News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke
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News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke We welcome new members who share the goals and objectives of The Feminist Caucus. If you will be attending the agm in Toronto, June 7-9, please join us for the panel on Friday at 2 p.m.-3 p.m. and the brief Business Meeting (to plan 2014) & Reading at 3 p.m.-4 pm; and, on Saturday, the Open Reading at 4:15 p.m. -5:15 p.m., when we will be launching Poetry & The Disordered Mind , edited by Lynda Monahan, with readers Penn Kemp and Janet Vickers. This month, we also feature a brand-new review by Susan McCaslin of Doyali Farah Islam’s Yūsuf and the Lotus Flower (Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 2011); in addition to Previews of Untying the Apron Strings, Daughters Remember Mothers of the 1950s (Toronto: Guernica Books ) AND Force Field - 77 Women Poets of British Columbia , edited by Susan Musgrave (Salt Spring Island B.C.: Mother Tongue Press). Schedule: Friday, June 7, 2013 The Feminist Caucus Panel 2013 is at 2 pm Note: Immediately following the Panel, at 3 pm, there will be a brief business meeting to plan next year's program. Come and join us! Then we have an open reading , all welcome, until 4 pm. Schedule: Saturday, June 8, 2013 , there is the Fem Caucus Open Reading (all welcome) at 4:15 pm. We will be launching Poetry & the Disordered Mind . Janet Vickers and Penn Kemp contributors, will be two of the readers. Winners of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award will be announced during a special ceremony at the annual LCP Poetry Fest and Conference to be held at the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel in downtown Toronto on June 8, 2013. Help us launch Poetry & The Disordered Mind with Penn Kemp , Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal winner and Janet Vickers whose poems have appeared in various Canadian and UK anthologies, literary journals such as The Antigonish Review, Grain and Sub-Terrai n, and online in nthposition . In 2002 her poem, "You Were There", won the poetry category of the third annual Vancouver International Writers (& Readers) Festival Short Story and Poetry Contest. You Were There is the title of her first chapbook published in 2006. Her second chapbook Arcana was published in 2008. Introduction to the Panel & the Panelists: July 7, 2013 FRIDAY: 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Feminist Caucus Panel: “fe(males): dialogues, exchanges & conversations”. Women Poets and Their Male Poet Mentors who supported our womanhood, Feminist Poetics, and writing; about how they have been helped in their writing careers. Panelists: Jenna Butler, Louise Carson, Jennifer Footman, and Candice James. Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980. She is the author of three trade books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road (NeWest Press, 2013), Wells (University of Alberta Press, 2012), and Aphelion (NeWest Press, 2010), in addition to ten short collections with small presses in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Butler teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton during the school year. In the summer, she and her husband live with three resident moose and a den of coyotes on a small organic farm in Alberta’s north country. Latest books: Seldom Seen Road (NeWest Press, 2013) and Wells (University of Alberta Press, 2012) Louise Carson lives in a bungalow surrounded by gardens (thus fulfilling one of her life's ambitions) with her daughter (another ambition fulfilled), two cats and one dog. She teaches piano and singing part-time while honing her skills as a writer. Most recently poems have been published in Cahoots, Montreal Serai, Carousel and Event , and in the chapbook Beautiful Women , Lipstick Press. Her work recently appeared in Vallum, Geist, subTerrain , Prairie Fire, CV2 and on line at Sunday@6. Her books include Rope (Broken Rules Press, 2011) and Mermaid Road (BRP, 2013). She lives near Montreal, Quebec. Jennifer Footman : Originally from India, she spent most of her life in Edinburgh and is a graduate of that university, coming to Canada in 79. Her poetry and fiction have been in most Canadian literary magazines and many US and UK ones. She has four collections of poetry, has won several competitions including the Canadian Authors Okanagan Award, the Envoi poetry award, the LNN short fiction award and the Alumnus\Scotia McLeod Award. She is active in editing and has created many anthologies for various organizations. She has also has been involved in community writing projects for many years, including local outreach programmes. She has been both Brampton Artist of the year and Mississauga Artist of the year. She also teaches teach part-time and gives workshops and readings. Candice James is Poet Laureate for New Westminster B.C. She has poems in many International Anthologies, magazines and newspapers: Corvus; Angie's Diary; The Loop; Royal City Record, Downtown BIA; Black Rainbow Poetry; Newsleader; Darker Poetically; The Prairie Journal ; Dystennium ; etc. etc.... and has led online forums for Writers Etc. and facilitated and led many workshops. Her poetry has appeared many times in the monthly magazine "Arts and Entertainment Hollywood". 