I will be reading at the Second annual Watermelon Seeds Festival of Literature.
Internationally acclaimed and award-winning novelists, poets, playwrights, and journalists read in solidarity with the Palestinian people in a time of genocide. The Festival features Lucy Alford (Forms of Poetic Attention), Duha Alshaqaqi (We Are Not Numbers), Danielle Janess (The Milk of Amnesia), El Jones (Abolitionist Intimacies), Sonnet L’Abbé (Sonnet’s Shakespeare), Leila Marshy (My Thievery of the People), Nyla Matuk (Stranger), Philip Kevin Paul (Little Hunger), Ziyad Saadi (Three Parties), Neil Surkan (Unbecoming), Craig Taylor (New Yorkers), Saeed Teebi (Her First Palestinian), Paul db Watkins (Soundin’ Canaan). A hybrid event with readings on site and by video.
You are invited to join me, along with d’bi.young anitafrika, Wayde Compton, and Sonnet L’Abbé, for performances and conversation that embody and expand on the wide-ranging power of human sound to make, unmake, and remake the ways in which we feel, engage with, and know ourselves, others, and the world around us.
After a remixed reading of my book, I sat down for an on-stage interview with Wayde Compton. This was an incredible full circle moment, and audio (as well as a transcript) are now available as well.
I’ve also added a new remix to the Remix section: “Kind of Blue in Green (for GEC),” which reimagines Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” and offers a poetic riff/reading of George Elliott Clarke’s “Bluing Green.”
Head over to www.soundincanaan.com to explore this new material and more from the book. If you don’t have a copy yet, you can grab one here — and save 20% all April with the code POETRY2025.
There are three things I wanted to let you know about.
I’m pleased to announce a new website to support my book, Soundin’ Canaan: Black Canadian Poetry, Music, and Citizenship. Created for readers, listeners, courses, and research and discussion groups, the companion site soundincanaan.com is designed to benefit both readers of the book and anyone interested in Black Canadian poetry, culture, and Black music. The site features audio and transcripts of interviews with poets from the book, as well as resources mentioned in the book—including newly added materials of interest. You’ll also find playlists from the book (available on both Spotify and YouTube), a section of remixed audio, and additional media and news. An Open Access chapter is already available to read there.
On Friday, March 7, from 10–11:30 a.m., I’ll be giving a performance/talk at Malaspina Theatre (located on VIU’s Nanaimo campus). In my colloquium talk, I will combine sound (including a live DJ mix), images, material from the website, and text. Adopting a self-reflexive creative approach and cueing samples from interviews with the poets featured in my book, this presentation promises a captivating journey through the dynamic world of Black creativity in Canada.
Finally, I want to encourage you to come out to the Victoria book launch, which will take place on March 13 at Paul Phillips Hall (1928 Fernwood Road). This event will feature one of my all-time favourite writers—and a major influence on the ideas in the book—poet Wayde Compton (Performance Bond, The Outer Harbour, Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics). Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
As always, thanks for the support. I hope you read the book and, especially, seek out the work of the fantastic poets featured in it.
Thanks to everyone who came out to my book launch on Feb. 6 at The Vault! We packed the house, and I sold my entire box of books. It was a night to celebrate my book, Soundin’ Canaan, but it was also a night of poetry and music—a night of community. It was a night of sonic solidarity in honour of Black History Month. I’m very grateful to both Neil Surkan and Sonnet L’Abbé for sharing the power of their words. The night left me feeling a little more hopeful about the state of things.
On March 7, from 10–11:30 a.m., I’ll be giving the final colloquium talk at VIU in the Malaspina Theatre. The talk will combine sound (including a live DJ mix), images, material from a new website to support the book, and text.
A second book launch will take place in Victoria on March 13 at Paul Phillips Hall (1928 Fernwood Road). This event will feature poet Wayde Compton (Performance Bond, The Outer Harbour, Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics). Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕚𝕟’ ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕒𝕒𝕟: 𝔹𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕜 ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟 ℙ𝕠𝕖𝕥𝕣𝕪, 𝕄𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕔, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕫𝕖𝕟𝕤𝕙𝕚𝕡 is officially out! Seeing it in physical form is truly special. Music weaves through the book, and just in the Prelude, I reference Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi G**dam,” and Oscar Peterson’s “Hymn to Freedom.” Get your copy today!
