pauldbwatkins Event, Literature

Soundin’ Canaan Book Launches!

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.

Warmly,
Paul

pauldbwatkins Academic, review

When Voices Intertwine (Book Review)

Robert Bringhurst is often described as a modern-day renaissance man. Few writers could navigate fields as diverse as poetry, translation, typography, cultural history, and philosophy as interwoven vocations. Through an adherence to polyphony as a mode of deep ecological thinking, Bringhurst works to make accessible the wisdom of poets and thinkers past, from Sophocles to Haida mythtellers Ghandl and Skaay.

As Bringhurst puts it, “when two voices intertwine, the space they occupy gets larger, and the mind gets larger with it”; no wonder poet Denis Lee calls him “a man of massive simple-mindedness.” Bringhurst has a way of chiselling complex thinking down to that part of being that ineluctably binds all living matter together. Bringhurst’s ontological approach is more aligned with ancient Greece than the modern academy, which is why editors Brent Wood and Mark Dickinson make clear that he doesn’t neatly fit within the “twenty-first century university’s rubric of knowledge production and transmission.” As such, Bringhurst is most comfortable in the role of an independent public thinker, bound by neither institution nor strict cultural protocol, which has irked some of his critics.

Click here to read my full review at Canadian Literature.

pauldbwatkins review

Book Review: Dennison Smith’s Fermata and Catherine Owen’s Trobairitz

A Sound Withheld

Dennison Smith’s Fermata and Catherine Owen’s Trobairitz are two poetic texts significant not only for the sounds they make, but for what they withhold. For all the cacophony and multivoicedness sustained in each text, there are plenty of moments that give the reader pause. Fermata (a lyrical text of Zen-like suspension) and Trobairitz (a text that weds twelfth-century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz, with twenty-first century metalheads) are worlds apart; yet, both texts resonate with silences, shift between suffering, love, and desire, and combine and reclaim traditional materials with the alchemical power of the fearless poetess who conducts language at the centre of each narrative.

To read the full review at Canadian Literature, click here.