Poetry London Online Presents Melanie Janisse-Barlow & Cassidy McFadzean
Thursday March 25th
On Thursday March 25th, our next video event launches featuring Melanie Janisse-Barlow & Cassidy McFadzean along with local opener Akshi Chadha! Tune in at 7pm to our YouTube channel and join us for great online poetry!
- YouTube Readings 7:00pm EDT on YouTube
- Zoom Workshop 6:00pm (limited enrollment, register by email at poetrylondon[dot]ca[at]gmail[dot]com)
SPECIAL ART-POETRY WEBINAR EVENT!
On March 30 at 7:00pm, join us for a live Zoom artist’s talk with @mingot, who will discuss her poet portraits series with @rozsharp & give a tour of her visual arts studio space!
Full info & free registration here: https://t.co/2aZi1GUJ8Z pic.twitter.com/SK5721ARvv
— Poetry London (@poetrylondon_ca) March 23, 2021
MUSEUM LONDON POETRY PROJECTIONS
Featuring the words of Melanie Janisse-Barlow and Cassidy McFadzean
Visible behind the Museum from the Wolf Sculpture Garden
Tuesday, March 23 to Saturday, March 27, from dusk to dawnMuseum London’s Poetry at the Forks projections are returning this week for all-night viewings. See arts-inspired excerpts from Windsor poet Melanie Janisse-Barlow’s latest collection Thicket, and Toronto-based Cassidy McFadzean’s book Drolleries projected onto our river-facing screens (the big window behind the Museum). Experience writing like you’ve never felt it in this night-lighting, larger than life format. All details here!
Poetry London 2021 Open Theme Contest
***DEADLINE EXTENDED: March 19th, 2021
Submit your best work to Poetry London’s 2021 Open Theme poetry contest, judged by
legendary Canadian poet Phil Hall! Contest entries must be one poem of no more than 40 lines, on any topic, in any style; only submit original work that has not been previously published in print or online.
Send poems in PDF format by email only to poetrylondon.contest@gmail.com. Please include your name, your complete contact information (including mailing address) and the title of your poem in the body of the email. Judging will be anonymous. Do not include your name in the PDF file of your poem. You must be a resident of (or attending school in) London and surrounding area to enter. Winners will be announced in mid April 2021 (only winners will be contacted).
- First Prize is $100
- Second Prize is $75
- Third Prize is $50
The winning poets will have their work published on Poetry London’s website and will be invited to read their winning pieces at an upcoming digital video event.
Poetry London Online Presents Sachiko Murakami & Catherine Graham
Wednesday February 24th
On Wednesday February 24th, our next video event launches featuring Sachiko Murakami & Catherine Graham along with local opener Jonathan Hermina! Mark the day in your calendars. Tune in at 7pm to our YouTube channel and join us for great online poetry!
- YouTube Readings 7:00pm EDT on YouTube
- Zoom Workshop 6:00pm (open to all, email registration)
- Email us at poetrylondon[dot]ca[at]gmail[dot]com
Poetry London Online Presents Irfan Ali & Shane Rhodes
Wednesday January 20th
Don’t miss this event! Browse to our YouTube channel on Jan 20th at 7pm and enjoy.
- YouTube Readings 7:00pm EDT on YouTube
- Zoom Workshop 6:00pm (open to all, email registration)
- Email us at poetrylondon[dot]ca[at]gmail[dot]com
Happy 2021 everyone!
While COVID-19 prevents us from returning to live events, we still have outstanding digital #poetry coming your way, starting with our Jan 20, 2021 event featuring Irfan Ali & Shane Rhodes.
Poetry London Online Presents Madeline Bassnett & El Jones
Wednesday November 18th
On Wednesday November 18th, we launch our next video event featuring Madeline Bassnett, El Jones, along with local opener Melissa Schnarr!
- YouTube Readings 7:00pm EDT on YouTube
- Zoom Workshop 6:00pm (open to all, email registration)
- Email us at poetrylondon[dot]ca[at]gmail[dot]com
Join us for fantastic online poetry!
All Wings and Fire: A Review of Madeline Bassnett’s Under the Gamma Camera
by Taylor Rousselle
Madeline Bassnett’s first full-length collection of poetry, Under the Gamma Camera (2019), comes at the perfect time to a world plagued by natural and physical illness. Described as “a frank portrait of our relationship with disease,” Bassnett’s poetry gives voice to the intensely personal, as it works to reconcile her contradictory experience with breast cancer which was at once deeply emotional and strangely clinical, but also to the broader human condition which, at its core, is inextricably connected with the fraught condition of the Earth.
If you were to ask any of my peers, they would tell you that I refuse to analyze poetry before I have read it aloud at least once. While I hold this fervent belief that meaning is missed, sometimes entirely, in the absence of sound, I caution the reader who dares to speak “The Secret Life of Crabs” aloud. When verbalized, this poem which explores the relationship between internal and external illness, between the natural world and the human body, can be felt; not emotionally – though I was certainly moved by this poem – but physically. To one who has yet to read this collection, this idea of a poem holding the power to physically touch you might seem alien. If it does, or even if it doesn’t and you are simply curious, I implore you to pay close attention to enunciation and sound as you read the following lines aloud: “I have found them always slightly repellent, / their hiding tactics, their sideways scuttle” (1-2); “Their communal ways, / clambering over each other’s brittle shells, / the rise and fall of multitudes of legs, clicking / and scraping” (7-10); “Their dim pools, / their crannies and caves, the way they appear / unnoticed, voraciously reproducing” (12-14).
Could you hear the crabs scuttling out of a crevice? More importantly, could you feel them crawling all over your skin like tiny pins and needles? If you could, you have Bassnett’s masterful (and unnerving) use of onomatopoeia (“clicking,” “scraping,” “clambering”), alliteration (“their sideways scuttle,” “their crannies and caves”), and diction (“multitudes of legs,” “voraciously reproducing”) to thank (or deplore). “The Secret Life of Crabs” is thus a poem that works at a multitude of levels, making it a useful roadmap for reading the collection in its entirety. At the most basic level, and most evidently, it is a poem that embodies Bassnett’s larger theme of connectivity between the natural world and internal illness: the crabs equated with cancerous cells. At the more personal level, however, it is a poem which both captures the personal unease felt by the poet at the idea of these crab-like cancerous cells “voraciously reproducing” within her breast and, through form and language that mirrors this anxiety, imparts a similar unease onto the reader.
Madeline Bassnett’s Under the Gamma Camera offers a powerful reminder of mortality and relation. Both as a woman born into a body with the incessant desire to suffocate her and as a human existing amidst a global pandemic and active climate crisis, I have never felt as seen and understood as I did while reading this collection. There is no better moment than the present, in which we feel disconnected from ourselves, from one another, and from the Earth, to be reading Madeline’s stunning verse which reminds us of our inherent bond with our own body, with others, and with our planet: of just “[h]ow wonderful it is, to be one.”
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