As one of several nominees for the Vancouver Poet Laureate position back in 2021, I had to propose a Legacy Project for the jury to consider. What immediately came to mind was a project involving poetry videos. Since 2009, I’d been collaborating with animators and filmmakers on making poetry videos, wondering why more local poets and filmmakers weren’t involved, given the popularity of the genre in Europe and the US. Here was a fabulous opportunity, not only to engage the public with poetry after an arduous period of pandemic lockdowns and isolation, but to kick-start the creation of a full fleet of poetry videos based on good poems about local historical, cultural and ecological sites that could both spark and deepen the public’s engagement with both poetry and place, while the erasures of the past.
Why poetry videos? They can expand the reach of poetry by making it accessible to people across borders and backgrounds. Many people are intimidated or confused by poetry. Maybe they’ve had a bad experience in school with analyzing a poem to death. They might not “get” a poem and turn away, thinking it’s too difficult or esoteric. Poetry videos can allow a poem to be read and heard of course, but most importantly experienced through visual imagery, colour, pattern, music, narration and more. Filmmakers in turn might be inspired by a poem’s metaphors and distilled, compressed language which might serve as a spine or screenplay for a sequenced collage of visuals and sound design. What’s also very cool about poetry videos is that they can sometimes extend and deepen the meaning of the poem itself. The visual images and sound design can tap into the unconscious, the unspoken, and universal, drawing upon the words and the white space of the poem on the page.
City Poems Contest 2022
In order to set the stage for the generation of poetry videos for the City Poems Project, it was important to start with strong poems by diverse writers about diverse historical, cultural and ecological sites. So I organized a city-wide poetry contest in 2022 for youth, emerging and established poets, judged by Rachel Rose, David Ly and Bonnie Nish. Wanting to encourage people to look at the city with fresh eyes and through a poetic lens, I reached out to community centres, schools, writers groups, and community groups to see who would respond, and how. Would there be poems that would engage with complex issues of conflict and loss, poems that would reflect upon the impact of urbanization, immigration and colonialism? As a first generation settler who has lived in Vancouver for over fifty years, I felt it was essential to acknowledge this area’s original inhabitants and its complex, multi-faceted history. And indeed, many writers took up the challenge, as evidenced by the 238 eligible poems that were submitted.
Making Poetry Videos 2023-24
The City Poems Project’s next phase in 2023 involved encouraging students from four pre-selected post-secondary courses at SFU Surrey (Moving Images IAT 344), UBC (Indigenous New Media , FNIS 454) and Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2D Animation 211 and Foundation 160 Core Media Studio) to make poetry videos based on the shortlisted poems from the previous year’s poetry contest, supplemented with a few other notable published poems to ensure representation. Many of the students were not familiar with working with poetry or with working in teams for video production. It was a journey of discovery for them, as well as for me.
Thirty-three poetry videos were submitted to the City Poems Poetry Video Contest judged by Heather Haley (former curator of Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival). Two youth finalist poets also made videos. The following year, after the contest, nine more poetry videos were made by SFU IAT 344.
Here’s a 6:40 minute trailer of compiled clips from all the poetry videos. (You can also check out the full versions on the VPL YouTube Playlists 2023 and 2024.) Audiences have responded especially well to “Postcard Home from English Bay” which is as surreal and zany as Alex Leslie’s poem, “This was supposed to be for Nora” featuring gorgeous animation accompanying author Junie Desil’s narration along with Hendrix-like riffs, as well as Vivian Li’s video “The Garden” (trailer here) that elegantly interprets her own poem, and Kenneth Karthik’s kaleidoscopic “Our Punjabi Market” based on Kuldip Gill’s vibrant poem.
Seven student poetry videos have gone on to be selected at 12 festivals around the world, including Cadence Poetry Video Festival (Seattle), Aotearoa Poetry Video Festival (New Zealand), Resonans Festival (Copenhagen), Drumshanbo Poetry Film Festival (Ireland), Midwest Video Poetry Festival (Madison, Wisconsin), and Living with Buildings (Coventry, UK) among others. Two of the poetry videos have won awards. One was selected last year for rotational screening at Vancouver’s Chinatown Storytellling Centre.
