pauldbwatkins Poetry, soundin canaan

Exciting Soundin’ Canaan Updates: Website, Talk, & Book Launch

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

pauldbwatkins Academic, Event, Literature, Music, sound poetry, soundin canaan

Scenes from My Nanaimo Book Launch

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.

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 Literature, Poetry

Preorder Soundin’ Canaan at 50% Off Today!

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)

pauldbwatkins book review, Poetry

A Review of Ken Hunt’s The Lost Cosmonauts

With the spirit of exploration that sent Dante into the unknown, Ken Hunt’s poetry collection The Lost Cosmonauts examines the experiences of astronauts and cosmonauts who ventured into outer space, especially those who lost their lives in the pursuit of their missions. Drawing from myth, largely from the Greco-Roman pantheons, Hunt details the global and socio-political conflict of the Cold War era in relation to the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Following his debut collection, Space Administration (2014), Hunt’s The Lost Cosmonauts continues his exploration of language, history, and humankind’s endeavour to explore space. The book is a small thing to hold in your hands, but the ideas are expansive, moving from our nascent efforts to explore outer space to the celestial bodies of the planets in our solar system (the section “Celestial Bodies” is inspired by Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets). Engaging with a mythopoeia of the space race and showing an impressive control over poetic form and history, The Lost Cosmonauts is vital reading for those interested in the history and mythic significance of humanity’s explorations into space.

You can read my full review over at The Malahat Review, here.

pauldbwatkins book review, Indigenous, Poetry

A Review of Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men

Shane Rhodes’s stunning sixth collection of poetry, Dead White Men, repurposes settler texts with pioneering deftness (words cascade, fonts change, statues silhouette, language obliterates), using poetry to critically interrogate the Eurocentrism found in many foundational settler texts. While the names of many dead white men have faded in the annals of history, their mythopoeic justifications for colonization remain woven into the fabric of Euro-American society. Stories shape our beliefs and ethics, and so there’s good reason to go back to colonial origin stories, especially given the cultural amnesia around them. As Rhodes explains in the Notes section, “I was interested in looking to these past stories (especially those focused on North America and the South Pacific), not to add to the fictions of past white heroism but to better understand the problematic relationship between the stories, the mythologies they have become, and the lands and peoples they describe.”

You can read my full review over at The Malahat Review, here.

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pauldbwatkins Interview

Hogan’s Alley Remixed: Learning through Wayde Compton’s Poetics

Tomorrow, Friday, November 25, you are invited to step into Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s historic neighbourhood and a focal point of Black culture prior to its destruction in the late 1960s. I will be delivering the final Arts and Humanities Colloquium for the term, entitled Hogan’s Alley Remixed: Learning through Wayde Compton’s Poetics. 

My talk will look at the work of Vancouver-born poet, essayist, DJ, and historian Wayde Compton, whose collection, Performance Bond, explores the destruction of Hogan’s Alley. Compton incorporates hip-hop and turntable poetics in his piece to recover the past and effectively blend such histories into the present.

The presentation will mix images, sound, and text. VIU student and bassist Darin Nicolle will provide some bass accompaniment during the presentation and there will be an opening performance piece on mashup culture. 

The presentation is from 10-11:30 a.m. at Malaspina Theatre (on the Nanaimo VIU campus). The sessions are free to attend. Please join us at 9:30 am for coffee, tea, cookies, and conversation in the theatre lobby.

Press:

Nanaimo Bulletin: Vancouver Island University lecture examines poet Wayde Compton’s work

The Navigator: Exploring historic Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley through Wayde Compton’s eyes

Image Credit: RACHEL STERN / The News Bulletin

 

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.