The Series of online Poetry in Translation seminars has been successful, the final one was a group session which was on Oct 3, afternoon 3:00-4:30 with all four featured poets and Michael Mirolla, Guernica Editions joining us.
Guest poets reading and group discussion: 3:00-4:00PM
Open Mic / 4:00-4:30pm
Thank you all join us. Thank the League of Canadian Poets for funding. Co-host by The East and West Learning Club
Anna Yin was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and has authored five collections of poetry. Her poems/translations have appeared at ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, World Journal etc. Anna won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from West Chester University Poetry Conference, three grants from OAC and 2013 Professional Achievement Award from CPAC. She performed her poetry on Parliament Hill and has been featured at 2015 Austin International Poetry Festival and 2017 National poetry month project etc. She teaches Poetry Alive at schools, colleges and libraries. Her website:annapoetry.com
Frances Boyle is the author of two poetry books, most recently This White Nest (Quattro Books, 2019). She has also written Seeking Shade, a short story collection (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020) and Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018) as well as several chapbooks. Her writing has appeared throughout North America and the U.K. including recent and forthcoming work in Best Canadian Poetry 2020, Blackbird, Prairie Fire, Event, Dreich, Feral¸ Parentheses Journal and Cypress. Frances served on the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine for over ten years, and now writes reviews for that journal and for Canthius: feminism and literary arts. She lives in Ottawa. Visit www.francesboyle.com and follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @francesboyle19.
George Elliott Clarke and Anna Yin discussed poetry, translations and life experiences with writing poetry related to political issues, difficult history and identity etc. They also shared the view of poets laureate’s role for politics.
The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke is a revered artist in song, drama, fiction, screenplay, essays, and poetry. Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960, Clarke was educated at the University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Queen’s University. Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature. A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. His recognitions include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry,, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award.
On Sept 11 2020 Alice Major and Anna Yin explored how to get inspirations from science and how to write poetry with an interesting and understandable view related to science, and how to translate them.
A.F. Moritz and Anna Yin discussed poetry, translations and life experiences. They also talked about how other poets’ work had inspired their own writing. Here are videos from the event.
Our first session: Poetry in Translation: Molly Peacock and Anna Yin was a great success. There were 91 people joined us. Thank you Molly, Yang and all poetry/translation lovers, book lovers for supporting. Thank the League of Canadian Poets for funding. Thanks Guerinca Editions.
Here also from Molly’s thank-you note:
The conversation between Anna Yin and Molly Peacock about poetry translation from English to Chinese launched lots of ideas, and we so appreciate your support, either in person or in spirit. 谢谢 /多謝
A partial list of over 90 Canadian and American attendees, from Boston to Maryland, from Ottawa to Costa Rica to Detroit, from Vancouver to Colorado and from New York to Toronto, with gratitude from Molly for your presence, oh poets and translators, lawyer and arborist, IT coder and actor, painter, print-maker & portraitist, financiers and fiction writers, therapists, nonfiction writers, teachers and editors–& scholar-husband:
Gary Alexander, Bernice Baeumler, Susan Boone, Cathie Borrie, Helen Bournas-Ney, Lara Bozabalian, Madeleine Brown, Amy C. Clark, Mike Curtis, Dana Delibovi, Alison Edwards, Cindy Frenkel, Davidson Garrett, Michael Groden, Rachel Hadas, Jenine Holmes, Bob Kaplan, Mary Louise Kiernan, Anita Lahey, Deena Linett, Ashley Mabbitt, Wendy Mark, Bronwyn Mills, Irina Nikolova, Dawn Hansen Pergakes, Craig Poile, Ellen Rachlin, Janet Read, Patria Rivera, Lindsay Royce, Dale Matthews Satorsky, Jane Seskin, Terrill Soules, Norman Stock, Tim Suermondt, Helen Tzagoloff, David Williams, Joyce Wilson, and Pui Ying Wong.)
