There was a huge line-up for dog-loving kids and adults wanting to participate in the third year of the Canine Library, a community literacy event hosted on Saturday afternoon, September 9 by the VPL in collaboration with the St. John’s Ambulance BC/Yukon, Paws 4 Stories, and Trout Lake Community Centre. The VPL’s Programming and Learning Event Coordinator, Candie Tanaka, did a fabulous job organizing a range of engaging activities for the public.

People could book a ten-minute session with one of the 20 St. John’s Ambulance therapy dogs and their caretakers who waited to greet them in tents along the path behind the community centre. Each tent had an assortment of dog-themed poetry and fiction books that participants could choose from to read to their selected dog. 

I was pleased to be invited to run a dog poetry tent again this year. The VPL helped me set up a display of published dog-themed poems to engage passers-by. It was great to see people reading and taking photos of the poems on display. Local poets Alex Leslie, Aislinn Hunter, Billeh Nickerson and others had suggested a number of excellent poems last year which augmented my list. There are so many wonderful published dog poems out there. Clearly, a dog can serve as a poetic muse! Our table included a list of dog-themed books for all ages, as well as dog poetry worksheets.

Several people came over to chat, curious about the process of writing a poem. I held a few informal workshops with a few groups of participants, reading aloud a few sample dog poems and offering tips and encouragement as they attempted to create their own dog-themed poems. I very much enjoyed listening to each participant’s work. Participants who courageously tried to write poems included a journalist exploring opportunities to expand into creative writing, two dog-loving kids with their dog-leery parents, and an expert on classical Chinese poetry. One intrepid fellow, Ben Sigerson, wrote three in one sitting—all rhyming!

Do check out these and other dog poems, whether they are in library books or on the internet (see my list of links from last year’s Canine Library), or support an independent bookstore and poet by buying any of the books on the above lists. You might very well be inspired to write a dog poem yourself, either about a dog or even as a dog, channelling a dog’s persona and point of view! Poetry is a portal!

Did you know that a woman poet wrote the libretti for 9 of J. S. Bach’s sacred cantatas in 1725?

Yesterday evening, I participated in a pre-concert chat with Suzie LeBlanc, Artistic and Executive Director of the Early Music Society of Vancouver (EMV), and Alexander Weimann, Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra to discuss Christiane Mariane von Ziegler (1695-1760), a notable writer in Leipzig who was named poet laureate by the University of Wittenburg in 1733. Following our talk, there was a wonderful performance of three of the Bach’s cantatas based on her libretti, as well as his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major. This performance was one of several concerts held during the EMV’s Summer Music Festival which focused this year on the theme of “Women in Sight.”

Like her poetic predecessor Christine di Pizan (1364-1430), Ziegler was an educated woman who came from a prominent family, who was also a mother and a widow. Ziegler married at age 16, had her first child and lost her husband the next year at age 17. She remarried a few years later at age 20, and had a second child. But her second husband and both her children (ages 6 and 10) subsequently died when she was only 27. She returned to Leipzig to her family home (the famous Romanus house built by her father, the former mayor of Leipzig) and became the head of the household. Ziegler became renowned for hosting literary and cultural salons at the Romanus home, as well as for encouraging women to participate in the literary and cultural life of the city. Besides authoring books of poetry and translations, she authored a treatise on women’s education.

We get a vivid sense of Ziegler’s personality from this description of her in a letter by one of her contemporaries, Christian Gabriel Fischer quoted on the Bach Cantata Website: “We were invited to Mrs. von Ziegler’s house….She is a daughter of Romanus, a Leipzig Mayor and lives with her mother in the famous Romanus House….She is still a young widow, but will probably have difficulties marrying again because of many different circumstances. Among other things, her conduct is almost more than you would expect of a woman and her spirit is much too lively and clever/alert to be able to subjugate herself to normal type of understanding that men have. The shape of her body is not ugly, but her bone structure is rather prominent. Her face is rather commonplace. She has a smooth/level forehead, beautiful eyes, appears healthy with a slightly tan skin color, about 36 years old, speaks freely, but sensibly and properly, in her relations with others she tends to be more on the friendly side, amusing and humorous rather than solemn or grave. She takes part in everything; she plays all sorts of different instruments and sings to her own accompaniment, she can shoot rifles, pistols and crossbows in competition with others. She speaks French and is particularly adept in her German writing style and in poetry.….[She] encourages unreservedly other members of her sex to improve their minds by reading good books…. Following her example, there are already, as I have heard, other women here in Leipzig and in Saxony who are following her example as they try to emulate her good conduct. Distinguished individuals from the higher class of society enjoy Madame von Ziegler’s company so much that she is never missing from any of their social gatherings where she becomes the ‘life of the party’.”

