the heartbeat of change
Posted by Daniela Elza on Jun 18 2009 | Comment now »
dedicated to the people of Iran
the sound of thousands voices chanting in the night as one is the sound of hope. is the sound of prayer. the clapping of thousands of hands a sea of arms come to speak as one thunder. for this day stuck in the throat. a silent scream. light a thousand candles. do not bear to watch democracy burning itself down dropping out of our mourning sky. the people know. the people know when enough is enough. and that much a leader should know. light candles. it does not wait for anyone— the orange death. with a fist in the sun. green fingers sprout in the clouds of peace. the vigil is not over yet.
:introducing some chaos:
Posted by Daniela Elza on Jun 14 2009 | Comment now »
This was my first time at the League of Canadian Poets (LCP) Poetry Festival and Conference. I enjoyed the readings. I had fun reading at the different events.
On Thursday night I was excited to launch some of the collabrated work I have done with Harold Rhenisch and Rob Taylor.
On Friday night at the Cafe Deux Soleils I read to an awesome crowd. One of the new members did not show up for the reading, so the moderator said he will introduce some chaos: at the end had about seven or eight of us come up on stage with one poem each, and asked us to read our poems at the same time on the four mics. So we did. It was crazy, really. Half way through, as some of the poets dropped out, I started hearing the others and started pausing and playing. I was beginning to have fun with it. I can see how this can work with some tinkering.
It was good to attend some of the panels. These ones worked for me:
- “Working Class Heroes—work poetry and why it matters“.
One thing that came up and I thought was a necessary thing to talk about is how the poet who writes about work is never sure how his peers will take that. It is like we lead these dual lives until the book is published and we are faced with how public this other sided of your life becomes. To the surprise of the writers who spoke their colleagues were proud of them. Honoured that someone would write about what it is to be a builder, or carpenter, or a doctor. What greater reward than that? And always that interesting question: what we define as work in our society. - Who is In, Who is Out? The Anthology.
Funny, heartfelt, and honest. It turns out you cannot put an anthology together without pissing someone off. As Gary Geddes pointed out:You are at the risk of being accused of including your friends, or as an editor one should not have any friends, or possibly lose one’s friends in the process. Considering how the conversation about an anthology revolves around who is in, who is out especially in the reviews of such books, it makes one think: What do we want of anthologies? Are we too vain? I wrote a review of such a review in an earlier post, myself quite grieved at the opportunity reviewers miss to actually look at what they have in their hands. A review then ends up being an explicit statement of a reviewer’s own biases, blind spots, and unreasonable expectations. Pity to subject the book to the these, rather than actually trying to see what the book set out to achieve and evaluate if it has done it well.
I personally am interested in the community aspect of such endeavours. Poetry and poets are fractured and scattered. In such moments when an anthology is put together they are brought together into a community. Both the ones that I was in Rocksalt and A Verse Map of Vancouver were such occasions for me. To get in touch with younger and older poets who are alive and working in this field and start building connections. Not to mention the wider relevance to the communities we live in. So anthologies can be viewed as community building artifacts and events. And a kind of snapshot of a moment and a celebration. Do we compile anthologies to be read by other poets? Or do we intend for the anthology to reach a wider audience? And so on. A lot to discuss and to think about there. - Spoken Word:Deep Roots and Diverse Shoots.
I missed a bit of the beginning of this panel but soon after I came in one person left disgruntled. Hmmm. So, what is the big deal. There is a difference for me between reading a poem and inhabiting a poem. And the spoken word artists for me lean into the side of the inhabiting the words they speak. Embodying them. And carrying me along with them. Transfering that embodiment. I have suffered through a lot of readings of poems. And some very good poems, but the reading got in the way.
So we have a lot to learn from each other. Ultimately there is the text from which we all work from, and it connects us. And the poems on the page as well have their continuum of how much poetry they capture. So there are all these degrees of completions and inhabitions. And we try to classify them? And somewhere along the way we forget the passion.
We need to sustain the dialogue. And shed these artificial lines that someone comes and draws in the sand. Because the waves that lap from the ocean of poetry will keep smoothing them out. As Robert Bringhurst reminds us:“Professions become institutions, and institutions close their doors and windows, leaving poetry outside. … Outside—meaning outside human management—is the place where poetry lives.”
