There’s some necromancy happening in Vancouver. The Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly literary event held at Massey Arts Society in Chinatown. This long-running reading series is a curated seance of living poets performing the poetry of deceased poets as means to pay homage to the poetic lineage the came before. In this unique reading series format, featured living poets share the work of dead poet they’ve long admired. These performances take place on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations otherwise known as Vancouver, BC.
If you visit DPRS’ website and read the “about” section, you’ll notice there is sort of meta commentary happening in terms of haunted nature of this reading series and its many revivals throughout the years. Originally conceived by David Zieroth in 2007, DPRS has taken on many different forms through its organizing team and venue spaces. It feels quite fitting that this motif of “resurrection” runs through DPRS own history as an arts organization.
In its current iteration, Massey Arts Society has become the new venue for DPRS. Providing a summoning space for both the living poets and their conjured ghost-poem/poet companions. In a post-pandemic world where arts venues are becoming a scarcity, Massey Arts Society has provided a home for a plethora of Vancouver book launches, literary events, festivals, and workshops.
In July I was fortunate enough to be one of four feature poets at DPRS. Featuring at the DPRS is sort of a hybrid between presentation and performance. Readers are each given a twelve-minute time slot to briefly discuss the biography on their chosen dead poet and then read from their body of work. The poet I chose was Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian’s work, particularly her famous craft essay on “open texts” have been quite pivotal in my own linguistic experimentations. Hejinian was founding figure of the Language Poetry Movement of the 1970s and influential force in the world of experimental and Avant Garde poetics. Through a variety of techniques such as the “new sentence,” and an embrace of the open text, Hejinian’s work sought to engage the reader in new ways, making them active participants in the process of experimental lyricism, language materiality, and meaning-making.
The readers at DPRS are tasked with providing biographical details of the life of their dead poet, usually before they get into the poems. I found this quite fitting because even though Language writing tends to be anti-confessional and anti-realist, Hejinian’s work doesn’t reject these modes, and instead repeatedly engages with biography or autobiography. Through her work, Hejinian insisted that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent both reality and that which is often considered confessional, exploring the relationship between such writing practices and the subjectivity that biographical genres often obscure. Through this sense of a defamiliarization Hejinian’s writing urges us to be attentive to the ways in which meaning is emergent as well as to the constant unfolding of possibility that constitutes our public and private lives.
It was a privilege and honor to
represent the late Lyn Hejinian’s poetic body of work at DPRS. Great to take
part in one of Vancouver’s longest running literary series. Such a flurry of
poetic voices from my fellow readers.
Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in Composed: anthology of poetry 2024, periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filling Station. His poetic practice encompasses different modalities concerned with language acquisition, including receptive bilingualism, translingualism, speculative poetics, and asemic writing. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries and Michigan State University Libraries, respectively. In March 2024, Lê spent a two-week tenure as the poet-in-residence at Studio Faire, an artist residency located in Nèrac, France.