On hand were some of Canada’s brightest and most interesting poets, including Christian Bök and Derek Beaulieu, both from Calgary, Adeena Karasick, who lives and works in New York, Jill Battson from Toronto (and now Santa Fe), Alexis O’Hara from Montreal, Angela Rawlings and Motion Brathwaite from Toronto, Ziy (Ziysah Markson) from Peterborough, and Lebogang Mothibatsela, currently a student at Trent University.

The weekend kicked off with panel discussions at Traill College on Friday afternoon, during which the poets were asked to consider the relationship of their performances to music, on one hand, and to written text on the other. A lively – at times pyrotechnic – discussion of the role of the poet in society followed. Recordings and transcripts of the discussions will be available on the English Department website shortly.

These discussions thoroughly engaged audiences, especially when experimental poet Christian Bök controversially asserted that "poetry is the lowest art form". His notion, that people become poets because they fail or cannot be any other type of artist, earned a heated response from his fellow poets on the panel and from the audience. Several of the other artists reflected on these comments during their performances later that evening.

All of the poets ran workshops on Saturday afternoon, offering insights into all aspects of performance poetry (from slam and hip-hop to sound poetry and video poetry). The workshops, open to all and offered free, were filled to capacity. The organizers were particularly pleased that the workshops attracted a mixed audience of students, alumni, faculty and members of the public. One of the goals of the weekend was, after all, to take English Studies into public spaces.

Performances on both nights were held at Sadleir House. On Friday Ziysah, Lebogang Mothibatsela, Motion Brathwaite, Adeena Karasick and Alexis O’Hara packed the house. Ziysah opened the show with three pieces in the politically engaged, slam-inspired style she has become justly well-known for in Peterborough and Toronto (she would return later in the show with one of her most powerful poems, a brilliant tirade against intolerance). Lebogang Mothibatsela followed, her carefully sculpted poems perfectly designed to showcase the beauty of her voice. Motion Brathwaite, closed out the set. Her work is informed by hip-hop, blues and a variety of other musical forms, and she sang, chanted and rhymed herself indelibly into the audience’s imagination. One of the highpoints of her performance was a spoken-word history of the African voice in the new world, so vivid and articulate that it shamed conventional histories.

Adeena Karasick’s poetry often hinges on the accumulation of surprising, thought-provoking or simply delightful puns (one of her books, for example, is called Mêmewars, a title which suggests, amongst other things, that the writing of memoirs is a process of being at war with oneself). The highlight of her performance on Friday was a lengthy rumination on warfare as restaurant menu, that was as hilarious as it was revelatory.

Alexis O’Hara, who spent several days in residence at the Bata Library leading up to the symposium (and gave a memorable performance in the library atrium on Tuesday), rounded out the evening. She performed a shattering series of pieces rooted in the do-it-yourself aesthetics of punk, which, in her own words sounded like “the end of the world, with drinks.”

The following night, hosted by Anu Radha Verma and Kate McNeill, Derek Beaulieu, Anglea Rawlings, Jill Battson and Christian Bök took the stage. Beaulieu opened the evening with several pieces generated by trawling Project Gutenberg for occurrences of specific words such as “write” and “editor”; the results of these distillations are both tantalizing and disorienting (in approximately equal measure). Angela Rawlings was joined on stage by Toronto jazz singer Ciara Adams and together they performed pieces from Rawlings’ Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists. Their vocal ballet, teetering between earnestness and delighted silliness, stays in the memory as a thing of extraordinary beauty. Jill Battson’s Linguaelastic (a piece created and performed with award-winning composer Andrew Staniland) was equally lovely, its soundscape evoking a future-world both enticing and alienating.

The evening concluded with a performance by the inimitable Christian Bök, supported by Joe Sorbara on percussion and Trent’s own Michael Morse on bass. Bök’s always-surprising interpretation of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate (approximately twice as fast and three times as loud as Schwitter’s own performances) received additional propulsion on this occasion, from Morse and Sorbara’s improvised accompaniment. Several other pieces, including Bök’s own “Ubu Hubbub”, followed, leaving the audience stunned but Bök’s own vocal cords improbably unaffected.

Audience reaction both nights was beyond enthusiastic. Performers and audience all felt they had been part of something unique. Guest poets Motion and Adeena were impressed with the attention that performance poetry receives here in Peterborough. One audience member, who drove from Ottawa to attend “Doing it in Public”, was surprised that Peterborough had so much talent and a growing passion for spoken word.

The event was organized by Professor Hugh Hodges and Kim Fielding (for the English Department) with a crew of student volunteers: Cliff McCarten, Jason Stovell and Michael Minor (technical crew), Katelynn Schoop and Kristina Ottosen (promotion), Deborah Harkness (workshop co-ordination), along with all the students in ENGL 4951 “Performance Poetry”, who pitched in to help make the event a success. The event was sponsored by The Canada Council for the Arts and The League of Canadian Poets, the Symons Fund, the Nind Fund and the Academic Innovation Fund, as well as several Trent University offices and departments.

Photo credit: Julie Gagne