Nanaimo Book Launch, Feb 6th, 2025
The first launch will take place on February 6th at The Vault Café (499 Wallace St) and will feature poet and musician Sonnet L’Abbé (Sonnet’s Shakespeare) and Nanaimo Poet Laureate Neil Surkan (Unbecoming). I’ll also be performing remixed versions of sections from the book. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the readings will run from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. Come by and grab a signed copy!
Victoria Book Launch, March 13, 2025
A second launch will happen in Victoria on March 13th at Paul Phillips Hall (1928 Fernwood Road). This event will feature poet Wayde Compton (Performance Bond, The Outer Harbour, Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics). Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with an open mic at 7:00 p.m. Featured readings and an interview will start at 7:30 p.m.
Local folks: I hope to see you at one of the events! Also, for any local Nanaimo folk, you can grab a copy of the book from @windowseatbooks.
I’m thrilled to announce that my debut academic book, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, will be released on January 21, 2025! The Press is currently celebrating its 50th Anniversary with a sale, so you can preorder the book at 50% off until December 15 using the code WLUP50. (Canada and US only).
Using a DJ Methodology, I blend close readings of poetry, music, cultural and literary history, along with interviews with the poets featured in the book. It also includes an accompanying soundtrack of playlists to enhance your reading experience, and a website is forthcoming.
“Soundin’ Canaan is an imaginative, innovative, original, and immensely generative study of the relations that connect Canadian Black poetry to music, multiculturalism, social membership, and citizenship.” –George Lipsitz, University of California-Santa Barbara, author of The Danger Zone Is Everywhere (University of California Press, 2024)
“In Soundin’ Canaan: Black Canadian Poetry, Music, and Citizenship, Can-Lit-Crit scholar Paul db Watkins “brings da noise,” reading through Afro-Can poets to stress that our concern is to remix, adapt, sample, and echo African Diasporic literary and musical greats in confraternity or confrontation with the Bards of the Great White World—and of the Great White North.
Watkins is himself an adept DJ, scribing a bluesaic (not prosaic) and a Rap-sodic exploration of how a quintet of Black Can poets kick-start the toppling of Plato and his reactionaries, who dread that any shift in musical taste is equivalent to an insurrection of the masses. Well, so be it! Watkins is the polyphonous polymath, not just reading the words, but listening for and sounding the Rastafarian aesthetics that trouble Luciferian ethics. In short, Watkins reads Black Can poems as mosaics of transgressive conjunctions. He is himself the Sage of the Remix, and intersperses his prose with shout-outs to YouTube videos and Spotify tracks of pertinent artistes. His playlist? Shakespeare and Shad; Ma Rainey and Martin Luther King. You read this book; you’re now in the know. Why? Cos now ya’s in the groove….” —George Elliott Clarke, author of Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (Véhicule Press) & J’Accuse…! (Poem Versus Silence) (Exile Editions)
Here’s a list of 𝟙𝟘 𝕗𝕚𝕝𝕞 𝕡𝕒𝕚𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕘𝕤 that make great double features! I cheat a little on the first by including three, but Persona or Vertigo both pair so well with Mulholland Drive.
There are plenty of others I had in mind, but maybe that’s for another post. What would you include?
🎥 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕃𝕚𝕤𝕥:
1. Mulholland Drive (2001) and Vertigo (1958) or Persona (1966). David Lynch is a big Hitchcock fan, and Mulholland Drive feels like Vertigo on valium.
2. Cure (1997) and Memories of Murder (2003). If you liked Longlegs or Zodiac, you need to see these two masterpieces.
3. Blade Runner (1982) and Metropolis (1927). The set design of Blade Runner draws heavily from this silent classic.
4. Moonlight (2016) and Beau Travail (1999). Toxic masculinity: chopped and screwed or served with the rhythm of the night.
