The conclusion of the City Poems Project was celebrated with a wrap-up event on November 23 at the VPL’s Montalbano Family Theatre, followed by an informal reception at Poet’s Corner on the 9th floor.
The presentation featured the screening of a trailer assembled by SFU film student Brennan Henderson that integrated clips from the 46 poetry videos produced during the project, with input and suggestions from me. It included the 33 poetry videos made by students from preselected courses at ECUAD, SFU (Surrey) and UBC that were submitted to the poetry video contest in 2023; the 9 poetry videos made after the contest in 2024 by student teams from Professor Kate Hennessy’s SFU IAT 344 class; two high school poetry videos made by youth finalists from the 2022 poetry contest who participated in a special workshop to make their own films; and two special commissions made by local videographer Analee Weinberger (“Found” for Mountain View Cemetery based on James Wang’s poem, and “Ode to Vivian Jung” based on the collaborative cento poem with lines from poems written by a grade 4/5 class from Tecumseh Elementary School).
A short overview of my activities has been published in the online journal, Periodicities. If you are interested in more details about community workshops, the Canine Library, poetry videos and school visits, you can find descriptions in my past blogs.
I am very grateful to all many poets, filmmakers, teachers, and organizational partners involved in the project over the past three years. This project could not have become manifest without your essential contributions!
City of Vancouver Cultural planner Miko Hoffman asked me to facilitate an interactive poetry activity for over 200 municipal cultural planners at the Creative City Summit held in Vancouver this year. Here’s the description: “Have fun writing a haiku or short poem about a special or memorable place in your town! Whether it’s a quirky building, funky neighbourhood, historic park, community garden, key landmark or something else, capture the essence of how you experience that special place in a few honed phrases.”
To get the creative juices flowing, I provided examples of place-based haiku (from Basho to Jack Kerouac), including a few gems from the poetry month event held byThe New York Times in 2014.
Everyone had to rearrange themselves by province and region around the tables in the conference room, and then draft a haiku (or two or more if they wished) on post-it notes about a favourite specific place in their own town. Then they were asked to share their haiku with someone else at their table. It was a wonderful ice breaker. There was laughter and excitement in the room as participants shared haiku about their hometowns. The haiku were posted along the conference wall, from west to east, north to south. People enjoyed reading the results, taking photos, chatting about their favourite ones, or just chuckling in recognition. The muse had visited the conference room that afternoon! Here are some photos I took of a few of the poems, but there were so many terrific ones!
Here is the excerpt from Un/Write that I showed the participants to encourage them to write. It was animated by Lara Renaud with the help of Quinn Kelly (text, sound design), who were both students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art at the time it was made.
At the City of Vancouver Book Award ceremony held this past October during the Vancouver Writers’ Festival, I presented a poem, entitled “Gift,” that I wrote to commemorate a very special donation of 1000 cherry trees by the Vancouver family of Bunjiro and Kimi Uyeda to the Park Board in 1935 in advance of the city’s golden jubilee. The Uyeda family were well-established local business owners and philanthropists, owning and running a fabric store on Dunsmuir Street downtown. According to the book, The First 100 Years by Park Board historian R. Mike Steele, these donated cherry trees were not planted until 1942 because of labour shortages and financial constraints experienced during the Depression.
Three months before the trees were planted, however, the family was forcibly relocated, interned and dispossessed. The trees were even referred to as “Chinese” cherry trees because of the racism at that time. 22,000 Japanese Canadians were incarcerated during World War II, removed from the west coast and prevented from returning for years after the war ended. (The racism was so severe that interned Japanese Canadian children were barred by the Board from using the New Brighton Pool in July of that year despite a heat wave.)
This donation of cherry trees was mentioned in Nina Shoroplova’s wonderful book, A Legacy of Trees. Nina did some investigating and found what we believe to be the four remaining trees from the donation in Stanley Park near the causeway. Unlike most of the cherry trees in the city now, these ‘Somei-yoshino’ trees were not grafted, but have grown from their own roots. This type of cherry tree has a longer life span than others, of around 80 years or so. (Nina has informed me that there is also one more very old ‘Somei-yoshino’ near the Pooh Corner Daycare by Lost Lagoon which might be one of the donated trees.)
After being forcibly relocated to Kaslo, the Uyeda family moved to Montreal after the war. One of the Uyeda family’s granddaughters, acclaimed composer, Leslie Uyeda, moved from Montreal to Vancouver to live and work. In 2012, she accepted degrees on behalf of her two aunts, Mariko Uyeda and Lily Yuriko Uyeda, at a special ceremony at UBC to recognize and honour Japanese Canadian students whose education was disrupted in 1942 when they were exiled from the BC Coast. In her oral history interview for Landscapes of Injustice, she talked about how she only learned much later of her grandparents’ donation, the loss of their Dunbar home, her two aunts being pulled out of UBC as students, and the family’s life in Kaslo. Until I reached out to her, she hadn’t known that any of her grandparents’ donated trees might still be alive.
