SARS-CoV-2 at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival
April 21, 2022 § Leave a comment
My poetry film SARS-CoV-2, with sound scored by Hazel Fairbairn, will be screening in person and virtually as part of “As the wind is breathing” showcase at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival:
Explorations and exploitations of sound—the sound of words, the sound of anxiety, the sound of abstraction. This showcase features works that bring ancient poetic traditions of musicality and rhythm to a contemporary foreground across Super 8 footage, paintings, performance, and animation. Some skim the surface of music video buoyancy, some are a discordant choreography of the senses, all use audio as integral to the experience of language.
Watch online, 21 April through 1 May; watch in person, 11 April through 29 April (Mon-Fri, 10am-5pm), at Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle, WA.
First performance of Ledi for the Assembly exhibit, New Media Gallery, New Westminster
October 23, 2021 § Leave a comment
First performance of Ledi (Book*hug 2018) as response to Assembly exhibit, New Media Gallery, New Westminster. Here, we are inside the Zimoun tower, a construct of cardboard boxes and cotton balls, drumming. Pt.1, “Wrenched from the cold earth,” was performed inside Zimoun. As Herodotus described the burial practices of the Scythians, we exited the grave/kurgan, circling the tower, and moved onward into the dark of the Tan archival exhibit. 
First gig at New Media Gallery — Performance of Ledi
September 13, 2021 § Leave a comment
This is the first of possibly 3 performances of my poetry-film assemblage of Ledi (Book*hug 2018) with fiddle/composer Hazel Fairbairn. Our performance is a response to the Assembly exhibit at the New Media Gallery, New Westminster, featuring Fiona Tan, Zimoun, and Turner-prize-winning artist Elizabeth Bishop: “A collection, a set of instructions, an archive, a regime, a system. This is the Assembly. We recognize the power of an assembly that works, moves and thinks together, with apparent order and regularity. There is a potent force in the impressions and sounds of order; be they utopian or dystopian.
We have an innate desire to control a world in chaos. The will to order is considered one of the essential forces driving human behaviour, leading to such things as laws and institutional systems, rational and scientific thought, educational systems, political and public health orders….war. Art itself can be understood as a desire to order; in the development of systems, rules and organizations. At the same time creative thought can be a powerful force with the ability to break down ordering systems And when the assembly breaks down what follows? Out of the chaos new orders are swiftly born. ” (New Media Gallery). Two more performances possibly to be scheduled on the 22nd and 23rd.
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SFU Lunch Poems: David Ly + Kim Trainor
June 10, 2021 § Leave a comment
I’ll be a featured reader along with David Ly at this month’s SFU Lunch Poems: 16 June 2021 @ 12pm. Click here to register for this live, online reading! Hope you can join 🙂
David Ly is the author of the poetry collection Mythical Man(Anstruther Books, 2020) and the chapbook Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018). His poetry has appeared in PRISM international, Arc Poetry Magazine, The /temz/ Review, carte blanche, and elsewhere. He is the Poetry Editor of This Magazine and sits on the Editorial Collective of Anstruther Press. In 2020, CBC named David on their annual Writers to Watch list.
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Ledi was a finalist for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award. Bluegrass will appear with Icehouse Press (Gooselane Editions) in 2022. Her poetry films, created with the musician Hazel Fairbairn, have screened at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2020 and the 9th International Film Festival in Athens, Greece in 2021. She teaches in the English department at Douglas College and lives in Vancouver, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
9th International Video Poetry Festival | Ghost
June 2, 2021 § Leave a comment
The 9th International Video Poetry Festival will begin this Sunday 6th June: an online platform due to the current pandemic restrictions. Normally it is hosted by +the Institute [for Experimental Art] in Athens, Greece. There will be a screening of Ghost, one of my poetry films based on Ledi. Musical score by Hazel Fairbairn.
Debuts this Sunday! You can check out the program here and the online screening platform here.
Shoutout to fellow Canadian film makers whose work will appear at the festival, amongst the 206 video artists from 44 countries!
Marco Joubert.
Sam Luk.
Mironel de Wilde.
Shirley Camia.
Ross Belot.
Helene Matte.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.
Archna Sahni.
Integument–Official Selection for the 2020 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival
September 9, 2020 § Leave a comment
“Integument,” the first in a series of poetry films I’m making from my book Ledi, has been selected to appear in November at the 2020 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. More details soon…..
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