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Over the past four months, I’ve been working with the terrific editor, designer and producer, Blaine Kyllo to put together a final report about the City Poems Project, my three-year Legacy Project as poet laureate. Blaine worked for ten years as the managing editor of Arsenal Pulp Press and produces the Emerge anthology every year for The Writers’ Studio at SFU.
All 27 shortlisted poems by youth, emerging and established poets from the City Poems Contest are showcased, along with 10 notable poems by award-winning local poets. Several of the poems served as the inspiration for poetry videos made by post-secondary student teams from SFU, ECUAD and UBC. All of the poems and poetry videos relate to historical, cultural and ecological sites within the unceded, ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples that we now know as Vancouver.
The publication includes links to the VPL YouTube Channels featuring the 44 poetry videos, plus additional resources about Vancouver poetry and local history. Most importantly, it includes a special resource for teacherswith links to specific poems and poetry videos about diverse sites that will serve as an invaluable educational tool for years to come.
My hope is that the City Poems Project will inspire poets and filmmakers, nascent or seasoned, to collaborate in future, and reinforce how poetry can be relevant and meaningful to people of all ages and backgrounds.
Some wonderful draft poems about creatures of all kinds were written last Thursday afternoon at the weekly summer poetry in the park workshop held behind the field house at Oppenheimer Park! I displayed postcards with images of various creatures from land and sea, as well as some of my son’s old toys (sundry plastic dinosaurs and bugs and wooden animal blocks) to inspire us to write about creatures that can delight, comfort or frighten us.
I read my poems, “Ode to a Crow” and “Wolf” as examples, and also shared terrific poems by others included on a photocopied handout, such as Margaret Atwood’s “Song of the Worms“, Yvonne Blomer’s “Barfly” (about a polar bear), Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” (an encounter with swans while driving), and James Wright’s “A Blessing” (an encounter with two ponies). These poems illustrate how different points of view (first person, second person or third person) can be employed in a poem to good effect. We also talked about how paying poetic attention to chance encounters with birds, animals and insects can transform us in unexpected and profound ways.
The group wrote and shared draft poems about farm animals, former pets, dolphins, mice, cockroaches, and several other creatures, and created a list of creatures they might like to write about in future. The Oppenheimer field house staff generously provided us with a jug of refreshing iced tea and a lovely tray of assorted baked treats to sustain the group during three intensive rounds of writing.
I also co-facilitated a similar workshop the day before with Gilles Cyrenne, coordinator of the Downtown Eastside Writers Collective, through the Gathering Place Community Centre, which is holding weekly poetry workshops in July at Emery Barnes Park at 1170 Richards Street downtown. A bountiful array of fresh fruit, cookies and beverages was also served during this workshop. (See poster below for details.)
Please consider participating in these free, public workshops led by a different local poet each week. Each poet will employ various prompts and creative approaches to tap into writers’ creative potential. The upcoming workshops are sure to be stimulating and fun!
Thank you to Carnegie Centre’s Community Activities Coordinator, Nichole Lockwood, and Park Board staffers Jenn Taylor and Danielle Beaton (who took the photograph above), as well as the fieldhouse volunteers for assisting with the Oppenheimer Park poetry workshops. It was also great to work with Marnie Fleming, the librarian at the Gathering Place Community Centre who organized the Emergy Barnes Park poetry workshops. Thanks also to Brenda Racanelli, Community Arts Programmer with Department of Decolonization, Arts and Culture (Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation) for supporting these workshops.
This morning, I attended the wonderful year-end assembly for Tecumseh Elementary School students and staff. The community spirit in the gymnasium was palpable. Earlier this year, staff and students were displaced and had to relocate temporarily to the South Hill Eduation Centre when their school building flooded over the winter break. Parents and staff rallied valiantly to ensure the students had supplies and support.
This assembly was also the official debut of the poetry video based on a special collaborative poem, “Ode to Vivian Jung,” made of lines that I assembled from poems written by Tom Larson’s grade 5/6 class. (I had been invited by teacher Tom Larson to facilitate a poetry workshop with his students last November to write poems about Vivian Jung.) Videographer Analee Weinberger volunteered her time to help create the beautiful video. Linnea Ritland-Tam did additional editing and post-production work. The poem and video depict how Vivian Jung broke the segregationist colour ban at a local public pool and became the first Chinese Canadian teacher hired by the Vancouver School Board. A beloved teacher and award-winning coach, she worked at Tecumseh for 35 years. The first annual Vivian Jung Award was given out by her daughter, Cynthia Kent, to a deserving student.