Ziegler was the only woman invited to become a member of the prestigious German literary society led by Johann Christoph Gottsched. She won the literary society’s annual poetry prize twice. Ziegler’s words were also put to music once by Georg Philipp Telemann, a composer whom her father befriended and assisted professionally. This short, lively and spirited piece below, “Ich kann lachen, weinen, scherzen” (I can cry, laugh, joke), captures a sense of Ziegler’s exuberant personality.

After her third marriage (and the deaths of her mother and long imprisoned ex-mayor father) Ziegler moved to Frankfurt with her husband, but no longer published her writing. We’ll never know the reason. (You can find out more about Ziegler, her work and the historical context of the baroque period in a book by Mark A. Peters.)

During the festival, I attended a number of excellent concerts, including an opera and dance performance based on the life of Dido, a talk and performance on early keyboard instruments by artist-in-residence Catalina Vicens, as well as a performance by young cellist Jessica Korotkin of her own compositions based on Bach’s cello suites. I was also wowed by an all-Bach organ recital featuring Alexander Weimann.

Jessica Korotkin told us about the crucial catalytic role that one particular woman patron and family played in preserving J.S. Bach’s music his death. Sara Itzig Levy (1761-1854) was a harpsichord student of J.S. Bach’s eldest son and supporter of Bach’s second son and family. She performed and advocated for Bach’s work at her Berlin salons, and collected his manuscripts for posterity. She was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn’s maternal grandmother, Bella Itzig Salomon, who gifted Felix Mendelssohn the manuscript to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion which he performed in 1829 to widespread acclaim, which led to a revival of interest in Bach’s oeuvre.

Thank you to Suzie LeBlanc, the EMV team, Alexander Weimann, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, and all the very talented musicians and hard-working staff involved for raising the visibility of historic women curators, musicians, composers, and librettists over the past 10 days!

This past April, I was invited to give a poetry presentation at Amy Safarik’s gifted grade 12 class at the University Transition Program through the Poet in Class program with Poetry in Voice.

During my visit, I talked about different forms of poetry, read some poems, and showed some of my poetry videos and an erasure poem and discussed the process for the different approaches. The class also participated in some in-class writing exercises.

In June, students who had made poetry videos for their class assignments were encouraged by their teacher to contact me to share their videos. UTP student Pratyaksha Awasthi wrote an evocative poem, “a day at the park,” and turned it into the terrific poetry video below. She wrote, “I was really inspired by your poetry videos, especially the one titled “Omelet.” The images and the words together created a wonderful experience! Recently, we had a poetry project in school, for which I tried to make a video in a similar style, and I was hoping to share it with you!” I am certain viewers will find the animated drawings and sound design as lovely and engaging as I did.

Two other students from the class, Linden Shi and Amanda Young, undertook the creation of an amazing math-themed poetry video. I was impressed by the unfolding of the many images, the pacing, and expressive joint narration.

Linden told me about their extensive creative process in an email: “Inspired by your poetry videos, we also decided to try creating one. It was based on a poem we had written together, titled “Listen to What I’m Seong” (Richard Seong being the person who writes the math textbooks we use at school). Our poem playfully explores our relationship with math–a subject we’re both passionate about–and how it has changed over the course of our lives, filled with our own musings and references that hopefully make it relatable to our peers.  We wrote the poem with the idea of creating a video, and thus took great care to ensure that each section was of the proper length for a < 2 minute video. We also added bits and pieces of ideas for the visual components as we wrote. The video itself was animated digitally in Procreate, and included a few screen recordings as well. It took a lot of effort and a very long time to brainstorm animation ideas for the entire poem, create them, and stitch them together in a video editing software, but we think it was well worth it!” Viewers will agree that it was definitely well-worth it!

Teacher Amy Safarik told me about other students’ poetry projects. One group acted out their poems, and another student used AI to generate artwork. Others made handmade chapbooks. She told me, “I am very fortunate to work with highly gifted learners. With creative inspiration and support, they are capable of so much.” What a talented class!