Art Bar Poetry Series Podcast

Both a poet and translator, Colin Carberry admires the passion of Mexican poets and the passion average Mexicans show for them. He reveres the quiet passion of Irish rebel and poet Bobby Sands. His globetrotting behaviour has found him on enough islands to write a decalogue of sonnets. And what else? He's a snappy dresser. Just look at those shoes.

Blaise Moritz writes about cities: this city, distant cities, a city that qualifies as imaginary. Writers are often told to write what they know. What if all you know is cities? Does architecture become nature? Does civilization exist north of Lawrence Avenue?

Poet and editor John Barton can't help seeing fish as flesh, dreams as sex and spies in his hallway. He also can't sit down with a menu without correcting it. His ninth collection of poems, Hymn, was published this fall.

Writer and filmmaker Leanne Averbach took a detour from her path to becoming a poet into radical leftist politics. Her poems reflect a number of social concerns along with an unmistakable passion for living.

For a guy from the west coast who resides in a tiny Saskatchewan town, Allan Safarik has a lot of memories of Toronto, many of them based not far from Clinton’s. His poems are populated with characters, whether they be rural folk, big city folk or Can-lit giants, who happen to be old friends, such as Dorothy Livesay and Milton Acorn.

Matthew Dryden doesn't mind being known as a "sweet boy". He likes romantic movies, even the ones called chick flicks, and isn't afraid to say so. He is not even abashed to say he's watched every episode of Gilmore Girls.

Discover more in the Art Bar's exclusive tell-all interview.

Jill Battson has been traveling around for awhile, but folks who've been on the scene for a while remember her as an important local presence in poetry. Along with organizing the popular Poets Refuge reading series she coordinated poetry readings on a bus, in a boxing ring and on MuchMusic for awhile through the Word Up! poetry videos series.

Her latest pass through Toronto is especially triumphant. She was commissioned to write the libretto for Dark Star Requiem, a dramatic oratorio which opens this year's Luminato arts festival. The libretto's text concerns the topic of AIDS, a cause close to her heart.

For countless years Heather Cadsby was a tireless and indispensable presence at the Art Bar until she left it to the rest of us to discover in her absence just how much work she did for the series as a long-standing and long-suffering board member.

We're happy to receive her back as a poet, reading from her excellent and playfully sardonic book of poems, Could Be.

Come back any time, Heather.

Yehuda Fisher has cool hair and his own personal stash of lightsabers. He has the bat signal on his wallpaper. Geeks in the house. What part of drunk at 3 am didn't you get? And she liked it.

Up from Chicago where she teaches creative writing, Suzanne Buffam treated everyone to morsels of philosophy that wound up as love poems and one-liners just this side of tears. Her writing explored burning houses, heartbreak's correlation to fruit and why Parisian waiters won't congratulate you for chewing for chewing your food.

Regarding her verse, Suzanne says, "Basically, my poetry is clear, I hope, and plain-spoken enough for a child to read. If it presents the reader with any difficulties, they tend to be of the sort that lie beneath its surfaces. In general, I'm interested in paradox, the way a poem can assert seemingly opposite truths at once. The way life does."

Poet, publisher and soon-to-be novelist Sandra Kasturi delivered an animated, frequently irreverent performance of work that drew on genres such as science-fiction, horror, fairy tales (the earlier, gut-level kind, before the Disney treatment), a hint of Gothic, bodice-ripping romance, along with a generous dollop of kitchen-sink humour. Young mistress, behave!

Once again, Souvankham Thammavongsa proved that neither a loud voice nor towering stature were required to command the attention of a room as she presented compact, keenly-crafted poems which focus on both the minute and the cosmic. Souvankham says the architecture of her verse concentrates on "material, proportion, and balance."

Nashira Dernesch's poems confront love, death and the everyday with honesty, unvarnished sincerity and kindness. She claims the goal of her poetry is "to make a feast of all her losses." The poems from her chapbooks, It's No Secret You'll Feel Better and This Snowing Under are full of personal history. Nashira dedicated the reading to her sister, Shannon, who was on hand to listen for the first time.

Like many people, Sandra Kasturi is seeking William Shatner's genitals. She does a mean Jack Nicholson, and you don't want to see her attic. She does not love the pig light.

Valentino Assenza is in his usual good humour and sure of his hockey loyalties, but has an ominous curiosity about Lady Gaga. By the way, "Art Bardy Har-Har" was his idea, but he's too modest to boast about it.

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