Reg Johanson

Annharte's 'AKA Inendagosekwe'

Aka Inendagosekew, published by CUE, 2014
Aka Inendagosekew, published by CUE, 2014

In her recent collection of essays, edited by Vancouver poet and critic Reg Johanson and collected together as AKA Inendagosekwe (CUE, 2013), Winnipeg poet Annharte’s “Advice to Young Writers” reads:

Short Range Poetic Device, 2010

Short Range Poetic Device was a four episode radio show of discussions with and readings by poets, hosted by Stephen Collis and Roger Farr, as part of the alternative media resistance to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, February 12-28, 2010.

Short Range Poetic Device
Poetry and Poetics Streaming Against the Totality
Vivo Media Arts, Vancouver, British Columbia, February 16-17 and 23-24, 2010

#1, February 16, 2010:

  • Stephen Collis, “Tactical Propositions, or, Pwn the Odium”
  • Roger Farr, from “Secure Channels” (Surplus, 2006)
  • Donato Mancini, “If Violence (Hey You)” (Buffet World, 2011)

Reading Resistance at the Olympic Tent Village

A conversation with Mercedes Eng

Mercedes Eng reading at the Olympic Tent Village
Mercedes Eng reading at the Olympic Tent Village

Jules Boykoff

In my last post I wrote about poets’ involvement in activism around the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. One poet who was active during the Olympics moment was Mercedes Eng.

Mercedes Eng explores racialized oppression — locally, on the West Coast, nationally, and internationally — and how this oppression is underpinned by colonizing language and racist representation. Her first chapbook, February 2010, is a poem set in the context of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and is a thinking through and responding to the media and advertising, censorship, art, nationalism, diversity of tactics, and First Nations land rights. Her second chapbook, knuckle sandwich, juxtaposes text from local mainstream media coverage of the missing and murdered women of Vancouver with reportage of the Canadian “liberation” of women in Afghanistan in order to explore state violence against racialized women. She works collaboratively with Press Release and Standard Ink & Copy Press poetry collectives. A current creative project considers her lived experience with sex-work in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, using non-standard English to explore and to resist the ways in which victimhood is constructed.

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