Fiona Tinwei Lam : Moving Words in the City: Poetry Videos, Contests, Spontaneous Poems, Jazz and More

 

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.

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 Storytelling Centre.

A selection of 14 poetry videos is currently screening on rotation alongside other short films every weekday 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 that 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.

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

The Residency of Second & Third Chances: Leah Horlick at the CDWP, 2022-23

 

 

 

 

I was very fortunate to be the Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers’ Program from fall 2022 to spring 2023. It’s important for me to say that Jori Celona was awarded this residency in the first place, and had to turn the opportunity down for an important personal reason. I was honoured to be called in to fill the role in Celona’s stead and hope you’ll familiarize yourself with their work in lieu of their residency term. When I got the unexpected call from then-Program Coordinator Alex Handley inviting me to step in, it had been a difficult season. I had moved to Calgary from Vancouver in summer 2020, wanting to be driving distance to my family in Saskatoon while flights were stopped. By summer 2022, we were entering the I’ve-lost-count-now wave. There was so much to love about Mohkinstis: I had a satisfying day job, plus an editorial position with New Forum magazine—a revival of a historic local feminist publication produced by an excellent collective at the literary artist-run centre Loft 112. I was rapidly making up for ten years of sunshine deficiency on the (otherwise truly beloved) west coast. The drive to Banff or Kananaskis was shorter than my commute to work had been some years in Vancouver. My apartment was beautiful and affordable; I could walk along the Elbow River to the grocery store and a delicious French bakery and see the mountains. I lived at the edge of a nature preserve where I regularly saw bobcats, coyote, deer, hawks, and more rabbits than I could count. I was also extremely isolated, missed my friends, and was disturbed by a large, weekly anti-vaccine demonstration in a few of my regular neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, my family in Saskatoon was starting to hug each other again, without me. And, well—I had been rejected for the CDWP residency for the third time, having started applying before I ever lived in Calgary. Now my window for eligibility was rapidly closing, and with Calgary not panning out the way I had hoped, I knew it was time for me to leave and move home to Saskatoon. The week I booked the truck, Alex called to offer me the position.

I panicked on the phone. Of course I was interested. “Interested” was an understatement. But I also couldn’t stay in Calgary. I couldn’t keep going days without speaking to another human unless I weighed the risks and ran errands. And I had already given up my apartment! While I panicked, the compassionate, quick-thinking, and creative Alex talked me through a totally cogent plan. I’d pursue a hybrid residency and offer a majority of programs online—a wise decision regardless of my location, and one that may well have come to pass even if I stayed in the city, due to continually frightening and surging COVID numbers. I’d arrange to visit Mohkinstis a few times during the year for week-long visits that would coincide with important in-person events, yet to be revealed. It made perfect sense, and rather than create limitations, this flexibility opened up exciting possibilities all throughout my term, especially the ability to connect with under-served writers who are particularly at risk due to the ongoing pandemic. I remain extremely grateful to Alex and committee members Dr. Clem Martini, Dr. Bertrand Bickersteth, Vivian Hansen, Rosemary Griebel, Serena Bhandar, and Dr. Joshua Whitehead for trusting me with a hybrid model and so much experimental programming. Outgoing WiR Teresa Wong, offered me so much valuable insight based on her own term, and left me a beautiful, hand-drawn comic full of wisdom on my brand-new desk in my office. (Teresa has a new graphic memoir out now that you should most definitely order; I’ve seen excerpts and like all her work, it’s profoundly moving.) 

