Our most recent event was held on Saturday, September 30 as part of the “100 Thousand Poets for Change” global initiative. Sadly, Michael Rothenberg, co-founder of this unique organization, died late last year. However, his partner and co-founder Terri Carrion and all the support staff are carrying on. The Elora Poetry Centre and Gallery once again participated, this time with a reading by Khashyar “Kess” Mohammadi, a performance on the shakuhachi by Dr. Gerard Yun, and poetry, music, and dance presented by Choir in Motion.

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Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi

“Kess” is an Iranian born, Toronto based queer poet, translator and writer.

They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, 2022’s Arc Poem of the Year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript “G” is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems “Daffod*ls” is forthcoming from Pamenar Press Fall 2023.

Dr Gerard Yun

Dr. Yun teaches Community Music at Wilfrid Laurier University, specializing in, amongst other things, the Shakuhachi.

He is an intercultural,  contemplative musician, teacher, and scholar. A native of the Sierra Nevada Foothills of Northern California, he is a descendant of San Francisco and Jamaican Chinese with a background rooted in various musical traditions discovered and pursued alongside his formal training and professional work as a classical conductor. These include Japanese Zen Buddhist shakuhachi, Native American flute, Asian overtone singing, didgeridoo, West African kora and drumming. His scholarly interests focus on the intersections of music, spirituality and social justice through practices such as intercultural improvisation, restorative-contemplative musical forms, and performative eco-acoustics. At the juncture of emergence from the global pandemic, he seeks to reawaken awareness of relationships between humans, the natural world, and technology by combining scientific and musical modalities. Currently, assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Dr. Yun is in demand as a clinician and workshop leader. During the pandemic, he hosted the “Authentic Voice” podcast and Martin Luther University’s “Contemplative Music Pause.” An advocate of teaching innovation, he is currently producing “The Listeners” podcast to support students and researchers seeking access and primary data into the interdisciplinary theories and practices of listening and as a precursor to a new course titled “Listening: Theories and Practice.” He teaches community music, contemplative arts, and social justice courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels for the Faculty of Music and Martin Luther University College. Former director of both the University of Waterloo Choir and WLU’s Concert Choir, he is the founder of Conrad Grebel University College’s East-West Dark Horse Ensemble and Wilfrid Laurier’s Confluence Ensemble. As shakuhachi soloist and scholar, Dr. Yun performs and records with the Earth Ether Ensemble under the leadership of James Harley. He appears on Room 217 World Music series for Music Cares and various music apps, including Plant Choir’s biosonificstion app which creates generative music directly from houseplants. His latest composition projects feature seldom noticed or unhearable (with the unaided human ear) natural sounds (macroacoustics), and bio-electrical fields to generate new musical forms and structures. Dr. Yun serves as music advisor for Canada’s Plant Choir ® and president of the Community Music School of the Waterloo Region. 

Choir in Motion presents–HEARING NATURE

 Poetry, Music and Dance

Sometimes in listening we build the road to change which leads us to new places, or even back to ourselves.

Diane Chapitis─Artistic Director

Peter Skoggard—Musical Director

Ardeth Jarvis—Vocal

Tillia Kooyman—Clarinet

bill bissett and MLA Chernoff performed live on Wednesday, Nov. 16, in the Chapel of St. Bede, Renison University College, University of Waterloo. This event was co-sponsored by the University of Waterloo and the Elora Poetry Centre & Gallery, with support from the Arts First Pedagogical Enhancement Fund at University of Waterloo, the League of Canadian Poets, and Canada Council for the Arts. It was linked to the annual 100 Thousand Poets for Change global poetry initiative organized by Michael Rothenberg, held in over 700 international locations. Sadly, Michael died immediately after the event, so we were unable to send him the link to view it.

Described by Jack Kerouac as “one of the great poets,” bill bissett is an internationally acclaimed language poet, artist, and musician. He is the author of more than 60 books of poetry. Safia Southey observes, “bissett dispenses with standard written English (initial capitals, spelling, and punctuation), connecting with language on an elemental level that some reviewers have considered shaman-like.” Frank Davey has described him as “rejecting the conventional or ‘straight’ world . . . not only in lifestyle but in ruthless alterations to conventional syntax.” bill is a spellbinding performance artist who had delighted audiences at the Elora Poetry Centre on two previous occasions coordinated with 100 Thousand Poets for Change. This time bill was accompanied by Metroland Media 2021 Urban Hero winner Honey Novick, poet and singer, as well as writer, director & producer Wesley Rickert, who gave virtuosic performances of sound poetry.

Gordon Hill Press, publisher of MLA Chernoff’s recent collection [Squelch Procedures], notes on its website that “MLA Chernoff (they/ them/@citation_bb) was born at Women’s College Hospital in December of 1991–oops. They are a six-hundred-year-old Jewish, non-binary pome machine, a Postmodern Neo-Marxist, and (somehow) a PhD Candidate of the Neoliberal University of York University, where they once held a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship–no kidding.” MLA had delivered a stunning virtual performance for students at Renison University College and friends of the Elora Poetry Centre back in January 2022, but seeing him perform live was truly memorable. He was introduced by Jeremy Luke Hill, his publisher, who recollected how bowled over he had been the first time he heard MLA give a live reading, and everybody in the audience soon understood why.