Anna Yin is a startling dreamer. Poems that seem Romantic veer into Surrealism or Symbolism. Tutored in Sylvia Plath and William Carlos Williams, among many other poets (mainly American and Canadian), Yin issues poems that are nightmare dreams or dreamy nightmares: Here’s a world where the natural becomes unnatural, the unnatural natural: “the police-monkey escorts a well-suited rat / followed by his cloned brothers…” Some poems are parables, such as the story of a man- a father-who refuses to leave his home, even while it and others are being reduced to rubble: “I received a copy of the photo in the local newspaper. / My father looked so small on the top of the ruins. / It was titled, ‘The Last Temple.’” In another poem, the speaker says, “You are tired of his / molding, over and over, / thrashing, nailing / into you.” There’s a fierce feminism here, reinforced by readings of Dot Livesay and Dame Atwood. Though it’s tricky following Yin’s wicked, impressionistic juxtapositions, her painterly imagery is deliciously lustrous. Yin is endlessly perspicacious, endlessly compelling: “The autumn gusts feel warm / as if it’s spring…. / last night by accident I cut my finger… / slowly, on the rice paper, red roses grew.” She brings to Canadian poetry a sense of classicism and aestheticism and minimalism, all nicely mixed up with sensuality. Yin’s bravura poems – so exquisite and extraordinary – merit bravo upon bravo.
The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke is a revered artist in song, drama, fiction, screenplay, essays, and poetry. Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960, Clarke was educated at the University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Queen’s University. Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature. A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. His recognitions include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. Photo Credit of George Elliott Clarke : Harvard University.
Anna Yin was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and has authored five collections of poetry. Her poems/translations have appeared at ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, World Journal etc. Anna won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from West Chester University Poetry Conference, three grants from OAC and 2013 Professional Achievement Award from CPAC. She performed her poetry on Parliament Hill and has been featured at 2015 Austin International Poetry Festival and 2017 National poetry month project etc. She teaches Poetry Alive at schools, colleges and libraries. Her website: http://www.annapoetry.com/
A series of online events focus on poetry and translation by reading and discussing original poems then translations between poets and translator. The poets are George Elliott Clarke, Molly Peacock, Alice Major and A. F. Moritz, and the translator is Anna Yin
Each session lasts 90 minutes and involves one English-language poet and the Chinese translator to discuss techniques and adaptability required and close-reading poems of different styles and subjects.
Oct 3, 15:00-16:30 the group session on Zoom -a summary with the above poets and open mic
Molly Peacock’s latest poetry collections are The Analyst and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems. She is the series founder of The Best Canadian Poetry and the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. Her poems appear in leading literary journals such as Poetry, The Malahat Review and The Hudson Review, and are anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Author of a one-person play about poetry, The Shimmering Verge, she is working on Form with Feeling, a collection of essays.
A. F. Moritzis the 6thPoet Laureate of Toronto. His most recent books are As Far As You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), both from House of Anansi Press. In 2015, Princeton University Press republished his 1986 volume in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, The Tradition. He has published nineteen books of poems, and several volumes of poetry translated from French and Spanish. His poetry has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Beth Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine, and other awards.
Alice Major‘s 11th poetry collection is “Welcome to the Anthropocene”. published by the University of Alberta Press. Science has been a source of inspiration for much of her work, including an award-winning collection of essays: “Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science.” Alice served as the first poet laureate for her home city of Edmonton and her honours include an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta. www.alicemajor.com
The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke is a revered artist in song, drama, fiction, screenplay, essays, and poetry. Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960, Clarke was educated at the University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Queen’s University. Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature. A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. His recognitions include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry,, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award.
Meet Dr. Chun Yu, an award-winning poet based in San Francisco, and Anna Yin, Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, author of six collections of poetry and an IT Consultant; listen to their bilingual poems and share their creative experiences with boundary crossing. This event will be moderated by Dr. Shuyu Kong, Professor in Humanities at SFU and Co-Director of David Lam Centre for International Communication. This will be conducted in Mandarin.
A link and password to join the Zoom meeting will be sent by email.
register link: https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/5ef649a09cdc143a0004104c