5. Do the Right Thing (1989) and La Haine (1995). 24 hours of intensity x2 in this fitting double feature.
6. Parasite (2019) and Us (2019). The Housemaid (1960) is another great pairing for Parasite, but both these 2019 films tackle class in complex ways and keep viewers on edge.
7. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and In the Mood for Love (2000). Beautifully shot romantic films that know how to hold a moment.
8. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Andrei Rublev (1966). Two religious icons transcending time.
9. Stalker (1979) and Annihilation (2018). Both films are in “the Zone” of contemplative enjoyment.
10. Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Lemonade (2016). Lots of people know Beyoncé’s Lemonade, but way more should know Julie Dash’s work, which inspired its visuals.
“Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.” —Rick Rubin
Dedications III (2024) completes the trilogy I started back in 2013. The album builds on the previous two, continuing to explore the space between poetry/words and music, and the intersections between jazz, hip-hop, and beyond. Additionally, there is a nod to film, with the cover serving as an homage to Saul Bass’s iconic Vertigo poster. Vertigo is a film about mirroring and doubling, as well as obsession—the desire to create the perfect person, a meta-commentary on filmmaking and art, and the impossibility and danger of such an act.
In large part, Dedications III is about the creative act, an extended homage to the act of being creative. Like the other projects, the album draws from various genres. If you listen closely, you will hear J Dilla, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Ray Barretto, Dead Prez, Miles Davis, among a slew of other voices, sounds, samples, echoes, and cuts. The last two tracks look more outward, remixing Saul Williams’s “Not in Our Name” and ending with a simple mashup of Zeinab Shaath’s 1973 “The Urgent Call of Palestine” with Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die,” as read by the legendary actor Brian Cox. Both Shaath’s song and Alareer’s poem changed something in me the first time I heard them, and the message in each remains as urgent as ever.
As with the other two projects, I played most of the drums on an MPC Live, and many of the samples are recorded directly from vinyl. Dedications is a close listening exercise: it is a portal to the past and the future.
The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading).
Music can be an act of resistance and an impassioned cry echoing the wounds of history. It can also be a form of medicine, healing, and even liberation. For a Palestinian artist, it likely embodies all these things and more.
Recently, CBC removed an opening segment on CBC Reclaimed. The host, while introducing a song by Vancouver-based Indigenous DJ Handsome Tiger, said, “This one, in sonic solidarity with the people of Palestine, this is ‘River 2 the Sea,’ on Reclaimed.” This act of anti-Indigenous censorship reminds us that music, even without lyrics, can be loaded with rhetorical meaning. As Amiri Baraka tells us, the liberatory potential in art can occur at a purely aesthetic level. He points out, “Ideas do not require lyrics! Sound carries ideas, that’s why you get sad at one song and happy with another.”
Over these last eight months, watching the geno*ide in Gaza, I’ve been in a state of shock, often turning to music for escape, solace, resistance, and as a sonic map to revolution. Sometimes, I am even hopeful for the collective liberation of Black, Palestinian, Jewish, Indigenous, and truly, all people. I stand against all violence, hatred, and oppression. F*ck antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Fascism. And it’s not just Palestine, as Tigray, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Syria, Burma, and other places all deserve our attention.
In an act of sonic solidarity, I offer a liberation playlist. Some songs are full of righteous anger and address the open wounds of history, others offer protest and revolution, and many are antiracist. While many tracks are from Black and Palestinian artists, I’ve also included Indigenous artists, as well as Congolese, Sudanese, Syrian, Jewish, and other musicians who speak truth to power. The playlist embodies the themes of hope, resilience, and celebration often reflected in music. It opens with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” an anti-war, anti-poverty, and anti-injustice post–civil rights anthem that feels as relevant as ever. I close with the antifascist song “Bella Ciao.”
Lasting #CeasefireNow (free the hostages, political prisoners, and rebuild Gaza). May we one day all be free
PAUL db WATKINS 