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Feminist Caucus Business Meeting: Brainstorming for 2014 & OPEN Reading (all welcome) (MORE BIOS FOLLOW THIS REVIEW) "Salient Rose: the Mystical Peerings of Doyali Farah Islam", a review of Doyali Farah Islam’s Y ūsuf and the Lotus Flower (Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 2011), by Susan McCaslin. Doyali Farah Islam’s debut volume of mystical poems, Yūsuf and the Lotus Flower , is an intimate conversation between the poet and the divine which we not only have the privilege to overhear but to actively engage. Writing out of a mystical poetics is not an easy task, since spiritual poetry can all too easily default to the abstract, vague and misty. Islam’s concrete, embodied, evocative work avoids these pitfalls by being firmly grounded in the everyday. Deftly and gently, the poems take the listener to the edge of the unspeakable through language that includes the silences behind and within words. While writing these poems, Islam meditated and recited the Koran daily. Because the poems are deeply rooted in her own sacred oral tradition, the musicality and tonal shifts lift the reader past theology and systems of belief into more spacious places. Islam melds Islamic, Bangladeshi, and Canadian cultures. Her parents are from Bangladesh, but she grew up in Toronto, and later spent four years in London, England. Currently, she is pursing a double major in English and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. She was the first-place winner of Contemporary Verse 2’ s 35th Anniversary Contest, and her poems have appeared in Grain (38.2) and other literary magazines. What Islam calls her “inter-spiritual” approach comes naturally to her as a practicing Muslim who simultaneously does Kundalini yoga. Together these diverse practices are complementary and nourish her poetry. You could say that Islam’s contemplative life and her poetry (which is also a spiritual practice) form a seamless whole. She explores the commonalities of diverse paths without reducing them to a common denominator. The book’s exquisite cover, which the poet herself designed, is a visual statement about the union of Islamic “surrender” (which is what the word “Islam” means) and what the east has called “enlightenment” or awakening. The amber, turquoise, red and sky-blue panel on the left is taken from a painting called Yūsuf Entertains at Court Before His Marriage by the fifteenth-century Persian mystic, artist, and poet Jami. In the painting, the Islamic messenger Y ūsuf (Joseph in Judeo-Christian tradition) kneels on his prayer mat in a meditative posture, wearing a white turban from which a stick-like vertical rod points unerringly to unitive being, or what could be called non-dual awareness. The contrasting but complementary midnight-black panel on the right contains an image of the mysterious golden lotus of the east, symbolic of the delicate manifestation of beauty and peace that floats up from the depths of the chaotic, formless dark. The mystical traditions, with their experiential rather than dogmatic base, allow the poet to open to an inclusive field of unknowing or mystery. In the volume itself, Islam counterpoints the story of Y ūsuf with the rising of the golden lotus from the fertile void. With the opening poem “thrust,” the speaker wastes no time in drawing us to into the beginnings of the journey. Though intellect is included, it is clear we are being invited into the secrets of the innermost core—the heart. The language is erotic, suggesting the power of the divine Eros or love-yearning that fires the cosmos and draws all things into unity. We are situated at the very keyhole to another way of seeing: thrust, a tiny key into rusted heart-lock. dig and twist. (9) The imperative mood and active voice of the verbs “dig” and “twist” forewarn that this journey into the heart-space will not evade pain and suffering. So the subsequent poems steadily unfold how turmoil and loss, when accepted and integrated in one’s life, can contribute to the full flowering of the lotus self. The “I” voice expresses a sense of needful disturbance: I have fallen through something, gouged a hole in a stable dam, punctured murals of pastel skies and watercolour’d sea. I peer through, without my eyes. now where am I? (9) Where indeed is this place of eyeless peering? And what is it? Our fellow-pilgrim and guide wastes no time in claiming mystic ground—the opening to what the east has called “third-eye” vision. Yet as Islam suggests in a note, this “seeing without eyes” is equally a process of translation, not merely a translation from one set of linguistic symbols into another, but also “the act by which the inclinations, longings, and dances of the soul are converted into word-symbols” (Islam’s note, 76).