Today I have to gather myself, remember what it is I should be doing after this alternate reality of the League. Most conferences that last for a few days do that. There is a moment of oversaturation and then the re-membering of the parts that matter and nurture us.
league of canadian poets
Posted by Daniela Elza on Jun 11 2009 | Comment now »
I will be at the League of Canadian Poets reading tonight and I will be at the conference tomorrow through Sunday. I will also be circulating the petition for the funding of periodicals. If you are not passing a sheet around for signing, please find me and sign the one I will be passing around. Or hand in your signed sheets to me and I have volunteered to mail them all in to the Malahat Review. They are collating the petition and sending it to parliament.
Yan Martel also addressed this issue in a recent letter to Stephen Harper which you can read here. Hey, the good news is, after two years, there has been a few more responses from Harper’s office. The sad part is that they are so official, boring, and sound like the letters my daughter used to get when she wrote to Gordon Campbell on BC energy issues. I have a feeling they must have a template for these letters. Such a contrast to Yan Martel’s letters.
Two events that may be of interest:
- Today, Thursday, June 11. There will be a reading at the Cafe Montmartre at 4362 Main Street starting at 7.30. Every poet will have 5-7 min. I will be devoting my time to reading or rather co-reading my collaborated poems with Harold Rhenisch and Rob Taylor, the poem I did with Dethe (but he may not be there) and Christina Shah. This will celebrate these frigile beginnings into collaborating.
- Friday June 12, I will read from A Verse Map of Vancouver as part of the opening of the League’s annual conference, starting somewhere closer to 12.30- 1.30 at SFU Harbour Centre, Segal Centre.
I will also be reading for 10 min. as a new member of the League of Canadian Poets that night at 7:30 at Cafe Deux Soleils.
Maybe I will see you there.
Press 1: 2 poems
Posted by Daniela Elza on May 27 2009 | Comment now »
Press 1 online zine published two of my poems asphalt spring and memory calculus in their current issue, Vol. 3, Number 1 (May -August 2009). Thank you to the editors (Arlene Ang, Valerie Fox, Dennis Moritz, and Phyllis Wat) for selecting my work.
Interview in THE PEAK
Posted by Daniela Elza on May 04 2009 | 2 Comments »
Here is the interview in The Peak in which I was featured in relation to B.C. Book and Magazine Week’s Main Street Literary Tour on April 23. Thanks, Tessa.
are our poems domesticated?
Posted by Daniela Elza on Apr 24 2009 | Comment now »
I just started reading Everywhere being is Dancing: Twenty pieces of Thinking by Robert Bringhurst. Yes, if I have not mentioned it before, he is one of my heroes. Or shall I say beacons? Lighthouse? Like Tim Lilburn. Like Gaston Bachelard.
I am so busy reading right now, heading into comprehensives and all, that I will just leave you here with a quote.
Bringhurst says:
Poetry is knowing, but verse is a form, a technique, a device.
then goes on to say (on the next page):
What we hear in many poems is institutional or habitual form: the stride of fixed opinion, not the brief ecstatic dance;
and my favorite part:
Verse in the sense of a measured, repetitive pattern of syllables is scarcely to be found among paleolithic cultures, though poetry there is usually abundant. Peoples who choose not to domesticate plants and animals typically choose not to domesticate language either. The real hunter-gatherers I have known use language with great attentiveness and care, and they craft it with skill and dexterity — but in their oral literature, they typically accept its evolving structures and textures as part of the terrain, like the ways of animals, the growth habits of plants, and the grain of stone and wood. Sentences move like living creatures through the forest of the body and the mountains of the mind. They are snared when the time is ripe, and may be shared whenever the need or excuse arises. A song or story truly heard is a feast enjoyed, a meal consumed, a strength acquired. Language is not a beast to be yoked and harnessed but an independent being whose powers may contradict or amplify one’s own.
This is such a comfort today, when so much of what looks like poetry is not. And some that doesn’t is so much closer.
:4poets: to be published by MTP this fall
Posted by Daniela Elza on Apr 12 2009 | Comment now »
This is the cover of the book that I will be featured in along with three other emerging poets. It will be published by Mother Tongue Publishing (September, 2009) in their New BC Poets, a new MTP series, which will present emerging and elder BC poets.
4 poets: Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, Onjana Yawnghwe
is the first book in this series.