I had planned to go back to Saskatoon and recuperate and eat ice cream in my pajamas, etc. Not anymore! I had to get it together and talk to the paper and the radio and write a novel for the first time—the crux of my application to the residency, along with a robust, queer-centered proposal for community engagement, which is perhaps the hallmark of the residency. Its reputation as the highest-paid residency in Canada comes with a 50/50 split of writing time and free, public programming including free manuscript consultations. My schedule for consults was fully booked by January 2023; we maintained a waitlist until the very end of my term in June. Clients ranged from brand-new, brilliant emerging writers to very experienced mid-careerists with impressive publishing records. A number of folks have since reported back with positive news since then, following some of our revisions—book deals, grad school acceptances, first-time journal publications—which is very moving. (If you’re reading this—like I said in our consults—keep me posted on your good news!) Offering a majority of online consultations (and events) made it possible to reach rural writers, disabled, immunocompromised, and generally COVID-cautious writers, as well as a remarkable number of writers from Vancouver, Ontario, and the Maritimes who were able to book consultations if spots were available, after prioritizing writers located in Mohkinstis and on Treaty Seven territory or within Métis Region Three.

I think an undersung highlight of this residency is the amount of committee and administrative support the authors receive. I’m used to doing just about everything by myself, with a bestie, or a very small team. The gift of funded autonomy over my time and programming, with a built-in support network of about ten professionals is extremely rare. The committee and staff team were on deck for talking me through everything from wondering why writing a novel feels so much more vulnerable to me than poetry, to helping iron out bureaucratic wrinkles to create a BIPOC-specific virtual space. I want to specifically call attention to the time and energy Alex put into pre-screening the manuscript consultation documents I received from clients. I was fully prepared for a broad range of powerful content, but having never worked with this volume of consultations before, I was perhaps unprepared for the scale. Alex’s consistent work to flag consultations that included topics like explicit violence and self-harm was deeply appreciated and helped me show up more fully for our clients. For our in-person events, Alex arranged live captioning, CART services, scent reduction, and accommodated my fearful insistence on COVID protocols wherever possible, even as the university lifted restrictions. I remarked multiple times to Alex during my term that I am amazed she had not yet been headhunted by a publishing house due to her exemplary work with this program. Any author would benefit from her profound attention, and any publishing house would benefit from her comprehensive range of skills. I remain awed about what she was able to make possible for me, let alone during a three-day workweek while also completing her studies. I know she’s off making waves in her new chapter! We’re lucky that celebrated Calgary poet and writer Amy LeBlanc is now steering the program for outgoing and outstanding writer Francine Cunningham and incoming, incomparable Danny Ramadan. I would also be totally remiss without mentioning Nikki Reimer, an award-winning poet who also happens to be a professional on the Arts Communications & Marketing team at the university. Due to the themes of my writing, I’ve been known to find media interviews inducing of a cold sweat at best and nauseating at worst, and I had a marathon week lined up to announce my residency in mid-October. Nikki provided me with invaluable mentorship during those early days as I navigated a wide variety of media requests and developed some new coping skills for promotion.

The residency’s platform put me in front of new audiences and helped me partner with some top-notch prairie organizations to reach writers on and off-campus: the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, the Alexandra Writers’ Centre (thanks to Precious de Leon), and the Taylor Family Digital Library (with thanks to librarian Christena McKillop). One of my favourite parts of the residency was a collaborative workshop series I developed with Skipping Stone, a nonprofit that connects trans and gender diverse youth, adults, and families to comprehensive and low-barrier support across Alberta. I worked specifically with the fantastic Haley Wray, coordinator of Skipping Stone’s peer mentorship program, to develop and facilitate writing workshops for youth accessing services both in-person and online. While homophobia and trans-antagonism are heartbreaking realities across the country right now, I found that aspect of the climate in Alberta especially painful—the same as I do here in Saskatchewan—and this was a small way to combat some of my own perceived hopelessness. While we unfortunately weren’t able to collaborate on an event together during my term, I also met twice with Cal Gibbens, organizer of local queer & trans mutual aid collective Pansy Club. Pansy Club runs an extremely broad range of capacity-building programs for Calgary’s queer community, from dance parties to low-cost resource sharing events and a burgeoning open mic night. I so wished I had been able to take an even more active part in Calgary’s queer community when I lived in the city; I could not have imagined that the residency would give me such a meaningful second chance.           

