Hosted by:
Yolk in collaboration with the Quebec Writers’ Federation

Facilitated by:
Endre Farkas, founding member of the Vehicule Poets
Carmine Starnino, Poetry Editor at Véhicule Press

Cost:
$29.95 CAD (scroll down to sign up)

Limited to thirty participants.‍

In this one-time, three-hour workshop, poets will be divided into two smaller groups (with a maximum of 15). Each group will have a 75-minute workshop with either Endre or Carmine, then swap and have another 75-minute workshop with the other facilitator. We will then conclude with a brief open mic. All participants will additionally be offered the student-discount rate of $15 to become a member of the QWF.

ENDRE FARKAS: Endre Farkas was born in Hungary and is a child of Holocaust survivors. He and his parents escaped during the 1956 uprising and settled in Montreal. His work has always had a political consciousness and has always pushed the boundaries of poetry. Since the 1970s, he has collaborated with dancers, musicians and actors to move the poem from page to stage. Still at the forefront of the Quebec English language literary scene – writing, editing, publishing and performing – Farkas is the author of eleven books, including Quotidian Fever: New and Selected Poems (1974-2007). He is the two-time regional winner of the CBC Poetry “Face Off” Competition. His play, Haunted House, based on the life and work of the poet A.M. Klein, was produced in Montreal in 2009. Farkas has given readings throughout Canada, USA, Europe and Latin America. His poems have been translated into French and Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian and Turkish.

Endre’s “Playshop”: A creative bent poetry playshop with Vehicule poet Endre Farkas. A playshop for those with a creative bent who want to get more bent. The playshop will focus on the creative process, content and form. It will consist of exercises – individual and collaborative – and the “playshopping” (critiquing) of participants’ poems. A week prior to the playshop participants are asked to:

• Submit two poems (no more than one page each) to [email protected]
• Select a favourite line from five to ten of their favourite poems (not their own).

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CARMINE STARNINO: Carmine Starnino has published six collections of poetry, including This Way Out, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 2009 and recently translated into French by Éditions Hashtag under the title Par Ici La Sortie. His most recent collection is Dirty Words: Selected Poems 1997-2016. His other books include The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry and Lazy Bastardism: Essays & Reviews on Contemporary Poetry. He has received numerous awards, including the Canadian Author’s Association Prize for Poetry, the F.G. Bressani Prize, and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, in addition to being shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Prize for the best first book of poetry. 

Carmine’s Workshop: Poems can’t exist without some gratuitous delight in words. And when it comes to generating surprising turns of phrase, good poets are high-stakes gamblers. Poetry is rehabilitative. It’s an art where words, muffled by monotony of use, are given a noisier life. If you want your poems to sound like nothing else people have read, you need to want to uninhibit your language, to write against the grain of its everyday usage—the ready-made phrases and the serviceable expressions that threaten to flatline your voice. In this workshop, we’ll be talking about an aspect of poetry that gets too little consideration: its showmanship, its capacity to grab the reader’s attention. Participants are asked to come to the workshop with a poem that you believe handles language in a distinctive way. The poem should have a voice of its own, one can’t be confused with anyone else’s. It should have an authority of style that, even in a few lines, would allow us to identify it immediately.

Registered participants may cancel their registration and receive a 100% refund, provided that they do so within 72 hours of the workshop (before November 25th, 10:00am).

 

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