A selection of 14 poetry videos is currently screening on rotation alongside other short films every weekdays until May 2025 at the Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen, an outdoor public screen located at the intersection of Kingsway and East Broadway. I hosted an online screening of some of this set of poetry videos at REELpoetry festival in Houston, Texas in April this year. This fall, I collaborated with newly graduated fine arts student, Quinn Kelly to make Lost Stream, a two-minute video based on my poem about one of the lost and hidden streams of Vancouver.
Geolocative Poetry App
The third stage of the City Poems Project involves the development of a geolocative app by the CEDaR team at UBC. The first stage will be launched in early 2025. The app which is in its trial stage right now is a lot of fun--similar to Pokemon Go—and will foster interactive site-based learning outside the classroom setting. Students and the public will be able to use their cell phones to “find” audio recordings of some of the City Poems Project poems.
Publication and Teaching Resources
As part of my goal to encourage people to read, write and watch poetry, I created a teaching resource for schools that would include local poems about local places that would be relevant to the students. The City Poems 2022-2024, a free downloadable e-publication (also available as a PDF) includes the 27 shortlisted poets from the City Poems Contest along with additional local poems which were turned into poetry videos. The publication includes links to Vancouver-themed poetry books, poetry video resources, and a guide for local poets (reading series, consultations, courses, festivals, etc.). The poems and poetry videos deal with Musqueam history (Debra Sparrow), Japanese Canadian internment (Joy Kogawa), the historic Black neighbourhood of Hogan’s Alley (Junie Desil), Chinatown gentrification and unknown buried Chinese workers (Donna Seto, Jimmy Wang), the 1914 Komagata Maru incident and Punjabi Market (Sadhu Binning and Kuldip Gill), the 1958 Ironworkers’ bridge disaster (Gary Geddes), the St. George Greenway’s buried waterway (Rita Wong). Here’s a handy two-page summary which has links to several of the poems and poetry videos that might inspire students and non-students to write place-based poems and/or create poetry videos o f their own.
Community Outreach
I’ve had some amazing experiences as poet laureate and learned so much. Although it usually takes me months to write and polish a single poem, I typed almost two dozen spontaneous poems on request on the spot on an ancient manual typewriter at Main and Hastings for the Heart of the City Festival in 2022 and 2023. Although I hadn’t written any animal-themed poems before, I helped the VPL host a dog-themed poetry tent during Canine Library events in 2022 and 2023 at Trout Lake Park. I loved helping people write about their past, present and future canine companions, and sharing published dog poems that made passers-by chuckle in recognition.
For Poetry Month last April, I partnered with Coastal Jazz for an evening of spoken word and improvised jazz at Tyrant Studios above the Penthouse. Spoken word poets Tawahum, Jillian Christmas, Johnny Trinh, and RC Weslowski performed city-themed poems while musicians saxophonist John Gross, pianist Lisa Cay Miller, bassist Théo Girard, fiddler Josh Zubot and trumpeter Feven Kidane improvised. There were other musical events in the previous years: I read water-themed poems alongside a Celtic fiddler and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra at the Chan Centre for the Early Music Society’s summer music festival in 2022. I performed two poems accompanied by electric guitarist, Vern Beamish for a Christmas fundraiser organized by Word Vancouver for Musqueam families at the Mountain View Cemetery in 2023.
In addition to school visits, presentations on teaching poetry, and poetry readings, I held online place-based poetry workshops for the VPL and Heritage Vancouver at the tail end of the pandemic, then moved into live workshops for the public at Mountain View Cemetery, the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Garden, Oppenheimer Park, the Museum of Vancouver, the Chinese Canadian Museum, the Chinatown Storytelling Centre, as well as a few times with the Downtown Eastside Writers Collective at the Carnegie Centre. I wrote articles featuring local poets for Earth Day, National Indigenous History Month, Black History Month, and Asian Heritage Month for The Tyee online news magazine.
