The other artistic spinoff from the anthology “Refugium”, my poem “Slick” was among those incorporated into “Weather Watching”, an exhibit of sculptural coracles by artist Erika Grimm that hung from the rafters of the White Rock Museum and Archives in White Rock, BC. in February and March of 2018.
In 2017, my poem “Slick” was published in Refugium, Poems for the Pacific, an anthology edited by Yvonne Blomer and published by Caitlin Press. Originally published as a short prose poem in my collection Passenger Flight, it was recast here as short poem. The poem was inspired by memories of the Valdez oil spill, although of course it could reference the travesties wreaked on animal life by any oil spill. It’s an excellent anthology, by the way, featuring fine poems by the likes of Rachel Rose, Jan Zwicky, Patrick Lane, Maleea Acker, Barbara Pelman, Steven Heighton, Lorna Crozier, Fiona Tinwei Lam, and others. For the anthology — and for this poem in particular — there were a couple of surprising artistic spinoffs which I’ll describe in other posts. Below, a handwritten version of the poem.
Wrote Eve Krakow, one of the contributors to the Shy Anthology, to its editors (and she gave me permission to quote this), “…I too have been reading through the anthology and I’m amazed at how much I recognize myself in these stories and poems. It is something of a revelation. Maybe I’ve read stories with this character type before, but it’s quite different to have a whole book of them. Wow. Thanks for putting this together!”I just received a copy of Shy: An Anthology, published by The University of Alberta Press. It’s a beautiful book — I love the cover — and one of my poems happens to be inside. It’s a very personal confession called “Women Friends” that I was too shy to publish for over 25 years! It’s good to see it finally find a print home.
There’s good stuff in here: poems by Don McKay, Steven Heighton, Lorna Crozier, Wayman Chan, Bruce Meyer, and others. Prose by Aritha Van Herk, Sydney Sharpe, Russel Wangersky, et al.
The Montreal launch will be taking place on Nov. 11 at 7pm, at The Depanneur Cafe, 208 rue Bernard Ouest. I’ll be reading selections of the anthology along with fellow Montreal contributors Jeff Miller and Eve Krakow.
Here’s me, reading a prose poem from Passenger Flight at The Art Bar in Toronto in 2009.
Brian Campbell 