapbook (Baseline Press, 2012). Cosmic Boling, A Girl Walks into the Woods, a graphic novel with Londoner Diana Tamblyn, and Dressed in Only a Cardigan She Picks up Her Tracks in the Snow (Baseline), are her latest books. Hoogland was the 2019 writer-in-residence for the Al Purdy A-Frame and the Whistler Festival.
Cassandra Myers (My’z) (they/she/he) is an award winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, and counselor from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra's work is cinematic and juicy with it's critical anti-oppressive eye. Cassandra’s work has won national literary and spoken word titles including the National Magazine GOLD Award in Poetry and Champion of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Their work has been internationally received at the Ada Lovelace Festival in Berlin, and elsewhere. Find their poetry in ARC Poetry Magazine, Canthius, the Tahoma Literary Review, and more.
These workshops are presented by the LCP Webinar Series.