Given the rise of anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, it was meaningful to be invited to guide a class of grade 4/5 students at Tecumseh Elementary School in East Vancouver to write short poems about Vivian Jung, the first Chinese Canadian teacher hired by the Vancouver School Board in 1950 and who played a role in desegregating a local public pool in 1945 during a time when informal and formal racial segregation was common in BC. The school’s anti-racism committee produced a booklet of the student poems as a fundraiser for a school mural to commemorate her role. With the help of videographer Analee Weinberger, we put together a poetry video, “Ode to Vivian Jung” narrated by the students and based on a cento that I assembled by weaving together lines from each of the students’ poems. The poetry video was recently selected for rotational screening at the Chinatown Storytelling Centre. I began and ended my tenure with poetry contests: this summer, the Chinese Canadian Museum approached me to assist them in setting up and judging a poetry contest based on their superb exhibit about The Chinese Exclusion Act.
I also wrote a poem about a local Japanese Canadian family’s donation of 1000 cherry trees to the Vancouver Park Board in 1935. The donated trees were not planted until the family was interned along with 22,000 other Japanese Canadians during World War II. With the help of a local tree expert, Nina Shoroplova, we determined that four ancient cherry trees near the Stanley Park causeway were probably the only ones remaining from the original donation. Printer Soyeon Kim of New Leaf Editions typeset the poem by hand and illustrated the broadsheet with a woodblock print. Of the 20 broadsheets were printed, one was given to the granddaughter of the interned family, composer Leslie Uyeda, and others to the Nikkei National Museum, Historic Joy Kogawa House, and VPL. Recipients will also include the Landscapes of Injustice Project at UVIC, the Museum of Vancouver, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival and UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.
It’s been an intense three years as the city’s sixth poet laureate. I had many additional ideas for possible projects, but had to continually rein myself in, given the limits of working from home with minimal institutional administrative support except for key public events. Many people have erroneously assume that the Vancouver poet laureate role is publicly funded or confuse it with the library’s four-month writer-in-residence position. The Vancouver poet laureateship is funded by a private endowment grant to the Vancouver Foundation made by a local philanthropist in 2006. The $7,500 a year, part-time position has a two to three year term, and is overseen by the City of Vancouver (Cultural Services), the Vancouver Public Library, and the Vancouver Writers’ Festival.
The honorary role became a lens through which I saw the city anew: how a multitude of arts and culture organizations form the essential connective tissue of a community, and how complex layers of history lie beneath what we might overlook or take for granted. I’ve been inspired by the trust, faith and support of the post-secondary teachers and students who dove into the unknown with me, the poets who submitted their poems to the contest or who let students turn their poems into poetry videos, and the hardworking and creative staff of various local organizations and institutions with whom I collaborated. During the transition from those difficult pandemic years, I’ve used my role to affirm that there are people of diverse backgrounds and ancestries whose cultures and histories have long been interwoven into the fabric of this city, celebrating presence over absence, poetry over silence.
I hope that the City Poems Project has served as a creative launching pad for everyone involved. May the seeds of poetic inspiration find fertile soil wherever they land.
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Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored three poetry collections and a children’s book. Her poems have been included in Best Canadian Poetry (2010, 2017 anniversary edition, and 2020) and thrice with BC’s Poetry in Transit program. She has collaborated on several award-winning poetry videos made with filmmakers and animators that have screened at festivals internationally. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer (Leaf Press, 2011), and co-edited two nonfiction anthologies, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) with Cathy Stonehouse and Shannon Cowan, and Love Me True: Writers on the Ups, Downs, Ins & Outs of Marriage (Caitlin Press, 2018) with Jane Silcott. Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Prize and other awards, her work appears in over 45 anthologies, including Best Canadian Essays. A former lawyer, she teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies. fionalam.net