Although staged for ARTS 130 at University of Waterloo, the event was open to the Renison and University of Waterloo communities, friends of the Elora Poetry Centre, and general public. It was filmed by Robert Laurin of Waterloo Studio and can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Ppud6GPQw&list=PLxaW0IcKekckyGxSmT2K0mfVi-5n3_R3j

Karen Houle gave a synchronous reading on Feb. 4 from The Grand River Watershed: A Folk Anthology, short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2019. This event, funded by the Canada Council and Writers’ Union of Canada as part of the National Public Readings Program, was cosponsored by Renison University College at University of Waterloo and the Elora Poetry Centre & Gallery.

Here is the link to the recording of this event on YouTube: https://youtu.be/14mJ8fqRlxA

The following is from the book’s publisher, Gaspereau Press:

The Grand River Watershed: A Folk Ecology
Karen Houle

How might we grasp the natural history of a river in a way that transcends mere data and description? How might we chronicle the way in which a living consortium of geology, weather, plants, animals and people has impacted, and been impacted by, the existence of a particular watercourse over the passage of time? In her new book, philosopher and poet Karen Houle employs the wiliest tool she knows—poetry—to contemplate the complexities of the Grand River watershed in southern Ontario, stretching our notions of what can be known about a river.

Houle’s writing is inspired by, and borrows from, various kinds of scientific inquiry and documentation, integrating strands of thought from across the fields of archeology, entomology, molecular ecology, cultural anthropology and geography. But these established sources aren’t presented as the sole custodians of all that’s worth knowing. With often jarring juxtapositions and a prosody that sometimes flirts with chaos, Houle’s poems make a virtue of straining against the settled rules, agitating for a more complex, robust portrayal of the Grand River watershed by fusing apparently disparate narratives and methodologies—the scientific and the anecdotal, the personal and the collective, the emotion and the information, and the organic and the manufactured.

Like the river itself, Houle’s The Grand River Watershed suggests how seemingly jumbled, separate parts in fact exist in a web of relationships. For Houle, the best hope we have of comprehending the complexities of a phenomenon like the Grand River is rooted in our accumulated encounters with, and our collective articulation of, the river’s countless aspects over time, not in any one measurable part or moment of it.

Houle’s creative pairing of literary and ecological modes presents the Grand River as a complex living system that is full of interconnection and meaning, reinvigorating poetry’s possibilities as a tool for engaging with and speaking of the natural world.

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We were very excited to have Rae Crossman , well known poet on both radio and stage, and Tilly Kooyman, distinguished clarinetist of international acclaim, perform at the Elora Poetry Centre. 

Confluence of Words and Music

Poetry of Rae Crossman with Music Performed by Clarinetist Tilly Kooyman

Featuring Compositions by R. Murray Schafer

In this presentation, language and music flow together to evoke misty dawns, forest hikes, and river passages. Listen to bird song, cataract chants, and wind wail. Touch the tip of a young spruce. Read the rough calligraphy of bear marks. See an amber bead of sap lanced with light. Marvel morning.

Living in Kitchener, Rae Crossman writes poetry both for the page and for oral performance. His poems have been published in literary magazines, broadcast on CBC Radio, dramatized on stage, performed and recorded as vocal music, and displayed on transit systems across Canada. Collaborative projects include storytelling, choral compositions, and theatrical pieces set in natural environments.For more than twenty-five years, in canoes and along forest trails, Rae has lived the roles of several mythological characters in R. Murray Schafer’s Theatre of Confluence. He has served as a short story editor for The New Quarterly and has received a Waterloo Region Arts Award for his artistic endeavours across disciplines.

https://raecrossman.com/

Guelph clarinetist Tilly Kooyman is an active solo, chamber and orchestral musician, with particular interests in contemporary music, interdisciplinary works and sound ecology. She has performed across Canada and toured Japan with the Higashi-Hiroshima Clarinet Ensemble. An advocate for Canadian music, Tilly has premiered many works by Canadian composers at the World Bass Clarinet Convention in the Netherlands, the International Bohlen-Pierce Symposium in Boston, and with various ensembles broadcast on CBC Radio.

Tilly and Rae have frequently collaborated as members of the performance group SlanT, and have appeared together at the Open Ears Festival, Stratford Summer Music Festival, International Clarinetfest, Narrative Matters Conference, Soundstreams, and other events. For three decades they have participated in R. Murray Schafer’s Patria works and drawn inspiration from his call for art to be transformational. “What is the purpose of art? First, exaltation. Let us speak of that.”

• 

28 July 3.30 p.m.

A perfect summer afternoon was the setting of a double-bill of two esteemed poets, Asa Boxer and Max Layton, both sons of poets who emerged from Montreal in the 1950’s.  Asa read from his new chap book Field Notes From the Undead (published by the Elora Poetry Centre & Gallery/Interludes) and earlier publications The Mechanical Bird and Skullduggery, along with some wonderful new material composed since his last visit.  Tilly Kooyman provided a creative accompaniment to parts of the reading on her clarinet.  Max, eldest son of Irving Layton, read from several of his works, including his latest book of poems LIKE, which has just been published by Guernica Editions, after opening with three of his songs, on which he accompanied himself on the guitar.  A short discussion followed in the house and garden, with a buffet and drinks. Tom Althouse of Silk Purse Recordings, Elora, has agreed to assist us in archiving this and future events.