Fiona Tinwei Lam

Last Friday, October 27th, I arrived at the tent set up outside the Carnegie Centre at the corner of Main and Hastings Streets and plunked down my second-hand, manual Smith Corona typewriter on a checkered tablecloth. Festival workers John and Quinn set up a sandwich board with a poster for the Heart of the City Festival. Quinn stayed on to offer any ongoing assistance. Poetry booth coordinator, Gilles Cyrenne encouraged folks passing by to consider participating. We waited to see who would come by to take us up on the offer of a poem.

Inspired by the book, Writing Down the Bones by US writer Nathalie Goldberg, Gilles initiated the Spontaneous Poetry Booth event at last year’s festival, and hosted it on both Saturday and Sunday again this year. Gilles is a committed community activist, local poet, Carnegie Centre Board Member and coordinator of the DTES Writers’ Collective whose enthusiasm is infectious. He convinced me to join him at last year’s festival, my first time ever doing anything like this. Usually it takes me weeks, if not months, or even longer, to painstakingly draft, craft and hone a single poem. But this was an opportunity to try something that I had heard about other poets doing at Farmers’ Markets and hospitals in other cities. Toronto poet and psychotherapist, Ronna Bloom has written and prescribed poems on the spot in hospital and other settings. New Westminster’s Poet Laureate, Elliott Slinn is also renowned for typing spontaneous verse.

Twelve people had a turn to sit down at the poetry table to share memories, ideas, themes or prompts with me. The very first person was the festival’s artistic director, Savannah Walling, who requested a poem that dealt with the to-and-fro of ancestral grudges. A wide range of folks of varying ages and backgrounds followed over the next hour and a half. I listened carefully and tried to draft poems that integrated their thoughts and feelings, grateful for their trust in me and their openness. The poems that emerged ranged in length from half a dozen to a dozen lines, but each poem was unique, tailored to the person seeking the poem.

One man wanted a poem to honour his deceased parents. A young woman wanted a poem about the multiple questions she faces daily from her four-year-old child. There were requests for poems about identity, transitions to a new city and the loss of a previous home, a favourite ring encircled by carved hieroglyphics, a dialogue between poets, and even about a doughnut (is a poem like doughnut, is a doughnut like a poem?). One of the last poems requested by a cyclist (see the photo above of the cyclist in red beside Gilles and a bicycle) was a blessing for the entire world. Of course, I was pleased to oblige!

Whether or not these were “literary” poems, they felt “true”–meaningful words I could assemble on the page (albeit with more than a few typos) and offer as a kind of gift. It felt in a way like trying to conjure rabbits from a hat!

Just like last year, Gilles was extremely busy concocting poems for the Spontaneous Poetry Booth over two days. He told me of memorable poems he was asked to write for a woman who had left the war in Ukraine, and for another woman whose daughter had died of a drug overdose, leaving behind her daughter’s two young children.

It was an honour to work with Gilles again, and to be part of the over 100 diverse cultural events at the Heart of the City Festival. It’s a wonderful festival with something for everyone. Kudos to the hard-working organizers, coordinators, artists, performers, and volunteers!

The roster at this year’s free, public Word Vancouver Festival was brimming with numerous tantalizing events covering multiple genres. The festival worked well at the new venue of UBC Robson Square and drew lots of people to check out the literary and musical offerings.

Poetry Inspired by the Archives

I was especially intrigued by the panel on poetry based on research material from UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. The poems were brilliant: resonant, powerful and true. I encourage you to watch the full recording below, but the two poets kindly agreed to let me post excerpts of the poems they presented.

Responding to the Jim Wong-Chu fonds and the Chinese Canadian Research Collection, Rina Garcia Chua performed three visual and aural poems from her upcoming poetry chapbook, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards”. The Word Festival program describes her work as “counter-narratives of migrant labour, migration, and environmental extraction that resist and negate Canadian ‘multiculturalism.’” The effect of simultaneously hearing (both regular and whispered tones were used) and seeing these visually arranged words and phrases made for a haunting and electrifying experience.

Letters from the Joan Gillis fonds that were written by teenaged Japanese Canadians to their former classmate Joan after their forced uprooting from the British Columbia coast in 1942 were the source of inspiration for Carolyn Nakagawa. She presented a poem sequence that highlighted individual voices as well as shared experiences of young people going through the loneliness, struggle and injustice of dislocation and internment. Here’s a very moving excerpt from “please write home” by Nakagawa that distills the longing and heartache of that period:

Moving Words in the City

In the afternoon, I was pleased to do a brief presentation about the four-stage City Poems Project alongside a curated screening. Poetry videos made by two of the high school poetry finalists from last year started the set, followed by eleven of the poetry videos made by post-secondary teams. All of the videos were based on poems inspired by historical, cultural or ecological sites within the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, also known now as Vancouver.

Haiku Challenge

I chuckled and murmured in recognition while enjoyed watching the Head-to-Head Haiku Challenge emceed by Sean McGarragle and organized by the Death Rides a Unicorn Team. Subversive, irreverent, or serious, the 17-syllable poems presented by the diverse poets to the enthusiastic audience were wide-ranging and often thought-provoking. The group has organized another event that will be sure to also entertain, Famous Last Words, coming up on Friday evening, Oct. 27 at SFU Woodwards as part of the Heart of the City Festival.

Poetry in Transit

Poetry in Transit is a cherished public poetry program in BC cities. In partnership with TransLink, Books BC has produced sets of poetry cards for display on transit which have highlighted the work of emerging and established BC poets every year since 1996. I loved how the poetry bus was parked right on the pedestrian plaza on Robson Street by the art gallery steps for the festival. Many folks entered the bus to read and take photos of the newly selected poems on display. There was a full audience attending an outdoor poetry reading by the selected poets, hosted by one of the Poetry in Transit judges, the ever gracious and eloquent Evelyn Lau. Many passers-by stopped to listen too. This outdoor event was not recorded, but do look out for these poems next time you are on the bus or SkyTrain. You can also read them here through Books BC.

Kudos to Executive Director Bonnie Nish and her committed team of staff and volunteers for organizing an accessible, welcoming, and family-friendly festival that celebrates literacy, local writers, literary magazines and publishers, and other local performers. If you missed a session or want to know more, check out the recordings on Word’s YouTube playlist.

I always enjoy visiting the Regional Assembly of Text on Main Street. I love their delightful display of little books and their special “lowercase” reading room for chapbooks and arty booklets.

Chapbooks are a longstanding and wonderful way to showcase a sequence of poetry or even a single long poem. Little books can also of course contain prose or images or a combination. Almost anything goes—the only limit is the creator’s inventiveness and imagination. They can be whimsical, humorous, elegiac, quirky. They are often handmade and hand-sewn, using beautiful or interesting materials. There are a number of terrific chapbook publishers across Canada, but of course writers can make and distribute their own too. (I started out with two chapbooks before my first book was published, and tried making a handmade one with some of my concrete, shaped “plasticpoems” series about plastic pollution with recycled posters from a local gallery and recycled paper, inserting them in reused donated plastic greeting card sleeves.)

I recommend reading what Allan Twigg wrote in 2007 about Lander and his chapbooks in BC Bookworld to get a better sense of how unique a character Lander was. Catherine Owen has recorded a wonderful homage to him in episode 44 of her podcast series, Ms. Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws. You can find many of his numerous chapbooks at the Vancouver Public Library. The Dead Poets Reading Series will include a short homage to him at the start of their Sunday, November 19th reading at Massy Arts, 3-5 pm (free, with pre-registration online required). According to the Nanaimo Bulletin, there will also be a reading of his work in Nanaimo on his birthday in February, 2024.