200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
Geomantic riposte: 'Occasional Emergencies'
Phoebe Wang was born in Ottawa, Ontario and is a poet, reviewer and teacher. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including ARC, Canadian Literature, CV2, Descant, Grain, The Malahat Review, and Ricepaper Magazine, and also in TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto. Wang is emerging as an important contributor to critical studies of poetry, and her latest piece "Three Passages West" for online Toronto publication The Puritan (in my rather self-serving beau geste, including work by West Coast poets Brian Brett, Evelyn Lau, and however gone South, yours truly) demonstrates her astute and insightful analysis.