The most starry-eyed, humbling moment of my term was the chance to meet Jamaica Kincaid (!!!!), who was the Distinguished Visiting Writer-in-Residence that year through a stroke of extreme luck I still can’t quite believe. Having a front-row seat at her event in conversation with Suzette Mayr was a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The Calgary Women’s Literary Club generously hosted me for a beautiful reading and discussion at the Memorial Park library. (Of course, we all love the gorgeous downtown branch in Calgary, but Memorial is really my favourite location. It was walking distance from my old apartment, frequently had ducks wandering onto the lawn from the riverbank, and is just across the street from beloved bookstore Shelf Life. Plus, the park was the site of Calgary’s first-ever public protest for gay rights, if I recall my queer history walking tour with Kevin Allen correctly in addition to fondly). I was also invited to participate in wonderful local reading series Flywheel and Single Onion. Through an exchange with the University of Alberta thanks to Thomas Wharton, I was able to meet and read with their tremendous Writer-in-Residence, Bänoo Zann, and make an online visit to Marilyn Dumont’s poetry class. Back in Calgary, I was very graciously invited to speak to a number of classes, including Dr. Rebecca Geleyn’s first-year creative writing students, whose contagious energy was incredibly reviving when I started to flag and wonder why I ever pitched writing a novel in the first place. I was also honoured to virtual visit a few classrooms, including Dr. Annette Tim’s Holocaust Studies students, who brought an undivided level of care, attention, and understanding to Moldovan Hotel that continues to make me emotional just thinking about it. And I was able to take some risks and offer some experimental workshops: how about a dress rehearsal for writers who are anxious about public readings? How about some “parallel time,” where we write together online in silence and prioritize people who benefit from body doubling and/or voice-off spaces? The residency gave me the freedom to explore interventions beyond traditional formats, as well as turn some of my skillshare articles I had completed as the Open Book Writer-in-Residence in April 2021 into interactive workshops.                         

Oh, also—somewhere in the midst of all this, while moving and packing and week-long stays in hotels and very long cab rides and unpacking, I completed a draft of a novel. There was significant hand-wringing, a whole lot of related Duolingo practice, and major-league brushing up on my Yiddish folktales. You can read an excerpt of this work-in-progress in issue #81 of filling station thanks to Omar Ramadan and editors. Big thanks as well to the crowd at Hello/Goodbye 2022 for helping me take it for a test drive. I was also solicited for a pair of new poems from Riddle Fence, which you can find in their upcoming fall 2024 issue, and for this essay in periodicities—thank you rob!

 I’m so grateful to the CDWP for providing me with a second chance at an improved relationship with Calgary. It would have been so painful to leave another city on an emotionally difficult note, similarly to my departure from Vancouver early on in the pandemic. The residency gave me a safer, more hopeful, and deeply literary way to connect with so much of what I’d missed out on while living on the territory in person, and resolved so many of my wishes and anxieties left unresolved from when I moved in the first place. Just this past weekend I was co-facilitating the Writers’ Guild of Alberta retreat outside of Caroline, thinking about what a different visit it would have been if not for the residency—perhaps with some dread and regret along for the ride—if indeed the visit would have happened at all! Organizers I met during the residency (thank you Ashley White and Ashley Mann!) hosted a beautiful weekend for us in the woods. I saw a fox for the first time, and my first shooting star in a long while, which I get to tuck neatly in beside my neighbourhood bobcat memories. I’m hopeful that I can keep nurturing the literary and creative connections we built across the prairies during my term, and I’m so glad I was really able to be in two places at once.

 

 

 

 

Leah Horlick is the author of three collections of poetry: Riot Lung, For Your Own Good, and Moldovan Hotel. She is a past winner of Arc's Poem of the Year and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize (Canada's only award for emerging LGBTQ2S+ writers. Her second book was named a Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. She was the 2022-23 Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers’ Program. Originally from Saskatoon on Treaty Six territory and the homelands of the Métis, Leah is happy to have moved back home after many years away in Vancouver and Calgary.