Hi Friends,

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.

Warmly!
Paul

Hi friends,

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.

You can learn more and preorder the book here: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/S/Soundin-Canaan

All my best,
Paul db Watkins

Reviews

“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)