Poetry Day Ireland, 28 April 2022, 8pm GMT, online.
Beir Bua Press and Michelle Moloney King will host a poetic linguistic opera celebrating Written in the Stars, along with editor Michelle Moloney King for Poetry Night 2023 with two April launches; The Fabulous Op by Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin, and Wayne Mason’s <Reboot> More So…Disconnected.
The Fabulous Op by Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin.
Combining poetry, music, sound poetry, and visual poetry, you are most welcome to join us (GB and GB) as we disassemble the canon, language, poet before your very eyes. In a call to disorder, we will launch The Fabulous Op, published by Beir Bua Press, sit back and watch it flutter and flap its way to the sun and down into the sea. It will be a poetic operation, a poet’s operative, a linguistic opera, an opulence of language. Yes, we said may the alphabet always rise to meet the tongue, may each letter quiver fabulously, yes, upon your back. Yes, may the seeds of broken speech flower into splendour. We will.
Wayne Mason, <Reboot> More So…Disconnected.
Sound artist and poet, Wayne Mason, will share his interpretation of his word poetry through the lens of the star music in an experimental soundtrack – collection published by Beir Bua Press, <Reboot> More So…Disconnected.
Bios:
Gregory Betts is an experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (2005), the world’s first collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150. His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics. He has performed these works hundreds of times in many countries, including at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the “Cultural Olympiad.” He is a professor of Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University, where he has produced two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013—shortlisted finalist for the Gabrielle-Roy Prize) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2021—winner of the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize), both with University of Toronto Press. He is the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Associate Director of the Social Justice Research Initiative. His most recent book is Foundry (2021), a collection of visual poems inspired by a font named after a 15th century poet. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 26 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long listed for Canada Reads. His interactive writing installation using old typewriters and guitar processors was featured during 2016-2017 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Forthcoming books include The Most Charming Creatures (ECW Press, Fall 2022), Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses Eye, with Lillian Nećakov (Guernica, Spring 2023) and Portal (Potential Books, forthcoming.) A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is four-time recipient of Hamilton Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award. He was one of the judges for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. A PhD in music composition, Barwin has been Writer-in-Residence at University of Toronto (Scarborough), Laurier, Western University, McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library, Hillfield Strathallan College, Sheridan College and Young Voices E-Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, to at-risk youth in Hamilton and currently mentors through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. His writing has been published in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally—from Readers Digest to Granta and Poetry to the Walrus—and his writing, music, media works and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally. Though born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and has never been Governor of Louisiana. Garybarwin.com
Wayne Mason is a writer and sound artist from central Florida USA. He is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and experimental prose. A product of his working class surroundings, Mason is as influenced by machines and industrial landscapes as much as he is by the cut-up method and deconstruction. He has used these as tools to create writing and syntactical deconstruction that has been published widely in the small press in both magazines and anthologies.
Wayne Mason also records experimental audio, using everything from synths to everyday objects to create sonic experiments ranging from harsh noise to dark ambient soundscapes. For nearly three decades he has been involved in the experimental music scene both solo and as one half of the electronic duo Blk/Mas.
Poetry Day Ireland, 28 April 2022, 8pm GMT, online.
Beir Bua Press 