The poetry video incorporates artwork by students from Divisions 3 and 5 under the tutelage of AIRS artist-in-residence Julia McIntyre. Archival newspaper headlines and materials appear in the poetry video, alongside wonderful photos provided by Vivian Jung’s daughter, Cynthia Kent, with additional school photos discovered by Division 6 Teacher Thomas Aaron Larson, who also recorded his class reading the poem. I love the exuberant finale where the whole class chimes in!
You can find the text of the collaborative poem in a booklet of student poems and artwork published by the school to raise funds for a school mural that will be produced next year with local artists, Janet Wang and Stella Zheng. Find out more about how to purchase the booklet here. A sample of three of the student poems can also be found in Ricepaper Magazine. There are also audio-recordings of some of the individual poems written and read by these four students:
“It all starts small” by Kaiden Campos
“Standing Up” by Shikira Wu
“Standing Tall” by Tyler Higuchi
“What makes a good teacher” by Hans Go
Host Margaret Gallagher of the CBC Radio program, North by Northwest recently interviewed teachers Tilia Prior and Marion Elizabeth Collins who are on the anti-racism committee that is spearheading the Vivian Jung Mural Project at Tecumseh Elementary School, as well as myself.
If you’re curious to know more about the context and history, I wrote an article for The Tyee about Vivian Jung’s background, based on interviews and newspaper articles and other researched material. (Thanks for advice, tips and assistance from researchers Shona Lam, Olenna Hardie and city historian John Atkin!)
The 1945 incident (where the coach and fellow classmates of student teacher Vivian Jung challenged the segregation rule) could have happened at either Crystal Pool in Vancouver or Crystal Garden Pool in Victoria, according to an interview with Vivian Jung in the documentary, Operation Oblivion. There were subsequent student protests that followed in 1945 that ultimately led to the repeal of the bans in both Vancouver and Victoria. Although it’s unclear whether those actions, letters and protests were directly informed by Vivian Jung’s incident, it would appear that the seeds of social justice and equality had finally taken root in the wider community to render segregation less acceptable and to provoke a sufficient public outcry. My article also mentions Vivian Jung’s husband, Arthur Jung, and her brothers-in-law who fought in World War II for Canada and helped paved the way to Chinese Canadians finally obtaining the right to vote.
For those interested in writing and teaching, I discuss the process of writing and revising the students’ poems about segregation and social justice in the Tyee article.
Putting together the cento (which is the basis for the poetry video) took me several hours over two days. I cut out specific lines from a print-out of each of the students’ poems, then tried to find a way to make them flow together in terms of images, rhythm and narrative.
I made slight adjustments to ensure a consistent point of view and verb tense, and added a bit of poetic mortar here and there, including the last line. And voila!
Then, of course, it just made sense to produce a poetry video! Videographer Analee Weinberger is my long-time friend from Eric Hamber Secondary who volunteered her time and expertise.
Want to see more City Poems poetry videos about local historical, cultural and ecological sites? My previous blog has a resource list for teachers with a selection of site-based poetry videos from the City Poems Project that relate to Musqueam history, Japanese Canadian internment, the Komagata Maru incident, a historic Black neighbourhood of Vancouver, the gentrification of Chinatown, unnamed Chinese workers buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Vancouver’s lost streams and St. George Greenway, and the infamous collapse of the Ironworkers/Second Narrows Bridge in 1958.
Poetry videos have multidisciplinary and cross-genre potential: they can be included in lesson plans related to social studies, poetry, creative writing, local history, local geography, urban studies, digital media, or film.
Here below are lists of 14-16 selected site-based poetry videos made for the Poet Laureate’s City Poems Project, (along with links to the text of the poems) which are suitable for elementary school students and higher grades that was requested by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. Two of the edgier poetry videos which might especially appeal to high school and post-secondary students involve interpretations of Postcard Home from English Bay (based on a poem by Alex Leslie) which are on the second list below. All the videos can be found on the VPL YouTube Playlists that are linked in the introductory paragraph. The videos are all captioned or include text.
To get a taste of some of the videos, here is a short trailer of some of the City Poems Project poetry videos currently screening on weekdays on a rotational basis (alongside short films by other filmmakers) at the public outdoor Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen at Kingsway and Main Street in East Vancouver.
