Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Flying words


A week from this Friday, on February 6, CBC Saskatchewan is having its annual "Poetry Face-off". The theme of this little friendly competition this year is "flight" so Kelly Jo Burke, of CBC's Sound Exchange (and author of the play The Selkie Wife) called me to ask, "do you write poetry?"

That question has come before and I always answer the same way ("not really") with the same results: I end up writing something and shaping it into the facsimile of a poem.

"It can be a prose-poem," Kelly Jo said. "We are paying."

And so I have written a poem, which I will read on February 6 at the CBC building in the Galleria at 8 p.m. For contrast, there will be bona fide, legitimate poets there too reading their entries on the subject of flight--the likes of Marie-Elyse St George, Kelly-Anne Riess, Teresa Yang, and poet laureate Robert Currie.

[Swainson's Hawk image courtesy of the generous and inimitable Jared Clarke]

1 comment:

  1. There seems to be a hierarchy of "non-poets" :-) since your own previous efforts have inspired others:
    I'm not a poet, for one thing, and I was afraid somebody would point that out, or that I would get a summons from the League of Canadian Poets for operating without a license. Trevor Herriot did something similiar for the Crossfiring project at Claybank, and I'm no Trevor Herriot.
    (see "Ken" on July 6 2008 at http://windblown2008.blogspot.com/)
    /Keith F.

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