I am excited about this book because it has a vision, a new intent in poetry publishing: a bouquet over a solo performance. A book that is trying to rethink the poetry book. In its format the book will include a wider scope of a poet’s work. It will highlight a number of new poems by each of the four poets, translations of a poem into French, Thai, Bulgarian and Tahltan, poetry worksheets, interviews, author photographs, poetics and short biographies. All four of us have previously appeared in Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry also published by Mother Tongue Publishing in 2008. This will be our trade book debut. I really appreciate the community that also that emerges and forms around such publications.
Some stats on the book: It will be 120 pages, CDN $18.95, 6 x 9, trade paperback, french flaps, coloured endpages, 978-1-896949-03-1. Book Design is by Mark Hand. Cover: Landscape & Memory, 68 x 54″, 2005, acrylic on canvas, by Ian Thomas of Salt Spring Island.
A bit of information worth mentioning:
Mother Tongue Publishing is the first publisher dedicated to always using original BC artists’ work for their covers & books. All printing & publishing is done in Canada. No work is sent off shore to China.
For now launches are planned for: Salt Spring, Vancouver, Victoria, and Prince George. Will update this as more information comes in.
Finally here are the Poet’s Bios:
- Daniela Bouneva Elza is a doctoral student in Philosophy of Education at SFU. Her work appears in more than 30 publications, including The Capilano Review, CV2, Van Gogh’s Ear, Vallum, Rocksalt Anthology, A Verse Map of Vancouver, and Poetic Inquiry (SensePublishers). Elza is currently compiling her first full-length manuscript. She lives with her husband and two children in Vancouver.
- Peter Morin is an independent curator, visual artist and writer working in Victoria BC. He is from the crow clan of the Tahltan Nation. Morin was assistant editor for Redwire Native Youth Media Society, working on Redwire and Red Directions magazine. As a visual and performance artist, Morin’s work looks deeply into de-colonizing through relationship building and speaking one indigenous language.
- Al Rempel is currently an alternate teacher in Prince George, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His poems have been published in The Malahat Review, GRAIN, in the online journals Reflections on Water and stonestone, and anthologized in Rocksalt, Half in the Sun, TheForestry Diversity Project, and Down in the Valley. He has a book of poetry forthcoming with Caitlin Press.
- Onjana Yawnghwe was born in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and grew up in Vancouver, BC. A graduate of the University of British Columbia (MA), she is the co-founder Xerography, a little literary journal, and fish magic press, a micro press which produces fine, hand-made publications. She lives in Burnaby, BC.
mutating the signature: take 4
Posted by Daniela Elza on Apr 10 2009 | Comment now »
Here is the fourth, and last poem, that was accepted for qarrtsiluni’s issue on mutating the signature titled: rounding up the seasons. It is one that Christina Shah and I collaborated on. Take a look. I am currently reading Living in the World as if it were Home by Tim Lilburn and it is delicious. It is so good I want to lick the pages. Otherwise, life is busy, busy. So, more later.
tracing the poetry/philosophy loop
Posted by Daniela Elza on Mar 29 2009 | 2 Comments »
I want to thank Dr. James Hatley (Professor of Philosophy) for his comment on my work. He was the guest editor of the special issue of Environmental Philosophy journal titled Species of Thought: In the Approach of a More-that-Human World. I sent a number of my crow poems in the form of a poessay, five of which got selected for publication. The manuscript I am putting together now will be all my crows, all together. Hopefully it will find a publisher that would release them into the world. Crows have a special place for me in my work. I feel connected to them and I cannot ignore them. Anyway, back to the editorial in which Professor Hatley says:
“How greatly must human language be stretched, how creative must we become in both our perceiving and our speaking, if we are to witness responsibly the human world? Daniela Elza’s poem In the Eye of a Crow comes directly after [Cheryl] Lousely’s essay as an exemplar of another sort of writing and subjectivity that might be more in line than that of [Farley] Mowat with sustaining our responsibilities to the living world. Among the innovative features of her poem, Elza asks that its open verse structure be read in all possible directions on the page. In requesting this of her readers, she is moving them to a more radical responsibility in regard to the words she has offered on behalf of a crow. She is also breaking open any controlling narrative structure by which the hold upon another living entity’s world might be solidified.”
I am thrilled that the work is communicating with its form and content on the philosophical level as well. This much appreciated feedback adds to the spiraling loop between writer and reader. Thank you, Dr. Hatley.