After reading the poem during a Jane’s Walk in Stanley Park this summer organized by local poet, Kevin Spenst, I decided to commission the printing of a limited edition poetry broadsheet. Given the significant age of the trees and their limited lifespan, I was concerned that these trees might not be around much longer. Printmaker and artist Soyeon Kim manually typeset the poem and made a limited edition of 20 prints at New Leaf Editions on Granville Island, overseen by master printer Peter Braune. The poetry broadsheets feature a woodblock print carved by Soyeon on cherry wood that depicts the four remaining donated trees.
I presented a broadsheet (beautifully framed by Soyeon) to Leslie Uyeda immediately following the book award ceremony. Broadsheets were later given to the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, Historic Joy Kogawa House, City Hall, the Museum of Vancouver, the VPL (for the 9th floor Poet’s Corner area), Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) at UBC, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, and the Legacies of Injustice project at UVIC. The photo below was taken at City Hall in February 2025 with Leslie Uyeda, the composer and granddaughter of Kimi and Bunjiro Uyeda (on the left), and printer Soyeon Kim of New Leaf Editions (on the right).
On the subject of Japanese Canadian internment, two poetry videos were made for the City Poems Project based on Joy Kogawa’s poem, “What do I remember of the evacuation.” (You can see brief excerpts of those poetry videos at the 0:16-0:24 second mark of this compilation of trailers compiled by curator Alger Ji-Liang for the Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen, or watch the full versions by Emily Carr University student team here and by an SFU student team here on the VPL YouTube Playlist 2023.)
On November 11th, I had the honour of reading the poem, “For the Fallen” by poet Laurence Binyon for the Remembrance Day ceremony at Chinatown Memorial Square at the corner of Keefer and Columbia. Binyon, who was too old to enlist as a soldier, wrote “For the Fallen” in 1914 while he was working as a medical orderly in a French military hospital during World War I. The fourth stanza of Binyon’s poem is well-known and often quoted:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
It was moving to hear the veterans and soldiers echo the phrase, “We will remember them,” as it perfectly distilled the emotional essence of the gathering. The ceremony which started at 12:30 pm following the morning ceremony at Victory Square, was organized by ANAVETS, Pacific Unit # 280, the Chinese Canadian Military Museum Society, HMCS Discovery and 39 Service Battalion. Thank you to King Wan, Randall (Bud) Wong, and Harry Fong for including me.
The Chinatown Remembrance Day ceremony is extremely meaningful to the Chinese Canadian community. Over 600 Chinese Canadian soldiers, as well as other Chinese Canadians both male and female, volunteered in Canada’s war effort during World War II while being denied Canadian citizenship and while experiencing ongoing informal and formal segregation policies in housing and employment, at public amenities like swimming pools and cinemas, and more. Their patriotic efforts paved the way for the repeal of The Chinese Exclusion Act which had barred Chinese immigration from 1923-1947. Chinese Canadians were finally granted the right to vote as well.
The Chinese Canadian Museum in collaboration with the Chinatown Military Museum Society will be launching a new exhibit in the spring of 2025, “A Soldier for All Seasons,” about the role of Chinese Canadian soldiers.
Earlier in the day at the Vancouver’s Remembrance Day ceremony at the cenotaph in Victory Square, 11-year-old Kari Wang, a Grade 6 student from H.T. Thrift Elementary, recited her poem, “The Colour of Remembrance.” (Each year, student winners of the Cam Cathcart Youth Poem of Remembrance Award recite their original poems. Cam Cathcart, who served as Vancouver’s director of ceremonies for 18 years before his death in 2021, created the award to engage local youth.) The full poem was printed in the program for the ceremony:
THE COLOUR OF REMEMBRANCE by Kari Wang
If remembrance was a colour,
It would be red and white.
The colour of the Canadian flag.
If remembrance was a sound,
It would be people’s heartbeats,
The worried heartbeats of the soldiers
and the families that are waiting
for them to come home.
If remembrance was a smell,
It would be a comforting smell from home.
The cozy place that was always
welcoming to you.
If remembrance was a feeling,
It would be hopeful.
The hope of warm hugs and good friends
when you return.
If remembrance was a taste,
It would be bitter,
The bitterness of coffee without cream,
Like a family that has been split apart.
If remembrance was a place,
It would be a cenotaph.
Where names of long-ago heroes are written
on the stone for people to remember.
If remembrance has a purpose,
It is to recognize and remember all
the people that have participated in wars.
So that we could have peace and freedom.
In 2023, Jacqueline Murray, a Grade 12 student at Little Flower Academy, won the award. reading her poem, “They Do Not Chill Us So.” In 2022, Sapphire Peng read her poem, “Red of the Poppy.” In 2021, student Mikah Nanson read his poem, “The Forgotten Algonquin” to honour the First Nations soldiers who fought for Canada.
A highlight for poetry month this past April involved a wonderful collaboration with Coastal Jazz. Award-winning saxophonist, John Gross, set up a meeting with artistic programmer Cole Schmidt to plan a special evening that would feature four acclaimed local spoken word poets performing city-related poems alongside notable jazz musicians at Tyrant Studios downtown. Jillian Christmas, Tawahum, Johnny Trinh and R.C. Weslowski were paired up with musical improvisers John Gross, Feven Kidane, Theo Girard, Lisa Cay Miller and Josh Zubot. It turned out to be a memorable evening with many moments of remarkable synergy!
