Paul Vermeersch, Callista Markotich, Terese Mason Pierre
with Jason Heroux
In his new book, NMLCT (Animal City) Paul Vermeersch displays a certain optimistic futurism, for which he admits a certain nostalgia: “The world envisioned—in the popular imagination—by people like Buckminster Fuller, Walt Disney, Carl Sagan, and Gene Roddenberry: the jet packs, commuter rails and fantastic buildings of a post-capitalist utopia built on the principles of scientific and intellectual discovery. Are these the dream cities that Jane Jacobs alludes to? I don’t so much long for those dream cities, though, as a time when people believed they were possible.”
Callista Markotich, a retired teacher and superintendent of education and author of a debut collection Wrapped in a Big White Towel, fell into writing poetry as she mourned the loss of her sister. That death stilled her long relationship to poetry as a reader and listener, but opened up her poetic self. She had always been moved by hyperbolic expressions of grief in religious poetry, drawn to the language of grand despair in the poems of John Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “The great stately language at my sister’s funeral in the readings and hymns and prayers was a validation of the vastness of my feelings – how deep the loss, how huge the void, how infinite the loneliness.” Can sorrow be a balm for other sorrow? she asks. “Perhaps it’s due to the universality we strive for in poetry, that which lets us know we are not alone in human moil.”
In Myth, Terese Mason Pierre weaves between past and present, between ancestry and visiting extraterrestrials, myths manifesting in the everyday, shaped in an ecstatic lyricism, and always, somewhere, the spell of unspoiled nature. “The palm trees nod/at the ocean/the ocean does/what it always does/trusts the moon completely.” Her poems seem to ask, How can we create futures that honour our legacies?
Kingston Surrealist poet Jason Heroux leads the conversation on poetry that reflects and projects, sometimes both at the same time.
Tickets: $30
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