National Poetry Month in April was incredibly busy this year, with the launch of nine new City Poems Project poetry videos, as well as an online screening of last year’s poetry videos at REELpoetry Houston 2024, plus the inclusion of a program of 14 poetry videos from last year’s City Poems Project with the Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen (MPCAS)!
NEW SITE-BASED POETRY VIDEOS
The brand new batch of 9 site-based poetry videos were produced with Professor Kate Hennessy’s SFU IAT 344 class this term. You can watch all nine of them on the VPL YouTube Playlisthere. Despite the wrap-up of the 2023 poetry video contest, Kate had enjoyed the challenge and structure it offered, and wanted to dive in once again. I couldn’t say no to the opportunity to have more site-based poetry videos created by her talented students. Thank you to the terrific local poets who gave permission for their poems to be turned into poetry videos and who were consulted by the students. These are the new site-based poems the students could choose from:
“Lost Lagoon” from Flint and Feather by E. Pauline Johnson, an iconic Mohawk poet from Six Nations who lived in Vancouver and is buried in Stanley Park.
“Ad hominem” from With/holdingby Chantal Gibson about the colonial legacy of explorer Simon Fraser, whose name adorns several institutions and buildings around the City of Vancouver.
“Our Punjabi Market” by Kuldip Gill, about a vibrant neighbourhood in East Vancouver. This poem and many more can be found in A Verse Map of Vancouveredited by George McWhirter.
Last fall, Vancouver’s historic cemetery, Mountain View Cemetery, commissioned another poetry video, “Found” (based on a poem of the same title, “Found” by James Wang that was submitted to the City Poems Contest Stage 1) for the annual All Souls event there October 25-November 1, 2023. The poem is about the unknown Chinese workers buried there long ago. The poet worked with videographer Analee Weinberger to produce a lovely meditative poetry video that integrates archival photographs.
MOUNT PLEASANT COMMUNITY ARTS SCREEN
MPCAS curator, Alger Ji-Liang chose 14 of last year’s poetry videos for screening as part of a special program (Poet Laureate’s City Poems Project) which will be shown three times every weekday alongside other programming for the next 12 months until March 2025. The screen is located on the southwest side of Kingsway at East Broadway opposite Kingsgate Mall. (Screening schedule here.) We held a celebratory Watch Party (with popcorn and doughnuts!) at the grunt gallery with students, teachers and poets to celebrate this momentous event.
OTHER SCREENINGS
I also want to congratulate all those student poetry teams and poets whose poetry videos have been selected for screening elsewhere–either in town or at festivals around the world! Here are some of the places where they’ve been selected for screening, with more possible selections for festivals to come:
Chinatown Storytelling Centre: animated ECUAD poetry video, “Contrasts” based on a poem by Donna Seto selected for rotational screening
Aotearoa Poetry Video Festival 2023 (Wellington, New Zealand): animated ECUAD poetry video, “This was meant to be for Nora” was screened and won best student poetry video
Cadence Poetry Video Festival 2024 (Seattle): ECUAD’s animated poetry video,”This was meant to be for Nora” and SFU IAT 344’s “Postcard Home from English Bay” selected for online screening
Duemila30 Festival 2023 (Milan, Italy): first year ECUAD team’s poetry video, “What do I remember of the evacuation?” was shortlisted for this festival for young filmmakers focused on sustainable development and social inclusion.
Canadian Roots Exchange2023: UBC FNIS 454 video, “Know who you are, know where you come from” selected as one of 8 videos screened in Banff, Alberta for a national Indigenous-led youth organization.
Other festivals: Vivian Li’s poetry video, “The Garden” has been selected for screening at the Whistler Film Festival (Whistler, BC), Bloomsday Film Festival (Dublin, Ireland), So Limitless and Free International Film Festival (Montreal, QC, Award-winner), and Poetry Film Festival (LA, USA).
COLLABORATION WITH VANCOUVER HERITAGE FOUNDATION
One of the purposes of the City Poems Project was to provide resources for elementary, secondary and post-secondary instructors who wish to teach their students about Vancouver’s historical, cultural and ecological sites, as well as about poetry generally. It’s wonderful that the Vancouver Heritage Foundation is interested in including a list of several of the poetry videos in its Heritage Study Guide for Teachers! Long live City Poems Project poetry videos!
