Colin Browne

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Larissa Lai’s poetry here “is on the move between things,” as Fred Wah puts it in this episode of PoemTalk, for which Al Filreis also gathered Daphne Marlatt and Colin Browne to discuss Lai’s long poem Nascent Fashion (published together with several other long poems in Automaton Biographies). Fred, Daphne, and Colin were on tour together as a Western Canadian trio for readings and events along the US east coast. Fortunately for PoemTalk and Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia was one of their stops.

On Close Listening, Colin Browne and I talked about the founding of the Kootenay School of Writing, the limits of narrative in poetry and film and the possibilities of collage, the trickster figure in the work of Charles Edenshaw, and the overlays of personal history and cultural history in Browne’s new book about Edenshaw, a nineteenth-century indegenous artist from British Columbia.

(30:00): MP3

Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Colin Browne visited Philadelphia on March 15, 2017. They joined me for a recording of an episode of PoemTalk on Larissa Lai’s Nascent Fashion, and then give a triple reading at the Penn Book Center. That reading was recorded on audio and will be available soon at the poets’ PennSound pages. Meantime, I captured performances of two poems as video recordings — Fred Wah reading (his encore poem) from his great book Is a Door, and Daphne Marlatt reading a piece from her Vancouver Poems.